Via Hogg’s Universe, this is freaky:
It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it isn’t. The pages coming out of your color printer may contain hidden information that could be used to track you down if you ever cross the U.S. government.
Last year, an article in PC World magazine pointed out that printouts from many color laser printers contained yellow dots scattered across the page, viewable only with a special kind of flashlight. The article quoted a senior researcher at Xerox Corp. as saying the dots contain information useful to law-enforcement authorities, a secret digital “license tag” for tracking down criminals.
The content of the coded information was supposed to be a secret, available only to agencies looking for counterfeiters who use color printers.
Now, the secret is out.
Yesterday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco consumer privacy group, said it had cracked the code used in a widely used line of Xerox printers, an invisible bar code of sorts that contains the serial number of the printer as well as the date and time a document was printed.
Holy conspiracy theory, batman!
When my uncle worked for IBM, he told me one of the intelligence agencies used to visit from time to time and “suggest” that they use a particular cryptosystem. He said the experts at IBM would look it over and were always very suspicious of the system proposed by the agency, so they never used them. This always seemed like a silly approach to me. Much better would be to get one of your supersmart mathematicians hired at IBM and then use this insider to convince the company to use this cryptosystem. Well maybe you would need more than one supersmart mathematician, but still…