EFF REVERSES color LASER PRINTER FINGERPRINTS

The EFF has damaged the tracking code for the Xerox DocuColor. The DocuColor prints a faint 15×8 grid of yellow dots on every page. To see these dots you requirement a magnifying glass. You can likewise utilize a blue light to make the dots appear black. The EFF page has a developed in application for decoding the dots which hide the time, date, as well as serial number of the printer. The EFF likewise preserves a listing of printers which do or don’t have this “feature”.

Andrew “bunnie” Huang assisted out a great deal with this research. To speed up analysis of submitted printer samples he customized a scanner to utilize blue light. The scanner does a white balance calibration before each page scan so the blue lights requirement to be turned off during that period otherwise the scanner will compensate. bunnie likewise opened up his HP 2600N to figure out where the watermark was implemented. Studying the boards he made a decision that a lot of color laser printers are most likely utilizing Canon engine boards. By coercing one maker the government was able to get watermarking into a majority of the laser printers sold.

[via BoingBoing]

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