Do these "watermarks" survive a photocopying?
If not: print out one copy and photocopy from it as many as you need before destroying the original.
Most Printers Secretly Add Their Serial # to Everything They Print
11–14 of 14 posts
Re: Most Printers Secretly Add Their Serial # to Everything They Print
#12Sensationalistic and bad title for this submission. It's not 'most printers', it's color laser printers. And that's not even going into it being a 4 year old article.
Re: Most Printers Secretly Add Their Serial # to Everything They Print
#13Even if the Secret Service can find the manufacturer and serial number info in a document, how can they match this information with the end user if he/she does not turn in a warranty card? I can think of a couple of scenarios: 1) During the driver installation process, the serial number and the user info stored on the system is (edit: could be) sent to the manufacturer. This might be defeated by using an open OS and…
Even without the ability to trace to an exact purchaser, to be able to correlate multiple documents to the same person, or use the printer as corroborating evidence after finding a suspect by other means, would be very valuable to law enforcement. And unless the printer is only used for disfavored purposes, its other output is in circulation. Who's to say there's not a ad hoc registry maintained by paper samples cull…
Uh, I think you're giving the government's tracking and cataloging abilities way too much credit. They have trouble keeping track of a list of terrorists.
It think it's for confirming that a particular printer made a particular note (and determining how many different printers are involved in counterfeiting). Nothing more.
Re: Most Printers Secretly Add Their Serial # to Everything They Print
#14With regards to the constructive criticism about the date of the article, thank you and I will keep that in mind next time.
I submitted this article because I genuinely thought it was interesting and wanted to share it with like minded tech savvy people. (My real life friends wouldn't really care about this :-p)
I chose to submit this page rather than the newer version ( http://eff.org/issues/printers ) because I found the image of the dots on this webpage very interesting. I figured if people were interested they could click the "For up-to-date" information link. I will save everyone a click next time.