Re: Tracking printed docs: EFF examines codes printed on docs

[Adam Shostack <adam () homeport org>]

I have lots of links at
http://www.emergentchaos.com/archives/001762.html

Adam

On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 04:01:44PM -0400, Xu He wrote:
| 
| There was an article a few years ago about the anti-counterfeiting feature in
| the new Euro and new US 20 Dollar.   Just can't seem to find the link.  To
| summarize it from what I remember, there are tiny yellow "o" or zero's in the
| new currencies that's of the same size (1mm).  When someone tries to zerox one
| of these bills, the color printer will stop working after a number of
| attempts.  Take a look at the back of the 20 dollar bill, and you will see that
| the '2' and '0' are of looks like different type of fonts.
| 
| 
| On 10/17/05, Jon O. <jono () networkcommand com> wrote:
| 
| 
|     http://www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/wp.php
| 
|     On Nov. 22, 2004, PC World published an article stating that "several
|     printer companies quietly encode the serial number and the manufacturing
|     code of their color laser printers and color copiers on every document
|     those machines produce. Governments, including the United States, already
|     use the hidden markings to track counterfeiters." According to the article,
|     the high fidelity of outputs from color machines to their original
|     documents suggests that counterfeiters can potentially succeed in creating
|     high-quality counterfeited currency and government documents using these
|     machines. At the request of the United States Secret Service, manufacturers
|     developed mechanisms that print in an encoded form the serial number and
|     the manufacturer's name as indiscernible markings on color documents. The
|     Secret Service and manufacturers would be able to decode these values from
|     the markings and in the event a color machine was used to print a suspected
|     counterfeited document, these values would be used with customer
|     information to discover the identity of the machine's owner.
| 
|     [see link above for more info]
| 
| 
| 
|