Tuesday, November 23, 2004

Color lasers encode machine serial number in pictures

At least it's happening according to this post on BoingBoing:

Colour laser printer manufacturers encode each printout with the printer's serial number so they can trace it back to you if you are counterfitting bills. They can trace it back to you for anything else as well.

The reason you probably haven't heard much about it is because it (AFAIK) is only used by the Secret Service to trace counterfeit documents back to their source machines, and the Secret Service doesn't like to talk too much about means and methods.

For what it's worth, true or not, it's certainly interesting to consider (not that I am advocating counterfeiting of anything) how you could be tracked by a printer output.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

the Canon CLC products are usually around $20-45K a peice and usually have a loan or a financing period to them. Not only that, but some of the machines actually stop working when money is attempted to be copied and there are only two people in the United States employed by Canon that can release the machines to start printing again.