November 23, 2004, 10:38 am
Government Uses Color Laser Printer Technology to Track Documents:
Next time you make a printout from your color laser printer, shine an LED flashlight beam on it and examine it closely with a magnifying glass. You might be able to see the small, scattered yellow dots printer there that could be used to trace the document back to you.
According to experts, 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.
Peter Crean, a senior research fellow at Xerox, says his company’s laser printers, copiers and multifunction workstations, such as its WorkCentre Pro series, put the “serial number of each machine coded in little yellow dots” in every printout. The millimeter-sized dots appear about every inch on a page, nestled within the printed words and margins.
“It’s a trail back to you, like a license plate,” Crean says.
[via Alex Pang]
[see also Ed Felten]
November 18, 2004, 11:10 am
Via Stanford Center for Internet and Society:
Magistrate Judge Arlander Keys rejected Polska’s assertion of hearsay, holding that the archived copies were not themselves statements susceptible to hearsay exclusion, since they merely showed what Polska had previously posted on its site. He also noted that, since Polska was seeking to suppress evidence of its own previous statements, the snapshots would not be barred even if they were hearsay. Over Polska’s objection, Judge Keys accepted an affidavit from an Internet Archive employee as sufficient to authenticate the snapshots for admissibility.
November 15, 2004, 9:03 am
Maximillian Dornseif’s Red Team: FireWire round-up has several links on using Firewire (IEEE 1394, Sony i.Link) to access physical memory, without any software cooperation from the target host. He just presented at the PacSec/core04 conference. He publishes sample code. He points out that this could be very useful for forensic analysis of live systems. He demonstrates how the technique can be used for privilege escalation or spying. He points to several security advisories that arose out of this discussion.
