The EFF has broken 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 need a magnifying glass. You can also use a blue light to make the dots appear black. The EFF page has a built in application for decoding the dots which hide the time, date, and serial number of the printer. The EFF also maintains a list of printers which do or don’t have this “feature”.

Andrew “bunnie” Huang helped out a lot with this research. To speed up analysis of submitted printer samples he modified a scanner to use blue light. The scanner does a white balance calibration before each page scan so the blue lights need to be turned off during that period otherwise the scanner will compensate. bunnie also opened up his HP 2600N to determine where the watermark was implemented. Studying the boards he decided that most color laser printers are probably using Canon engine boards. By coercing one manufacturer the government was able to get watermarking into a majority of the laser printers sold.

[via BoingBoing]

Continue reading “EFF Reverses Color Laser Printer Fingerprints” →

There was an Engadget post today about Motorola IMFrees that are free after rebate. From the IMFree hacking forum it appears that the project is still in pre-alpha.

Hack-A-Day isn’t hiring. Weblogs, Inc. is. They’re hiring for a new geek blog: “old skool geek as in comic book/sci-fi/D&D genre geeks”.

MAKE:Blog featured the Travel Tinker Trouble Kit that a lot of sites picked up. Julian has added a couple followup posts since then: one, two. I think a good companion to this would be the Altoids survival kit. [The Mark]

[Robogeek] continues to work on his LED bed design improvements.

[combustible] and his buddy Ken built this vodka filtering rig using four filter stages. The system is pressurized to 120psi. It took about 30 minutes to filter a 1.75 of vodka, but that was because the chilled vodka froze the latent water in the filters.

[JaSon] said that security took away their office’s “unapproved appliances” i.e. microwaves, toasters, etc. He’s looking for some rack mount projects that make these items look more official. Probably something a little more discrete than the 3U wine rack [jesse] found.

[Paul Stamatiou] has posted “Part 3: Azureus Anonymity” or “How to abuse the Tor network” DO NOT DO THIS Read the comments for suggestions that don’t involve hoarding bandwidth used to protect peoples lives.

[laughing man] didn’t like the low volume of his PSP headphones so he removed the resistors.

For those who hate traveling outside you could build a Surroundings Defense System. [Jon]

[Ian Nott] made an iPod video foldy to help people cope while waiting for delivery.

This is how I roll Darn this t-shirt addiction [via Waxy] UPDATE: I just saw BoingBoing’s post about someone hooking up their PS2 controller to an oscillating fan to complete the 10^6 rose level on Katamari. Go look at the screen shots so you don’t have to do it yourself.

The tip line

Continue reading “Hackaday Links” →