Wednesday, October 19, 2005

NPR : Watermarks Help I.D, Printer, Copier Documents

Listen to the NPR story (You'll need the Real One Player) Then read this article.

Finally, See if your printer is listed.

The basic idea here is that printers have an imbedded bar code that identifies where each document was printed. Similar to the old, "We know which typewriter that came from" but with a vicious new twist. In the old days, it was easy to tell what brand of typewriter created a document. Then, if they could find that typewriter, they could compare the way the keys were worn. Took a lot of detective work. Now, however, with the bar code right on the document, they can compare that with your registration data, and know in seconds who owns the printer, the address and when it was purchased.

But wait! There's more. This sort of identification scheme also identifies copiers, scanners and yes, even digital cameras! If you think you can take a picture of your neighbor over the fence and publish it on the internet without getting caught, you'd be wrong.

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Aww, darn; guess I'd better quit snooping on my neighbors with my digital camera.

From now on, I'll just have to use the old telescope, instead ... !


;-)

8:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

By the way, I love saying things like the above to my wife, especially since I'm likely to be unemployed in a month or so.

She gets this look of quiet panic in her eyes, kinda like when I say that I'm really looking forward to "spending a whole lot more time with [her], once the kids go off to school in the morning ... !"


;-)

2:05 PM  
Blogger Lou Schwing said...

You can also use a regular film camera to record those special moments. You might have to learn how to develop them yourself though! Depends on what the subject is....

2:18 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Yeah, but the telescope has a much more powerful telephoto lens, along with far greater resolution!

It is, unfortunately, limited to real-time application, with no capacity for any subsequent editing ...


;-)

2:39 PM  

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