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choco
12-02-2010, 09:32 PM
Hi everyone!

First of all I would like to introduce myself. My name is Vesselin Hadjitodorov and I’m student at the University of Amsterdam. I’m doing a research project in a team with couple of students on the topic concerning “yellow dots printed for tracking”. As most of you already know almost every color laser printer and copier prints nearly invisible yellow dots which are used for tracking the device.


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/14/Printer_Stenography_Illustration.png/250px-Printer_Stenography_Illustration.png



They help the authorities to find the machines used for counterfeiting documents and money. But in some countries there are cases that these dots are also used against organizers of legal protest activities. Every vendor uses its own different pattern to encode information like serial number, model, date and time of the printer. Some brands like Xerox and Dell have already been decoded.

Our project is to try to decode a series of printer based on Konica Minolta Bizhub C360 - OCE 3622C, NEC IT36C6, Developer ineo+ 360. We have some OCE printers in the university and have already extracted the patterns which they print on each page. We are working on software which makes the scanned dots visible for the naked eye and create script which detects their position so we can analyze their location and try to decode the pattern.

How can you help:
We have access only to OCE 3622C printers and we need to know if all the printers based on KM C360 use the same serial number scheme. We need some more serials from the different brands so we can compare them.

We will be very happy if you can print one demo page (color) on a KM C360 or the equivalent machine you have, scan it with 600dpi and send it to us along with the serial number of the machine. We need the file in a tiff or bitmap, because the compression used by other formats introduces artifacts which destroy the data. Normally a scan is between 40 and 60 MB which is a lot to distribute over email. So you can upload the scans (zipped maybe) in a file hosting service like 2shared.com .

We are not experts in printers and we don’t know a lot of the features these machines offer. We printed the “configuration page”, but I’m sure that there is more detailed information which can be printed (extracted) from each machine so we can analyze it. Also the tracking maybe is not based on the exact serial number, but some internal unique numbering stored in the memory and the vendors have database which number corresponds to which serial. If you know some “hacks” which can help us with this task please write me a personal message or contact me via email - Vesselin.Hadjitodorov => os3.nl where => is @ (to cheat spammers)

The domain my email is hosted is also the webpage of my university program, so you can check that I’m not just a guy trying to obtain serial numbers and other internal information.

We will not publish in our paper the information you send us in order to protect your privacy. We will use it as a guideline to help us answer questions concerning our work. Even if we don’t manage to succesfuly decode the patterns we are happy from the fact that there is increased awareness on this topic which will help in protecting privacy.

Thank you!
Vesselin

Stirton.M
12-02-2010, 11:55 PM
Contact Konica Minlolta directly for this information.

And to be quite honest, I could not give a shit about privacy issues from those with extreme paranoid delusions who wish to perform illegal acts of sedition, let alone print money. Don't engage in illegal activity, it will never be an issue.

As I said, contact Konica Minolta directly for this information. They will provide you with what you want to know, provided you are with law enforcement, which this encoded information is for. Only Konica Minolta, and other competitors, have the right to provide you with the proprietary information you seek.

choco
12-03-2010, 11:31 AM
People who counterfeit money and documents know about these tricks and are careful enough not to get caught. But on the other hand normal people don't have any idea that the authorities are using their printers for tracking their activities. The vendors who do this don't have any benefit to announce this because it will lower their sales and people might switch to brands like Oki for desktop printers who haven't implemented this kind of tracking mechanism.

Konica Milnolta are not popular in the Netherlands because of the Dutch brand OCE, which re-brands their products. OCE will not tell us any information because they have signed non disclosure agreement and the can not release any confidential information to third parties. Maybe only Konica Minolta central can release this information and they would not do it.

On the other hand there is nothing scientific just to ask for the answer of your research project. The whole idea is to build analysis tools which will are able to decode information for us.

I have already managed to to get to the Service Mode and print the following information:
- Machine management list
- Adjustments list
- Parameter list

Actually only the Machine management list contains something useful like serial numbers of components inside the machine. We need serials from other machines in order to try decoding the patterns.

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