It's scary that companies feel the obligation to do the government favors without any actual legal mandate.
(Because if they don't... who knows; their printer shipment could be delayed at customs, their accounting practices could receive extra scrutiny, there could be a witness that says the CEO was seen at the scene of that murder. Who says the US is not a police state?)
Also, why not get one of these yellow-dot printers and just have your printer driver add additional yellow dots to it? Then when you counterfeit money, the Secret Service will go after someone else. BRILLANT.
I'd rather have one of the printers listed as having yellow tracking dots and yank out the color cartridges.
Its easier to disable a security measure you know than praying there isn't a security measure you don't know.
There is still a chance of a redundancy but I believe it is somewhat lower - as normally companies would do the bare minimum to comply with a directive like this one.
> I'd rather have one of the printers listed as having yellow tracking dots and yank out the color cartridges.
The trouble is that, for one dubious reason or another, a lot of modern laser printers will refuse to print without a complete set of cartridges that report that they contain sufficient toner. Whether the colour in question is actually required and whether enough toner is physically present do not seem to be relevant.
On the other hand, I'd like to see a list of actual privacy violations or other problems caused by these tracking dots. I'm guessing that would also be a fast read.
1) Why do manufacturers do this? Is it for their own internal warranty control / tracking, or is there a broader federal mandate motivating this?
2) The dots are only useful in after-the-fact analysis, correct? If I print something and then there's reason to suspect me they can print something, compare, and verify, but there's no mechanism to find the initial document and find the printer, correct?
That's the explanation I've heard given in the past, although I don't know if it's the official one given. The East German Stasi also used to mark typewriters so that they could tell who wrote subversive articles.
On the other hand, if they didn't put in a lot of effort to prevent the stupidest form of counterfeiting, then the stupidest form of counterfeiting would be the real problem.
I seriously doubt that this helps at all. If someone tried to print bank notes from Photoshop and fails, they'll just try some other graphics app. I'm pretty sure Gimp and many other apps will work just as well as Photoshop would have.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation is also recognized in many photo-editing software packages like photoshop. not government mandated, but i'm sure the software companies get leaned on to support it.
Re 2: Supposedly the manufacturer is supposed to keep track of which printers go to which stores, and the stores are supposed to keep track of the credit card used to purchase the printers.
By providing this list, they are making it super easy for the secret service to give the "no dot" manufacturers a call/visit (which is who asked for the dots to be on there in the first place if I am not mistaken).
(Because if they don't... who knows; their printer shipment could be delayed at customs, their accounting practices could receive extra scrutiny, there could be a witness that says the CEO was seen at the scene of that murder. Who says the US is not a police state?)
Also, why not get one of these yellow-dot printers and just have your printer driver add additional yellow dots to it? Then when you counterfeit money, the Secret Service will go after someone else. BRILLANT.