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19 October 2005

Xerox Conspiracy Theory

It seems that the U.S. government is tracking everyone and everything out there. Last year, an article in PC World magazine pointed out that printouts from many color laser printers contained yellow dots scattered across the page, viewable only with a special kind of flashlight. These dots may contain hidden information that could be used to track you down. Yesterday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco consumer privacy group, said it had cracked the code used in a widely used line of Xerox printers, an invisible bar code of sorts that contains the serial number of the printer as well as the date and time a document was printed. The EFF said it has identified similar coding on pages printed from nearly every major printer manufacturer, including Hewlett-Packard Co., though its team has so far cracked the codes for only one type of Xerox printer. Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
The question now is whether it is only printers, or there is a lot more under cover? Who can be sure now that they are not using their domination of the Technology market in order to track every move we make and every breath we take? I cannot stop myself from thinking that they may be recording our online behavior, there may be some logging systems to record our MSN, or Yahoo Messanger conversations, and may be Emails as well. May be there is some piece of code in our browsers to tell them what kind of sites we visit and when do we visit them. Anyway we are going to be tracked as long as we use technology and not create it ourselves. Tags: , , , , ,

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