*NEWS* LATEST MFP’s & ANTI-COUNTERFEITING

Toner News Mobile Forums Latest Industry News *NEWS* LATEST MFP’s & ANTI-COUNTERFEITING

Date: Monday February 26, 2007 11:33:00 am
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  • Anonymous
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    MFPs anti-counterfeiting measures toughen up
    New printers feature more subtle markings, security tactics
    Last
    time we tested similar MFP systems, we found that they adhered to
    federal anti-counterfeiting guidelines that recommended overlaying all
    color jobs with the machine’s serial number, encoded in big yellow
    dots. The dots were almost invisible, but not quite.This time, the
    yellow dots were no longer apparent. Turns out they’re still around,
    but the invisibility factor is greatly improved — at least one vendor
    says its machines still print the yellow dots, albeit much smaller.
    (See our printer round-up, “Color MFPs go mainstream.”)Other protective
    measures include identifying currency colors to prevent their exact
    replication and recognizing specific currencies or other documents
    based on image profiles, as in Xerox’s Anti-Counterfeit Detection
    technology.Another vendor told me that its anti-counterfeiting measures
    detect repeated attempts to make illegal copies and freeze the machine;
    only a site visit by a company rep can unfreeze the system. That scheme
    puts a big burden on the machine’s smarts to distinguish legitimate
    from illegal copying, however. In fact, my test system warned me that
    it was about to freeze on a counterfeit job when I was simply copying
    its own configuration report.Of course, many anti-counterfeiting
    measures may never be known, in the interest of keeping those secrets
    out of criminals’ hands. That inherent secrecy caught the eye of the
    Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which has concerns about some of
    the anti-counterfeiting measures and the practice of printing encoded
    information — including those aforementioned yellow dots — onto
    documents to identify the printer that created them.

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