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.