Connect the Dots

Prolific tech writer Annalee Newitz reports, “For years, governments all over the world have secretly been collaborating with the high-end color laser printer industry in order to track the origin of every color copy made. They’re doing it by programming the printers to create specific patterns of yellow dots—not visible to the naked eye—on every copy. These dot patterns are codes for the serial number, the make of the printer, and possibly even the time and date when the print was made.”

Newitz says it works because color laser printers are high-end enough that most people and businesses (FedEx/Kinko’s, Staples, etc.) buy them using traceable credit cards or purchase orders. You can see the yellow dots, Newitz learned, only if you look at the paper under a blue light to highlight the yellow, and even then most people will need a magnifying glass or a weak microscope.

“Xerox has openly admitted it shares its customer lists with the U.S. Secret Service, if asked,” continues Newitz. “And both the U.S. Secret Service and the Dutch government told PC World in a recent article (www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,118664,00.asp) that they asked printer companies to create the yellow dot patterns to help law enforcement track down counterfeiting suspects. Because color laser copies are so good, counterfeiters frequently use them to create fake money, as well as fake train tickets and other valuable items.”

But, Newitz worries, “How do we know they’re only using these printer marks to track counterfeiters? What if they’re also tracking people who copy what they think are anonymous political flyers or pamphlets?”

According to Newitz, “as of now, there are absolutely no regulations or laws that stop printer companies or copy shops from giving information about their customers to the government. Phone companies and Internet service providers, by contrast, are forbidden to give the government data about you unless served with a court order. But this isn’t true for credit card records kept by laser printer companies.”

Connect the dots yourself at www.alternet.org/columnists/story/25165.

Advent Rising—But Not Very High

Advent Rising (from Majesco, www.adventtrilogy.com, reviewed for PC, $30 list) is a third-person sci-fi shooter that was released earlier this year on the Xbox and is now available for PCs.

The game is an ambitious undertaking that, unfortunately, falls short due to a weak story line, frustrating gameplay, and a host of general technical problems, not the least of which is a slow-to-dreadful frame rate.

Even the promise of a script co-written by the transcendent Orson Scott Card (author of science-fiction classics like Ender’s Game and the Alvin Maker series) can’t save Advent Rising from descending into a derivative story line—despite admittedly snappy dialog in places. To wit: You play Giddeon Wyeth, a rookie space pilot who lives in a futuristic world you’ve almost certainly seen several times before in other games and movies. Not long into the game, humanity is warned about a hostile race, called the Seekers, that is coming to annihilate all humans. Sound at all familiar?

Weaponry includes some pretty cool pistols, machine guns, laser rifles, rocket launchers, and more, all of which can be assigned to left and right hands. Later in the game, Gideon gets a number of psychic powers that make battle quite a bit easier—but, regrettably, that’s largely because enemy AI is predictable and unsatisfying.

Red Hat for New or Old Hats

Whether you’re relatively new at it or an old pro, when it comes to using Linux, Red Hat Fedora 4 Unleashed (from Sams Publishing, www.samspublishing.com, 1,176 pages, about $45) contains everything you need to plan, install, configure, maintain, administer, rebuild, and use Fedora. (The complete Fedora install is even on the included CD.)

After an introduction to Red Hat and the Fedora Core project, you’ll see to how to set up and plan for an install, then get step-by-step directions to install Fedora in a variety of ways.

Further on, you will learn how to use essential commands from the /bin and /sbin directories, as well as log in and work with Linux, virtual consoles, environment variables, text editors, and permissions.

The book will help you choose the right Web browser and e-mail client, and even a Fedora-capable office suite like OpenOffice.org, NOME Office, or KOffice.

This is the most comprehensive guide I’ve yet seen to the latest version of Red Hat’s open-community Fedora Linux distribution.

Review contributed by Johnny Cantfield