From: jeff 

Rich Gauszka wrote:
> Serial number embedded in color laser printout?
>
>
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1093&u=/pcworld/118664&printer=1
>
> WASHINGTON--Next time you make a printout from your color laser printer,
> shine an LED flashlight beam on it and examine it closely with a magnifying
> glass. You might be able to see the small, scattered yellow dots printer
> there that could be used to trace the document back to you.
>
>  According to experts, several printer companies quietly encode the serial
> number and the manufacturing code of their color laser printers and color
> copiers on every document those machines produce. Governments, including the
> United States, already use the hidden markings to track counterfeiters.
>
>
> Peter Crean, a senior research fellow at Xerox, says his company's laser
> printers, copiers and multifunction workstations, such as its WorkCentre Pro
> series, put the "serial number of each machine coded in little
yellow dots"
> in every printout. The millimeter-sized dots appear about every inch on a
> page, nestled within the printed words and margins.
>
>
> "It's a trail back to you, like a license plate," Crean says.
>
>
> The dots' minuscule size, covering less than one-thousandth of the page,
> along with their color combination of yellow on white, makes them invisible
> to the naked eye, Crean says. One way to determine if your color laser is
> applying this tracking process is to shine a blue LED light--say, from a
> keychain laser flashlight--on your page and use a magnifier.
>
>

I was told awhile back that it was illegal to make a copier that had a high
enough resolution to copy money.

Looks like this was the solution to that problem.

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