Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmfdmf | Hacker News Reader

I am old enough to remember when the fax machine first became ubiquitous in the 80's and read about how the Soviets were threatened by it. Unauthorized use was a crime and they stationed guards at fax machines to prevent mis-use. Perhaps I naively fell for CIA propaganda at the time but if true we can hope/estimate that California Commies will fall in less than 10 years since things are moving much faster in today's world.

View on HN

It wasn't just fax machines. Throughout the Eastern bloc, typewriters were strictly controlled and registered. There's a great scene in The Lives of Others [1], a German movie about a Stasi agent and a dissident writer, in which the Stasi (East German secret police) have recovered a typed manuscript that was smuggled to the West, and are interviewing a forensic expert to determine the make/model of typewriter used, in an attempt to cross reference against anyone who owns that typewriter.

We still do similar things now, though for ostensibly different reasons. Inkjet and laser printers have long had various signatures they add to every printed page, barely noticeable to the naked eye, that can lead back to the specific printer used. The stated motivation is to prevent counterfeitting. Similarly, there is a pattern of "O" symbols called the EURion constellation that, if present in an image file, most commercial image editing software will refuse to print [2].

It's not surprising that politicians are trying these sorts of strategies with 3D printing, because they've already tried and used them often in the past.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation#Counterfe...

If you have a photocopier and a few currencies you can have a lot of fun with EURion:

- look up your local laws! usually you can photocopy money as long as it's shrunken / enlarged by a specific amount

- you can cover up everything but the EURion and see what it does to the rest of the copy

- you can cover up the EURion part of the bill and print out the rest

Again, particularly in the last point, be sure to look up local laws and set the printer scaling accordingly

The Lives of Others is a seriously underrated movie. I highly suggest watching it.

The fax thing sounds unlikely?

Perhaps the CIA wanted people to use fax for secret communications, so they could use automated means to read the text instead of having people listen to hours of phone conversations?

Consumer fax calls were cleartext were they not?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com