Re: [IP] Can cryptography prevent printer-ink piracy?

As is the case with several manufacturers today: Samsung is a great example. I *love* their printers - fast, cheap, reliable, etc... I could go on and on, but for one dealbreaker: crypto matched cartridges. We have migrated away from Samsung (and that includes the brand new $15,000USD printer that *could* have been a Samsung) because of this very issue. IIRC, HP is doing to, although this isn't first hand so YMMV. -- Yours, J.A. Terranson sysadmin_at_mfn.org 0xBD4A95BF "The real point is that you cannot harbor malice toward others and then cry foul when someone displays intolerance against you. Prejudice tolerated is intolerance encouraged. Rise up in righteousness when you witness the words and deeds of hate, but only if you are willing to rise up against them all, including your own. Otherwise suffer the slings and arrows of disrespect silently." Harvey Fierstein is an actor and playwright. On Sat, 7 Jul 2007, Sarad AV wrote:

Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2007 03:40:43 -0700 (PDT) From: Sarad AV To: cypherpunks@jfet.org Subject: Re: [IP] Can cryptography prevent printer-ink piracy?

Many end users just want to get their work done, irrespective of the cartridge as long as it meets their minimum standards. It should be annoying when one buys a cartridge and the crypto in the printer rejects the ink. The way business is done in many countries is that you cannot always go back to the seller and ask for a replacement. It will make end users look for printers without any encryption chip.

--- Eugen Leitl wrote:

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----- Forwarded message from David Farber -----

From: David Farber Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2007 19:53:46 -0400 To: ip@v2.listbox.com Subject: [IP] Can cryptography prevent printer-ink piracy? X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.752.3) Reply-To: dave@farber.net

Begin forwarded message:

From: Jeff.Hodges@KingsMountain.com Date: July 6, 2007 7:20:55 PM EDT To: dave@farber.net Subject: Can cryptography prevent printer-ink piracy? Reply-To: Jeff.Hodges@KingsMountain.com

Can cryptography prevent printer-ink piracy?

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/01/0221213&from=rss

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Zack Melich writes with news of a new front about to open in the war printer manufacturers wage with cartridge counterfeiters, refillers, and hardware hackers. A San Francisco company, Cryptography Research Inc., is designing a crypto chip to marry cartridges to printers. There's no word so far that any printer manufacturer has committed to using it.

Quoting: "The company's chips use cryptography designed to make it harder for printers to use off-brand and counterfeit cartridges. CRI plans to create a secure chip that will allow only certain ink cartridges to communicate with certain printers. CRI also said that the chip will be designed that so large portions of it will have no decipherable structure, a feature that would thwart someone attempting to reverse-engineer the chip by examining it under a microscope to determine how it works. 'You can see 95 percent of the [chip's] grid and you still don't know how it works,' said Kit Rodgers, CRI's vice president of business development. Its chip generates a separate, random code for each ink cartridge, thus requiring a would-be hacker to break every successive cartridge's code to make use of the cartridge."

=JeffH

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