Reply #25: It's a "voluntary" but unpublished standard [View All]

[kurth]

My understanding is if you want to set up a production line to make your own color printer, you will need certain semiconductor components to format and output the image onto paper. Inside one of these components lies a "microcode" devised/approved by the NSA/Secret Service which imbeds those yellow dots. However, the cryptography behind the code is customizable by the semiconductor supplier and it is fairly weak (it took the EFF only one week of not trying very hard to break the code - the methodology they used was a standard brute-force graduate-level homework exercise).