Hitachi comes to aid of hi-tech mole detectors

A TECHNIQUE invented by Hitachi means that the days of unauthorised copying of documents will soon be dead.

That could be a boon not only to secretive government departments but also to totally paranoid high tech companies like Intel and HP, who currently produce separate revisions of confidential documents to narrow down the process of hunting down and exterminating naughty moles who distribute them.

Sometimes sentences and words within a sentence are varied, so that Witchfinders at the different firms can further narrow down their search.

The Hitachi technique, according to a report in today's Nihon Keizai Shimbun newspaper, means that secret coding of 64 bits can be inserted into a sentence, which, say has 60 or 70 letters.

The coding is added to the fonts in a way imperceptible to the printed eye, and can only be read by using special software and using a scanner, the paper said.

There are similar techniques already for photographs and colour images, but the Hitachi breakthrough is that it can be applied to black and white text.

George Alfs, a senior PR representative at Intel USA, will be pleased. Earlier this year he collared the INQ and asked us whether we thought it was ethical for Chipzilla's partners to leak its roadmaps, given they'd signed non disclosure agreements.

We replied that whether it was ethical or not, it nearly always indicated that a specific partner had an axe of some kind to grind. µ