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Cheap scanners can spot paper 'fingerprints'
Elementary my dear HP
Tue Mar 10 2009, 19:07
BOFFINS at Princeton University and University College London have worked out a way to identify unique information, from any sheet of paper using any reasonably good scanner.
The breakthrough means that coppers could crack down on counterfeiting or companies could track of confidential documents.
Alex Halderman, now an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, who was part of the Princeton team, said that even with a cheap 1200 DPI scanner you can find unique mashups of fibres and create a fingerprint for each piece of paper. µ
L'INQ
Computerworld
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INQ Poll
I'm sure you can, with time. But can you do it in a reproducible and reliable way for every document ? Or do you need to assign coordinates to the spot where the "fingerprint" was taken ? If so, odds are great that mistakes will be made, maybe too many to make the technology reliable for law enforcement issues.