Tracing printers: Your home printouts of the Anarchist Cookbook anonymous no more

Just when you thought printing out those reams of terrorist training pamphlets at home was perfectly safe, along comes some nosy Purdue researchers who've developed a technique to trace documents to their original printers (both laser and eventually inkjet, they claim). Apparently subtle print characteristics and "intrinsic signatures" left by the printers can act like a fingerprint, or more accurately, like a person's handwriting style. We know this is supposed to be used for tracing terrorists and counterfeiters and everything, but we're going to immediately demand they trace the origins of all this Spock-on-Kirk fanfic we found on the subway the other day.

[Via Slashdot]