Copiers have Hard Drives?

hacking or social engineering skills for identity theft? Simply buy a user copier with many scans recorded and pull the images off the drive(s) stored in the copier.

Great.

I remember hearing about the Saudi's buying disk drives on EBay just to see what's on them. I figure my information has been digitized and recorded so many times and completely unguarded enough times that anyone can find out all they want to know about me. We're living in a digital fishbowl.

So I guess regularly dbaning your copier hard disks should be on the MIS maintenance schedule....

Moopst, the word you're looking for is "panopticon"

@Bob:

Good one. I was actually invoking a metaphor I had heard about the military, that it's like "living in a fishbowl." Of course a military that's voluntary - it's not unexpected that they would want to observe their members and get them to conform to a military standard of conduct. Given the trust and responsibility that the military takes on it's a good thing.

Quoting:While the design did not come to fruition during Bentham's time, it has been seen as an important development. For instance, the design was invoked by Michel Foucault (in Discipline and Punish) as metaphor for modern "disciplinary" societies and their pervasive inclination to observe and normalise. Foucault proposes that not only prisons but all hierarchical structures like the army, schools, hospitals and factories have evolved through history to resemble Bentham's Panopticon. The notoriety of the design today (although not its lasting influence in architectural realities) stems from Foucault's famous analysis of it.

What I worry about are who the observers are (ID thieves being the least troubling, foreign governments much more so). Did I mention my last Windows machine was communicating with an IP address in Fujan Provence, China?

Quoting:Did I mention my last Windows machine was communicating with an IP address in Fujan Provence, China?

I have PSAD running on my firewall to auto-block for a day any IP that so much as thinks about doing a portscan on me. Most of the blocked addresses are usually from China, with a few from Taiwan here and there, generally a few from here in the US, and maybe a couple from other countries.

It seems that China pretty actively probes for open machines.

> It seems that China pretty actively probes for open machines.

All those infected Winders machines make a good disguise for deliberate counter-intelligence operations.

Try denyhosts. It does a wonderful job of keeping strange machines off my back.

What I don't understand is, why do these copiers need a harddrive at all?

They worked fine without a harddrive before 2002, isn't it? After all, my 'desktop printer' doesn't have one, and my previous Laser Jet didn't have one either. It would be perfectly acceptable to have a copier with only RAM for the documents, isn't it?(and OS on FLASH ROM or something?)

The HD enables a collated copy, without lots of external hardware, at a much higher resolution. Imagine copying a 50 page document:

The old way had a collator attached to the paper egress, that moved up and down for every page printed. It printed N copies of page 1, then N copies of page 2, etc. up to page 50.

The new way has a single tray to catch all the printouts, and it just moves left or right a little bit to let someone pick up collated copies. It prints copies of all 50 pages, moves the tray left, then prints copies of all 50 pages, then moves the tray right... until you have all the copies you want.

It also lets someone interrupt a long copy/print job, to run off something else.

But I agree, after one day, those jobs should be deleted from the internal storage.

> Try denyhosts. It does a wonderful job of keeping strange machines off my back.

For now, sitting behind a NAT router set to ignore everything inbound works sufficiently.

But I'm not seeing attacks on IPv6 yet.

I run shorewall with every dropped by default except to the open ports. PSAD blocks anything that looks like it might be starting a portscan (hits on 2 ports with a total of 5 packets or more), because if they are trying to scan you they obviously aren't legitimate users of the available services. I use portknocking for ssh access to keep that safe from anyone that happens to try that port first. Overall it keeps my system a little safer and harder for any non-valid access to find out what's open.