A Decade Ago...

I  came across an article at WhatTheyThink about the Pitman Company.  The press release from Pitman begins: "Camden, NJ — The former chief financial officer of the Harold M. Pitman Company, a New Jersey-based graphic arts and printing supply company, pleaded guilty today to wire fraud and tax evasion in connection with a $2 million embezzlement scheme, U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman announced."

Apparently the fraud was conducted between 2003 and 2009.

I bring this up because my company crossed paths with Pitman during that period.

Lexigraph started out in the late 1990's by producing what would become pdfExpress.  The first version was a plug-in for Acrobat 3.0 that ran on a PC.  Previously the focus of revenue had been market research and mailing companies I had started.   The mailing company I have discussed before.  The market research company conducted mailing survey's using the "fill in the oval"-type printed surveys.  We also tallied the results and produced reports.

Once the first plug-in was working I made the decision to travel to a trade show in Moscone Center in San Francisco to demonstrate the product.  I hand built a back wall using example output I printed on a color laser printer I hand bought.

The booth generate a lot of interested from a company called PR1ME Source (PS).  PS was a distributor of Xeikon digital presses in the USA and claimed to be "the largest integrator of Xeikon branded presses in the world."  The reason for this was that our PDF process worked a lot like the front-end of their digital press at the time: the PrintStreamer II.  This was a hardware device built by a third-party Xeikon integrator that used a scripting language to assemble pages from components.

 

Our product, pdfExpress, worked in a similar fashion except in software assembling PDF components, e.g., overlays, charts, graphs, logos, into a PDF file.  This was a very advance technology and together we could do a lot of things that the big companies could not.

Over the next couple of years Lexigraph became heavily involved with PS - primarily because it was easy for us to build, simulate and test workflows in software without having to turn on a press.

The Pitman article piqued my interest because Pitman at that time was the chief rival of PS.  Both companies were primarily resellers of plates and other print related software and hardware to the printing industry.  I believe that PS's arrangement of Xeikon was kind of a poke in Pitman's eye.  PS was run by some far-ahead seeing executives and though in the long run it has since disappeared (I am not sure what happened to it - it got involved with a Xeikon partnership called Canopy and then I believe was bought by Fuji).  These execs understood that the real future growth of the print industry was going to be digital (this is about 2000).

I think that 9/11 in the US eventually caused PR1IME Source to be purchased by Fuji.  The print industry took a bit hit after that attack and recovery took several years.  PS's investment in the Xeikon relationship was expensive and Fuji bailed them out.

Eventually I hired some of the Canopy employees and I recall visiting the Pitman booths at trade shows in the subsequent years with them and discussing their company and products.  

I discussed the "digital printing" business with some Pitman people over the years.  They always felt that it was a mistake for PR1ME Souce and that they were going to stick with their primary business.  I think that they probably were right in the sense that they are still around and independently doing what they do.

Its a shame to see employees go bad like that - but anyone who runs a business has to deal with that sort of thing.

I had forgotten about Pitman until I read the linked article.

Jailbreaking: To Infinity and Beyond

Given the copyright law in the US what are we allowed to do or not do with the things that we buy?

Historically, of course, this has not been an issue.  For example, purchasing a hammer with a license to only build houses would be considered nonsense.  You've bought the hammer so its now yours.  The previous owner has no claim what-so-ever on your use of it.  Of course the seller of the hammer might attach a license but more than likely people would either ignore it or buy another hammer without one.

In the modern digital age many things we buy contain license agreements and software.  For example, an iPod or iPhone is a physical thing, like a hammer, but it also involves the use of some sort of intellectual property, like software, to make it work.  The software is typically covered with a license that restricts what you might do with the software - not the device ifself.  For example, decrypting the software or posting it on a public web site are types of restrictions typically found in such licenses.

Most of the law on this is covered by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  From WikiPedia: "The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures (commonly known as digital rights management or DRM) that control access to copyrighted works. It also criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself."

This protects downloaded music and DVD's from being unfairly copied as well as makes it a crime to decode or decrypt certain types of protection systems, e.g., the iTunes music system that limits your playing of music to, say, an iPod.

However, there are certain exceptions to the DMCA and an important one was added very recently: iPhone Jailbreaking.

Apple, of course, disagrees with this (see PDF here).  Apple argues that A) "jailbreaking" violates its license agreement and B) that a "fair use" of the iPhone and its software under the copyright law such as jailbreaking is not allowed because the jailbreaker does not own the software and is merely a licensee.

But Apple's view was struck down on two fronts:  First the Copyright Office concluded that, “while a copyright owner might try to restrict the programs that can be run on a particular operating system, copyright law is not the vehicle for imposition of such restrictions.”

Second, a Federal Appeals court ruled that "dongle protected software" can only enforce copyright issues but must allow the user to use and view the software.  From the ruling (listed here): "Merely bypassing a technological protection that restricts a user from viewing or using a work is insufficient to trigger the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision.  The DMCA prohibits only forms of access that would violate or impinge on the protections that the Copyright Act otherwise affords copyright owners."

The next front on which this will play out is now video games. 

If I buy a video game is it fair use to install "modded" hardware? 

(In case you don't know what "modding" is here is the Wikipedia definition: "Modding is a slang expression that is derived from the verb "modify". Modding refers to the act of modifying a piece of hardware or software or anything else for that matter, to perform a function not originally conceived or intended by the designer. ")

In this case the defendant, Mathew Crippen, thinks so - for the same reasons I listed above - he took money from some under cover agents to jailbreak an Xbox and was arrested.

The two rulings listed above are remarkable and I predict that, by the same logic used in both of these cases, the government will lose its case against Mathew Crippen.

What does this mean for the rest of us?

Well, for one thing I think that it says that if I buy software, like a PhotoShop or Windows, and I don't like what it does I can alter it despite what any license agreement might say so long as I don't violate the copyright provisions of that license, e.g., make illegal copies for someone else because of this.

In the case of my copier spying on me, which I wrote about recently, it says that me somehow hacking the software to prevent such spying is legal.

Could I "jailbreak" my RIP for my highspeed inkjet or digital press?

Could I take apart a printer I own with a color Adobe RIP and make use of it in some other way?

Could I view the inner workings of a PhotoShop or Quark and make use of what I saw so long as I did not violate other patent or copyright law?

Could I buy a junk RIP and diddle the innards to make a new product?

I think the answer to all these questions is yes.

Acrobat/PDF Security Issue

 Listed here.

Adobe's response here.

The Head of a (Green) Pin...

 There's a lot of discussion in the printing industry about being "Green". 

Sure, we all have some generic understand that "green" means "saving our mother earth from ecological disaster at the hands of man" but, if you want to write articles that quantify the savings, i.e., cloud computing is better than X, or producing a National Geographic Magazine has a carbon footprint of Y you had better have some sort of rational scientific basis.

The problem here is separating the causuistry, which I wrote about a few days ago, from actual causality.  If we pretend what we are talking about is a form of causality or exact measurement and it turns out not be then the entire discussion is no more valid than arguing about how many angles can dance on the head of a pin, even if the pin has a green head.

Before delving into something like the "greenness" of publishing a magazine or deciding whether a "cloud computing" facility is "more green" than some other type of computing we need solid foundation on what "green" actually means.  The classic definition of "green" in this context is the amount of CO2 put into the atmosphere by some process: driving, heating, generating electricity, and so forth.

Now there isn't such a thing as a "green-o-meter" that you can just punch in some numbers to get the "greenness" of some activity.  Sure there are web sites and other things that claim to do this but they really cannot be real (which we'll see in a minute).

So instead we have to use a proxy for the "green-o-meter" - that is something that we can measure easily which can be translated into a measurement of "greenness".

We're going to define green here in a comparative way:  We're going to say something is more green than another thing if it uses less measurable energy to do the same task.  This is actually a cheat as we will see later but for now, and to keep this article simple, we will assume this.  Of course, this assumes we actual want to do the thing we are talking about, i.e., drive, because, I could simply not drive instead which would use zero relative energy.

But even this can be subject to disagreement.

Let's take the example of something everyone can understand and is familiar with: a stove.  I had remodeled our house and in the process I planned to move the kitchen into the new addition.  In this process we are switching from electricity to gas.  However, because of the bad economy we cannot afford to acquire the kitchen appliances we originally wanted so we decided to temporarily acquire some used ones instead.  That we could complete the move of the kitchen and replace the used appliances with new ones in the future.

So I ask myself this: which is greener?  The electric stove or the gas stove.

This seems like a simple question, doesn't it?

So first off, let's take away the issue of the creation of the stove, its transportation, etc. and just consider the basic function: heating something, like a pot of water. 

This limits the question to this: when we turn the knob "on" to heat, say, a pot of water, which type of stove is more green?

First off let's see what we can find out relative to this.  Certainly some people seem to think electricity is more "green" than gas (from the link): "Unfortunately, I’m going to have to disappoint everyone who loves to cook on a gas cook top and tell you right now that an electric cooktop is going to be more eco-friendly – hands-down."  Yet this site says the exact opposite: "Usually it's more efficient to burn natural gas where it's needed -- in your home -- than to burn it at a power plant, convert the heat to electricity and then send the electricity over wires to your house. "
Well, this isn't much help...

Let's look at the specifications for the stoves then - perhaps that will make it possible to compare.

Some digging reveals that a gas stove might have a 9,500 BTU nat. rating per burner.  From more digging apparently nat = natural gas.  However, electric stoves are rated in Watts, e.g., 3,200 Watts per burner.

Since there is a direct formula for the conversion: 1 watt = 3.412141633 BTU/Hr you can easily compare the two.

But wait, this just compares the output of the burner on each type of stove.  Different stoves have different ratings, e.g., one electric stove might have 1,250W burners and another 3,200W burners.

So let's pick two imaginary stoves that have exactly equivalent rating for their burners - one gas and one electric.

So which of these is more green?  Neither, actually, as the burners are rated the same so the stove use the same amount of energy.

But is that a proper comparison?  Is a gas stove "as green" as an electric one?

No, actually, because of how you use the stove.

If had two stoves, one gas and one electric, equal BTU/Watt ratings mean that given both stoves are on and the burners heating at full efficiency it would take the same amount of time to heat the same amount of water (in equal amounts in equal pots) the same amount.  Not from scratch, mind you, but with the burners already on and placing the pot on the running stove.

But in reality you don't use the stove like this.  You start out with a cold pot of water on the stove with the burner off, you turn on the stove, and let the burner heat the water.   When you consider this the problem becomes more complicated because now you must consider a time element - how long does it take the stove to reach the full operating temperature?  We know that both stoves have the same burner ratings so once each reaches full operating temperature we know they are equivalent.

Though you don't have to believe me the gas stove has a virtually instant startup time: that is once the flame appears its at full temperature.  So let's say, just for argument, that it takes 1 second to bring the gas stove up to full temperature.

On my old electric stove it takes about 90 seconds for the burner to reach full temperature.

Bottom line is that while both stoves produce the exact same amount of heat the electric stove takes longer to reach full temperature.  Of course, during this warm-up time some heat is transferred to the pot, but not nearly as much as full power.

So, all things being equal, including exactly equal stoves, it would seem that the gas stove is greener because it uses less energy to do the same job as the electric stove.

So does a gas stove cause my "green footprint" to be smaller than the electric stove?  Or am I being fooled by causuitry here?

This is a much more complex question since it involves the relative "greenness" of the infrastructure used to provide gas and electricity to my house as well as the efficiency of that infrastructure in delivering this energy to me.

Now, most people of live near a big city probably have both gas and electricity.  Generally everyone in the US, at least, has electricity, and some have other technologies like oil if they live in rural areas.

We must now examine the relative greenness of the infrastructure used to deliver the gas and electricity.  Which uses more energy?  Is one greener than the other?

For example, we could say the the delivery system for each was "equal" in terms of green, i.e., the wires and the pipes use the same amount of energy to build and maintain.   But that's not enough either because gas in a pipe is not the same as electricity in a wire.  Electricity is lost in the transmission from point A to point B.  This is not true with gas.

Similarly something must create the electricity, i.e., a generator, and something must power that device.  Where as gas simply comes up out of the ground under pressure in the first place - though a gas well must be dug to reach the gas.

So what is greener for my stove? Gas or electricity.

The actual answer is probably impossible to tell.  I can guess that since gas does not involve a conversion to another form (electricity) and does not lose energy during the transmission that its more efficient, but that discounts the discovery and drilling process.

The point of all this discussion is how on earth would it be possible to tell if a physical, printed magazine was "greener" than, say, an electronic version of that magazine shipped via a cloud computer through a WIFI to my iPad.

I have greatly simplified the stove example - virtually anyone you discuss this with might not agree with the cheats and short cuts I took.  They might have different ideas about measuring green.

The bottom line is don't write articles and say "X is more green than Y" without some rational, scientific basis.

If you don't believe me check out some of the web sites the "green" ad sponsors offer to see if you can find any rational, scientific basis for their claims.

Patents, Trash Mobs, and Apple Pie

First a short note first on those who love Apple (no, not pie, computer) here.  If you like to guess what Steve Jobs is up to this site may be quite a bit of help...

But on to trash mobs and Apple Pie.  About five years ago Monica Gaudio wrote an article called "The Tail of Two Tarts" about the history of Apple Pie.  Several years later Ms Gaudio was notified by a friend that her article had appeared in Cooks Source - a for pay on-line and print publication.

The lifted article had appeared here, but now its no longer available at facebook - no doubt due to the pummeling provided by the trash mobsters.

According to this when Ms Gaudio contacted the Cooks Source editor, Ms Judith Griggs, this is the reply she got (she asked for a published apology and $130 to be sent to a specific charity cause):

“Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice, Housitonic Home and Connecticut oman Magazine. I do know about copyright laws. It was “my bad” indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things. But honestly Monica, the web is considered “public domain” and you should be happy we just didn’t “lift” your whole article and put someone else’s name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me… ALWAYS for free!”

Well there you go!  Ms Griggs want's to be paid for editing the original article.  How nice!

The picture at the beginning of this article was taken from the Cooks Source facebook page.

It looks like its the result of a trash mob that has shown up to give Cooks Source and Ms. Griggs what for (from the Cooks Source "Wall" at facebook).

Well this is all fine and good....

But wait!  Not so fast...

What's this?  A parody of Ms Griggs (image at the top of this article, link to facebook here) superimposed on a "Dummies" book.  Now as far as I can see the "Dummies" book format is Copyright © 2010 & Trademark by Wiley Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.

Hmmm, it would see that not only Ms. Griggs is serious about considering the web to be "public domain" - apparently a "Maggie Gorn, whoever that is, also believes things like the "Dummies" model is public domain - unless Wiley gave her permission to doctor up the cover of a Dummies book as a parody.  (Though this is possibly a "fair use" case under copyright.)

To me the big to do here is a little like the pot calling the kettle black.  I scrolled through a bit of the trash mobbing of Cook Source and while there were a few like Maggie most just posted text comments on how vile and evil Cooks Source is.  Since I did not find the use of the original Tarts article in context its hard to tell if there was or was not an offense committed (perhaps it was parody as well).

Even more interesting is that at the site of the original Tarts article there are a number of pictures.  These are not links to other sites but actual images housed on "www.godecookery.com" - the place where the original Tarts article was published.

However, these have been taken (with credit listed as "Gathering Apples. From Tacuinum Sanitatis, Paris, 15th c.") from another original work:  the Tacunium Sanitatis, which is a physical book, that looks like this:

According to Wikipedia a whole series of these books was published starting in 1531 - several complete copies survive today as well as parts of others.  I imagine that the French library in which these reside owns the copyright to these books.

In the original "Tale of Two Tarts" an image from this book is used.

Did www.godecookery.com take these photographs themselves?

Was permission to use these gotten from their owners or copyright holders?

If not, how is this different from Ms. Griggs supposed offense?

While "trash mobbing" might be fun and even necessary in a case like this, everyone needs to be careful that they themselves are not guilty before casting the first stone.

EDIT: I posted a link to this on the Cooks Source wall...

The Creation of JLight (Part 1)

In the fall of 2007 I needed a technical project to work on.

Out of the blue a fella called me from across the state - he had a problem.  His customer was a large Indigo printer and occasionally they had overflow work.  He, of course, had an Indigo, but he also had two iGens.  The Indigo was old and slow, but the iGens were new.  Was there a way, he wanted to know, to print the Indigo output on the iGen?

Not understanding I said, "sure, just send the file over to the iGen RIP".

"No, No" he said, "the files are already RIPed print ready JLYT files."

Now I understood.  This was some sort of file image-type format out of the Indigo RIP that went to the actual printing engine.

I said, "I'm not familiar with that format except generally.  I know its some sort of compressed image.  Send one over and I'll see what I can do..."

So he did.

(Some later efforts on this are described in this blog which I started in early 2009 to discuss the details of decoding the high resolution elements of the file.)

The discussion that follows here is based on my original efforts to decrypt this file format.  I did this as a black-box reverse engineering project.  (I had no prior knowledge of how JLYT works and no access to a JLYT implementation - either as a RIP or print consumer.)

First, what is a "black-box" reverse engineering project? From this link:

Black box reverse engineering is closer to the scientific method, only applied to hardware or software:

   1. Gather information and resources, typically by reading any available public documentation.
   2. Form a hypothesis, such as how something is implemented.
   3. Perform experiment and collect data. For software, the "experiment" is typically a test program of some sort.
   4. Analyze data.
   5. Interpret data and draw conclusions.
   6. Repeat 2..5 until the underlying hardware or software is understood.

The J-LAYOUT files, as they are called, is really a series of press-ready images inside of a PDF wrapper.  This was easy enough to tell by simply opening the file and looking at it.  At the surface it has all the common elements of a PDF file: COS objects, XREF, a root, pages, Kids, and so forth.  Being somewhat expert in this it was fairly easy to see this by basically opening the file in an editor.

However, below the PDF /Page level things were a bit different.  Each JLYT page turned out to be a series of PDF streams.  The structure and form of these was much less clear.  I could see, for example, that what appeared to be each page began with a stream prefixed with 'IC96'.

I surmised this to mean "I = Indigo, N.V. - the original maker of the press and file format", "C = compressed - as in compressed image format", and "96 - the year it was created."

The streams appeared to be sequential within a page so it seemed likely that the series of streams together made up the page.  Each stream was only 65,536 bytes in length - which was odd. PDF streams can be much longer.  So I guessed this was some sort of design limitation - Indigo presses had been around since the mid-1990's so a limit like this seemed rational for the computer hardware at the time.

So my next step was to cobble together the series of streams that I thought made up a page, which I did, and placed it into a file imaginatively called "dummy.guts".  This file was in binary format so it was hard to work with.  I then created some tools to dump out the file in various textual forms: binary, decimal, hex and so on so that I could try and discover the structure.

Since I knew the raster size of the page from the PDF structure I started looking around the IC96 portion of the file.  Eventually I deduced this:

typedef struct {
  char iid[4]; // 'I' 'C' '9' '6'
  short int height;
  short int width;
  short int q1;
  short int q2;
  short int q3;
  short int q4;
} IC96T;

Which told me the height and width of the image - not surprisingly, this match the height and width of the page declared in the PDF portion.

The nex step was to figure out what came next...

How Your Office Copier is Spying...

So I was looking into the specs for the Canon ir2200.  This is a copier/printer/scanner/fax-type device that costs around $1,500.00 USD used, a lot more new.

This is the kind of device you might find in any office.  Typically something like this is leased.  In fact, most modern copiers are leased these days.

The specs for this device include the following:

Image Server Memory: Standard 128MB RAM+5.1GB

So this is not only a copier/printer/scanner/fax device, but it has a hard drive and a built in processor of some sort as well.

Hmmm...

I did a bit of digging and I came up with this PDF on "The Forensic Analysis of Digital Copiers":

"Many modern digital copiers store copied and printed information on internal hard drives.  Such information may have value as evidence. In order to test the possiblities for evidence extraction from copiers, two digital copiers containing hard drives were dismantled and forensically analyzed. The analysis shows that it is possible to retrieve exact copies of documents that has previously been copied and/or printed on digital copiers. "

So this device, as probably most or all of the same type, doesn't simply image your copy onto the old-fashioned selenium drum, charge the drum, let toner stick to the drum, and impress the toner on the paper.  No.  It scans your page into a hard drive memory and prints it out onto the page.  This PDF is about using that information as evidence.

Apparently it never deletes the scanned image.

Now the old fashioned copier method ensured security because once the selenium drum as discharged all the toner would come off - leaving almost no trace of what was copied.  I suppose someone very clever could probably recover an image or two from the toner residue on the drum.  But that's probably a lot more tricky and complicated than what I am about to describe.

So these folks in the forensic analysis PDF do the following:

1) They scan a set of 20 pages of known content into the copier.

2) They take the copier apart.  Apparently this involves nothing complicated.

3) They find the hard drive: a standard 2 ½ “ ATA hard drive of size 5.6 Gb. "The drive was easily imaged using EnCase 3.20 through a writer blocker on a standalone computer."  The EnCase 3.20 is some sort of commercially available disk tool for accessing contents computer hard drives.  Basically you physically remove the drive from the copier and hook it up to this device - most geeky 12-year olds could do this.  My guess its probably not even as complicated as they describe.

So they dump out the information on the hard drive:

Code Type Start Sector Total Sectors  Size
06 BIGDOS 0 8401995 4.0GB
06 BIGDOS 8401995 1269135 619.7MB
06 BIGDOS 9671130 1028160 502.0MB
06 BIGDOS 10699290 1028160 502.0MB

Their first attempts to read the information yield some gibberish, but with some effort:

"... it was found that swapping the bytes of the entire file systems, the contents could be read. The file systems of partition 2-4 were now readable as a variant of the FAT file system (with headers reading as “VXDOS”.) The first partition however contains no clearly visible file system (With header reading “NadaFSFastVCTTable”.

It was however found that the contents of this partition was indeed corresponding to the direct storage of images of previously copied document pages. These pages could be extracted and viewed in a standard image viewer."

4) They find their 20 pages of images.

Now they don't specify the image format used but my guess would be TIFF or JPEG - very standard because open-source (free) software is available to read and write these formats.

The byte-swapping they describe is because the device was probably designed in Japan.  Japanese DOS-type operating systems, no doubt like the one used in the ir2200, use a different byte order than those in the US.

So, in the case of the Canon ir2000, it can store about 4.000 images.  Now, most software that's embedded in a device like this is fairly dumb.  My guess is that it simply cycles through all 4,000 image slots as copies are made and only starts writing over previously copied and stored images on copy 4,001 - leaving an embedded history of the last 4,000 copies at any given time.

The analysis I describe to was done by some sort of group associated with gathering evidence, i.e., lawyers or prosecutors.

So what does this mean for you?

Well, for one thing that photocopy of your "rear end" made at the last Christmas party might still be lingering in the office copier (remember that the device I discuss is about 7 years old and has a tiny 5.6Gb drive - I am sure newer devices have much larger drives holding a much longer history of images).

If your boss leased the copier and the lease has run out since then your "rear end" copy might be hanging out across town at this very moment - say at "Joe's Autobody".  Hopefully little Joe Jr. isn't reading this article...

It turns out that "erasing" this hard drive is not something that happens between one lease and another. (Though by now there is no doubt legislation making it a federal felony of some horrific sort to not erase the drive - but still I doubt anyone bothers.)

On the other hand, if you made copies of your spouses or boss's personal files for revenge, well, that evidence may also still be on the copier.  Hopefully their lawyers are reading this either...

Then there's the issue of whether the device supports networking.  If so, no doubt there is hackery to simply access the images.  Imagine the fun when someone emails the image of your "rear end" to ... well, you get the picture (no pun intended).

The bottom line is this: modern copiers are not your friend.  Public copiers even less so...

Who knew?