Misc. Ramblings

I posted last week about some Lexmark printer drivers apparently phoning home. This week comes the revelation that at least some Xerox color printers, and perhaps Canon also, encode your printer's serial number on all printed pages. The coding is then used by entities such as the US government to track documents back to particular owners. Such tracking is aided by Xerox in that they (Xerox) voluntarily provides their customer database to government workers. Is this a GoodThing?