[Printers] HP networked printers "phoning home" ?

[Seth David Schoen]

dave writes:

> I've just joined this list having become *very* concerned over the  
> speed at which this  Administration appears to be eliminating  
> whatever privacy or *security* rights we (believed?) we previously  
> enjoyed**.
> 
> I've appended my observations since 9/11, but I had a related  
> question to the watermarking.
> 
> Has anybody observed any of the recent "networked" printers "calling  
> home" in the early hours?

This should be easy to confirm or disconfirm.  Run a sniffer like
Ethereal or tcpdump on your router or firewall, or on a broadcast
segment shared with the printer, and see whether it generates any
traffic outside the local network segment over the course of, say, a
week of use.  You can write a one-line libpcap rule to capture such
traffic.

There are an alarming number of devices and programs that do phone
home nowadays, although they do so for a remarkably wide range of
reasons.

-- 
Seth Schoen
Staff Technologist                                schoen at eff.org
Electronic Frontier Foundation                    http://www.eff.org/
454 Shotwell Street, San Francisco, CA  94110     1 415 436 9333 x107