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This video is about bricks.
Now, something you might not know about bricks is that they often have an indentation on
one side which is referred to as the frog.
Among bricklaying enthusiasts, there’s this big debate as to whether you should lay the
brick frog up or frog down.
If you go on bricklaying forums, you’ll see endless spirited debate on frog orientation
and that really… ok, that should be enough to get the FBI agent assigned to my channel
to click away.
That was necessary because today we’re spilling some secret government tea.
There are few certainties in life: death, taxes, that Denver airport is home to the
secret underground liar of the lizard people, and that snitches get stitches.
Considering that’s the case, you might want to figure out how to sew through plastic and
inkjet cartridges… because your printer is tattling on you… and it’s been doing
so for years.
Not only have printers been putting secret codes on every page for decades, but for over
20 years, nobody knew.
Well, nobody except the government, that is.
They definitely knew about it, because that’s the whole point—the codes are there to allow
investigators to track counterfeiters.
You see, back in the 1980s, a lot of things were happening.
Rubix's cubes were all the rage, walls were getting torn down, and people were sitting
bored in their houses for hours on end because there wasn’t a fast, free, and easy way
to watch dozens of professional-quality videos about bricks.
Also, the color photocopier was starting to get pretty popular and when that happened,
the world government, based in DC, understandably started to get pretty worried that people
would use those color copiers to copy money.
After all, before that, to copy money you had to either have own your own printing press
or be really, really good at drawing George Washington’s weird hair.
The Xerox company wanted to assure the government that there was no way that somebody would
be able to use their copiers to copy money so they secretly developed a way to include,
on every single printed piece of paper, a map back to the source.
The key?
Tiny yellow dots.
Still today, nearly every printed piece of paper is covered with tiny yellow dots that
are so small—with a diameter of 1/10 of a millimeter—that they’re almost invisible
to the naked eye.
They were intentionally made yellow so that when printed on white paper, nobody would
notice them.
In fact, even if you know they’re there, the only way to see them clearly is to shine
an LED light on the page and then look very carefully using a magnifying glass which is
probably why nobody noticed them for so long because, like, why would you do that.
That would be weird.
But if you do, in fact, do that, you’ll notice a bunch of dots that look randomly
scattered across the page, but the placement isn’t random at all.
It’s a code.
When the public found out about these dots, it didn’t take long for people to break
the code and figure out exactly how these little yellow dots had managed to report so
much information to the government.
Here’s how it worked.
The dots were printed in a 7-by-15 grid, and each column represented something different,
like the time, or the date, or the serial number.
Under each column, a number was written in a version of binary code that used dots instead
of ones.
It’s can be a little confusing, but here’s a breakdown.
The numbers were represented by what’s called a 7-bit counter, that can represent any number
between 1 and 127.
There are seven spots in a seven-bit counter, and each represents a different number—64,
32, 16, 8, 4, 2, and 1.
You put a dot or a one or something in a spot out of seven to add that number to the total.
So if I want to make the number one, I would write 0000001.
If I wanted to write 2, I would write 0000010.
If I wanted to write 73, I would write 1001001.
You can combine these numbers in a way to make every number up to 127.
That’s how these codes worked.
Each column had a number that was spelled out in binary code.
The first and fourth columns showed what time it was.
The fourth column showed the hour, and the first column showed the minute.
So in this example, the fourth column says: add 8 and 4.
That’s 12.
So we know it was 12 something.
The first column says, add 32, 16, and 2.
That’s 50.
So we know the time the page was printed was 12:50.
The next columns showed the date.
Column 6 showed the day, 7 showed the month, and 8 showed the year.
So we know the day was 16+4+1, or 21.
We know the month was 4+2, so 6.
And we know the year was 4+1, or 5.
In this case 5 means 2005.
And then columns 11-14 showed the serial number in reverse order.
I won’t do all the math all over again because that was already enough for the week, but
in this example the serial number would be 21, 05, 28, 57.
Aaaand, nobody every figured out what the 15th column does.
So let’s just assume that it [censored.]
These grids of code aren’t just printed once per page.
They’re printed about 150 times on each sheet of paper but even still, nobody noticed
these dots for two decades.
But then, in 2004, rumors started to swirl, and PC World broke the news that your printer
was a double agent.
Now we don’t know exactly how many counterfeiters the government managed to catch in that time,
but we do know, according to one counterfeiting specialist with the US Secret Service, that
the codes have been, “extraordinarily helpful.”
You know what’s also extraordinary helpful?
Always having a razor blade, stick of deodorant, tube of toothpaste, tub of hair gel, stick
of chapstick, bar of soap, and every other grooming product stocked consistently in your
home so you have it when you need it.
Well then, it’s dan-diddly-doodle good that Dollar Shave Club exists.
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