
A University of California researcher says he has found <A HREF="http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-5600055.html?tag=zdnn.alert">a way to identify computer hardware remotely,</A> a technique that could potentially unmask anonymous Web surfers by bypassing some common security techniques. Tadayoshi Kohno, a doctoral student, wrote in a paper on his research: "There are now a number of powerful techniques for remote operating system fingerprinting, that is, remotely determining the operating systems of devices on the Internet. We push this idea further and introduce the notion of remote physical device fingerprinting...without the fingerprinted device's known cooperation."