Flutterby™! :

On the color copier code rumour , I've had several messages from people who say they work at or at dealers for Xerox pointing out that there's no "Richard Longcoat" in the company directory, that Xerox OEMs enough stuff that the secret of how these IDs are encoded would have to be pretty widely spread, and that with the optical copiers it'd be hard to not swap parts around to change serial numbers. I've asked for permission to excerpt from and cite them, more may be coming later. Thanks, all.