> The DEDA toolkit allows anyone to anonymize documents by removing the tracking dots at the software level<p>Sounds like the tracking tech is implemented in the proprietary drivers. If only the free software movement had filled its original purpose (freeing printer drivers¹) for more models…<p>¹<a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/201cthe-printer-story201d-redux-a-testimonial-about-the-injustice-of-proprietary-firmware" rel="nofollow">https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/201cthe-printer-story201...</a><p>Edit: looks like it may be in the firmware on the printer itself, not drivers on computers, as h-node warns of tracking even on printers with full compatibility with blobless, FSF-endorsed distros eg. Trisquel GNU/Linux-libre: <a href="https://h-node.org/printers/view/en/2215/HP-DeskJet-2700-series/1/1/undef/undef/undef/undef/compatibility/undef" rel="nofollow">https://h-node.org/printers/view/en/2215/HP-DeskJet-2700-ser...</a>
Wholly aside from the privacy and control implications of this antifeature, these dots are actually a significant impediment to the normal use of my laser printer. Sure, they aren't visible when printing on to white paper in a single pass, but when printing on transparency or coloured paper they are very visible, and especially so when running multiple passes (for composition of images without a computer).<p>They also affect me when I use the printer for producing PCBs using the toner transfer method - the dots act as an etch resist and impose an uncorrectable noise of copper dots on to an otherwise excellent result.
EFF got my donation for their resource on yellow dot identification on printed documents. Got a cool shirt out of it too.<p><a href="https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display-tracking-dots" rel="nofollow">https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d...</a>
There was no need to use the yellow tracking dots to track Reality Winner... the NSA would certainly have the ability to audit anything printed in their facility and know exactly what was printed on any given day.
"It's been posited by researchers that tiny discrepancies in the spacing between words or even the kerning of letters could be used to encode information."<p>I know some DTP types that this technique would drive them crazy. They spend so much time adjusting the leading/kerning to get the text appear in the layout they way they want. Having that thrown out the window by the printer would absolutely drive them insane. For science, I want to try this out now. It would be awesome to do it as an April Fools joke.
I knew about this aspect of printers more than a decade ago, before I ever got into tech, so I'm 100% sure it was/is semi-widely known. It's really sad that the Intercept and other news orgs are so technically oblivious that they would screw their source like this.
Interestingly enough, back in the early nineties, when I was working in a print bureau, the vendors would warn us how traceably colour copiers/printers of the era were, so it seems like an example of an "open secret".
Somehow when I last read about this technology I had thought it was only triggered when copying or printing counterfeit currency, but really the history is that it was the fear of counterfeiting which helped the US government get printer manufacturers to add this tracking info to most color laster printers. Ugh. Good to know...
<a href="https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/household-printers-tracking-code/" rel="nofollow">https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/household-printers-trackin...</a>
Similar type of thing was used to trace typewriters behind the iron curtain before the communism collapsed. All owners of typewriters had to register their typewriters with the police and they all had peculiarities that would trace back to each typewriter. They'd load a page and type all the characters and that was it. I guess it had more of an psychological impact as the matching would be quite difficult. I guess they were afraid of independent people writing manifests or disseminating information.<p>Illegal information was circulating somewhat freely though, maybe not very sensitive stuff (people were self censoring very political stuff as they were afraid of repercussions from authorities), but lots of things from the west were circulating: magazines, books, videotapes and so on.<p>Growing up there it was drilled in us that counterfeit money is an extremely grave offense and it is punishable severely, and the same story with drugs. I was surprised to find out that counterfeit money was circulating in the states and when I received such a bill I asked a police officer what am I supposed to do with that. He told me to just keep it:) He said I shouldn't bother to report it as nobody would really care about it.
I printed a page of text and then scanned it back in. I spent quite some time messing around with the resulting image and couldn't see any dots. My printer is an almost new, Canon color laser so I would've expected it to be spying on me.<p>Is there some software or a web site that will scan an image and decode the dots?
On some older PS/PECL laser printers the firmware lived in a small DIMM-like board (for upgrades) with a mask ROM on it. Pretty much all of these are PowerPC (some might have mips). There's probably not much in the way of low-level security there. Just saying.
So, if I am getting it correctly - this is only for color printing right? Why would they implement it on software level, would not hardware be easier and harder to remove?
Whether it is the Blockchain, Tor or other privacy guards that wane us in anonimity - we, especially us techies, often underestimate typical chokeholds which a government can easily control (eg your ISP, your cell phone tower, your cell phone maker, payment provider, ...), because it usually does and government agents usually don't make a fuzz about it because it's a valuable trap.<p>Without the fuzz over enough time passed we, even NSA experts, seem to forget about those traps.<p>The moral of the story for us techies: Don't wane people in anonimity if they use X or do Y. There will be a percentage of people who do things, they wouldn't have done without that info, and some of said percentage will be blackmailable (think miners having "inciminating pictures" on their machines because they were stored on the blockchain once).<p>Worse than a privacy infringing government are blackmailable citizens (One could argue the former causes the latter, I argue the latter steers the former into worse).
I really don't see what the big deal is. We live in an age of intense, personal, for-profit surveillance, why should I care about printer watermarks?