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List of Printers Which Do or Do Not Display Tracking Dots
- mattpavelle 9y agoMy cursory research into this topic (this morning...) lead me to believe inkjet printers may be uncompromised (not printing steganographic dots). The NYTimes believed this to be the case as well back in 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/technology/personaltech/24askk-001.html http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/technology/personaltech/24...) - anyone with more knowledge of the subject have information about this?
- schoen 9y agoI wrote the original article, and that consistently matches what we've learned and heard. However, that doesn't mean that forensics can never identify the printer that printed a document (there's an entire lab at Purdue that's been studying possible ways to do so for over a decade!), just that the printers are not intentionally engineered to track their users. Edit: It looks like the Purdue lab was only publishing research from 2003 to 2010, or hasn't updated its web site.
- CodeWriter23 9y agoSo they perfected it and received a gag order under the State Secrets Act.
- schoen 9y agoGood thing this country doesn't have a State Secrets Act! (Maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act if they filed for a patent.)
- CodeWriter23 9y agoThat's what I was referring to. Thanks for the clarification.
- dmitrygr 9y agoTime to start printing full yellow background instead of white. Con: lots of yellow toner needed. Pro: no tracking. Or maybe never refill Yellow toner and then dots fail to appear.
- Simulacra 9y ago..or a return to dot matrix printers? Good thing I never threw those away.
- bonaldi 9y agoI think that might make you easier to track. Even driving slowly round the neighbourhood listening carefully would ferret you out.
- Simulacra 9y agoLOL I'm still not throwing them out. Nostalgia. They'll sit on a shelf next to my Nintendo and typewriters.
- protomyth 9y agoA daisy wheel printer would actually be less susceptible because a dot matrix could add small dots to the text.
- fnordfnordfnord 9y agoOld manual typewriters were also uniquely identifiable just by virtue of being shitty.
- Simulacra 9y agoThe Lives of Others
- natosaichek 9y agomaybe this is why some color printers will refuse to print black and white if they're out of the color ink.
- amiga-workbench 9y agoAre there any known forensic marking methods used by monochrome laser printers?
- schoen 9y agoNo, but it may still be possible to tell them apart in some ways. It would be good to start with https://engineering.purdue.edu/~prints/publications.shtml https://engineering.purdue.edu/~prints/publications.shtml and then see who's cited them in the last few years.
- irixusr 9y agoI'm hypothesizing, but you could make the slightest of changes to the print. For example, if it's text, modify the font ever so slightly so it's invisible to the eye but measurable to someone looking for it.
- bobsam 9y agoThe real question you should be asking yourself is how hard it is to fake these. If I get hold of someones copies, can I use them as template?
- kemiller2002 9y agoI think this is an excellent example of why security through obscurity is a bad idea. Now that we know they are there, it's only a matter of time before they are all broken and duplicated. How hard is it? I don't know, but I can't imagine that its impossible. Given time and technology, someone will figure how to forge these without difficulty. They were clearly betting on the fact that no one would notice they are there. What scares me is we're just finding this out. How long have criminal organizations and rogue nations known about this and what have they used it for?
- schoen 9y agoI'm confused about why people consistently think that this was a total secret, no matter how many waves of press coverage it gets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_steganography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_steganography There were press articles about it by 2004 (and I think some earlier), we had written the tool that Rob Graham used to decode these scans by 2005, and I gave a number of TV interviews about it during 2005. A small number of manufacturers (maybe worried about European data protection laws) also alluded to the existence of the technology in their user manuals. Some of the people from industry who contacted me also said that this was common knowledge to people in the printing industry since at least the turn of the millennium.
- ProfessorLayton 9y agoIt would be neat if there was a privacy printing app that added random yellow dots to a document to obscure the info. Perhaps simply printing a single yellow dot through a few different printers would be enough to accomplish the same thing. Then using the resulting paper for "real" prints. The more I think about it, this could even be a service. "Preprinted" paper that went though a bunch of printers, each adding their own unique identifier each time, then sold and distributed. That or just paying cash for a printer.
- brianwawok 9y agoI hate to be the security is not important if you aren't doing anything wrong guy.... but I use a printer to do things like print a picture for my kid to color. What the hack are you doing with you printer to need pre dotted paper?
- sathackr 9y agoprinting documents that could expose government corruption, without fear of backlash or even death? If we all lived in a perfect world then we wouldn't need a way to print things without being tracked.
- ProfessorLayton 9y agoI don't even own a printer myself. However, I don't think you need to be doing something wrong to not want to be tracked by others.
- bo1024 9y agoIt's about making "hard to track" the norm, not the exception. Similar ideas apply when using Tor, VPNs, do-not-track, etc for "innocent" internet browsing.
- fnordfnordfnord 9y agoIsn't this just another "If you're not doing anything wrong, you've got nothing to hide" argument?
- 9y ago
- schoen 9y agoI wrote this article/originally created this list, and I would like to emphasize that there is a second generation of this technology that probably uses dithering parameters or something of that sort, and that does not produce visible dots but still creates a tracking code. We don't know the details but we do know that some companies told governments that they were going to do this, and that some newer printers from companies that the government agencies said were onboard with forensic marking no longer print yellow dots. That makes me think that it may have been a mistake to create this list in the first place, because the main practical use of the list would be to help people buy color laser printers that don't do forensic tracking, yet it's not clear that any such printers are actually commercially available.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y agoCould you elaborate/speculate on how dithering patterns would be used?
- PatentTroll 9y agoThis isn't an answer, but I used to examine patents in this space. There are very advanced watermarking methods out there that are stable through transcoding, compression, obfuscation, etc. while being invisible to the naked eye. Really amazing stuff, wouldn't be surprised if there were lots of watermarks on media (audio, video, still image) that aren't readily apparent. One of the big use cases I remember was watermarking movies so that it would be possible to identify the time and place that a cam bootleg was recorded. That's a camcorder aimed at a movie screen and then heavily compressed and distributed over the internet, and the watermarks would still be detectable.
- kem 9y agoOne of the things I wondered when I read this story is if it would be possible to develop software that would somehow circumvent this type of situation. For example, using autoencoding or something to lose watermarking details intentionally or something. But what you're discussing seems more advanced than the yellow dots idea. I was surprised to see printers being involved--I thought something like this leak would all be digital. I was also surprised that the Intercept would not be more savvy about printer identification because it's been publicized so much over the years.
- kazinator 9y ago> the source of documents produced with other printing technologies are also possible, but, as far as we know, other kinds of printers do not deliberately encode their serial numbers in their output. To clarify, other here refers to anything other than a color laser? Also, are color LED printers included as color laser? (I would think so).
- schoen 9y ago> To clarify, other here refers to anything other than a color laser? Right. > Also, are color LED printers included as color laser? (I would think so). Yes. We could also perhaps say "color printers other than inkjet or dot matrix". Also color photocopiers (using the same codes).
- kazinator 9y agoPaying cash for the printer should mitigate things. At best they can tell something like that the page was printed by something that passed through a BestBuy warehouse in your town in the first quarter of last year, and that's it. Buy a printer hundreds of miles away from home while on a road trip, pay cash, and then do whatever you want with it: print yourself a hundred million dollars and enjoy your print-irement. :) Simply the awareness about the possibility of tracking goes a long way.
- prawn 9y agoCould they narrow down to any printers of that brand bought with cash in the country and request surveillance footage? Then build a shortlist from there. I imagine cash purchases of printers would be fairly rare and help limit the list. Buying a printer second-hand with cash might cover this situation. Burner printers...
- 21 9y agoThe problem is that it gets easier and easier to track everything. In the future maybe each pack of paper will have a steganographic tracking code - slight white variations for example, so you could track the paper to the selling shop. The camera, the scanner could also do this. And as more and more systems get integrated, they could see that your car and your phone were present at the time in the shop where the paper was sold. A second hand printer can still be tracked if you buy it through craig list, even through a long chain - the original printer was sold in a shop, the CCTV and facial recognition and phone location identified the original buyer, the buyer Craiglist account sold such a printer second hand on some date, he was tracked to some location, you were also tracked to same location at same time, you were pictured carrying a big package, your high-resolution electricity metering suddenly shows that you have a laser printer running in your house, and that you printed exactly 53 pages on the day of the leak, ... As you can see, it will become harder and harder to do anything anonymously. CSI will look naive compared to what will be possible in the future. Infinite zoom and camera viewpoint rotation will be trivial if you'll have one little camera in every door, every street sign, every corner, every car, every little thing.
- kylehotchkiss 9y agoIt could just print the mac addresses of all the nearby wifi networks. One subpoena to google's mapping service and you know exactly where the paper was printed. Yay, surveillance.
- comboy 9y agoSeems like a lot of data to print. I suppose just unique id would be enough. If the printer has access to wifi or internet connection in general (even through usb drivers) it can report the details.
- likelynew 9y agoWell, modern printers print with 100s of ppi, which on doing some maths suggest around 100 dot in a box of side 1 mm(in 250 ppi, most printers print with more ppi), enough for displaying 64 bit number with hash, even if it only works in binary mode. If more that just on/off can be detected, it can store much more.
- imchillyb 9y ago> ...google's mapping service... I guess we'd immediately be aware if google's _nomap wifi flag /actually/ did anything or not.
- FatAmericanDev 9y agoIs there an open source printing platform that allows the printer to be sure no codes are inserted?
- ouid 9y agocan I just use up all my yellow ink to solve the problem?
- pja 9y agoThen your printer will stop printing & demand that it be refilled. (At least some are known to do this now.)
- cowpig 9y agoIs there a reason that this would be a bad thing, pragmatically speaking?
- irixusr 9y agoNot necessarily. In fact the Stasi thought it was a swell idea!
- irixusr 9y agoNot necessarily. In fact the Stasi thought it was a swell idea!
- rhizome 9y agoWhether or not it's a good or bad thing relies entirely on each person's own definition of pragmatism itself. It's practical for my Mom to be indifferent about it. Reality Winner, not so much.
- Cieplak 9y agoTime to start reverse engineering printer firmware :)
- i336_ 9y agoI just realized something. - Office IT maintenance all hate printers - I'm sure you've gaped at the control software that came with the little $40 inkjet you bought (or had to use) at some point - Even the creator of MINIX cited "buggy printer drivers" as his rationale behind prferring nanokernel architecture (all drivers run in userspace) instead of monolithic approach (all drivers run in ring 0; printer driver sits next to crypto keyring). So. Printers are terrible. Remember Brinks' fireproof safes that were absolutely rock-solid but were running fully unpatched WinXP and had a USB port on the side of the keypad for "security updates"? Hackable with a keyboard stuffer that looked like a flash drive. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961024 I remember reading (somewhere) a conclusion that went along the lines of, Brinks are awesome at making safes - and this safe was truly amazing - but they weren't a software company, to a profound extent. It's clear to me that printer companies are similarly really, really bad at software design too. So, reverse-engineering the firmware to figure out what things printers are doing use probably wouldn't be all too difficult. The printer companies were told to write the code, not write it perfectly and make it impossible to unravel as well. Of course, if anyone actually take a crack at this (excuse the pun) that'll make things change a bit, but printer firmware is probably at the "open sesame in a big way" stage right now, and the printer industry is huge and slow to change, which suggests reverse engineering could remain trivial for a little while, even with publishing.
- jbmorgado 9y agoI was actually discussing this the other day at work (I work in a relatively small laboratory of about 50 people and we don't have a dedicated IT department so most of us contribute a bit to keep the IT infrastructure). It is incredible how fickle printers are, all the hassle they give, printing problems, network connection problems, special drivers to install even on modern operating systems, paper jams (one would have guessed by now they should have at least solved the paper jams) even on our quite expensive printers. It's like everything but the print quality got stuck in the year 2000 and never again evolved.
- codezero 9y agoIs it possible to add yellow dots or the opposite of yellow dots (assuming they are additive?) to the printed content such that the existing dots become noise?
- samtho 9y agoJust a guess, but I would be willing to bet that some of these manufactures ensure that the tracking appears outside of normal printable boundaries.
- theodorton 9y agoBuy two of the same printer and they'll scramble the code!
- 8note 9y agoyou could cut those ones off with scissors.
- nathanvanfleet 9y agoThe Lives of Others, which takes place in East Germany and includes a typewriter which is not registered with the government; was one of the best movies I've seen in a long time. And it's ultimately the live we'll live as tracking technologies continue to get better.
- X4lldux 9y agoYeah. Back in the days in Poland, when communism was still 'live and well', every typewriter was registered. Also, phone calls were monitored, but at least they had the courtesy to play a message "calls are monitored" before each call.
- B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago> they had the courtesy to play a message "calls are monitored" Probably meant they didn't actually have the resources to monitor all calls, so they were requesting people to not plot rebellions on the phone. Now we're richer than that.
- cm2187 9y agoWhen we start evoking the Stasi in a discussion about this surveillance, it always feels a bit like a Godwin point. But the reality is that all of this surveillance is exactly what the Stasi used to do and what the west was fighting the communist block for. If I had told people in the 80s that shortly in all western countries, all communications will be monitored, it will have become illegal to have any discussion that the government cannot eardrop on, the state will be compiling a file on every of its citizens and want to have a list of every book and article every citizen reads, they would have thought that the russians invaded us.
- lb1lf 9y agoPedantry mode: All of this surveillance is exactly what the Stasi _dreamed_ of doing. (I fully agree with your point; however, I'd argue that the (relative, back then) lack of digital storage and communication made gathering of information much, much harder back then than it is now - even for the Stasi.)
- higginss 9y agoWe need an open source / hardware 2d printer
- ResidentSleeper 9y agoI love the term "2d printer". What a time to live in.
- bo1024 9y agoFOSS seems to be the best, if not only, solution. (As usual, when it comes to freedom and privacy...)
- clishem 9y agoDo you mean FOSS printer drivers? Are you sure that would make a difference?
- bubblethink 9y agoNo, FOSS printer hardware, firmware and software. Obviously, nothing mainstream like that exists. It's not just the dots. Since printers are connected to networks, and there have been countless printer vulnerabilities, it's a worthy cause in its own right.
- bo1024 9y agoI know next to nothing about printers, so I'm not sure of anything! But what I'm seeing in the discussions here is a ton of uncertainty about what models even use tracking methods and what methods they use. So I'm guessing this is mostly because we don't know what the software in these printers is doing.
- beefsack 9y agoIt's likely any tracking mechanism would be implemented inside the hardware, not as part of drivers.
- rjmunro 9y agoIt would be in the firmware. It should be possible to hack a printer with open source firmware. You could even make a printer with open source hardware - something like this, but higher resolution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX09WnGU6ZY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX09WnGU6ZY, or think http://reprap.org/ http://reprap.org/ - home made 3d printers made only from commonly available and 3d printed parts.
- 9y ago
- lsiebert 9y agoI wonder if printing the exact same document on the same paper might mess up watermarks
- kristianp 9y agoThis seems to be only color printers. Does that mean B&W printers are too hard to add the tracking information to?
- desdiv 9y agoThe ostensible reason for this tracking feature is to deter counterfeiters (of currency). Since no currency is B&W, there would be no defensible excuse to coercer the manufactures into complying.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agothis is why open-source printers are so essential.
- dang 9y agoDiscussed in 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1408510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1408510
- jlebrech 9y agoanyway to make it print someone else's dots?
- alkonaut 9y agoIt's basically impossible to rule out that an image (or anything rasterized) is watermarked. The best way of ensuring this isn't to test it, but to simply ask the producer whether they would do this. If they say "no" or refuse to answer then don't buy that product. Not even if you had a printer from a manufacturer that had public firmware and driver code could you be sure by just inspecting the code and the printed output. If they clearly say they don't watermark output then you probably have to trust them or simply not use printers.
- barking 9y agoThe best bet is to assume that everything is traceable. Best you can do is do ocr on what you've printed and pass that on, i'd say.
- mtgx 9y agoSamsung printer business was just sold to HP, so there goes that option.
- whiw 9y agoSo if we swap our yellow and (say) blue cartidges then these dots will become more apparent?
- jerrre 9y agoif you find a printer which accepts it... (haven't tried, but I fear it won't be this easy)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- chris_wot 9y agoMakes the following book pretty fascinating reading: https://books.google.com.au/books?id=1XKqCAAAQBAJ https://books.google.com.au/books?id=1XKqCAAAQBAJ
- fiatjaf 9y agoI don't understand what could be done by governments with this kind of information. Please enlight me.
- Eric_WVGG 9y agoAn NSA contractor leaked information about the Russians meddling in the 2016 election to the press. She had been identified using these techniques. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/us/politics/reality-leigh-winner-leak-nsa.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/us/politics/reality-leigh...
- schoen 9y agoNote that the Times qualified this with: "And there may have been an even more glaring telltale that the F.B.I. did not mention in court filings." (So they were more cautious in that respect than other journalists, unfortunately.) In particular, the government has not acknowledged having used this evidence.
- CodeWriter23 9y agoWith the serial number of the printer, they can track it through retail channels to the buyer. If someone paid cash, they can review the surveillance footage at the point of sale at the time the sale was made. And when they find you in possession of the printer that emitted the printout, they can conclude you printed whatever it was.
- adventist 9y agoWhy create such a list? It seems like things like this should just be in the background to be used by people who may need this information in the future.
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoDo scanners also add unique identifiers to output, that seems like the low-hanging fruit in this space.
- amq 9y agoEven without deliberate watermarking, it is probably provable that an x document comes from a y printer, based on the way how letters look under microscope. Relevant, for example, if one would be dumb enough to print secret documents at home.
- zaxomi 9y agoYes, it probably is. But it is a very big difference that someone can prove that a specific printer they are in possession of was used by comparing the printed papers, or if they can just look at the paper and get the serial number and time the document was printed. (And if they have a database of who purchased the that printer, they know where they should start to look)
- jakub_g 9y agoICYMI this is linked to this thread from yesterday: "Secret Dots from Printer Outed NSA Leaker" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14494818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14494818
- c3833174 9y agoWhy not just use dot matrix printers? Can be had for free from business throwing them out, ribbons are readily available, plus they can be used as generic printers (limited graphics capability, but supported both on windows and CUPS) or by writing directly to /dev/lp0
- fizgig 9y agoSomeone from Purdue (I think) did research on being able to identify printers that used stepping motors due to unique characteristics in various models as well as individual printers. I'm not sure if dot matrix was in the study (I want to say it was inkjet?) but the principle remains the same. Not as precise as embedded serial numbers with watermarking, but it could get a whistle blower identified.
- tiku 9y agoWe could just sell "tracking dotted white paper", with 150 different patterns on it.. Or just release a pdf that has them embedded so you can print that first.
- codedokode 9y agoI wonder what is the motivation for printer manufacturers to implement this kind of tracking?
- NewSystems 9y agoI wonder what is the motivation for consumers to care?
- _pmf_ 9y agoThere might still be statistically significant alterations that allow tracking; I'd be very careful.
- JulianMorrison 9y agoIf your printer has tracking dots, this doesn't tell the people reading the tracking dots on the printout anything, unless they either - already suspect you, or - can trace the serial back to the purchase. Conclusion: buy your printer second hand and don't get caught.
- cestith 9y ago- in cash
- dgudkov 9y agoMatrix printers may suddenly get back in fashion.
- icholy 9y agoHere's how you decode them https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/ https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/
- 8_hours_ago 9y agoThis information is the result of research by Robert Lee, Seth Schoen, Patrick Murphy, Joel Alwen, and Andrew "bunnie" Huang. Does bunnie do any non-cool projects?? He inspires me more than any other developer/researcher today.
- sedachv 9y agoHas anyone here tried building a laser printer following Horace Labadie's book Build Your Own Postscript Laser Printer and Save a Bundle?
- tarikozket 9y agoFor people wondering what the dots looks like: http://static.snopes.com/app/uploads/2017/06/printer_EFF_dot_code_fb-865x452.jpg http://static.snopes.com/app/uploads/2017/06/printer_EFF_dot...
- cestith 9y agoPrint sensitive documents at FedEx Office or Staples and pay in cash. It's the only way to be sure. There were magazine articles, newspaper articles, and news site discussions about this years ago. They covered it being added to stop color laser printers and dye sublimation printers from being used for currency counterfeiting. That the tech community has this short of a communal memory astounds and saddens me. Even beyond the public knowledge of this tactic, that Reality Winner was working at an intelligence agency and was silly enough to think said intelligence agency couldn't track what had been printed in its own offices is laughable. Either she had no business working in that environment as she clearly doesn't understand their mission and methods or she's a scapegoat. * 2014 - PC World - http://www.pcworld.com/article/229647/counterfeit_money_on_color_laser_printers.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/229647/counterfeit_money_on_c... * 2004 - PC World - http://www.pcworld.com/article/118664/article.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/118664/article.html * 2005 - Washington Post, stating it had been in use at least ten years, and that at least one version of the yellow dot code had been broken. - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/18/AR2005101801663.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10... * 2004 - Slashdot - https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/04/02/06/1513255/hp-discusses-anti-counterfeiting-measures https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/04/02/06/1513255/hp-disc... * 2004 - Geek.com - https://www.geek.com/news/color-laser-printers-allow-feds-to-track-your-documents-557002/ https://www.geek.com/news/color-laser-printers-allow-feds-to... I could probably easily find more.
- 5_minutes 9y agoThanks, handy to know for my ransom notes.
- JammyDodger 9y agoPrivacy printer startup anyone?
- woof1971 9y agoWould printing on yellow paper solve the yellow-dot problem, or would the still be detectable?
- pvaldes 9y agoSo... Maybe people should start printing some documents directly in yellow paper? I wonder if printing a blank page and then double printing the document on this page would distroy the pattern It seems that there is an opportunity here for creating a program able to print a random layer of light yellow points to a blank page.