8 ms·

Why printers add secret tracking dots

160 points by happy-go-lucky 9y ago

DarkKomunalec 9y ago
Because 'your' printer, and its manufacturer, are hostile to you. Edit: > Finish your sentence, please :) OK: Because 'your' printer, and its manufacturer, [and the NSA/Erdogan/multinational corp.] are hostile to you [printing illegal protest posters/exposing corporate crimes/spreading dissent/whistleblowing]. And yes, preventing individuals from breaking the law is hostile to those individuals, even if all laws were just. And they are not.
- pc86 9y ago
  > Because 'your' printer, and its manufacturer, [and the Secret Service,] are hostile to you [counterfeiting money]. Finish your sentence, please :) That was the original purpose of the tracking dots. I don't think it's at all surprising that an intelligence agency would co-opt a law enforcement identification mechanism. There is nothing "hostile" about preventing individuals from breaking the law.
  - wtetzner 9y ago
    > There is nothing "hostile" about preventing individuals from breaking the law. It all depends on how they do it. There are plenty of hostile things that are done in the name of law enforcement.
  - _jal 9y ago
    > There is nothing "hostile" about preventing individuals from breaking the law. 1) It prevents nothing. It is about post-facto detection. 2) It is self-evidently hostile to the law-breaker. 3) Whether or not it is moral to break the law is the relevant question, and that depends on the law. The "original purpose" of this tech hardly matters. Ask the authors of Soviet-era samizdat.
  - irixusr 9y ago
    How can you counterfeit money with an inkjet? You'll get caught in days (wrong paper, streaking, poor quality print) with or without the dots. You'd have to be blind not to notice the difference, but then you'd feel the difference. Heck, you could hear the difference. Smell the difference. Troublesome counterfeiting is more sophisticated than a $100 throw away printer. The Stasi took fingerprints of every typewritter so people couldn't publish illegal things. This is not hostile only if the state is defined as non hostile.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    > There is nothing "hostile" about preventing individuals from breaking the law. Shall we all be clockwork oranges, then? The only ones allowed to have free will shall be the ones that programmed us to vote them into the legislature every time?
- captainmuon 9y ago
  I think that should be forbidden. We have a legal principle in most countries that you can't be forced to testify against yourself or against family, or that the court can't use illegally obtained evidence. If we were just interested in solving crimes above all, we wouldn't have those restrictions. Why don't we e.g. make the punishment for not confessing or denunciating equal to the punishment for the crime itself? In the same vein, I think there should be a restriction in place in principle. Your stuff cannot be made to work against you. The police should not be able to remotely stop your car via software. And more importantly, if you have any implants like a pacemaker, the police should not be able to use that to incapacitate you. It's entirely concievable that at some point there will be a hostage situation where the criminal has an implant, and somebody will come up with that plan. More general, as "stuff" is becoming more and more intelligent, we should be able to trust our stuff. I think it is a fundamental value in the modern "information society" or "IOT world" or "industry 4.0" or what you might call it. The idea seems crazy at first, but the more I think about it, it is right up there with free speech, or the idea that my wife can't be forced to testify against me. (Or, controversially, the right to bear arms - and I say that as a liberal who is for strict gun control! - but I think the sentiment is related. When the government goes out of control, some people want to rely on their guns - I think that is not realistic, and harmful for society - but I just want to be able to rely on my laptop, to be able to write subversive content without it ratting me out!)
  - fivestar 9y ago
    There are already court cases that affirm that anything you store in the cloud is not subject to 4th Amendment protections because it's not on "your" hardware. WTF? We get conned into buying into all this cloud bs and then they turn the tables on us!
- eeZah7Ux 9y ago
  Why all the downvotes against the parent? Please don't downvote opinions you disagree with - challenge them.
ungzd 9y ago
TLDR: the article does not answer this question.
cmiles74 9y ago
I believe they are in place to help the Secret Service track down people who counterfeit money.[0] In 2012, the Secret Service released a document in response to an FOIA request that listed the manufacturers that agreed to add these tracking dots at that time.[1] [0] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/technology/personaltech/24askk-001.html http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/technology/personaltech/24... [1] https://www.scribd.com/doc/81897582/microdots-pdf https://www.scribd.com/doc/81897582/microdots-pdf
- nerdponx 9y ago
  Can you convincingly counterfeit money with a home inkjet printer? Find that hard to believe.
  - hyperbovine 9y ago
    Well, who do you have to convince?...
  - Tiki 9y ago
    There was a story a while back about a team of people working out of a garage who were bleaching lower denominations and printing a higher value note onto the bleached paper. Higher end inkjets are quite capable, the 'feel' was the biggest issue.
    - ramjamrodeo 9y ago
      I'd be interested in seeing an article if that was real. Otherwise the only place I've heard of that was the plot in one of the Jack Reacher novels.
      - cmiles74 9y ago
        I found an article: man in Florida bleaching fives to print hundreds. http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-09-10/news/os-bleached-money-arrests-20120907_1_counterfeit-bills-counterfeit-money-genuine-money http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-09-10/news/os-bleac...
nerdponx 9y ago
I would love to know how many engineers, managers, and execs at printer companies were/are complicit in this. Obviously it's a useful feature for an employer; a little underhanded (it should be common knowledge, not a secret program) and understandable from a business perspective. Especially for an organization like the NSA. But for a consumer product, it is completely unreasonable to at least not offer an option to disable the feature. The only other product that deliberately leaves identifying traces that I can think of is ammunition. Did anyone at one of these printer companies express reluctance over the idea? Was anyone let go over it? Did anyone refuse to work on the project?
- greedo 9y ago
  How does ammunition deliberately leave an identifying trace?
  - secfirstmd 9y ago
    I know that firing pins usually leave a fairly unique trace.
  - lsaferite 9y ago
    I'm guessing they are talking about barrel rifling and firing pin/ejector marks that are used in matching weapons to crimes. I guess the could add some serial number during firing, but I've not heard of this as something in civilian weapons.
  - nerdponx 9y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microstamping https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microstamping
    - jke5kiwe56 9y ago
      Despite CA's idiosyncratic firearms laws, microstamping effectively does not exist in the real world (as in, no firearms on the market employ it, though the technology does exist).
    - 9y ago
nonamechicken 9y ago
If printers have this type of tracking, I wonder what type of tracking they have in our PCs (other than ad tracking and Windows telemetry).
- rockinghigh 9y ago
  For the internet, they intercept all communications at the internet provider level.
- Quai 9y ago
  You mean something like the Clipper chip[1]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
touristtam 9y ago
err ... how is this news? Here are two article from 2005 [1] and 2009 [2] about exactly the same thing: [1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/20/outlaw_printer_dots/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/20/outlaw_printer_dots/ [2] https://viewfromll2.com/2009/11/16/big-brothers-invisible-yellow-dots-using-secret-printer-tracking-data-in-civil-litigation/ https://viewfromll2.com/2009/11/16/big-brothers-invisible-ye...
- coldpie 9y ago
  Because it's interesting background information for a current news item.
tarikozket 9y ago
For the people wondering what it 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...
TomSharks 9y ago
You can read more about essay here http://parsonscollegemuseum.weebly.com/ http://parsonscollegemuseum.weebly.com/
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
Are there any American printer makers not selling out their customers?
agentgt 9y ago
Sort of relevant is microprinting that still is in use today on money documents such as checks [1]. It would be interesting to combine the two techniques! Microprinting is for preventing forgery and thus is incredibly difficult to copy but techniques to copy are always improving. I assume microdots are not as difficult to copy and are about tracking. So if someone effectively copied the microprint you could inject microdots and those would be copied as well. Thus you might be able to track the forger as well detect forgery statistical analysis (based on the fact microdots encode changing data such as time). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprinting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprinting
twobyfour 9y ago
Anyone notice that the article doesn't actually answer the question of "why"?
jmkni 9y ago
They were doing this with typewriters in Germany during the cold war, Mikko Hyppoonen talks about it in this Ted talk - https://www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_three_types_of_online_attack https://www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_three_types_of_onli...
bloaf 9y ago
So what's the status of open source printer firmware that doesn't have secret tracky dots?
- nerflad 9y ago
  I find it sad/ humourous that open source printer firmware was part of the impetus behind the free software movement, yet it's probably still one of the most opaque areas there is.
- fivestar 9y ago
  What I want is an open source printer--like a reprap, but 2D? Why not? The printers we buy are such obnoxious crap that falls apart as soon as the warranty is over.
- mmcwilliams 9y ago
  It's not quite what you're looking for, but the EFF publishes a list of printers and whether or not they print tracking dots. https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display-tracking-dots https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d...
bediger4000 9y ago
Is this an example of market failure? I mean, absolutely no customer pressed for this mis-feature, and no customer made a decision to buy a printer with this mis-feature.
- JackFr 9y ago
  > I mean, absolutely no customer pressed for this mis-feature, And you know that because...?
  - tehwebguy 9y ago
    Because customers don't even know about it until articles like this surface.
    - JackFr 9y ago
      Again, you know this because ....? Just because you didn't know about it doesn't mean that the General Services Administration and large corporate IT departments weren't quietly asking for it.
      - bediger4000 9y ago
        Have you used printers? Because you write like you're only vaguely acquainted with the concept of printing, let alone ever having tried to print something.
- fixermark 9y ago
  It doesn't feel like it fits easily into an economics template to talk about it as a "market failure." If I turn my head and squint, it looks roughly like "Government oversight / voluntary manufacturer action to minimize cost due to tragedy of the commons"---the technology makes some forms of crime much cheaper, the government worked with manufacturers (probably with some off-the-books arm-twisting) to alter the technology to minimize its efficacy for a subset of those forms of crime.
tehwebguy 9y ago
Would like to know if any serious counterfeiting arrests have ever been made with these.
mapimopi 9y ago
At one point I was working at a printing shop. One time I was testing color calibration, running the same sheet through the printer multiple times, and these dots became visible clearly. It was quite a head scratchier, we actually thought there's something wrong with our printer until I googled about these yellow dots.
newman314 9y ago
Not to go off on a tangent but I find it disappointing that printer manufacturers choose to spend time and money on this instead of providing up to date firmware. I know of a line of printers that you can netcat firmware into. That's just terrifying.
acomjean 9y ago
I know someone who used to design chips that went into printers. There is code At the chip level that is unknown to the what it actually does provided by the government. Thought to be currency detection, but maybe adding these dots too?
893helios 9y ago
I always figured one of the drivers for this was that the NSA basically mandated that this feature to be built into any printers it would buy (or let be bought). The power of the federal/DOD purse is a thing.
- cestith 9y ago
  The Secret Service and FBI really wanted it.
squarefoot 9y ago
Someone with knowledge and money should push for the development of alternative open and free (as in speech) printer mainboards to swap the original ones. In some cases reverse engineering and flash reprogramming should be enough. I'd happily donate some quid if such a project would exist.
compsciphd 9y ago
you'd think it be smart if securedrop post processed everything in a manner that removed the dots.
rabboRubble 9y ago
This is why you can't print in B&W from a color printer when the color cartridges are out of ink. No yellow ink, no printer fingerprint on the document. My Dad had a complete melt down one day about not being able to print in B&W. When I told him about the yellow fingerprinting, he thought I was joking. Nope!
Double_a_92 9y ago
How do the dots get linked to me? E.g. lets say I print a ransom note and send it to someone. The police can analyze the dots on them, find the id of my printer... And then? I never registered my printer with my name somewhere or so.

Because 'your' printer, and its manufacturer, are hostile to you. Edit: > Finish your sentence, please :) OK: Because 'your' printer, and its manufacturer, [and the NSA/Erdogan/multinational corp.] are hostile to you [printing illegal protest posters/exposing corporate crimes/spreading dissent/whistleblowing]. And yes, preventing individuals from breaking the law is hostile to those individuals, even if all laws were just. And they are not.

pc86 9y ago
> Because 'your' printer, and its manufacturer, [and the Secret Service,] are hostile to you [counterfeiting money]. Finish your sentence, please :) That was the original purpose of the tracking dots. I don't think it's at all surprising that an intelligence agency would co-opt a law enforcement identification mechanism. There is nothing "hostile" about preventing individuals from breaking the law.
- wtetzner 9y ago
  > There is nothing "hostile" about preventing individuals from breaking the law. It all depends on how they do it. There are plenty of hostile things that are done in the name of law enforcement.
- _jal 9y ago
  > There is nothing "hostile" about preventing individuals from breaking the law. 1) It prevents nothing. It is about post-facto detection. 2) It is self-evidently hostile to the law-breaker. 3) Whether or not it is moral to break the law is the relevant question, and that depends on the law. The "original purpose" of this tech hardly matters. Ask the authors of Soviet-era samizdat.
- irixusr 9y ago
  How can you counterfeit money with an inkjet? You'll get caught in days (wrong paper, streaking, poor quality print) with or without the dots. You'd have to be blind not to notice the difference, but then you'd feel the difference. Heck, you could hear the difference. Smell the difference. Troublesome counterfeiting is more sophisticated than a $100 throw away printer. The Stasi took fingerprints of every typewritter so people couldn't publish illegal things. This is not hostile only if the state is defined as non hostile.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  > There is nothing "hostile" about preventing individuals from breaking the law. Shall we all be clockwork oranges, then? The only ones allowed to have free will shall be the ones that programmed us to vote them into the legislature every time?
captainmuon 9y ago
I think that should be forbidden. We have a legal principle in most countries that you can't be forced to testify against yourself or against family, or that the court can't use illegally obtained evidence. If we were just interested in solving crimes above all, we wouldn't have those restrictions. Why don't we e.g. make the punishment for not confessing or denunciating equal to the punishment for the crime itself? In the same vein, I think there should be a restriction in place in principle. Your stuff cannot be made to work against you. The police should not be able to remotely stop your car via software. And more importantly, if you have any implants like a pacemaker, the police should not be able to use that to incapacitate you. It's entirely concievable that at some point there will be a hostage situation where the criminal has an implant, and somebody will come up with that plan. More general, as "stuff" is becoming more and more intelligent, we should be able to trust our stuff. I think it is a fundamental value in the modern "information society" or "IOT world" or "industry 4.0" or what you might call it. The idea seems crazy at first, but the more I think about it, it is right up there with free speech, or the idea that my wife can't be forced to testify against me. (Or, controversially, the right to bear arms - and I say that as a liberal who is for strict gun control! - but I think the sentiment is related. When the government goes out of control, some people want to rely on their guns - I think that is not realistic, and harmful for society - but I just want to be able to rely on my laptop, to be able to write subversive content without it ratting me out!)
- fivestar 9y ago
  There are already court cases that affirm that anything you store in the cloud is not subject to 4th Amendment protections because it's not on "your" hardware. WTF? We get conned into buying into all this cloud bs and then they turn the tables on us!
eeZah7Ux 9y ago
Why all the downvotes against the parent? Please don't downvote opinions you disagree with - challenge them.

ungzd 9y ago

TLDR: the article does not answer this question.

cmiles74 9y ago

I believe they are in place to help the Secret Service track down people who counterfeit money.[0] In 2012, the Secret Service released a document in response to an FOIA request that listed the manufacturers that agreed to add these tracking dots at that time.[1] [0] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/technology/personaltech/24askk-001.html http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/technology/personaltech/24... [1] https://www.scribd.com/doc/81897582/microdots-pdf https://www.scribd.com/doc/81897582/microdots-pdf

nerdponx 9y ago
Can you convincingly counterfeit money with a home inkjet printer? Find that hard to believe.
- hyperbovine 9y ago
  Well, who do you have to convince?...
- Tiki 9y ago
  There was a story a while back about a team of people working out of a garage who were bleaching lower denominations and printing a higher value note onto the bleached paper. Higher end inkjets are quite capable, the 'feel' was the biggest issue.
  - ramjamrodeo 9y ago
    I'd be interested in seeing an article if that was real. Otherwise the only place I've heard of that was the plot in one of the Jack Reacher novels.
    - cmiles74 9y ago
      I found an article: man in Florida bleaching fives to print hundreds. http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-09-10/news/os-bleached-money-arrests-20120907_1_counterfeit-bills-counterfeit-money-genuine-money http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-09-10/news/os-bleac...

nerdponx 9y ago

I would love to know how many engineers, managers, and execs at printer companies were/are complicit in this. Obviously it's a useful feature for an employer; a little underhanded (it should be common knowledge, not a secret program) and understandable from a business perspective. Especially for an organization like the NSA. But for a consumer product, it is completely unreasonable to at least not offer an option to disable the feature. The only other product that deliberately leaves identifying traces that I can think of is ammunition. Did anyone at one of these printer companies express reluctance over the idea? Was anyone let go over it? Did anyone refuse to work on the project?

greedo 9y ago
How does ammunition deliberately leave an identifying trace?
- secfirstmd 9y ago
  I know that firing pins usually leave a fairly unique trace.
- lsaferite 9y ago
  I'm guessing they are talking about barrel rifling and firing pin/ejector marks that are used in matching weapons to crimes. I guess the could add some serial number during firing, but I've not heard of this as something in civilian weapons.
- nerdponx 9y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microstamping https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microstamping
  - jke5kiwe56 9y ago
    Despite CA's idiosyncratic firearms laws, microstamping effectively does not exist in the real world (as in, no firearms on the market employ it, though the technology does exist).
  - 9y ago

nonamechicken 9y ago

If printers have this type of tracking, I wonder what type of tracking they have in our PCs (other than ad tracking and Windows telemetry).

rockinghigh 9y ago
For the internet, they intercept all communications at the internet provider level.
Quai 9y ago
You mean something like the Clipper chip[1]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

touristtam 9y ago

err ... how is this news? Here are two article from 2005 [1] and 2009 [2] about exactly the same thing: [1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/20/outlaw_printer_dots/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/20/outlaw_printer_dots/ [2] https://viewfromll2.com/2009/11/16/big-brothers-invisible-yellow-dots-using-secret-printer-tracking-data-in-civil-litigation/ https://viewfromll2.com/2009/11/16/big-brothers-invisible-ye...

coldpie 9y ago
Because it's interesting background information for a current news item.

tarikozket 9y ago

For the people wondering what it 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...

TomSharks 9y ago

You can read more about essay here http://parsonscollegemuseum.weebly.com/ http://parsonscollegemuseum.weebly.com/

JumpCrisscross 9y ago

Are there any American printer makers not selling out their customers?

agentgt 9y ago

Sort of relevant is microprinting that still is in use today on money documents such as checks [1]. It would be interesting to combine the two techniques! Microprinting is for preventing forgery and thus is incredibly difficult to copy but techniques to copy are always improving. I assume microdots are not as difficult to copy and are about tracking. So if someone effectively copied the microprint you could inject microdots and those would be copied as well. Thus you might be able to track the forger as well detect forgery statistical analysis (based on the fact microdots encode changing data such as time). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprinting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprinting

twobyfour 9y ago

Anyone notice that the article doesn't actually answer the question of "why"?

jmkni 9y ago

They were doing this with typewriters in Germany during the cold war, Mikko Hyppoonen talks about it in this Ted talk - https://www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_three_types_of_online_attack https://www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_three_types_of_onli...

bloaf 9y ago

So what's the status of open source printer firmware that doesn't have secret tracky dots?

nerflad 9y ago
I find it sad/ humourous that open source printer firmware was part of the impetus behind the free software movement, yet it's probably still one of the most opaque areas there is.
fivestar 9y ago
What I want is an open source printer--like a reprap, but 2D? Why not? The printers we buy are such obnoxious crap that falls apart as soon as the warranty is over.
mmcwilliams 9y ago
It's not quite what you're looking for, but the EFF publishes a list of printers and whether or not they print tracking dots. https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display-tracking-dots https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d...

bediger4000 9y ago

Is this an example of market failure? I mean, absolutely no customer pressed for this mis-feature, and no customer made a decision to buy a printer with this mis-feature.

JackFr 9y ago
> I mean, absolutely no customer pressed for this mis-feature, And you know that because...?
- tehwebguy 9y ago
  Because customers don't even know about it until articles like this surface.
  - JackFr 9y ago
    Again, you know this because ....? Just because you didn't know about it doesn't mean that the General Services Administration and large corporate IT departments weren't quietly asking for it.
    - bediger4000 9y ago
      Have you used printers? Because you write like you're only vaguely acquainted with the concept of printing, let alone ever having tried to print something.
fixermark 9y ago
It doesn't feel like it fits easily into an economics template to talk about it as a "market failure." If I turn my head and squint, it looks roughly like "Government oversight / voluntary manufacturer action to minimize cost due to tragedy of the commons"---the technology makes some forms of crime much cheaper, the government worked with manufacturers (probably with some off-the-books arm-twisting) to alter the technology to minimize its efficacy for a subset of those forms of crime.

tehwebguy 9y ago

Would like to know if any serious counterfeiting arrests have ever been made with these.

mapimopi 9y ago

At one point I was working at a printing shop. One time I was testing color calibration, running the same sheet through the printer multiple times, and these dots became visible clearly. It was quite a head scratchier, we actually thought there's something wrong with our printer until I googled about these yellow dots.

newman314 9y ago

Not to go off on a tangent but I find it disappointing that printer manufacturers choose to spend time and money on this instead of providing up to date firmware. I know of a line of printers that you can netcat firmware into. That's just terrifying.

acomjean 9y ago

I know someone who used to design chips that went into printers. There is code At the chip level that is unknown to the what it actually does provided by the government. Thought to be currency detection, but maybe adding these dots too?

893helios 9y ago

I always figured one of the drivers for this was that the NSA basically mandated that this feature to be built into any printers it would buy (or let be bought). The power of the federal/DOD purse is a thing.

cestith 9y ago
The Secret Service and FBI really wanted it.

squarefoot 9y ago

Someone with knowledge and money should push for the development of alternative open and free (as in speech) printer mainboards to swap the original ones. In some cases reverse engineering and flash reprogramming should be enough. I'd happily donate some quid if such a project would exist.

compsciphd 9y ago

you'd think it be smart if securedrop post processed everything in a manner that removed the dots.

rabboRubble 9y ago

This is why you can't print in B&W from a color printer when the color cartridges are out of ink. No yellow ink, no printer fingerprint on the document. My Dad had a complete melt down one day about not being able to print in B&W. When I told him about the yellow fingerprinting, he thought I was joking. Nope!

Double_a_92 9y ago

How do the dots get linked to me? E.g. lets say I print a ransom note and send it to someone. The police can analyze the dots on them, find the id of my printer... And then? I never registered my printer with my name somewhere or so.