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DEDA – Tracking Dots Extraction, Decoding and Anonymisation Toolkit
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- VladVladikoff 2y agoFor those who missed it, this is an interesting and related topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42880704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42880704
- ruytlm 2y agoAdding some context to this, because it's a really interesting read that's worth the time if you ask me: it's about how some recently 'discovered' early playtest versions of Pokemon cards were found to be fake, or at least very suspicious, based on the presence (and decoding) of these dots. I also find it interesting because the person who posted the discovery and breakdown of the dots stood to personally lose thousands of dollars they'd spent on the fakes, but posted their findings anyway.
- UncleEntity 2y agoOr, alternatively, to prove thousands of dollars in damages.
- chaps 2y agoHad the experience of poking at tracking dots recently for circumstances I won't share here. Do y'allself a favor and get a blue LED flashlight and point it at a color print. It's shocking how many are printed. It looks like a spattering of sand across the entire page!
- atVelocet 2y agoAre we talking about laser, color laser and/or ink printers?
- timewizard 2y agoIt's not even just for printers anymore. https://datadotusa.com/technology.htm https://datadotusa.com/technology.htm
- ale42 2y agoNot exactly the same thing. This is more akin explosive tracers, i.e., lots of small particles that contain some identifying information.
- RachelF 2y agoI'm surprised there's not been a class action against printer manufacturers for all the extra yellow toner that's been used.
- kmoser 2y agoNot to mention failure to accurately print what you sent to the printer. There must be some use case where these "invisible" dots actually undermine the intended output.
- mschuster91 2y agoThis gonna be pretty important in the next years... people, if you plan on printing protest flyers and pamphlets, either get them done in a professional print shop (if you know someone you can trust, that is), or at the very least buy the printer in cash, never ever connect it to the Internet, and only connect it via USB to a Linux computer - macOS and Windows both will install printer drivers automatically that might phone back to the mothership and link your printer ID to some sort of identifier.
- adamrezich 2y ago[flagged]
- decimalenough 2y agoWouldn't it be way easier to just track the people handing out the flyers?
- Terr_ 2y agoThat depends on whether: 1. You're looking for a very specific person. 2. You want to unconstitutionally punish somebody for free speech, and you don't care who, you just want to cheaply find a convenient victim. In that respect, tracking-dots are an invitation to #2, since they don't really need much in the way of human labor-hours or focus.
- decimalenough 2y agoTracking dots can be used to confirm that a specific printer was used to print a specific page. However, going from only a serial number to finding the name and address of its owner is going to be very difficult to impossible. You might be able to track it down to the retailer, but if you buy your printer in person from a stack at Costco, nobody has any idea which printer has which serial number.
- rustcleaner 2y ago>However, going from only a serial number to finding the name and address of its owner is going to be very difficult to impossible. Printers send telemetry to the mothership, including serial number. Anyone under NSL cannot disclose that fact, so it's possible (probable) that if OEMs are pulling serial numbers, computer names, usernames, registered owner names, IP address logs, that they are NSL to retain and/or redirect that data feed. It explains why everything, everything is so ****ing leaky with your information (beyond just advertising). Where do you think our modern machine learning came from? It was in order to process this stupendously gigantic mountain of data! I'm sure Utah was running some less efficient prototype of the learning we see in the public today back in the time of the GWOT! So no, it's not just to confirm, as a few privileged individuals [at best] can go to terminals and pull up gobs of information. This is one of the reasons seeing-sphere-company's stock has done so well recently (money money for me)!
- banku_brougham 2y agoDo black and white laser printers produce tracking dots? Also, what is the meaning of this tracking, must every corner of our lives be tracked just on principle?
- doctoboggan 2y agoIt's my understanding that the secret service requested (required?) that the printer manufacturers start adding the dots once the printers got good enough to easily recreate paper bills. Because they are primarily a tool for tracking counterfeiters, they are not needed with black a white printers and thus are not included.
- krupan 2y agoThe tracking dots aren't for anti-counterfeiting. The secret service has a separate chunk of code in every color printer that detects if you are printing money and prints out a page that says essentially, "you can't do that." (at least that was the case 20 years ago when I worked for HP). The tracking dots are used by the FBI if someone prints out classified information and passes it around, or other copyrighted/illegal documents.
- Doxin 2y agoThe EURion constellation[0] is how that detection mostly works as I understand it. Neat bit of tech. It's real obvious on euro bills once you know what to look for. Fun fact: not all printers give a hoot about this pattern, so it's a neat trick to annoy people with if your printer doesn't. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
- theGeatZhopa 2y agomostly, the software in printers/scanners and Adobe's Photoshop alikes is looking out for the "EURion" pattern. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation That is not to be confused with (dynamical) and non-visible tracking info on printed sheets, which in fact can have everything coded in. By that, even 1-bit printouts can be identified up to the source. If the printer model and #salt is printed alongside, the prosecution has evidence for the cases the printer involved.
- noodlesUK 2y agoI'm really curious what proportion of printers can be decoded with public tools. Are there any stats on which manufacturers codes have been cracked?
- IvyMike 2y agoThe github references this document: Timo Richter, Stephan Escher, Dagmar Schönfeld, and Thorsten Strufe. 2018. Forensic Analysis and Anonymisation of Printed Documents. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security (IH&MMSec '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 127-138. There is a copy here: https://ericbalawejder.com/assets/hexview/Forensic-Analysis-and-Anonymisation-of-Printed-Documents.pdf https://ericbalawejder.com/assets/hexview/Forensic-Analysis-... Table 1 (manufacturer, #of printers analyzed, dots found): Brother 1 no Canon 10 yes Dell 4 yes Epson 8 somemodels Hewlett-Packard 43 somemodels IBM 1 yes KonicaMinolta 21 somemodels Kyocera 4 yes Lanier 1 yes Lexmark 6 somemodels NRG 1 yes Okidata 9 somemodels Ricoh 6 yes Samsung 5 no Savin 1 yes Tektronix 4 no Unknown 1 yes Xerox 15 somemodels It sounds like they mostly understand the dot patterns wherever they found them, with some caveats that are explained in the paper.
- twalkz 2y ago> My printer does not print tracking dots. Can I hide this fact? > If there are really no tracking dots, you can either create your own ones (deda_create_dots) or print the calibration page (deda_anonmask_create -w) with another printer and use the mask for your own printer The thought of being able to “spoof” the tracking dots of another printer has interesting implications for deniability. Though I guess in this case you’d still need access to the original printer to print the anonmask…
- decimalenough 2y agoPer Wikipedia, the dots' "arrangement encodes the serial number of the device, date and time of the printing", so all you really need to spoof somebody else's printer is the serial number. Which can likely these days even be accessed remotely through printer settings.
- CobrastanJorji 2y agoNo need to examine the printer. Just find a sheet of paper that printer printed, decode the dots, and then print your super illegal whatever with their printer's dots and a timestamp that makes sense for whatever you're framing them for doing. Nobody's ever gonna believe "the dots were a lie." They sound too much like fingerprints.
- dylan604 2y agoOr just go to a big box retailer, grab a couple of serial numbers off of the packaging, and then randomize per page.
- banku_brougham 2y agoWhy is the randomizing step needed?
- dylan604 2y agojust to throw of the scent. why do people bounce around TOR nodes?
- otaviogood 2y agoMe and my team used these yellow tracking dots to reconstruct shredded documents for a DARPA shredder challenge over a decade ago. You can see our program highlight the dots as we reconstruct the shredded docs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzZDhyrjdVo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzZDhyrjdVo Thanks to that, we were able to win by a large margin. :)
- dylan604 2y agowhat was the process of getting each of the shredded pieces scanned for your program to use. I'm guessing that process could have a write up on it just as much as the solver. there's definitely a personality type that can handle that type of mess
- otaviogood 2y agoDARPA scanned the shreds. The funny thing is, they didn't want to shred the original paper, so first they photocopied the paper in a high quality color copier, shredded it, and scanned it. And that's where the little yellow dots came from. :D
- dylan604 2y agointeresting. now my brain is churning on why would they not want the originals shredded. what does that say about the value they placed on the originals? why would they open a contest up with documents of such perceived value as the content? being DARPA, i'm sure there's a reason though
- otaviogood 2y agoYou might be reading into it too much. I think the originals were just random pieces of different kinds of paper. Graph paper, yellow lined, paper, blank white paper... I don't remember exactly, but I think the copies could be special paper with a colored backside so they would know which way was up really easily for the scanning process.
- rustcleaner 2y agoI'm beginning to think the MIB show up to any nerd's house who starts an equivalent of OpenWRT project, for printers. Can't have untracked speech, need to be able to surgically strike certain founts of inconvenient memes. This sort of thing is why my craigslist sourced b&w laser printer is on its own VLAN with a CUPS server playing go-between. Nobody consented in an informed manner to Niantic's operation for the last decade+. Nobody consents to their every print being traceable. There is nothing, nothing about the product or process which warns the device owner or user that "Lack of obvious visible identifiers in the output does not mean it is identifier-free (steganographic identifier)." Just like nobody consents to the Universal Machines in our products being locked down to the point that even we the owners can't repurpose them as we see fit. We as peoples have come to accept the barrage of insults from commercial and state entities, that it's either a shit-sandwich or no-sandwich at all (plus a beating). Louis Rossmann's Consumer Action Taskforce (CAT) is becoming a great anthology of what I am talking about in this regard. It's time to fight back! Let's start hacking the good printers out there, get their firmwares replaced with something viable, and start divorcing this nonsense. These tracking dots and other steganographic tracking methods exist precisely to track people like me and silence me, people who point out the occulted control methods, people who spread memes deemed information hazards and malinformation by the giant onyx squid. [/rant]
- rustcleaner 2y agoBesides, if I wanted to counterfeit I would [naïvely] get one of those tight tolerance watchmaker CNCs and have printing stamps made out of aluminum or something. Printing to paper in the usual home-office way seems to me an asinine method which is easily detected by most people who handle bills regularly.
- Henchman21 2y agoYa gotta do what the cartels do: bleach out singles and print $100 on it so it feels right
- rustcleaner 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dyingkneepad 2y agoWhat happens if I print the same page in multiple printers? Like, have the first printer print the actual contents, and then have the other printers add just a little bit of stuff in still-white areas. Does one printer mess the dots of the others?
- kadoban 2y agoYes. How would it know not to? To be clear, it's possible/probable that some or all of it could still be read depending on details I don't know.
- sneak 2y agoSomebody (more likely a group of somebodies), somewhere is responsible for having gone to each and every printer manufacturer and done or said something to make them implement this functionality.
- schoen 2y agoIf I remember correctly from the FOIA documents we got, it was a meeting or series of meetings with a Japanese printer industry association during the 1990s. I forgot if we learned whether the government side was a specific government or governments, or the consortium called Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group https://rulesforuse.org/ https://rulesforuse.org/ which has been involved in other related stuff (like making some software and devices refuse to process images that are detected to be images of currency!).
- theGeatZhopa 2y agothats only for evidence/prosecution for fraud/criminal intents. If one say's "NO WAY I said and printed that contract" ... "Lemmy check...oh! You did. Its your printer. Look!". I think its not like "somebody gone to each..", but rather "... a good idea".
- sneak 2y agoPreventing anonymous publishing is not a good idea, it is malicious. Wishing to publish anonymously is not exclusive to those perpetrating fraud or other crimes. Privacy is important to a free society.
- theGeatZhopa 2y agoyou can publish anonymously. no one hinders you. But in case it is illegal, prosecuters have evidence - which isn't malicious or bad per c'est. And, knowing which printer has been used for the illegal thing, doesn't mean the location of the printzer is known, too. So, no probs or conflict with that from my side. If you really afraid, just overlay your PDFs with noise of yellow dots before printing. Or apply a digimarc pattern onto that with gibberish. That will mitigate recognition unless the digimarc pattern is recognized and removed, which is kind of difficult if unknown (https://www.digimarc.com/ https://www.digimarc.com/). There are possibilities.
- 29athrowaway 2y agoYou may also be interested in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2y agoAnd the lesser known, newer, invisible, digital watermark based version of it. Unfortunately very little information is available about that one. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/sjm217/projects/currency/ http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/sjm217/projects/currency/
- theGeatZhopa 2y ago... thats also the reason why your yellow ink catridge/tank is the first to go empty. Each printout, no matter B&W or in YMCK, will have this yellow dots all over the place.
- fph 2y agoSo why don't the manufacturers make their printers with a yellow tank bigger than the other colors?
- theGeatZhopa 2y agoYou typically would keep the tank sizes same in volume and reduce the amount of other inks. By that other inks are empty approx. in the same time with yellow. Similar question can be asked: Why some (consumer) supply tanks are units and can only be exchanged together in one, even there's still dye left in one of the colors? Why do cartridges signaling "empty" even there's still enough in them? You can sell more of units and save on dye/ink.
- fph 2y agoBut why would a manufacturer want to keep the tank sizes equal, in the first place? I see no practical advantage. If anything, having them different would prevent mistakes: customers cannot install a yellow tank in the place of a blue one, because it does not fit.
- theGeatZhopa 2y agobecause its easier to produce (e.g. no redesign of the inners to fit the tank, no extra sausage for individual tank production, no stock-keeping, etc..), because its easy and convenient to replace the tanks for the customer without the needs of opening the device .. there are a lot of why-reasons one can think of and which we don't know. But, the fact that its been done that way, should tell us, there are other people thought about this already and decided to do it like its done. If you want to be able to change YMCK individually, then look for a model with individually replaceble tanks or choose a professional device with 8+ dyes. But they're expensive.
- sciencesama 2y agoNeed a web ui as a self hostable docker so we can take total advantage of this !!
- davidwritesbugs 2y agoIf you take a photocopy/scan are the dots detectable in the copy? Asking for a friend.