Posted by pavel_lishin 4/1/2025
Super cool demo btw
(I mean it is, but seeing this almost real-world implementation is fun!)
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!
> 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…
Except if you can manipulate the timestamps, then they aren't relevant anymore, so the search space is much bigger than the intersection of each set of days.
It's the intersection of all the people who visited each printer at least once any time.
If everything you print has the same fictitious serial number, it's still a stable identifier that can be triangulated.
You might fool someone who does such analysis casually but I'd expect an actual experienced investigator to e.g. go "the tracking dots are clearly brand X, but the raster used for greyscale is obviously from Y, soooo"
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.
To be clear, it's possible/probable that some or all of it could still be read depending on details I don't know.
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.
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For counterfeiting, a technical person's first thought is: "how does the Bureau of Engraving and Printing actually do it?" and then they do that - and you nailed it: offset printing.
Laser printers and inkjets can't even remotely compare.
There were people who did counterfeiting "right", down to getting real printing presses, suitable paper etc. https://www.businessinsider.com/frank-bourassa-on-how-he-cou... (it's strongly implied that he got away with 6 weeks in prison and likely got to keep a decent amount of the profit).
Bill scanning to verify authenticity is already occurring, why not record the fact Bank of xAI ATM #67387 tendered two Franklins with serial numbers $SERIALA and $SERIALB to you (verified by PIN and card, and possibly bolstered by Face ID incognito); maybe older systems only do the verification locally and lack OCR, but I'm positive new systems are plenty powerful enough to run pared down OCR on serial numbers... wait they have been doing it with cheques all these years with handwritten dollar values, so why not OCR serial numbers coming and going? You see? The net deepens. I probably can't suggest methods of washing this data without possibly committing some obscure crime, so I will leave you to your creative imaginations...
Hyosung isn't putting this capability on these cheap units, neither is NCR on even more expensive units.
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.
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)!
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Product Usage Data – We collect product usage data such as pages printed, print mode, media used, ink or toner brand, file type printed (.pdf, .jpg, etc.), application used for printing (Word, Excel, Adobe Photoshop, etc.), file size, time stamp, and usage and status of other printer supplies. We do not scan or collect the content of any file or information that might be displayed by an application.
Device Data – We collect information about your computer, printer and/or device such as operating system, firmware, amount of memory, region, language, time zone, model number, first start date, age of device, device manufacture date, browser version, device manufacturer, connection port, warranty status, unique device identifiers, advertising identifiers and additional technical information that varies by product.¹ https://web.archive.org/web/20190828162443/https://www8.hp.c...
There is a copy here: 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
Also, what is the meaning of this tracking, must every corner of our lives be tracked just on principle?
The tracking dots are used by the FBI if someone prints out classified information and passes it around, or other copyrighted/illegal documents.
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.
List hasn't been updated since 2017, was probably one guy making inferences from FOIA requests. We'll have to wait until the next time a Chinese university publishes some US government secrets.
the only people to be fooled by B&W money are most likely drug related, at least, the only ones willing to attempt to fool others with it.
Decades ago I worked on some software that would adjust the kerning on characters to hide information. As far as I know the project never went anywhere.