It has a link to the App that decodes, what being embedded in the print and anonymize the prints, by scrambling the yellow dot patterns. dfd.inf.tu-dresden.de
Yes, assuming your printer has a black cartridge. (Otherwise, it’s because it legitimately needs all the colors to reconstruct a shitty black – I don’t know if they still make printers like that, though.)
“Rich black” in CMYK is one thing, but not what I was talking about. Am I misremembering that some really old inkjets used to be just “CMY” (or maybe a slightly different set of three pigments, but either way no K) where they had to mix all three to get an approximation of black, and do any like that still get made?
(It’s been long time since I’ve paid attention to any kind of printers other than lasers, LOL.)
True story: I bought my current printer from a homeless man. I had actually found the printer in a box that someone had left on the curb across the street the night before, so I knew it wasn’t stolen. I was going to take it home but was walking away from home at the time and didn’t get a chance that night. The next day I saw it with the homeless man across the street and offered to buy it.
I wonder whether whether it’s possible to render this effectively useless in software by just adding more yellow dots to the image.
Like, can I just cover every non-yellow pixel with a yellow pixel at the same intensity as the tracking dots have? Yeah, maybe it gives my image a faint yellow cast, but…
Copies or printouts of documents with confidential personal information, for example health care information, account statements, tax declaration or balance sheets, can be traced to the owner of the printer and the inception date of the documents can be revealed. This traceability is unknown to many users and inaccessible, as manufacturers do not publicize the code that produces these patterns. It is unclear which data may be unintentionally passed on with a copy or printout. In particular, there are no mentions of the technique in the support materials of most affected printers. In 2005 the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sought a decoding method and made available a Python script for analysis.[20]
In 2018, scientists from TU Dresden developed and published a tool to extract and analyze the steganographic codes of a given color printer and subsequently to anonymize prints from that printer. The anonymization works by printing additional yellow dots on top of the Machine Identification Code.[1][2][3] The scientists made the software available to support whistleblowers in their efforts to publicize grievances.[21]
That makes it even more annoying. If printer manufacturers aren’t going to defeat that, I’d kind of rather that they not have the yellow dots at all.
“(added 2017) Reminder: It appears likely that all recent commercial color laser printers print some kind of forensic tracking codes, not necessarily using yellow dots. This is true whether or not those codes are visible to the eye and whether or not the printer models are listed here. This also includes the printers that are listed here as not producing yellow dots.
THANK YOU FOR THE YELLING OF THIS INFORMATION. I CLEARLY WOULD HAVE OVERLOOKED IT LIKE FAINT YELLOW DOTS BUT YOUR CAPS HAVE HELPED ME BETTER APPRECIATE THE CONTENT.
That’s one simplification I think English could use. Having separate lower and uppercase glyphs is an additional complexity that isn’t really needed. Languages with Cyrillic do just fine with it.
that’s how i’ve been writing since about college, I think. My printed handwriting I mean - I so large/small caps only. It’s so much easier to read. but also my handwriting sucks.
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