[HN Gopher] DEDA - Tracking Dots Extraction, Decoding and Anonym...
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DEDA - Tracking Dots Extraction, Decoding and Anonymisation Toolkit
Author : pavel_lishin
Score : 82 points
Date : 2025-04-01 21:11 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| VladVladikoff wrote:
| For those who missed it, this is an interesting and related
| topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42880704
| chaps wrote:
| Had 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!
| mschuster91 wrote:
| This 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.
| decimalenough wrote:
| Wouldn't it be way easier to just track the people handing out
| the flyers?
| Terr_ wrote:
| That 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.
| banku_brougham wrote:
| Do 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 wrote:
| It'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.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| The github references this document: Timo Richter, Stephan
| Escher, Dagmar Schonfeld, 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-...
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Per 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 wrote:
| No 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.
| otaviogood wrote:
| Me 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
| Thanks to that, we were able to win by a large margin. :)
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