Printer fingerprint decoder

[HulaHoop]

In Defense of The Intercept on the Reality Winner Case

It is in fact such a “normal” thing that the EFF provided an online-tool to decrypt these patterns: https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/

Simply enter the dots and you get the result.

Equally, it isn’t a secret that printers are prone to tracking what you are trying to print out or copy. The most famous example is the Eurion pattern which is found on Euro and other currency bills and forces certain printers to prevent them from printing what one must assume to be the worlds least convincing counterfeit currency.

All these things are covered under the label “Printer steganography”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_steganography

Nice find! The EFF program is released under the GPL here: https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/docucolor.cgi

@Ego @Patrick do you think there is value in packaging this or should I just refer to it on our wiki page on the topic?

One piece of opsec I heard was that using a black and white only printer would have made this technique impossible. Do you know if this is true?

[Patrick]

What’s the value of packaging this? What could a user possibly do with that?

Printer tracking is an important topic. We have some documentation here:

https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Software#Printing_and_Scanning

Please check if it’s complete.

Perhaps it deserves its own wiki page and/or should be moved elsewhere. //cc @torjunkie

[Ego]

Good day,

As far as I can tell, @HulaHoop already made additions to that section 3 hours ago.

Have a nice day,

Ego

[HulaHoop]

You’re right. This script only seems to say the dots are there which we know already and so it really doesn’t change anything unlike MAT that removes identifying info.