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EFF's “Yellow Dots of Mystery” (2008)

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Re: EFF's “Yellow Dots of Mystery” (2008)

#21
post #14

Time to start a Paper company with pre-printed random yellow dots in it... The pre-printed dots should confuse the hell out of the Printer-printed dots....

In terms of anonymity though, there'd have to be a lot of people buying your paper to avoid uniqueness any individual document. Maybe you could buy, rebrand and resell the most commonly sold yellow paper as 'Super Secret Document Paper'!

Re: EFF's “Yellow Dots of Mystery” (2008)

#24
Hi folks, I wrote a lot of this and appear in the video.

I thought at the time that the most significant part of this is that private companies would agree to participate in secret government programs to modify the design of their technology, even without being legally compelled to, and then most of them would not talk about it. That's a bigger deal than what the particular technology actually does.

I still think that was exactly right.

The second-biggest part for me is that a lot of people don't see a core value in anonymous publishing, so we see some technologies with intentional forensic marking of documents -- especially this and optical media, which the recording industry and U.S. government have pushed to have marked with indications of where discs were manufactured. Those technologies are a major threat to underground and samizdat media because a government has an unambiguous starting point to figure out what device or facility produced the documents. Document forensics exists, and it will always be possible to learn something about the provenance of a document by physical examination, but actually putting device serial numbers into the documents -- especially without clearly warning the users -- is way uncool if you think there should be able to be anonymous mass media.

Re: EFF's “Yellow Dots of Mystery” (2008)

#25
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the linked 'seeing yellow' site: "They are present in both color printers and copiers but do not show up in pages printed in black-and-white mode."

Because you can't print counterfeit currency with black and white, which is ostensibly the reason the whole thing got started.

Couldn't you replace the black ink with green ink and then print in "Black and White" mode?

Re: EFF's “Yellow Dots of Mystery” (2008)

#26
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the linked 'seeing yellow' site: "They are present in both color printers and copiers but do not show up in pages printed in black-and-white mode."

Because you can't print counterfeit currency with black and white, which is ostensibly the reason the whole thing got started.

So you could substitute green ink in the black ink container?

Re: EFF's “Yellow Dots of Mystery” (2008)

#28
post #19

When Color laserjet copiers first started being manufactured to the present quality that they are now I understand that the Treasury Dept requested manufacturers to include serial numbers in printed copy to track forgers of currencies. Microscopic serial numbers can be found within images interspersed throughout the image.

The 21C3 lecture from Stephen Murdochs on reverse engineering photoshop and printers attempting to detect currency also of interest.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/projects/currency/

http://events.ccc.de/congress/2004/fahrplan/event/108.en.htm...

Re: EFF's “Yellow Dots of Mystery” (2008)

#29
post #24

Hi folks, I wrote a lot of this and appear in the video. I thought at the time that the most significant part of this is that private companies would agree to participate in secret government programs to modify the design of their technology, even without being legally compelled to, and then most of them would not talk about it. That's a bigger deal than what the particular technology actually does. I still think tha…

Without weighing in on the merits, it's not uncommon for companies to preemptively adopt self-regulation in an effort to keep legally compelled regulation at bay.

Re: EFF's “Yellow Dots of Mystery” (2008)

#30
post #19

When Color laserjet copiers first started being manufactured to the present quality that they are now I understand that the Treasury Dept requested manufacturers to include serial numbers in printed copy to track forgers of currencies. Microscopic serial numbers can be found within images interspersed throughout the image.

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