DEDA – Tracking Dots Extraction, Decoding and Anonymisation Toolkit

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. :)

> 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…

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!

For those who missed it, this is an interesting and related topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42880704

What happens if I print the same page in multiple printers? Like, have the first printer print the actual contents, and then have the other printers add just a little bit of stuff in still-white areas. Does one printer mess the dots of the others?

I'm beginning to think the MIB show up to any nerd's house who starts an equivalent of OpenWRT project, for printers. Can't have untracked speech, need to be able to surgically strike certain founts of inconvenient memes. This sort of thing is why my craigslist sourced b&w laser printer is on its own VLAN with a CUPS server playing go-between. Nobody consented in an informed manner to Niantic's operation for the last decade+. Nobody consents to their every print being traceable. There is nothing, nothing about the product or process which warns the device owner or user that "Lack of obvious visible identifiers in the output does not mean it is identifier-free (steganographic identifier)." Just like nobody consents to the Universal Machines in our products being locked down to the point that even we the owners can't repurpose them as we see fit. We as peoples have come to accept the barrage of insults from commercial and state entities, that it's either a shit-sandwich or no-sandwich at all (plus a beating). Louis Rossmann's Consumer Action Taskforce (CAT) is becoming a great anthology of what I am talking about in this regard.

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.

[/rant]

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?

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?

Need a web ui as a self hostable docker so we can take total advantage of this !!

You may also be interested in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation

Somebody (more likely a group of somebodies), somewhere is responsible for having gone to each and every printer manufacturer and done or said something to make them implement this functionality.

... thats also the reason why your yellow ink catridge/tank is the first to go empty. Each printout, no matter B&W or in YMCK, will have this yellow dots all over the place.

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.