alt Hacker NewsDo 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?
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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.
https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d...
List hasn't been updated since 2017, was probably one guy making inferences from FOIA requests. We'll have to wait until the next time a Chinese university publishes some US government secrets.
I think the idea is that nobody is going to be fooled by a B&W $20 bill, so they don't have to print the dots.
No yellow dots on monochrome printers.
Decades ago I worked on some software that would adjust the kerning on characters to hide information. As far as I know the project never went anywhere.
I can't affirm knowledge of steganographic identifiers in B&W printers. I wanted to state I would be surprised if B&W printers did not embed tracking information. There's too much national security value in spamming origination details on everything. There is always, always a safety or security argument to do so, followed with "but what's the harm, you're not doing anything you shouldn't be doing... are you? "