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   mhoye (mhoye@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 23:20:17 JST mhoye

   In case this is useful to somebody:

   Because of corporate collusion with law enforcement dating back to the 80s, all colour printers put tracking information on their printouts, whether you're printing a colour document or not, encoding information that ties printouts back to the specific printer used.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots

   In 2018, scholars at TU Dresden created a tool to re-anonymize color-printed documents by obscuring that data:

   https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3206004.3206019

   The tool: https://github.com/dfd-tud/deda

   • Linux Walt Alt (@lnxw37a2) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} likes this.
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   • Embed this notice
     mhoye (mhoye@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 30-Mar-2025 13:59:32 JST mhoye

     in reply to

     Relatedly: don't forget that office and networked printers aren't really "printers" and haven't been for decades; they're networked servers that happen to output printed media. They store userID and datestamped logs of everything anyone prints on them, and nobody throws out logs.

     Stay safe out there.