Big brother is watching you – but not in a way you would expect, according to Professor Hannah Fry who revealed how to identify the surveillance technique.
As technology continues to advance at such a rapid, many people are conscious of how much our devices appear to know about us.
We all get targeted advertisements on social media based on our web browsing history – and some even think our smart speakers are listening to us. It may come as a surprise to learn, however, that a much different device in our homes has the capability to keep tabs on us.
Mathematics professor, Hannah Fry took to TikTok to explain that our printers are “set up to snitch” on us. Jokingly describing the office appliance as a “double-sided double agent”, she revealed how to spot the secret sign, which holds information on us.
“Next time you’re printing something, look for tiny yellow dots that are scattered across the page,” Hannah began in a video. “They’re really difficult to see with the naked eye – but they are there.”
Hannah added that these dots are there to “identify exactly which printer did the printing”. She continued: “It’s not a new idea – there was a Sherlock Holmes story where he used the imperfections of typewriter keys to track down con artists.”
@fryrsquared
A double-sided double agent… Printer Steganography, Reverse Engineering the Machine Identification Code by Peter Buck (2018)
original sound – fryrsquared
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Hannah went on to warn: “For your printer, however, this is more than just a fingerprint.” The history behind the technological technique dates back to the 1980s at the dawn of colour printing, which prompted authorities to become concerned over the potential to create counterfeit money.
“The printer companies got together and agreed on this secret way that they would track the documents that had been printed with this barely visible secret code of yellow dots,” Hannah said. “They’re much easier to see under UV (ultraviolet) light if you want to find them.”
Hannah closed by explaining that the pattern of dots changes with each page printed. The “matrix can be decoded” to reveal the precise date and time of the printing – as well as the serial number of the printer itself.
“This method was let out of the bag by Dutch police in 2004 when they mentioned they were using it as a successful method for investigating counterfeits,” she said, before pointing out that printing in greyscale doesn’t create the dots.
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“So that’s why my printer insists on a cyan ink replacement when I need to print in black and white,” one TikTok user alleged in response. This was backed up by a second person, who commented: “That’s the point – you can’t just print in black and white – that’s why printers won’t work if the don’t have colour ink in them even when printing black and white.”
A third fumed: “Another control thing by the people in power! Thanks for information.” Meanwhile, a fourth hit out: “My whole life has been in IT and the one thing I despise is printers, from the scam of ink to tracking, no thank you I will not support them.”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation adds of the technology: “It prints a rectangular grid of 15 by 8 miniscule yellow dots on every colour page. The same grid is printed repeatedly over the entire page, but the repetitions of the grid are offset slightly from one another so that each grid is separated from the others.
“The grid is printed parallel to the edges of the page, and the offset of the grid from the edges of the page seems to vary. These dots encode up to 14 7-bit bytes of tracking information, plus row and column parity for error correction. Typically, about four of these bytes were unused (depending on printer model), giving 10 bytes of useful data.”
Well, you learn something new every day!
Sourse: www.express.co.uk
