Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If9bVPHra_U

The Ownership Ban Is Happening

I should inspect my black & white printouts for the yellow dots. Alternately I guess I could remove the color cartridges.

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

Could this be solved with software that would just print its own random yellow dots to make the code unreadable? At the cost of wasted ink

That’s why a lot of printers refuse to print in black and white when color cartridges are empty.

There are exceptions but it is the case for a large amount of printers

Oh, paper printers

Only the dots in a certain place in a certain pattern are used to track the printer. Any other dots aren’t useful for that purpose and can be ignored. If you printed a solid block of yellow at the correct location, however, the tracking dots might be indistinguishable.

Just get a laser printer already

Nowadays though, they are wifi-ied. So they are ratting you out in other ways too, not just the paper markings, you can bet.

I have a color laser printer. :/

That's an interesting idea.

The wiki page says the pattern is repeated about 150 times on a standard page, so it is fault tolerant. In theory, a printer could also dynamically relocate them. To avoid regions of yellow. But if there was no dynamic reloc, then you could overwrite.

Wikipedia thinks you are onto something!

In 2018, scientists from TU Dresden developed and published a tool to extract and analyze the steganographic codes of a given color printer and subsequently to anonymize prints from that printer. The anonymization works by printing additional yellow dots on top of the printer's tracking dots. The scientists made the software available to support whistleblowers in their efforts to publicize grievances.

You can use a blacklight to see if the printed page has the tracking dots.

It's an hp. I just assume it does.

Even this cutie pie?

Thinking more about your (and TU Dresden's) idea, circumvention would be a nice ability to have as standard functionality in linux printer drivers.

I wonder if inkjets do this too. I have only heard it in the context of color lasers, and that's all the wikipedia page says. But IDK why they wouldn't also add it to inkjets.

if you don't wanna watch a vid.. eff has posted several articles over the years on the 'tracking dots' of printers: https://www.eff.org/issues/printers

That one will just stab you in your sleep, so you should be good.

I have a printer?

Can't watch YouTube.

How do black and white laser printers print yellow dots if there's no yellow toner?

aka MIC (Machine Identification Code)

https://dys2p.com/en/2022-09-print-scan-traces.html#mics-eigene-untersuchungen

Dys2p did a great write up about it

Update: they don't https://dys2p.com/en/2022-09-print-scan-traces.html#mics-eigene-untersuchungen

You not using newpipe/peertube etc?

Not trying to force you to do something you don't believe in your don't want to use, but generally I just type the title in and video shows up. Links used to copy paste and work but havent for me.

Only downside is if you switch in and out of PiP mode, or rewatch a unfinished video 12 minutes in YouTube will ban your IP for like 6hrs. Which is trivial with a VPN. I think switching from full video to pop out mode essentially refreshes the video load, and starting a view mid way through must be suspicious or bot like.

NewPipe doesn't work. It asks me to login to google.

I do use PeerTube.