Doug Webb

2020-03-02 20:31:40

Today I learned that many/most color laser printers layer an array of yellow microdots on top of documents 🔬

This Machine Identification Code en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_… encodes a print date and a serial number unique to the machine. It only became public knowledge in 2004, ~20 year after deployment 😑

The Technical University of Dresden released a tool 2 years ago to layer on _even more dots_ to render the MIC unreadable and aid whistleblowers publishing github.com/dfd-tud/deda ✊