Secretly printed serial number & date outed Reality Winner's PDF
"The situation is similar to how Vice outed the location of John McAfee, by publishing JPEG photographs of him with the EXIF GPS coordinates still hidden in the file."
Is your color printer secretly outing you?
criminals are stupid.
there was a bank robbery near me where after robbing the bank, the idiot waited for a bus at a bus stop near the bank. not only did he not wait very long, but he got an express ride downtown and had his photo taken for free.
that isn't the one i was talking about.
In both the McAfee & Reality Winner case, it was the journalist who as you sayed "are stupid" since "all major manufacturers of color laser printers entered a secret agreement with governments to ensure that the output of those printers is forensically traceable."
they were both stupid, particularly reality winner, who should change her name to reality loser.
Hardly news, Xerox/PCWorld/EFF revealed the yellow dots 13 years ago
winner.html
Not news at all since tracking yellow dots in printers were known for many years. If you need to print something sensible and not traceable to you, just buy an used printer and use it for a single print run. Then scrap it in pieces and make it disappear. Or better, buy some used printers every month along with a new cartridge, each one with other stuff at different places, then shelve them and pick randomly one to be single used then disposed of as above. Of course you should not use any traceable technology as well in the process; the printer yellow dots might be meaningless but if a closed source office app or printer driver superimposes other dots containing date/time and your exit IP address, you're screwed anyway.
Have something to add? Share your thoughts — no account required.
Ask the community — no account required