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PaperclipPerfector  28d ago (text post)   34300 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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Printer manufacturers make it so that printers fingerprint themselves on anything that's printed (as requested by the feds), with a pattern of dots imperceptible to the human eye acting as the identifier. So you could see if there's a third party printer printing hundreds of ballots, and then track it to the purchaser.

You can acquire printers that don't do this, but if you found a bunch of ballots lacking the identifier, I'd consider it a strong sign of fraud.

You can acquire printers that don't do this, but if you found a bunch of ballots lacking the identifier, I'd consider it a strong sign of fraud.

I thought that the identifiers are only on color printers (and maybe only inkjets?). So black & white lasers are generally safe.

You can also similarly encode the printer's identity (and all the metadata associated with the print job--time, originating user, document name, local network information) into the depth of grays on the printout, edge noise, kerning, and probably a thousand other things. No confirmation by manufacturers or the government that that's done, but the yellow dot trick has been around for decades, and I would be very surprised if there haven't been significant advances implemented since then.

I wouldn't trust any printer made in the last two decades for printing anything you don't want traced back to you.

Interesting... I have to go return some videotapes.

Knowing what printer was used isn't that much of a threat if you plan around it. People leave out perfectly good printers on the street when they move. They sell them in yard sales without taking ID. Collect a few without being traced, print the fraudulent ballots, then dump them somewhere.

Also wonder how hard it would be to hack a printer to change the dot pattern it imparts.

I imagine the dot pattern is probably pretty hard to hack--AIUI, it was created to make tracking money counterfeiters easier, and the US government definitely takes counterfeit cash seriously.

It would help for identifying the ballots as fraudulent, at least, unless someone only printed a few ballots per printer.

As far as hacking a printer, it's a question of how much of the steganography is implemented in software vs physical components. At least the printer identity could be done with just physical components.

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