How tech wizards cracked the mysterious code that turns your printer into a spying toolSpread throughout the pages were barely visible yellow dots , each less than a millimeter in diameter , repeated over and over in the same rectangular pattern . You could see them by zooming in on the pages and adjusting the color.Or , if you had the original printed papers ,you could have inspected them with a magnifying glass and a blue LED light .
They’re called tracking dots or microdots.
Nearly every color printer on the market is
equipped with a feature that covertly prints
them.They encode any page that comes out of a printer with a serial number, date and time that can be interpreted using a simple cipher.
Printer manufacturers are not required to tell customers the feature exists .Although the FBI has signaled otherwise,some experts have speculated that such dots may have helped investigators track down and arrest Reality Leigh Winner,the government contractor who was charged by the FBI.
In This technology is one way that governments secretly pressured industry to change products to undermine privacy and anonymous speech when the law did not require it.This should make us all wonder how else the government is working in secret to undermine privacy and speech.
We should insist that companies be transparent about how government requests have affected the design of the products we use, since those designs can have profound implicationsAuthorities have not said whether the yellow dots on the pages of the NSA document leaked to the Intercept helped lead them to Reality Winner.If anything,court documents suggest that the FBI traced the leak back to her using other means,including computer logs.But cybersecurity experts said finding whoever printed the document would have been an easy task using the tracking dots.
This technology is one way that governments secretly pressured industry to change products to undermine privacy and anonymous speech when the law did not require it.This should make us all wonder how else the government is working in secret to undermine privacy and speech. We should insist that companies be transparent about how government requests have affected the design of the products we use,since those design can have profound implications
sources & Credits to:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Yellow-Dots-of-Mystery-Is-Your-Printer-Spying-on-/
Very great and informative.Lets take caution of the hidden attacks.
ReplyDeleteYes a lot is going on with Technology..thank you
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