EFF's “Yellow Dots of Mystery” (2008)

I thought at the time that the most significant part of this is that private companies would agree to participate in secret government programs to modify the design of their technology, even without being legally compelled to, and then most of them would not talk about it. That's a bigger deal than what the particular technology actually does.

I still think that was exactly right.

The second-biggest part for me is that a lot of people don't see a core value in anonymous publishing, so we see some technologies with intentional forensic marking of documents -- especially this and optical media, which the recording industry and U.S. government have pushed to have marked with indications of where discs were manufactured. Those technologies are a major threat to underground and samizdat media because a government has an unambiguous starting point to figure out what device or facility produced the documents. Document forensics exists, and it will always be possible to learn something about the provenance of a document by physical examination, but actually putting device serial numbers into the documents -- especially without clearly warning the users -- is way uncool if you think there should be able to be anonymous mass media.

Some nerd: The code has been cracked and anybody can download a program to decode them, giving access to private and possible sensitive data to anybody who wants it.

NSA Advocate: Hmm, next time will make the code harder to crack or something other than stopping to coercing businesses from building in far-from-impenetrable back doors into public consumer products that are used by hundreds of millions.

https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d...

i wonder if mono black laserjets have similar issues.