I am slightly nervous about the uncritical posting of such stories as this. The statement 'just about every printer on the planet...leaves a tiny yellow dot'. Well my black and white laser printer surely doesn't, unless the CIA have secretly introduced yellow ink. The original work on which this story was based refers only to colour laser printers - the sort you could use to print fake currency. The article on which this news item was based contains the statement "While a few dozen printers from other manufacturers did not have the dots, EFF pointed out that just because they couldn’t identify them didn’t mean they weren’t present". I can't see the fairies at the bottom of my garden, but it does not mean they are not there. It is also an old story going back to 2009 at least,so why raise it now?

On 16 December 2015 at 00:38, PeterK <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Just about every printer on the planet leaves a digital footprint – tiny, almost invisible yellow dots on every page they print, featuring information such as the printer’s serial number and a timestamp. To pick up the dots, you’d need a microscope and a blue light.

The information is there for the exact reason you would expect, to make pages traceable. It’s a practice known as digital steganography, which IEEE Xplore define as “the art of inconspicuously hiding data within data”.
http://bit.ly/1Jaw0Wz
http://bit.ly/1Jaw0Wz+

--
Peterk
Dallas, Tx
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David