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Following Winner's arrest and subsequent charging, the security researcher has submitted a pull request to the PDF Redact Tools, a project for securely redacting and stripping metadata from documents before publishing.
[...] "The black and white conversion will convert colors like the faded yellow dots to white," Szathmari told Bleeping Computer in an interview.
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"Printer Dot Sanitisation" Software Seeks to Cleanse Yellow-Dot Watermarks
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
TOO BAD YOU CAN'T BUY a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin
real fast and freak everybody out.
-- Jack Handey, The New Mexican, 1988.
(Score: 4, Informative) by bradley13 on Saturday June 10 2017, @06:24PM (14 children)
It's all well and good for PDF software to eliminate any little yellow dots, but that doesn't prevent the printer from putting them on paper - that has nothing at all to do with the source document. And what would be the point of printing a document, only to scan it in as PDF?
No, we should be upset that printer firmware puts tracking marks on every document we print. This has been around long enough that we all forget about it, but really, it's just as intrusive as a government GPS tracker on your car. It's supposed to catch criminals, and since law abiding citizens have nothing to hide...where have we heard this before? It's another piece of the totalitarian wet-dream represented by people like Theresa May and her campaign against encryption.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by KilroySmith on Saturday June 10 2017, @06:53PM (6 children)
>>>And what would be the point of printing a document, only to scan it in as PDF?
Well, it's a great way to definitively strip any identifying metadata from the document. Were I ever to leak a document, it's certainly one of the steps I'd take.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mhajicek on Saturday June 10 2017, @07:08PM (5 children)
Why not scan the print with OCR and release it as a text file?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 10 2017, @08:09PM (1 child)
Proof that a document is official often requires the letterhead, signatures and other markings.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Sunday June 11 2017, @09:21AM
Well those are easy enough to Photoshop.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday June 10 2017, @08:18PM (1 child)
First you'd have to print it. (That leaves a digital record of who printed what, from what station, at what time).
Sending it out of the NSA across any network is going to get you caught quickly.
So you have to get it out of the NSA in printed form, and do your scanning and PDFing outside.
So you smuggle it out in paper form.
Oh, wait. I think I see the problem right here.... How did THAT happen? Just walk out with a sheaf of papers?
Seems to me, Ms Winner was set up for this fall. She can't be smart enough to GET that job, and dumb enough to think it would be that easy.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday June 10 2017, @11:08PM
There are a lot of people with clearances. They don't seem to mean too much. And in fact her boss(es) may not be that smart or just squeezed by budget or profit demands. It was a subcontractor after all.
(Score: 2) by KilroySmith on Saturday June 10 2017, @08:41PM
Often the letterhead, headers, and footers help to authenticate that the document is "real", even though they're easily faked.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday June 10 2017, @07:57PM (6 children)
It was originally to catch counterfeiters. That is what it was sold as anyway.
This is a perfect example of feature creep for the benefit of Government.
You would expect a government spy agency to have this installed. You would expect someone working at a spy agency to know this. And you would expect any PDF writer available on a spy agency computer would be equally compromised. You would expect the same of Military bases, Classified Research sites, Lawyers offices, etc.
This case is brought to our attention by the arrest of a very silly young woman, utterly ill prepared to do the deed she decided to do. When the FBI Director is leaking documents, how do you expect anyone else to toe the line?
Yes Yellow Dots have been around a long time. And yes, it would make more sense to hang up a Tracking Dots warning sign over each printer to prevent leaks than hope to catch the leakers after the fact. That just reveals the failure of the current intelligence mind set in this country. Find ways to catch everybody after the fact, and to hell with the collateral damage done by allowing the attack/espionage to occur in the first place.
https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display-tracking-dots [eff.org]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 10 2017, @08:53PM (5 children)
Which, of course, is a terrible justification. Tracking everyone because some people are bad guys is not something 'the land of the free' is supposed to do.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday June 10 2017, @09:17PM (4 children)
The land of the free is not to blame here.
Its the Printer/scanner Manufacturers (mostly in Asia) satisfying the customers (world wide) who pay extra for that feature.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday June 10 2017, @10:19PM (3 children)
I hear Samsung is one of the ones that doesn't bother adding the spy dots.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 10 2017, @11:03PM
The Epson Stylus Photo R200 doesn't add them, I've heard.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 10 2017, @11:17PM (1 child)
There are 4 Samsung units listed at the EFF link from frojack.
All of those are no-dots.
There are 14 OkiDATA units listed.
All of those are no-dots.
Xerox/Tektronix/Fuji is a mixed bag.
Another EFF page that has a decoder at the bottom.
DocuColor Tracking Dot Decoding Guide [eff.org]
There's some organized resistance in the EU. [seeingyellow.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday June 11 2017, @01:29AM
And none of those is getting any business from the CIA/NSA etc.
This isn't something the manufacturers are foisting on an unsuspecting public.
It is something agencies and businesses actively seek out to protect the information they are charged with protecting.
They could make the technology far more effective by just hanging up a sign and saying every document will be dot encoded. Combine that with a 27 cent finger print reader on the "Copy" button, and just about all your document copy thefts disappear.
Is this wrong?
Should just ANY clerk working for the IRS be free to photocopy or print out your tax returns and post them all on line? Your medical records? Your bank account?
I suggest this is only a story because a very silly woman stole something from a big bad three letter agency. (Note: It was RUSSIAN intelligence she copied - not your email).
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.