Color laser printers have contained hidden surveillance technology since the mid-1980s. Xerox and Canon developed Machine Identification Code, a system of mi...
The wiki page says the pattern is repeated about 150 times on a standard page, so it is fault tolerant. In theory, a printer could also dynamically relocate them. To avoid regions of yellow. But if there was no dynamic reloc, then you could overwrite.
Wikipedia thinks you are onto something!
In 2018, scientists from TU Dresden developed and published a tool to extract and analyze the steganographic codes of a given color printer and subsequently to anonymize prints from that printer. The anonymization works by printing additional yellow dots on top of the printer’s tracking dots. The scientists made the software available to support whistleblowers in their efforts to publicize grievances.
That’s an interesting idea.
The wiki page says the pattern is repeated about 150 times on a standard page, so it is fault tolerant. In theory, a printer could also dynamically relocate them. To avoid regions of yellow. But if there was no dynamic reloc, then you could overwrite.
Wikipedia thinks you are onto something!