March 31, 2025 As the joke goes:

Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!

Programmers/Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.

Security technicians:*takes a deep swig of whiskey* I wish I had been born in the neolithic. The only lie in this is the date; colour printers (and scanners, try scanning a $20 bill sometime) haven’t worked only for their owners since the 80s. Thanks to corporate collusion with law enforcement dating back to the first color printers on the market, all colour printers silently and near-invisibly embed tracking information every page of their printouts whether you’re printing a colour document or not, and it can’t be turned off. They’re called “printer tracking dots”, and they encoding enough information to tie any printouts made by a printer back to the specific printer used. Printers have fingerprints, basically, and they’ve left those fingerprints on every document they’ve printed. So, that’s a fun thing to know. But another fun thing to know is that in 2018, scholars at TU Dresden created a tool to re-anonymize color-printed documents by obscuring that data. The paper describing their approach is here, and the tool itself is available on GitHub. Relatedly, it’s worth keeping in mind that office and networked printers aren’t really “printers” and haven’t been for about as long as printout-fingerprinting has existed; they’re networked servers that happen to output printed media. They store userID and datestamped logs of everything anyone prints on them, and nobody throws out logs. (I’ve got a funny story about a corporate printer repair technician I used to know who retired at the ripe old age of 33 that I’ll tell you some other time.) Anyway, I can’t promise anything here; everything is always an arms race, but you wash your hands and take the easy wins where you can get them. It’s worth adding this to your mental model of how dots get connected in this difficult world of ours. Stay safe out there.