Your printer is telling on you...

[XMEN Gambit]

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/78682/print ... -page.html

Apparently there is a secret arrangment of dots on many printers that encodes the timestamp of printing and the printer's serial number. This is decodable by the secret service, supposedly only to be used to catch counterfeiters but not legally limited thereto.

So much for anonymous pamphleteering, such as Ben Franklin used.

Oddly enough, though, there was a recent case of a state supreme court protecting the anonymity of someone posting on a blog. He'd made comments about a mayoral candidate, and the court specifically cited pamphleting as was used in the Revolutionary War era, stating that "anonymous free speech" is a constitutional right.

[TimberWolf]

So if I was to print out protest pamphlets and hand them out and the SS get a hold of it then they can track that back to me. I guess I should take the color ink out so it cant do that.

[XMEN Gambit]

Some people have suggested printing your stuff with a pale yellow watermark background to "throw off the scent."

The problem is the yellow dots are just the method the EFF has found. Doesn't mean there aren't other means of tracking you.