A very interesting
BBC article. Quotes:
"At that point, experts began taking a closer look at the document, now publicly available on the web. They discovered something else of interest: yellow dots in a roughly rectangular pattern repeated throughout the page. They were barely visible to the naked eye, but formed a coded design. After some quick analysis, they seemed to reveal the exact date and time that the pages in question were printed: 06:20 on 9 May, 2017 – at least, this is likely to be the time on the printer’s internal clock at that moment. The dots also encode a serial number for the printer.
These “microdots” are well known to security researchers and civil liberties campaigners. Many colour printers add them to documents without people ever knowing they’re there."
"Some forms of text-based steganography don’t even use alphanumeric characters or symbols at all. Alan Woodward, a security expert at the University of Surrey, notes the example of ‘Snow’ – Steganographic Nature Of Whitespace – which places spaces and tabs at the end of lines in a piece of text. The particular number and order of these white spaces can be used to encode an invisible message.
“Locating trailing whitespace in text is like finding a polar bear in a snowstorm,” the Snow website explains.
Now if we could just decipher BC's many spaces after a period we could have an interesting story.
Cheers,