Printers are the text book examples of why device manufacturing shouldn’t be left to big companies. You have tracking dots, spyware infestation, subscription for ink/toners, reporting of the cartridge as empty when you still have much left in it, refusal to print when unused color cartridges are empty, intentional bricking if 3rd party cartridges or ink is used, and utterly crappy firmware in general.
Inkjets require precision manufacturing. But assembling it or other types from components should be possible - like how desktops, mechanical keyboards, etc can be. We really need to ditch filthy mass market printers because DIY printers will be much better than anything they offer.
I’m pretty sure this measure was requested either by the government or some big three letter agency.
I doubt that, if all printers were manufactured by a government monopoly, you wouldn’t have this shit baked in. It would probably be way worse
I’m not at all asking for a government monopoly on making printers, if that wasn’t clear.
Open source printers
Use the 3D printer to make the 2D printer. Finally, we are moving in the right direction.
You can tape a pen to your 3d printer to use it as a plotter.
Honestly, yes. I love open source hardware
It’s insufferable how people will respond to “We shouldn’t let corporations do this” with “OK SO YOU WANT THE GOVERNMENT TO DO IT?!?!”
It’s insufferable that the answer is always “build your own.” Lemmy assumes that every single person on the planet is an engineer with enough free time to design, build, and troubleshoot every device they own.
It’s based in rugged hypercapitalist bootstrap thinking. If something is broken just do it yourself! Even though that’s never realistic, and even if it were, no one person can or should be expected to do everything.
I do think it shoukd be left up to (potentially big) companies; however, we should put restrictions on e.g. ink cartrige compatibility, just like what the EU is trying for smartphones and messagin right now.
It was requested by the secret service as a countermeasure for counterfitting. More frequently it’s been used to “catch other criminals”, at least that’s what they say.
It helps catch morons copying classified materials.
It’s how Reality Winner got real fucked.
via Wikiedpia:
Both journalists and security experts have suggested that The Intercept’s handling of the reporting, which included publishing the documents unredacted and including the printer tracking dots, was used to identify Winner as the leaker. In October 2020, The Intercept’s co-founding editor Glenn Greenwald wrote that Winner had sent her documents to The Intercept’s New York newsroom with no request that any specific journalist work on them. He called her exposure a “deeply embarrassing newsroom failure” resulting from “speed and recklessness” for which he was publicly blamed “despite having no role in it.” He said editor-in-chief Betsy Reed “oversaw, edited and controlled that story.” An internal review conducted by The Intercept into its handling of the document provided by Winner found that its “practices fell short of the standards to which we hold ourselves”.
A technology that was made To Stop Criminals™ being used against a political whistleblower? Color me surprised! (thanks for sharing the link btw, didn’t know about that)
You’re very welcome. It’s good to be able to show real-world examples so people are less skeptical. A lot of people won’t read a deep technical document describing printer surveillance, but they will read a paragraph excerpt from Wikipedia.
Color me surprised!
I can’t, I’m out of yellow.
Those dots are practically invisible if you have the printed copy, they’re not going to be visible at all in a photography. Printers and their network leave a lot to logs behind, pretty sure they just check up the printed files of their network, found the document and who send the printer order and done.
So you think tracking her down with forensic methods that objectively exist is farfetched, but accessing the print logs of every printer in America to figure out which one printed the document is realistic?
Interesting. I remember reading a news article before 2017 stating that printers used to do this, but the practice has since ended because someone was able to prove they were doing it in the mid-2000s. At the time, I saw some people on Reddit claiming they just switched to a new, harder to detect method, and everyone was saying they were conspiracy theorists.
On wikipedia there’s some suggestion that methods that involve intensity of toner/ink across a document could be used to uniquely identify a machine but no such methods are currently publicly known (at least as far as the Wikipedia article has been updated)
Digimarc
Source: I work in flexography.
To be fair Reality Winner sent her emails to the intercept from her government account, so she was fucked anyway and it was just a matter of time
It’s weird that when it comes to security companies are like “we got too many important things to be doing, like adding this quarters new shiny feature, we don’t have time to encrypt user data”.
You would think that when it comes to adding obscure tracking codes companies would be like “we don’t care what people print, it’s not our problem, we aren’t going to bother with tracking watermarks”. But, no, every company has tracking watermarks while cutting every other corner possible.
I mean, half the companies out there are barely able to get their software to work, meanwhile printer companies have this robust watermark system that never fails. I don’t understand these priorities.
Where’s my tinfoil hat?
Well for starters. Consumers in general have very little rights in the United States.
Meanwhile you don’t wanna fuck with either the Secret Service, The IRS, or the Federal Reserve.
Dear conspiracy theorists
Sorry i called you crack pots. Please pass the foil
I find that a large number of conspiracy theories are asking the right questions, just not providing the right answers. Does big tech want to control our minds with 5G towers and microchips hidden in covid vaccines? Probably not. Does big tech want to control our minds with social media and invasive advertising? Absolutely. Is the world controlled by a secret society of lizard people? Probably not. Is the world controlled by a not-so-secret society of billionaires and politicians? To a large extent. Even those awful racist or bigoted conspiracy theories start to sound somewhat
palpablepalatable if you filter out the racist or bigoted part. Do Jews make life for the rest of us miserable by controlling the economy? No. But replace “Jews” with “the owning class”, and suddenly it kind of makes sense.EDIT: Is the government putting chemicals in the water that turn frogs gay? No. Are corporations putting chemicals in water bottles that turn frogs into hermaphrodites? Literally yes
EDIT PART TWO - ELECTRIC BOOGALOO: Palatable, not palpable. Words are hard.
All of this just makes me want an open source printer. Anyone know of a color laser printer which uses open source firmware?
Wikipedia has a good article on it, including photos of what the marks look like. They’re practically invisible to the naked eye, getting them to show up usually requires additional steps like taking high quality scans and running them through some color filters, or using a UV light.
From the EFF coverage of it, it sounds like every laser printer probably prints these marks now. I’m not sure if inkjets or other printer types do or not.
From the EFF coverage of it, it sounds like every laser printer probably prints these marks now.
- every color laser printer
Ftfy
If you’re going to do illegal shit, or shit against the owner class, don’t use modern technology to do it.
Dot matrix FTW
Then they’ll just identify you by the sound of the printer being audible from down the street.
Are those still being made? Can a consumer buy one?
I know Tom Scott was able to buy one brand new on Amazon a few years back.
I don’t think they make them anymore but unsurprisingly most are still functionnal.
The challenge would be to find paper for it.
They are still used in finance. There are a lot of antiquated technologies finance still uses because some random broker with millions of dollars on his book of business just says “nah, I am not using the new stuff”.
You can still buy both the printer and paper on Amazon.
This isn’t necessarily bad. It is made so forgeries can be detected.
Halfway competent criminals know how to prevent it. But at the same time, I am simply against any and all non-consensual tracking.
I have a similar stance on this as DRM.
