Does it not strike anyone else as wrong that a printer that you own has to do the bidding of the government instead of you? That you have to pay for it to be forensically watermarked against your own interests? And why have all these companies just taken orders from 3 letter agencies about this? Doesn't anyone have integrity? Isn't there anyone who believes that your own possessions shouldn't be made to conspire against you?
I guess the whole smartphone thing answers that question far better than a printer...
The origins of Free Software (or at least the GNU and GPL parts of the family tree) lie in this exact domain!
In the late 1970s Richard Stallman wanted to patch a faulty printer given to his by Xerox. They wouldn’t ship the source code though unless he signed an NDA:
Are there any open source printer projects out there? It doesn't seem like it should be too hard of a technology to crack considering we have stuff like the frame.work laptop
Why not toilet control - if you have not enough fiber in your ... the electronic money you have on the bank account won't be able to buy you more meat, suggesting vege instead.
But where is the limit of freedom? Where is the border we should stop before or fight for it somehow?
those are limits on squandering community resources. this requires you to use your resources (ink) for no benefit to you. to continue the bathroom theme it would be more like requiring your toilet to add rfid tags to your poops to track them downstream.
Is the engine shutoff the government mandate, or is it an implementation by the manufacturer to reduce fuel consumption and thus emissions?
I mean I get the comparison - government requires your car to have a seatbelt and your printer to have identifiable dots and your scanner to be unable to scan money - but in the case of engine shutoff it's more the manufacturer's idea. I don't know who came up with the xerox code though.
There is a difference between government limiting what your device can do, versus government monitoring what you use your device to do.
Sure your engine may shut off to save fuel, but once you have finished driving and left your car, it no longer has any power over you. But tracking dots can forever be used to link a piece of document to your printer.
Good luck shredding everything and never let anything you print leave your control.
Printing something onto paper should not be a blanket opt-out of the 4th amendment.
As far as I understand it, the yellow dots thing comes from the US government stepping on the toes of Xerox and getting them to jump. Same thing with Biden getting COVID misinformation removed or Trump getting the entire tech industry to lurch to the far-right overnight. Both of those imperil the 1st Amendment[0], and the yellow dots imperil the 4th.
Now, let's look at the two other examples you provided. Automatic engine shut-offs[1] and water flow restrictors may be annoying, but they do not imperil constitutional rights like the watermarking dots do. If we were talking about the US government mandating tracking chips in every car, then it would be like the watermarking dots.
Of course "government mandated tracking chips" is old news. The stuff of conspiracy theories. You might even be able to sue the government to stop it.
The current meta regarding getting around the 4th amendment is using industry to violate people's privacy for you. Industry will happily violate people's privacy on their own, because there's money in spying on people, so all the US government has to do is buy from private spies[2]. And because this is 'private' action, 4A stays untripped, because our constitution is a joke.
[0] Not nearly to the same extent, of course. Biden bruised 1A's arm, Trump wants to dump gasoline on it and light it on fire.
[1] My mom's Tuscon has this 'feature' and it's genuinely annoying. First thing you do when you use the car is shut it off so that it doesn't get you T-boned trying to save gas.
No, a massive amount of the materials in use are printed, at the same time you can see the persistence of fraud of all types.
It’s little things like this that are needed to provide some ground truth. Without the writers observation these items would continue to be sold at high prices, everyone looses except the fraudster, and if they can be connected to a set of fake items in future then even better.
This seems a particularly harmless (and even beneficial) of hardware serving the interests of a wider society in reducing fraud rather than its owner in perpetrating fraud.
In general you put your name on documents you print. But true that if you are a reporter in some country you might want to print stuff anonymously. How easy it is to modify a printer firmware to scramble those dots?
I believe it is not firmware. Because of many reasons, one would be issuing firmware release for every machine would be impossible. It is probably lying so low in the hardware layer, one cannot simply remove or alter it without desoldering etc.
I just don't think that serial killers are enough of a problem to mess with printing. Surely there are more effective ways to deter people from this sort of behavior.
To "catch a serial killer" you'd need each retailer selling printers to track the ID and model number on a receipt, to be submitted to a central government agency and saved in a database. This is not what's happening in your country either, am I correct?
Instead this ordeal makes it possible for the government agencies, who do keep track of their own inventory to follow the tracks of those, who decided to leak documents to the outside world by printing them on printers at work. Like the outing of the whistleblower, courtesy of a journalist at The Intercept.
I find it interesting that this research seems to be (at a glance from reading that first page of the thread) coming from someone who owns some of these fraudulent cards (and could have just re-sold them and kept their mouth shut).
I had a friend whose home was full of movie memorabilia. The boxing shorts from Rocky, the journal from Raiders of the Lost Ark, props from Star Wars, etc. all professionally displayed in shadowboxes along with autographs and photos.
The only thing is that they were all fake. My friend's hobby wasn't collecting memorabilia, it was making fakes. He was quite open about the fact that none of it was real and would happily describe how he created each piece.
I remember a case where a man was accused of forging a will. They figured out it was a forge because it used the Calibri font, Microsoft only added Calibri in 2007 and the document was supposed to be from a few years before.
Similarly, there's also Rudy Kurniawan, who was a wine counterfitter. Went to Federal prison, deported, and now is in demand to produce wine again in Asia because of how good he was at it.
There is a film essay by Orson Welles called "F for Fake" about art forgery, an artist that creates forged works that gain value by being works of art in their own right, that then takes a sudden turn. I don't want to spoil it, but it's a fascinating look at art, truth and lies.
My father restored paintings. There are a great many fakes in circulation, either consciously or unconsciously.
A classic case is when an heir discovers that one of grandfather's badly preserved paintings is on the side. If it's not restorable, a new painting is made and reintroduced to the market in place of the old one, which is destroyed. The new painting benefits from all the traceability of the old one. Many experts are not fooled, but they don't get a commission if there's no sale, and nobody wants to have proof that their painting is worthless.
Fakes are only revealed when their number affects the quotation and sale. As long as everyone's making money, no one really cares.
From what I understand in the topic the original Pokemon card inventor is involved in this as is a renowned card grading company (knowingly or not I leave out of the question).
So if this stirs up a large controversy, it might actually make the fakes, especially the signed ones, collectibles as well. Probably never the value they first had, but I hope the wistle blower can recover some of his losses.
I worked for a gacha gaming startup early in my career. We were small so I did customer support besides engineering and got to know our whales quite well.
For every tech/finance worker who made hundreds of thousands a year and could afford to casually drop $5k a month on “collectibles”, there was easily 10 people who clearly were not making that much money but compulsively spending it for short lived dopamine hits.
It was kind of sad.
The one that really stuck with me was a social worker who worked with sick children making minimum wage, and spent all her spare cash on our product.
If you're interested in this kind of thing, Tavis King is one of the more knowledgable people with regards to mtg. Here's him mapping a booster to print sheet, to see how many Lotus' are still out there, possible to be opened: https://youtu.be/nnYe8FWTu_o?feature=shared&t=184
I remember reading a story about a (now) well-known MTG player. It was about their experience at one of their first tournaments, and had this detail about how during the tourney he got some pointers from Kai Budde (I think) on drafting - and in particular on print sheets.
My memory is fuzzy, but it was something like "Kai looked at a few of the boosters in a practice draft, and then was able to tell us (something) about the cards that should be in the remaining packs just by reasoning about print sheets."
I'm sure I'm getting the details wrong here - I'm not positive that it was Kai, and I don't have a good enough mental model of print sheets to know what was possible back then. And I think these skills aren't relevant today (?)
But I thought it was a fascinating detail. It's always fun to hear about the wrinkles that serious players of a game pick up on in order to find an edge.
(I've searched for the story a few times and haven't been able to find it; I just don't remember enough about it now)
edit: some discussion below, but I think the story here is approximately "Kai memorized all possible print runs, which was feasible to do back then, and was therefore able to back out which cards had probably been drafted and who was probably holding them" or something like that. Nothing about reasoning about runs across boosters!
There is a woman who found a way to game casino black jack and made millions out of it before getting caught. It's nearly impossible to replicate but it involved spotting imperfections in the way print sheets are cut up into individual cards.
I don't remember her name but she was an associate of poker legend Phil Ivey, and there's a whole documentary on YouTube about it. It's pretty fascinating what greed and a ridiculous level of risk tolerance can achieve.
I thought it was less that you could predict across packs and more that you could infer what card had been taken given what was left. That meant you had a better chance of not getting cut during the draft.
Most of MtG’s secondary market value is protected by how difficult it is (or how costly it is) for cheap printers to match Cartamundi’s (and other global printers) offset printing processes. The number of counterfeit tests (green dot, black layer, Deckmaster, etc) that are simple and useful for basic users to determine counterfeits all trace back to the printing processes WotC uses.
I am amazed by how much value is protected by such a small technological detail
It relies heavily on the security and trustworthiness of the printer as well though, same as any kind of company where their product's value far outweighs its production cost (like cash money); I can imagine that before the big boom, employees would be able to take some cards / boxes / sheets home if they wanted to.
I remember trying to print out fake magic cards in the late 90s (I picked a non-valuable card). I used two passes: a dye-sub printer with a laser for the black text. It looked great to the naked-eye, but trivial to see the difference due to differing print technology under a microscope. I'm slightly surprised that examination of the CMY pattern in the color wouldn't have been sufficient to identify a fake.
[edit]
Just re-read the post and realized these were identified as fake just from the picture posted online. That makes a lot more sense.
In a game where there are rules about deck content, but scarcity around the existence of cards, I don’t see the ethical problem with counterfeiting a card for personal use.
If you add a fifth ace to a deck in the middle of a poker game, that’s cheating. If poker decks were printed without aces but aces were allowed, then why should anyone care how you got these four aces, as long as they were shuffled fairly into the deck? Just play the damn game.
> I don’t see the ethical problem with counterfeiting a card for personal use.
Neither does most of the community. We call it proxying. Of course it's not allowed in sanctioned play because the purpose of sanctioned play is to sell cards, but I've never been around a table in someone's basement who cared that the sol ring I just played is actually a mountain with "sol ring" scribbled on it in sharpie as long as there was no way of telling it from the other cards in the deck, it would be legal for a real sol ring to be in that deck and I played it according to the rules governing sol ring. There are different formats to magic and the one with the most extensive, and therefore expensive, list of permissible cards has competitive decks that run into the tens of thousands of dollars invested (https://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/vintage#paper). If you had to buy all of that every time you felt like playtesting a new deck people simply wouldn't do it.
My understanding is that the inherent rarity of some cards is actually part of the game's balancing. If everyone can have every card (or worse, multiples of every card), then some vaguely game-breaking cards, or combinations of cards — that normally don't matter / aren't theory-crafted, because of their rarity — would suddenly be everywhere, in every tournament deck, creating a "dominant strategy" for the game, in turn necessitating those cards be banned. Even though those cards/combos would have been perfectly fine and fun and not-broken, had they stayed rare.
(Or at least, that's how MtG was originally designed to be balanced; I think this may have changed with MtG Online.)
Oh for sure, if it's about the game then using "counterfeits" is not a problem at all; many proprietary card games (like Uno) can be played using regular playing cards which are a literal dime a dozen or cheaper.
But this isn't about the actual card game though, but the collector's market where grading companies sign off on the authenticity and quality of in this case 30 year old playtesting cards. I feel bad for the people that did get scammed, on the one side they should've known better because these were too good to be true, but on the other they put their trust in the grading company. I hope the grading company gets serious repercussions for letting this pass, surely they of all people should know about the printer dots to determine counterfeits and age?
You definitely don't want actual counterfeits to exist in the game at all. Even if they're for personal use, they'll end up getting into the supply, and someone gets screwed over because they don't know any better. Instead we use "proxies" which aren't meant to be passed off as the real thing, but represent it in-game. They usually have a different art, or a different card back, or some other obvious difference from the real deal.
> In a game where there are rules about deck content, but scarcity around the existence of cards, I don’t see the ethical problem with counterfeiting a card for personal use.
Where there are high prices of cards, any convincing counterfeit would be poor optics. Game play with non-convincing counterfeits is accepted in many places (i.e. proxies).
Yep this. We should be fighting 'pay to win' systems like this. Afterall the wealthy person who can afford these rare cards will have a natural advantage.
Imagine if dnd was sold in a way that only a few player's handbooks had fireball and if you had it, you could cast it.
Its a shame these systems caught on instead of more ethical systems. I hope Gen Z ends up burying this consumerist junk.
Because part of playing the game for "bring your own deck" competitions is the time/effort/money that went into acquiring the cards. It's as much about "making the best deck you can with the cards you can get your hands on" as it is about just making the best deck you can.
> I'm slightly surprised that examination of the CMY pattern in the color wouldn't have been sufficient to identify a fake.
If I'm understanding the post correctly, these counterfeit cards were claimed to be from an early playtest which would in fact have been printed on normal consumer/office grade printers and not using a commercial large scale printing process. Some of the fakes are noted to actually have two sets of dots, one set from the original printer and another from whatever was used to make the fakes.
I remember my son really wanting a copy of The Nightmare before Christmas which Disney wasn't selling at the time because, at least then, they regularly let movies go out of print.
I found a "used" copy on AMZN which was obviously a fake with inkjet printing on the box and the disc, metadata on the disc indicating it was a DVD+R, etc.
I've gotten new movies on DVD-Rs from Amazon before. Also clearly pirated since they just played the movie when you put it in rather than a forced showing of the FBI warnings &c.
So, knowing nothing about Pokemon, it was lost on me if 2024 was legitimate or not (I suspected not, but it seems the article kind of assumes you know when the cards should have been made).
> Millions of Dollars of Prototype Pokemon Cards May Be Forgeries, Retired Creatures Employee Involved
> The authenticity of the Pokemon TCG’s famous “prototype cards” are now being called into question.
> Last year, hundreds of prototype Pokemon cards began to sell in collecting circles from the personal collection of Takumi Akabane, one of the original creators of the Pokemon TCG. He worked at Creatures until 2008. He recently attended events to sign some of the cards. Grading company CGC worked closely with Akabane to verify the cards’ authenticity.
> The prototype cards represent the earliest days of the TCG, produced in 1996 before Base Set released in Japan. They show the progression of Pokemon cards from their “proof of concept” stage where they used their Red & Green sprites to their beta designs that used their final artwork from Mitsuhiro Arita and Ken Sugimori.
I've asked chatgpt to explain to me the pokemon card craze, and it gives a long answer, but I still don't understand the videos of people shoving shopping carts full of big boxes of Pokemon cards...
The fact that a large grading company would not check such a basic type of forgery makes it seem like they're in on the scam. This sounds similar to what happened with video game grading company Wata, who were alleged to have fraudulently inflated the value of games they were grading:
That theory doesn't make too much sense; if they were both in on the scam and aware of the printer metadata, surely they would have asked for a different version before signing their name to it.
IMO it's more likely that "grading" is just a joke.
This is a good point! My assumption was that they actually do have a high baseline of fake rejection and gave these a fair analysis, given that they would want to maintain credibility and have multiple write-ups on their web site about how they closely analyze submitted cards to detect counterfeits. I wonder if there are any independent tests out there on how well they actually detect and reject fakes sent in for grading by normal people.
Yeah, we had a global financial meltdown in 2008 because it turned out the people who graded securities didn't look too closely at what they were grading; turns out customers wanting their bonds rated wouldn't choose rating agencies that applied an inconvenient level of scrutiny.
It'd be naive to expect the pokemon card industry to be better regulated.
It sounds like they suspect someone who helped design the original Pokemon trading card game - Takumi Akabane. A prominent investor claims to have gotten the cards directly from him and doesn't care if they're fake as a result.
Maybe the original designer wants to make a few more dollars.
Akabane or the buyer could be the original source of the fakes, but the grading company CGC was responsible for "verifying" that they were authentic before they were sold at auction:
"Heritage Capital Corp. and Numismatic Certification Institute. Also named in the action were Steve Ivy and James Halperin, prominent numismatic figures. A consent order was signed agreeing to establish a $1.2-million fund for collectors who purchase the NCI-graded coins from Coin Galleries Inc. of Miami."
FYI, these yellow dots are part of a Secret Service program to fight counterfeit currency. It was big news a couple decades ago and is well understood in art/printing circles. There are host of similar programs to protect printed money.
EURion is a funny[1] kind of DRM, what caught the fake Pokemon cards is Xerox DocuColor[0], a watermarking technology.
The difference is that DRM is designed to prevent you from copying something, while watermarking is designed to make you dox yourself if you copy something. I've yet to see evidence that EURion et. all actually stop counterfeiting, but watermarking has been very effective at finding counterfeiters.
[1] Most DRM is intended to enforce copyright; but the state is not asserting copyright over the image of a banknote. There are cases where it is legal and moral to completely reproduce a faithful image of a banknote, and those cases are much broader than the various exceptions to copyright that exist.
> but watermarking has been very effective at finding counterfeiters.
Whistleblowers, too. That's believed to be how they got Reality Winner, because the documents published by The Intercept contained those tracking dots.
Eurion is part of a series of programs that stop some high-end scanner, printers and editing software from handling currency. Try scanning/editing/printing a eurion note and you will run into roadblocks. That makes it a type of DRM.
Kind of, most version it's just the serial number which is a very soft dox. Going from that to the identity of a real person is really hard if you don't have the investigative powers of the state or have hacked the printer manufacturers registration data (if the person even bothered to register their printer).
Maybe they are, but some of these fakes were authenticated by a third party whose entire job is to serve as a trusted authority for collectors, so they're even bigger idiots for not noticing such a well known tell. This throws everything they've ever graded into doubt.
Are they? They passed off all these cards and will likely get away with it. The people left holding these cards are the ones who got 'screwed'. Though collecting, and paying high premiums, for pieces of cardboard backed by barely anything at all probably means they were screwing themselves to begin with. (IE A game of pokemon with 100% proxies is just as fun as a game of pokemon with no proxies)
TIL printer dots! Also curious if someone more familiar with this space/community could provide more backstory here. Reading some of the comments in the forum, it seems like 1) these "beta cards" surfaced a while ago and have been a contentious topic since, 2) a card authenticator business is involved. What's the scale of this scheme? What's the impact going forward/how much money is tied into this?
It looks like CGC - one of the big card graders - has touted their ability to grade some very early Pokemon The Card Game playing cards (even alpha test cards printed in very low numbers). Here is their grading scale on their site https://www.cgccards.com/news/article/13347/
People have purchased these CGC cards on ebay assuming they were legit based on the above certifications. It looks like total cards is something like 6 test decks of 26 cards of the alpha prototype - so the rarest example is fairly small, but I think it goes up as they got to later pre-release versions. Furthermore, there are some cards that were signed by Akabane (a co-creator of the game) and those have the presence of the yellow dots - meaning those are most likely not legit pre-production cards. One of those signed cards was sold for $200k I believe - https://www.cgccards.uk/news/article/13661/
So total financial impact of this directly in low millions?
Thank you! Looks like CGC is in a tough spot. The grading guide struck me as quite vague.
> CGC Cards utilized all the tools at our disposal to help document and authenticate these cards, compiling vast resources for comparison with future submissions. A very thorough process is in place for the authentication and grading of these cards using ones verified by Mr. Akabane.
In an ideal world, it seems like there should be publicly shared, repeatable methods/standards for authenticating cards to avoid issues (whether complicit or an honest mistake) like this from a single central authority.
What personal info is printed in these yellow dots? Are they present if I print from Linux? Brother colour laser owner here.
Edit, from [1] posted in this thread it looks like date printed and printer serial number are printed. And if it's done by the printer firmware it wouldnt help to use OS drivers.
Not sure but I'd expect it's handled at the printer firmware level and not controllable from the OS. It would be pretty weird to let the user modify such a "feature" without even having to disassemble their printer.
This is something that's pretty well known in the magic the gathering community. Some of us who trade in older cards to play certain formats have jeweler's loupes to check this stuff.
Basically none in practice, but there are some hybrid collector-players who like the idea of building decks from their collection as opposed from all decks, and bristle at the idea of someone else not doing that. (And of course the collectors and WoTC themselves like to push for it because it makes them money: WoTC officially pretends that the secondary market doesn't exist but their actions make no sense if they aren't crafting their ~~loot boxes~~ booster sets with the idea of rare and valuable cards driving a lot of the demand).
(I personally think that if you want to force everyone to pay for product, play sealed or draft. Then everyone's on an even playing field budget wise, and it's more interesting than just net-decking. I'm sympathetic to the fact that WoTC needs to make money, I'm not sympathetic to their approach of chasing whales and making large chunks of the game basically inaccessible by their definition of 'legitimate play')
Organized Play official events require authentic cards, but nobody is stopping people from using a printer for kitchen-table style games.
Personally, having used printed paper inserted over top of a real card, I'd rather stick with real cards. Otherwise, I'd just go digital in this day and age.
When it comes to playing the game between friends outside official tournaments, you are basically correct (though some use cost as a power level limiter).
When it comes to trading, you don’t want to accidentally pay a premium for something you won’t be able to resell. Lots of players view trading as, more or less, leasing cards. Valuable cards typically have fairly stable prices (though there are notable exceptions). Buy for a dollar sell for somewhere between 0.75 and 1.25.
Yes, it's very cool that I can print some protest leaflets or political posters, and have the police at my door the next day because "my" printer betrayed me thanks to a literal corporate-state conspiracy.
The amount of effort required to track a specific serial number printer to its buyer means that the police are only ever going to get THIS involved if your protest leaflet happens to include original CSAM or snuff imagery.
Reminds me of a friend that was selling "signed" comic books in high school. He did it for pocket money, infrequently and never exceeding $50 profit.
And there were many before him. Wikipedia writes that "in 2016, a relic of True Cross held by Waterford Cathedral in Ireland, was radiocarbon dated to the 11th century by Oxford University."[1]
Even funnier to me, there are relics of real people around, it used to be a big thing historically. So there's some saints or whatever where there's 3 or more "arm of X" floating around, multiple heads for the same person, all kinds of fun stuff.
I don't get why yellow isn't subsidised for all the printers
I'm running out of yellow despite hardly ever printing any colour
or is this printer manufacturer's subtle protest
The way humans construct "authenticity" and negotiate the ship of Theseus is going to provide so much fodder for the AIs to entertain themselves.
Like my father-in-law interrogating me about being vegetarian at the dinner table, the sardonic Socratic dialog really writes itself...
"OK; but now what if I were to selectively replace the molecules of one and only one pigment with a visually identical analog that is slightly modified to be more stable over time and with respect to UV exposure—could THAT still be an original card?"
> No, it will be detected as fake due to colorimetry.
That is a different question. You are answering if the usual methods would authenticate it as an original. I believe you are right that they wouldn't. Thus it would probably be worthless.
But that makes sense. There are many modifications you can do with a card which will render them useless and no longer recognised as an original.
For example you can burn the card to ash. They would not be even detected as a pokemon card, but they are still an original pokemon card (if they were ever) which got burned into ash.
It would be incredibly funny if these cards are actually genuine and someone just didn't bother to set the clock (year) correctly on their printer.
(But I don't believe this is the case and am not sure if available printers back in 1996 would even emit these patterns in this form. Just noting in this case the device's knowledge of date and time is also a factor of uncertainty.)
In the thread a few prototype cards that turned up before the current ones[1] are checked and they do have 1996 dates in the dots. So at least some printers at the time did have them.
But there’s also a batch identified as “high quality” that don’t have dots on the front printing, which if genuine would point to some printers not doing it at the time.
[1] There were like, 3, and the thread has a spreadsheet showing that well over a thousand prototypes were graded in the last few months. Not sus at all.
One way to check could be to insert the serial number into various printer manufacturer's warranty check pages to see if anything pops up. Some companies (like Lexmark) require a model number first (which was not present for the example), but others (like Brother) will accept just a serial.
OT: I've wondered about printed forgeries, but in the context of comic books rather than cards.
Suppose someone in the 1960's had bought a printing press of the same make/model as what was being used to print Marvel comics. Suppose they also bought a large supply of the same ink and the same paper and the same staples. They then wait.
Then decades later they can see which 1960's Marvel comics have become valuable collectables. The early '60s was when Marvel introduced Spider-Man, Thor, the Fantastic Four, Doctor Strange, Iron Man, the Avengers, the Hulk, the Black Widow, and the X-Men for example, many of which went on to fetch hundreds of thousands or even millions for mint condition copies.
They they use their vintage press, ink, paper, and staples to print mint condition forgeries.
I suppose it'd be easier for someone to buy one of each of the comics, rather than an industrial size printing press used to print comics and hold onto it for 70 years.
I dont think ink, on it's own, has a 70 year shelf life either.
And, aside from having the setup to print stuff with, you still need the source material (presumably printing plates or whatever) which is where the actual forging comes in. Assuming it was printing plates lets say, you'd need to copy them to a microscopic level along with every dot on a matching comic book.
I think the problem is that people didn't know comics would be valuable. If you knew that, then just buy a bunch of the comics and store them safely. It's probably a lot less work, won't get stuck with fakes if you can't sell them, and it's 100% legal.
The one factor that might be hard for them to control is "aging". Sure, the paper will likely have aged the same, but maybe the ink ages differently on paper than on a bottle. (In both potential ways: The ink in the bottle may go bad, or it may age less than on paper.) I am really not qualified to even speculate.
But one thing I want to note is that this scenario does not strike me as too different from "what if I had bought or mined 100 bitcoin while they were still cents each", which would actually have required significantly less effort and even foresight.
I don't think anyone originally thought that comic books for kids sold at newspaper stands would ever become collector's items with such a massive value, so it would probably have been rather bizarre for someone to do what you suggested, especially since the many factors that you mentioned alone mean that some explicit planning for this scenario is likely required for things to actually fall into place that way. I'm eager to be proven wrong, of course.
It depends on if they get too greedy. One or two would probably slip in.
But once you get too many, something would be noticed. Everything would match, but the ink wouldn't have been on paper long enough, that kind of thing.
And the space and requirements to keep everything in wait - would be more hassle and expense than just stockpiling copies of every comic ever made.
The article doesn't explain what playtest cards are nor what is being caught by their detective work.
It doesn't even mention the word counterfeit.
I can guess what's happening here, but I'd like to know more concrete info about the scale and impact of this, how much people were paying for these cards, etc.
As for the article, it's posted to a niche specific community site, they're naturally going to explain less because the readers already have the context. These cards are expensive and sought after and there's a plausibly massive number of fakes out there.
The KGB caught some Soviet dissidents the same way. They had a (mandatory) register of the unique imprint pattern of every mechanical typewriter.
- "Nightmare for the KGB: The Advent of Photocopy Machines"
- "In the early 1960s the Soviet ruling elite—in this case, the KGB’s Fifth Directorate, responsible for ideology and counter-subversion, and the Agitprop Department, the party’s main watchdog over “ideological” matters —imposed special procedures for introducing newly invented photocopying machines. The procedures were designed to prevent the use of photocopying machines for producing copies of materials viewed as undesirable by the authorities."
- "Decades earlier, a similar approach was used for typewriters. Proprietors of offices and stores had to provide local KGB branches with sheets of paper showing examples of the font of every typewriter they had. These sheets enabled the KGB, using technical procedures, to determine the origin of any typed text."
- "In one case that occurred at my present place of employment—the Institute of World Economy and International Relations—the KGB traced an “illegal” social-democratic-oriented journal advocating “socialism with a human face” to a typewriter belonging to the secretary of the Institute’s director. Only a few dozen copies of the journal had been produced, but this proved to be enough to put five or six young people in jail for a year. The Institute’s director fired his secretary, who had permitted her son-in- law to use her typewriter to produce the illegal copies."
- "The only typewriter I knew of that could not be traced by the KGB was one I had in my home. It had been presented as a gift to my father, Soviet statesman Anastas Mikoyan, when he made an official trip to East Germany and visited a factory there that produced typewriters."
Note that having the "only typewriter that can't be traced" soon becomes easy to trace, once they know it exists and the text doesn't match anything else.
One of the many reasons to buy a brother monochrome laser printer. I mean the convenience about not needing yellow, not necessarily extra privacy - that is still uncertain.
> Other methods of identification are not as easily recognizable as yellow dots. For example, a modulation of laser intensity and a variation of shades of grey in texts are feasible. As of 2006, it was unknown whether manufacturers were also using these techniques.
No it's because color printers actually do use small amounts of color in the black parts of the image to make it look better. They act the same for all colors not just yellow.
I always thought that a near learning project would be training an ML on “real” cards and then detecting fakes. I don’t play the games but I was always thrown by how much effort went into counterfeits, but I guess there’s enough profit for someone. There’s usually something wrong with the registration or colors.
What is missing in the context here is that the cards mentioned in this article are not actually real. They never existed, and therefore they are not "counterfeits" of a real one, they are just made up. Someone just claimed to know someone that had playtest cards from back in the day. They are not a commercial product.
I built one of these several years ago for MtG cards. Trained a neural network with a binary classifier on a cheap $20 USB microscope looking at examples of the backs of real cards vs. fake cards.
Sadly never got around to shipping it, because it worked really well. Ported it to the web, but never figured out the billing issue, and so it died during the delivery phase. From time-to-time, I still wonder if I should resurrect this project, because I think it could help a lot of people.
This was in the hacker Zeitgeist a few years ago, when "Secret Dots from Printer Outed NSA Leaker", though it's unclear whether the dots were used or if it was one of the other opsec failures.
> The combined sales across all auction websites likely exceeds $10M. Individual cards were selling between four to six figures, based on the variant and the popularity of the Pokemon.
Woah, I had no idea Pokemon cards could be so valuable (obviously I don't know much about Pokemon other than my kids use to play with them)
There's been a fairly high profile hype cycle around them for a few years driven by a few high profile creators/influencers making some huge stunt purchases and lots of speculation on the value of the cards. Feels very beany baby-esque to me but bubbles are lasting a long time these days so who knows how long it'll last.
It makes one really wonder why this is not absolute basic step in the "authentication" process. You could pretty much automate this as part of documentation process.
I know nothing here but just assumed the card stock for all these collectible cards was unique, easily identified, and hard to counterfeit. I guess not.
Also probably not even going forward. What prevents me from printing a copy of a card and claiming it's the real card and the one registered on the chain is the forgery?
NFTs for tracking real items is fundamentally flawed as it requires people to perfectly and accurately update the ledger and never feed false information into it. Also how do you crack a pack when they're NFT tracked? The whole economy of TCGs is built around the blind box element of loads of people buying packs of cards.
with-lots this information (in the game Pokémon/Pokemon TCG*), there so many-chances for misinformation of exact-words; however, its possible to realise from Titles, much more details in-print, art-work, these almost "easter eggs" actually printed-out
meta-data/"metadata", is 1 point to consider when seems "noisy", hopefully browsers take-care for having seen–noticed
However, its lucky to see these almost "behind-the-scenes" look at what is happening there. Hopefully people that contribute, realise these details, more, are what is happening! (even in January, 2025)
> Different brands use different dot encoding patterns, and not all of these can be decoded. The companies don’t reveal this information so any known pattern has been cracked by someone from the general public.
If you ever wondered why color printers with a separate black ink tank won't print a black and white document when it's low on color -- it's because they have to print the secret yellow dots for fingerprinting purposes and need the color ink to do so.
First, the reason inkjet printers use color ink for monochrome documents is pretty well known. While there is no doubt a degree of "profit optimization," there's a printing benefit to doing so. Most inkjet printers, because of the properties of the ink used, cannot produce very good blacks with only their black ink. It's standard to use some magenta and blue to 'deepen' the black which produces a subjectively better result. On many printers you can toggle this off, either on the printer or in the print driver. But, and here's where the profit optimization comes back, on a lot of cheaper printers especially you can't (although this might have more to do with the general lack of configurability of inexpensive printers). This technique is unnecessary for laser printers because of their different properties (toner is an opaque material bonded to the surface of the paper; ink is a liquid with a degree of transparency that is absorbed by the paper).
There's also an argument made by inkjet manufacturers that cycling the color cartridge is important to keeping the print head ready for use, although I don't think it's really that big of a motive since with some firmware work they could just run the cleaning cycle on the color cartridge for each print job (although, once again, a lot of this comes down to cheap printers being built around commodity controllers with very little configurability or intelligence in general).
Second, MIC-type dot markings are associated only with laser printers. The concept was developed within the laser printer industry and does not work as well on inkjets due to the higher level of bleed and poorer halftoning of very faint colors. I am not aware of any inkjet printers that print these types of dots; I would not be surprised to learn that there are a handful (particularly in the higher-end photographic market) but it's certainly not common. The EFF, for example, says that no inkjet printers do so. There's probably not much value to printing tracking dots anyway, because inkjet output is usually more obviously different from offset printing than laser (poorer color saturation and density), which makes inkjets unappealing for counterfeiting. There are, of course, a whole different class of "giclee" printers with excellent output quality (is HP Indigo still king?) but they're specialty devices and tracking dots only appear on consumer and office equipment.
> "Most inkjet printers, because of the properties of the ink used, cannot produce very good blacks with only their black ink."
Many inkjets solve this by using two different black inks. One which is the K in the four CMYK "dye inks" for printing photos etc, and another "pigment black" for printing purely B&W text etc.
For most modern inkjet printers, there's a simple reason: there must be ink inside the printhead at all times[1] or some of the nozzles will dry out and clog.
Solution/hack: buy one of those ink cartridge refill kits, but put black ink in the yellow cartridge. That way when you want to see the dots they should come up nice and clear?
Obviously this is not going to work out well if you actually print in colour.
I've looked into it before and I didn't find anything suggesting that it's a law. It appears to be willful collaboration with the feds and other nation states, possibly to avoid the attention of regulators, but it's all done in secret so there's not a ton of info.
Along similar lines, scanners and commercial software packages like Photoshop attempt to detect EURion dots and the digital watermarking that replaced it in currency. Obviously open source software has no such thing because it would be pointless, and it's not illegal that it doesn't.
For whatever reason, these antifeatures seem to also be missing from commercial digital cameras.
> Is this a federal (US) mandate or a law in any other country?
No, its a backdoor regulation in the US (probably using the threat of actual regulation premised on controlling counterfeiting to get firms onboard) via agreements from manufacturers to act without regulation.
While most of the printer is pretty simple mechanically and electronically, inkjet heads and laser drums are going to be beyond the ability of most home hobbyists. Even dot matrix heads would be pretty complicated to fabricate with lots of tiny precise parts.
It genuinely seems that a 3D printer is easier to build; the precision and resolution required is significantly less than for photo-quality (or even document-quality) printing, right?
Because no-one, especially the kind of person who's into open-source, uses printers often enough for the problems to bother them, and because the existing commercial products are highly optimised and effective.
I'm curious how long it has been since an even half-way convincing fake could be printed on a home printer (even if it were totally unlocked). My guess is quite a while. Maybe you could do it for small denominations that don't have color shifting inks, but I'm pretty sure that paper that even sort of approximates the feel would make it not economically viable, even on a home printer.
When it comes to highly valuable collectibles, the chinese are very good at making fakes. Take a pricey watch, like the Rolex Daytona 116500LN (unobtaimium at a dealership, MSRP $13 K or so but impossible to get, so they went up to $40 K used [but never used])... Well you've got chinese counterfeit, like Noob factory and others, where they even number the revisions and each revision is better than the last one.
Journalists asks a counterfeiter "but how comes you improved so much between v5 and v6 and it's now impossible to tell the watch appart without opening it?" and the counterfeiter answers: "We watch your YouTube videos where you compared our v5 to a real one and see everything we missed that you noticed and we fix these".
Fakes are so good now a percentage of the parts can be swapped for real ones (meaning there's also now an issue of "frankenwatch": bad guy takes one real one and two fake ones and creates two "frankenwatch", which both have parts of the original, making them even harder to tell from real ones seen that they're each partially the real thing).
I've got all my Magic the Gathering cards from the nineties. Some are worth 4 digits a pop. I know there are insanely good chinese fakes now. There's one way to tell certain fakes with a magnifier but don't be fooled: chinese counterfeiters are watching all the YouTube vids about how to tell fakes from real cards and are enhancing their process. And if it requires "magic" fingerprint, they'll modify their printing process to be able to reproduce even those hidden dots.
Wizards of the Wokes (sorry, Wizards of the Coast) tried to fix the issue by adding holograms and foils and whatnots but even that the chinese can of course copy and, anyway, it's mostly the old, simplest to copy, cards that are worth $$$$ (except for some unique cards like the "One ring" from the "fat goldberry", "asian gandalf" and "black aragorn" edition of Lord of The Rings. Yup, Wizards of the Wokes went full DEI, so full left that their brains fell out of their skulls and they really did black aragorn, asian gandalf and fat golderry -- certainly as an homage to Tolkien's legacy and certainly to please Tolkien's fans). So Wizards of the Wokes: from the bottom of my heart, go fuck yourself!)
Does it not strike anyone else as wrong that a printer that you own has to do the bidding of the government instead of you? That you have to pay for it to be forensically watermarked against your own interests? And why have all these companies just taken orders from 3 letter agencies about this? Doesn't anyone have integrity? Isn't there anyone who believes that your own possessions shouldn't be made to conspire against you?
I guess the whole smartphone thing answers that question far better than a printer...
The origins of Free Software (or at least the GNU and GPL parts of the family tree) lie in this exact domain!
In the late 1970s Richard Stallman wanted to patch a faulty printer given to his by Xerox. They wouldn’t ship the source code though unless he signed an NDA:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42884133
If you have two minutes...
Working on a Printer Paper Jam - Dylan Beattie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhlWSOQ4cC4
Are there any open source printer projects out there? It doesn't seem like it should be too hard of a technology to crack considering we have stuff like the frame.work laptop
My car has limits the government puts on it - it has to shut off it's engine to reduce fuel consumption to hit a government mandate.
My shower doesn't use as much water as I'd like, as the government mandates a flow restrictor.
Why not printers?
>has to shut off it's engine to reduce fuel consumption
Which government, what car feature?
It sounds like idling shutoff that saves you money, reduces pollution, and reduces fuel consumption, eg when you stop to wait for traffic lights?
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Why not toilet control - if you have not enough fiber in your ... the electronic money you have on the bank account won't be able to buy you more meat, suggesting vege instead.
But where is the limit of freedom? Where is the border we should stop before or fight for it somehow?
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>> it has to shut off it's engine to reduce fuel consumption to hit a government mandate.
I've not heard of any car where you can't turn this off. There is no switch anywhere to turn off watermarking in your printer.
those are limits on squandering community resources. this requires you to use your resources (ink) for no benefit to you. to continue the bathroom theme it would be more like requiring your toilet to add rfid tags to your poops to track them downstream.
Seems strange to comparing resource saving to spyware? Potato potatoes I guess.
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The yellow dots requirement means you can't print black and white without yellow ink.
If the government is going to require this, they need to subsidize the yellow ink that I never use, but have to constantly replace.
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Is the engine shutoff the government mandate, or is it an implementation by the manufacturer to reduce fuel consumption and thus emissions?
I mean I get the comparison - government requires your car to have a seatbelt and your printer to have identifiable dots and your scanner to be unable to scan money - but in the case of engine shutoff it's more the manufacturer's idea. I don't know who came up with the xerox code though.
There is a difference between government limiting what your device can do, versus government monitoring what you use your device to do.
Sure your engine may shut off to save fuel, but once you have finished driving and left your car, it no longer has any power over you. But tracking dots can forever be used to link a piece of document to your printer.
Good luck shredding everything and never let anything you print leave your control.
Printing something onto paper should not be a blanket opt-out of the 4th amendment.
As far as I understand it, the yellow dots thing comes from the US government stepping on the toes of Xerox and getting them to jump. Same thing with Biden getting COVID misinformation removed or Trump getting the entire tech industry to lurch to the far-right overnight. Both of those imperil the 1st Amendment[0], and the yellow dots imperil the 4th.
Now, let's look at the two other examples you provided. Automatic engine shut-offs[1] and water flow restrictors may be annoying, but they do not imperil constitutional rights like the watermarking dots do. If we were talking about the US government mandating tracking chips in every car, then it would be like the watermarking dots.
Of course "government mandated tracking chips" is old news. The stuff of conspiracy theories. You might even be able to sue the government to stop it.
The current meta regarding getting around the 4th amendment is using industry to violate people's privacy for you. Industry will happily violate people's privacy on their own, because there's money in spying on people, so all the US government has to do is buy from private spies[2]. And because this is 'private' action, 4A stays untripped, because our constitution is a joke.
[0] Not nearly to the same extent, of course. Biden bruised 1A's arm, Trump wants to dump gasoline on it and light it on fire.
[1] My mom's Tuscon has this 'feature' and it's genuinely annoying. First thing you do when you use the car is shut it off so that it doesn't get you T-boned trying to save gas.
[2] This knowledge has been public domain since at least 2011: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/social-media-is-a-tool-of-the-c...
Now try photoshoping money. Just open a high definition picture of a dollar bill on Photoshop and report back. https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/cds.html
Yeah, but anyone using an Adobe project knows they don't own the product and that Adobe owns them.
No, a massive amount of the materials in use are printed, at the same time you can see the persistence of fraud of all types. It’s little things like this that are needed to provide some ground truth. Without the writers observation these items would continue to be sold at high prices, everyone looses except the fraudster, and if they can be connected to a set of fake items in future then even better.
I don't have an answer but it's something that EFF has been aware of.
https://www.eff.org/issues/printers
This seems a particularly harmless (and even beneficial) of hardware serving the interests of a wider society in reducing fraud rather than its owner in perpetrating fraud.
It's no Juicero, let's say.
Sometimes the invisible hand of the free market isn't so invisible and might point a gun at your business
In general you put your name on documents you print. But true that if you are a reporter in some country you might want to print stuff anonymously. How easy it is to modify a printer firmware to scramble those dots?
>In general you put your name on documents you print.
What do you mean? I’m confident that 95%+ of the documents I print do not have my name, or the name of anyone who has ever been in my house, on them.
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I believe it is not firmware. Because of many reasons, one would be issuing firmware release for every machine would be impossible. It is probably lying so low in the hardware layer, one cannot simply remove or alter it without desoldering etc.
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> Doesn't anyone have integrity? Isn't there anyone who believes that your own possessions shouldn't be made to conspire against you?
Welcome to the Western Business World. You must be new here.
If you let Fed.Gov pwn your customers, they help you get your product to market.
If (like me) you refuse to help Fed.Gov own your customers, the they shut you down, as they did to me.
Good luck fighting the government.
There's a story here that I would love to hear.
When is it against your own interests ?
When you want to forge something, or send your manifesto after serial killings ?
And what are you paying extra ? 0.01 USD per yellow ink cartridge, that is already wildly overpriced due to profiteering schemes ?
I'd happily pay that 0.00001% if that means a stupid serial killer gets caught once in a while.
I just don't think that serial killers are enough of a problem to mess with printing. Surely there are more effective ways to deter people from this sort of behavior.
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To "catch a serial killer" you'd need each retailer selling printers to track the ID and model number on a receipt, to be submitted to a central government agency and saved in a database. This is not what's happening in your country either, am I correct?
Instead this ordeal makes it possible for the government agencies, who do keep track of their own inventory to follow the tracks of those, who decided to leak documents to the outside world by printing them on printers at work. Like the outing of the whistleblower, courtesy of a journalist at The Intercept.
https://blog.erratasec.com/2017/06/how-intercept-outed-reali...
I find it interesting that this research seems to be (at a glance from reading that first page of the thread) coming from someone who owns some of these fraudulent cards (and could have just re-sold them and kept their mouth shut).
I remember reading a story about a painter who was forging works in the style of an artist that had been dead for 40 years.
The police found it very difficult to investigate because no-one wanted to have paintings they had spent money on to be discovered to be fakes.
The forger was given community service, changed his name to match the artist and served his sentence by painting and signing a mural.
I had a friend whose home was full of movie memorabilia. The boxing shorts from Rocky, the journal from Raiders of the Lost Ark, props from Star Wars, etc. all professionally displayed in shadowboxes along with autographs and photos.
The only thing is that they were all fake. My friend's hobby wasn't collecting memorabilia, it was making fakes. He was quite open about the fact that none of it was real and would happily describe how he created each piece.
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I remember a case where a man was accused of forging a will. They figured out it was a forge because it used the Calibri font, Microsoft only added Calibri in 2007 and the document was supposed to be from a few years before.
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Similarly, there's also Rudy Kurniawan, who was a wine counterfitter. Went to Federal prison, deported, and now is in demand to produce wine again in Asia because of how good he was at it.
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There is a film essay by Orson Welles called "F for Fake" about art forgery, an artist that creates forged works that gain value by being works of art in their own right, that then takes a sudden turn. I don't want to spoil it, but it's a fascinating look at art, truth and lies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_for_Fake
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My father restored paintings. There are a great many fakes in circulation, either consciously or unconsciously.
A classic case is when an heir discovers that one of grandfather's badly preserved paintings is on the side. If it's not restorable, a new painting is made and reintroduced to the market in place of the old one, which is destroyed. The new painting benefits from all the traceability of the old one. Many experts are not fooled, but they don't get a commission if there's no sale, and nobody wants to have proof that their painting is worthless.
Fakes are only revealed when their number affects the quotation and sale. As long as everyone's making money, no one really cares.
> changed his name to match the artist and served his sentence by painting and signing a mural
If you kill Santa Claus, you must become Santa Claus!
I was pretty sure you meant this guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Beltracchi
But he didn't change his name.
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Tony Tetro?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Tetro
Pretty close to this story, which may have exaggerated a few things.
I have to wonder if the fakes made by this unique forger aren't works of art in their own merit...
Not the same person but see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_van_Meegeren#M._Jean_Decoe...
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From what I understand in the topic the original Pokemon card inventor is involved in this as is a renowned card grading company (knowingly or not I leave out of the question).
So if this stirs up a large controversy, it might actually make the fakes, especially the signed ones, collectibles as well. Probably never the value they first had, but I hope the wistle blower can recover some of his losses.
Yes imagine if Andy Warhol were alive and involved in selling forgeries of his own work... is it still a forgery then?
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The poster acknowledges this: "I will lose thousands".
https://www.elitefourum.com/t/many-of-the-pokemon-playtest-c...
If you're spending thousands of dollars on collectible pokemon cards, you probably aren't strapped for cash.
I worked for a gacha gaming startup early in my career. We were small so I did customer support besides engineering and got to know our whales quite well.
For every tech/finance worker who made hundreds of thousands a year and could afford to casually drop $5k a month on “collectibles”, there was easily 10 people who clearly were not making that much money but compulsively spending it for short lived dopamine hits.
It was kind of sad.
The one that really stuck with me was a social worker who worked with sick children making minimum wage, and spent all her spare cash on our product.
You say that, but I know at least a few collector types who definitely spend above their means to collect the stuff they're into... it's not great.
Hopefully that's not the case here, but it's definitely not just a "money to burn" thing..
What a homie. Judging from their profile picture they are also a fan of "The Untalkative Bunny". What a nice person.
If you're interested in this kind of thing, Tavis King is one of the more knowledgable people with regards to mtg. Here's him mapping a booster to print sheet, to see how many Lotus' are still out there, possible to be opened: https://youtu.be/nnYe8FWTu_o?feature=shared&t=184
edit: If you want the very technical version, here's a video from his own channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwnYLvWdNd8
I remember reading a story about a (now) well-known MTG player. It was about their experience at one of their first tournaments, and had this detail about how during the tourney he got some pointers from Kai Budde (I think) on drafting - and in particular on print sheets.
My memory is fuzzy, but it was something like "Kai looked at a few of the boosters in a practice draft, and then was able to tell us (something) about the cards that should be in the remaining packs just by reasoning about print sheets."
I'm sure I'm getting the details wrong here - I'm not positive that it was Kai, and I don't have a good enough mental model of print sheets to know what was possible back then. And I think these skills aren't relevant today (?)
But I thought it was a fascinating detail. It's always fun to hear about the wrinkles that serious players of a game pick up on in order to find an edge.
(I've searched for the story a few times and haven't been able to find it; I just don't remember enough about it now)
edit: some discussion below, but I think the story here is approximately "Kai memorized all possible print runs, which was feasible to do back then, and was therefore able to back out which cards had probably been drafted and who was probably holding them" or something like that. Nothing about reasoning about runs across boosters!
There is a woman who found a way to game casino black jack and made millions out of it before getting caught. It's nearly impossible to replicate but it involved spotting imperfections in the way print sheets are cut up into individual cards.
I don't remember her name but she was an associate of poker legend Phil Ivey, and there's a whole documentary on YouTube about it. It's pretty fascinating what greed and a ridiculous level of risk tolerance can achieve.
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I thought it was less that you could predict across packs and more that you could infer what card had been taken given what was left. That meant you had a better chance of not getting cut during the draft.
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Most of MtG’s secondary market value is protected by how difficult it is (or how costly it is) for cheap printers to match Cartamundi’s (and other global printers) offset printing processes. The number of counterfeit tests (green dot, black layer, Deckmaster, etc) that are simple and useful for basic users to determine counterfeits all trace back to the printing processes WotC uses.
I am amazed by how much value is protected by such a small technological detail
It relies heavily on the security and trustworthiness of the printer as well though, same as any kind of company where their product's value far outweighs its production cost (like cash money); I can imagine that before the big boom, employees would be able to take some cards / boxes / sheets home if they wanted to.
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I remember trying to print out fake magic cards in the late 90s (I picked a non-valuable card). I used two passes: a dye-sub printer with a laser for the black text. It looked great to the naked-eye, but trivial to see the difference due to differing print technology under a microscope. I'm slightly surprised that examination of the CMY pattern in the color wouldn't have been sufficient to identify a fake.
[edit]
Just re-read the post and realized these were identified as fake just from the picture posted online. That makes a lot more sense.
In a game where there are rules about deck content, but scarcity around the existence of cards, I don’t see the ethical problem with counterfeiting a card for personal use.
If you add a fifth ace to a deck in the middle of a poker game, that’s cheating. If poker decks were printed without aces but aces were allowed, then why should anyone care how you got these four aces, as long as they were shuffled fairly into the deck? Just play the damn game.
> I don’t see the ethical problem with counterfeiting a card for personal use.
Neither does most of the community. We call it proxying. Of course it's not allowed in sanctioned play because the purpose of sanctioned play is to sell cards, but I've never been around a table in someone's basement who cared that the sol ring I just played is actually a mountain with "sol ring" scribbled on it in sharpie as long as there was no way of telling it from the other cards in the deck, it would be legal for a real sol ring to be in that deck and I played it according to the rules governing sol ring. There are different formats to magic and the one with the most extensive, and therefore expensive, list of permissible cards has competitive decks that run into the tens of thousands of dollars invested (https://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/vintage#paper). If you had to buy all of that every time you felt like playtesting a new deck people simply wouldn't do it.
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My understanding is that the inherent rarity of some cards is actually part of the game's balancing. If everyone can have every card (or worse, multiples of every card), then some vaguely game-breaking cards, or combinations of cards — that normally don't matter / aren't theory-crafted, because of their rarity — would suddenly be everywhere, in every tournament deck, creating a "dominant strategy" for the game, in turn necessitating those cards be banned. Even though those cards/combos would have been perfectly fine and fun and not-broken, had they stayed rare.
(Or at least, that's how MtG was originally designed to be balanced; I think this may have changed with MtG Online.)
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Oh for sure, if it's about the game then using "counterfeits" is not a problem at all; many proprietary card games (like Uno) can be played using regular playing cards which are a literal dime a dozen or cheaper.
But this isn't about the actual card game though, but the collector's market where grading companies sign off on the authenticity and quality of in this case 30 year old playtesting cards. I feel bad for the people that did get scammed, on the one side they should've known better because these were too good to be true, but on the other they put their trust in the grading company. I hope the grading company gets serious repercussions for letting this pass, surely they of all people should know about the printer dots to determine counterfeits and age?
You definitely don't want actual counterfeits to exist in the game at all. Even if they're for personal use, they'll end up getting into the supply, and someone gets screwed over because they don't know any better. Instead we use "proxies" which aren't meant to be passed off as the real thing, but represent it in-game. They usually have a different art, or a different card back, or some other obvious difference from the real deal.
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> In a game where there are rules about deck content, but scarcity around the existence of cards, I don’t see the ethical problem with counterfeiting a card for personal use.
Where there are high prices of cards, any convincing counterfeit would be poor optics. Game play with non-convincing counterfeits is accepted in many places (i.e. proxies).
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Yep this. We should be fighting 'pay to win' systems like this. Afterall the wealthy person who can afford these rare cards will have a natural advantage.
Imagine if dnd was sold in a way that only a few player's handbooks had fireball and if you had it, you could cast it.
Its a shame these systems caught on instead of more ethical systems. I hope Gen Z ends up burying this consumerist junk.
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Because part of playing the game for "bring your own deck" competitions is the time/effort/money that went into acquiring the cards. It's as much about "making the best deck you can with the cards you can get your hands on" as it is about just making the best deck you can.
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> I'm slightly surprised that examination of the CMY pattern in the color wouldn't have been sufficient to identify a fake.
If I'm understanding the post correctly, these counterfeit cards were claimed to be from an early playtest which would in fact have been printed on normal consumer/office grade printers and not using a commercial large scale printing process. Some of the fakes are noted to actually have two sets of dots, one set from the original printer and another from whatever was used to make the fakes.
I remember my son really wanting a copy of The Nightmare before Christmas which Disney wasn't selling at the time because, at least then, they regularly let movies go out of print.
I found a "used" copy on AMZN which was obviously a fake with inkjet printing on the box and the disc, metadata on the disc indicating it was a DVD+R, etc.
Served Disney right.
I've gotten new movies on DVD-Rs from Amazon before. Also clearly pirated since they just played the movie when you put it in rather than a forced showing of the FBI warnings &c.
So, knowing nothing about Pokemon, it was lost on me if 2024 was legitimate or not (I suspected not, but it seems the article kind of assumes you know when the cards should have been made).
This article seems to give a clearer picture:
https://www.pokebeach.com/2025/01/millions-of-dollars-of-pro...
> Millions of Dollars of Prototype Pokemon Cards May Be Forgeries, Retired Creatures Employee Involved
> The authenticity of the Pokemon TCG’s famous “prototype cards” are now being called into question.
> Last year, hundreds of prototype Pokemon cards began to sell in collecting circles from the personal collection of Takumi Akabane, one of the original creators of the Pokemon TCG. He worked at Creatures until 2008. He recently attended events to sign some of the cards. Grading company CGC worked closely with Akabane to verify the cards’ authenticity.
> The prototype cards represent the earliest days of the TCG, produced in 1996 before Base Set released in Japan. They show the progression of Pokemon cards from their “proof of concept” stage where they used their Red & Green sprites to their beta designs that used their final artwork from Mitsuhiro Arita and Ken Sugimori.
I've asked chatgpt to explain to me the pokemon card craze, and it gives a long answer, but I still don't understand the videos of people shoving shopping carts full of big boxes of Pokemon cards...
The answer is they are gambling they can sell them for more later
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In 2020 during COVID influencers like Logan Paul got into it and made it a fad again.
This may sound stupid but can you actually ask ChatGPT to comment on stuff that’s happening in realtime, now? I haven’t been using AI much these days.
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I get -3 points on the downvote, and yet.. thread below among others.
The fact that a large grading company would not check such a basic type of forgery makes it seem like they're in on the scam. This sounds similar to what happened with video game grading company Wata, who were alleged to have fraudulently inflated the value of games they were grading:
https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/grading-firm-wata-i...
That theory doesn't make too much sense; if they were both in on the scam and aware of the printer metadata, surely they would have asked for a different version before signing their name to it.
IMO it's more likely that "grading" is just a joke.
This is a good point! My assumption was that they actually do have a high baseline of fake rejection and gave these a fair analysis, given that they would want to maintain credibility and have multiple write-ups on their web site about how they closely analyze submitted cards to detect counterfeits. I wonder if there are any independent tests out there on how well they actually detect and reject fakes sent in for grading by normal people.
It's easily possible that this was overlooked because when being in on the scam one will be less diligent about such things.
Yeah, we had a global financial meltdown in 2008 because it turned out the people who graded securities didn't look too closely at what they were grading; turns out customers wanting their bonds rated wouldn't choose rating agencies that applied an inconvenient level of scrutiny.
It'd be naive to expect the pokemon card industry to be better regulated.
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Kinda like twitter's blue marks
Or llc's by departments of state
It sounds like they suspect someone who helped design the original Pokemon trading card game - Takumi Akabane. A prominent investor claims to have gotten the cards directly from him and doesn't care if they're fake as a result.
Maybe the original designer wants to make a few more dollars.
Akabane or the buyer could be the original source of the fakes, but the grading company CGC was responsible for "verifying" that they were authentic before they were sold at auction:
https://www.cgccards.com/news/article/13347/
Easier to assume the person grading this just didn't do a great job.
I mean grading is a scam all its own so them teaming up with other scammers wouldn't surprise me at all.
Yeah imagine paying top dollar for a Pokemon card that has zero market liquidity.
PSA is a scam company?
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“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.“
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
In the case of Wata the dude scamming now (Jim Halperin and Heritage Auctions) scammed in the eighties in exact same way and got fined peanut sum by FTC for it https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-08-10-vw-88-sto...
"Heritage Capital Corp. and Numismatic Certification Institute. Also named in the action were Steve Ivy and James Halperin, prominent numismatic figures. A consent order was signed agreeing to establish a $1.2-million fund for collectors who purchase the NCI-graded coins from Coin Galleries Inc. of Miami."
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FYI, these yellow dots are part of a Secret Service program to fight counterfeit currency. It was big news a couple decades ago and is well understood in art/printing circles. There are host of similar programs to protect printed money.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
EURion is a funny[1] kind of DRM, what caught the fake Pokemon cards is Xerox DocuColor[0], a watermarking technology.
The difference is that DRM is designed to prevent you from copying something, while watermarking is designed to make you dox yourself if you copy something. I've yet to see evidence that EURion et. all actually stop counterfeiting, but watermarking has been very effective at finding counterfeiters.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
[1] Most DRM is intended to enforce copyright; but the state is not asserting copyright over the image of a banknote. There are cases where it is legal and moral to completely reproduce a faithful image of a banknote, and those cases are much broader than the various exceptions to copyright that exist.
> but watermarking has been very effective at finding counterfeiters.
Whistleblowers, too. That's believed to be how they got Reality Winner, because the documents published by The Intercept contained those tracking dots.
Eurion is part of a series of programs that stop some high-end scanner, printers and editing software from handling currency. Try scanning/editing/printing a eurion note and you will run into roadblocks. That makes it a type of DRM.
>watermarking is designed to make you dox yourself if you copy something
Is that a legal requirement on paper somewhere?
It seems like an expensive feature to add if not required.
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Kind of, most version it's just the serial number which is a very soft dox. Going from that to the identity of a real person is really hard if you don't have the investigative powers of the state or have hacked the printer manufacturers registration data (if the person even bothered to register their printer).
Seconded. The counterfeiters are idiots.
Maybe they are, but some of these fakes were authenticated by a third party whose entire job is to serve as a trusted authority for collectors, so they're even bigger idiots for not noticing such a well known tell. This throws everything they've ever graded into doubt.
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Are they? They passed off all these cards and will likely get away with it. The people left holding these cards are the ones who got 'screwed'. Though collecting, and paying high premiums, for pieces of cardboard backed by barely anything at all probably means they were screwing themselves to begin with. (IE A game of pokemon with 100% proxies is just as fun as a game of pokemon with no proxies)
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TIL printer dots! Also curious if someone more familiar with this space/community could provide more backstory here. Reading some of the comments in the forum, it seems like 1) these "beta cards" surfaced a while ago and have been a contentious topic since, 2) a card authenticator business is involved. What's the scale of this scheme? What's the impact going forward/how much money is tied into this?
It looks like CGC - one of the big card graders - has touted their ability to grade some very early Pokemon The Card Game playing cards (even alpha test cards printed in very low numbers). Here is their grading scale on their site https://www.cgccards.com/news/article/13347/
People have purchased these CGC cards on ebay assuming they were legit based on the above certifications. It looks like total cards is something like 6 test decks of 26 cards of the alpha prototype - so the rarest example is fairly small, but I think it goes up as they got to later pre-release versions. Furthermore, there are some cards that were signed by Akabane (a co-creator of the game) and those have the presence of the yellow dots - meaning those are most likely not legit pre-production cards. One of those signed cards was sold for $200k I believe - https://www.cgccards.uk/news/article/13661/
So total financial impact of this directly in low millions?
This reddit thread has more reddit style conversation about it w/ some data mixed in https://www.reddit.com/r/PokeInvesting/comments/1ibjlch/poke...
Thank you! Looks like CGC is in a tough spot. The grading guide struck me as quite vague.
> CGC Cards utilized all the tools at our disposal to help document and authenticate these cards, compiling vast resources for comparison with future submissions. A very thorough process is in place for the authentication and grading of these cards using ones verified by Mr. Akabane.
In an ideal world, it seems like there should be publicly shared, repeatable methods/standards for authenticating cards to avoid issues (whether complicit or an honest mistake) like this from a single central authority.
> TIL printer dots!
Are these dots why some printers refuse to print b&w when you have no yellow left?
No, that's just because the function of inkjet printers is to transfer as much money as possible from you to the printer manufacturer.
Uh, I mean, because it's because colour ink makes your blacks blacker. Yeah, that's it.
What personal info is printed in these yellow dots? Are they present if I print from Linux? Brother colour laser owner here.
Edit, from [1] posted in this thread it looks like date printed and printer serial number are printed. And if it's done by the printer firmware it wouldnt help to use OS drivers.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots#Compar...
Not sure but I'd expect it's handled at the printer firmware level and not controllable from the OS. It would be pretty weird to let the user modify such a "feature" without even having to disassemble their printer.
You could add decoy dots or areas of negative yellow
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This is something that's pretty well known in the magic the gathering community. Some of us who trade in older cards to play certain formats have jeweler's loupes to check this stuff.
Pardon the naiveté: I understand the value of authenticity for collectors, but if it's just to play certain formats, what's the problem with a print?
Basically none in practice, but there are some hybrid collector-players who like the idea of building decks from their collection as opposed from all decks, and bristle at the idea of someone else not doing that. (And of course the collectors and WoTC themselves like to push for it because it makes them money: WoTC officially pretends that the secondary market doesn't exist but their actions make no sense if they aren't crafting their ~~loot boxes~~ booster sets with the idea of rare and valuable cards driving a lot of the demand).
(I personally think that if you want to force everyone to pay for product, play sealed or draft. Then everyone's on an even playing field budget wise, and it's more interesting than just net-decking. I'm sympathetic to the fact that WoTC needs to make money, I'm not sympathetic to their approach of chasing whales and making large chunks of the game basically inaccessible by their definition of 'legitimate play')
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Organized Play official events require authentic cards, but nobody is stopping people from using a printer for kitchen-table style games.
Personally, having used printed paper inserted over top of a real card, I'd rather stick with real cards. Otherwise, I'd just go digital in this day and age.
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I believe official tournaments don't allow any form of proxy?
you don't want it causing a complication with prize money or etc if you try to play in a regional tournament and get dqed by this I assume
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When it comes to playing the game between friends outside official tournaments, you are basically correct (though some use cost as a power level limiter).
When it comes to trading, you don’t want to accidentally pay a premium for something you won’t be able to resell. Lots of players view trading as, more or less, leasing cards. Valuable cards typically have fairly stable prices (though there are notable exceptions). Buy for a dollar sell for somewhere between 0.75 and 1.25.
You wouldn't want to pay a premium for a reproduction.
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Original print runs will score higher resale values, especially for something rare like unreleased Pokemon trading cards made during play testing.
Reproductions can be fine, but anyone can do them on the cheap.
[dead]
It's cool that printers have this technology, but the flip side is that it actually makes the printers worse at being printers for doing prints.
Brother printers don't do it iirc, and they're the only good brand anyway.
Brother B/W laser don't, Brother CMYK Laser/LED do.
Brother CMYK printers only skip printing the MIC if they think they're printing an internal test page in maintenance mode.
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I'd say "the least bad brand" rather than "the only good brand" because of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
Are you sure? the only two on the EFF site say they do: https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d... and it also says that basically all commercial printers do have tracking dots (last updated in 2017).
Surprised there is no researcher dumping the SPI flash, patching some conditional jumps and doing a write-up.
It'd probably get them visited by men in black suits and sunglasses if they tried.
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Yes, it's very cool that I can print some protest leaflets or political posters, and have the police at my door the next day because "my" printer betrayed me thanks to a literal corporate-state conspiracy.
Even better; get a printer that doesn't do it, but manually add the id dots from the printer of someone you don't like.
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The amount of effort required to track a specific serial number printer to its buyer means that the police are only ever going to get THIS involved if your protest leaflet happens to include original CSAM or snuff imagery.
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Looks like printers don't do it if you're printing black & white.
Reminds of the fake "sealed" authentic NES cartridges going for thousands of dollars or more on Ebay. It is a very lucrative business for scammers.
Reminds me of a friend that was selling "signed" comic books in high school. He did it for pocket money, infrequently and never exceeding $50 profit.
And there were many before him. Wikipedia writes that "in 2016, a relic of True Cross held by Waterford Cathedral in Ireland, was radiocarbon dated to the 11th century by Oxford University."[1]
Authentic collectibles are a timeless scam.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Cross
Even funnier to me, there are relics of real people around, it used to be a big thing historically. So there's some saints or whatever where there's 3 or more "arm of X" floating around, multiple heads for the same person, all kinds of fun stuff.
Lol, it is a running joke that there are enough fragments of the "true" cross to build a forest.
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I don't get why yellow isn't subsidised for all the printers I'm running out of yellow despite hardly ever printing any colour or is this printer manufacturer's subtle protest
The way humans construct "authenticity" and negotiate the ship of Theseus is going to provide so much fodder for the AIs to entertain themselves.
Like my father-in-law interrogating me about being vegetarian at the dinner table, the sardonic Socratic dialog really writes itself...
"OK; but now what if I were to selectively replace the molecules of one and only one pigment with a visually identical analog that is slightly modified to be more stable over time and with respect to UV exposure—could THAT still be an original card?"
No, it will be detected as fake due to colorimetry. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorimetry
> No, it will be detected as fake due to colorimetry.
That is a different question. You are answering if the usual methods would authenticate it as an original. I believe you are right that they wouldn't. Thus it would probably be worthless.
But that makes sense. There are many modifications you can do with a card which will render them useless and no longer recognised as an original.
For example you can burn the card to ash. They would not be even detected as a pokemon card, but they are still an original pokemon card (if they were ever) which got burned into ash.
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But what happens when we ship of Theseus the AIs themselves, which as information are infinitely copyable and arguably have no "true" identity?
Yes it would be an original card modified by you. Was this supposed to be a hard question?
It would be incredibly funny if these cards are actually genuine and someone just didn't bother to set the clock (year) correctly on their printer.
(But I don't believe this is the case and am not sure if available printers back in 1996 would even emit these patterns in this form. Just noting in this case the device's knowledge of date and time is also a factor of uncertainty.)
In the thread a few prototype cards that turned up before the current ones[1] are checked and they do have 1996 dates in the dots. So at least some printers at the time did have them.
But there’s also a batch identified as “high quality” that don’t have dots on the front printing, which if genuine would point to some printers not doing it at the time.
[1] There were like, 3, and the thread has a spreadsheet showing that well over a thousand prototypes were graded in the last few months. Not sus at all.
It seems unlikely the printer would choose 2024 if set incorrectly though.
One way to check could be to insert the serial number into various printer manufacturer's warranty check pages to see if anything pops up. Some companies (like Lexmark) require a model number first (which was not present for the example), but others (like Brother) will accept just a serial.
OT: I've wondered about printed forgeries, but in the context of comic books rather than cards.
Suppose someone in the 1960's had bought a printing press of the same make/model as what was being used to print Marvel comics. Suppose they also bought a large supply of the same ink and the same paper and the same staples. They then wait.
Then decades later they can see which 1960's Marvel comics have become valuable collectables. The early '60s was when Marvel introduced Spider-Man, Thor, the Fantastic Four, Doctor Strange, Iron Man, the Avengers, the Hulk, the Black Widow, and the X-Men for example, many of which went on to fetch hundreds of thousands or even millions for mint condition copies.
They they use their vintage press, ink, paper, and staples to print mint condition forgeries.
What would their chances of fooling people be?
I suppose it'd be easier for someone to buy one of each of the comics, rather than an industrial size printing press used to print comics and hold onto it for 70 years.
I dont think ink, on it's own, has a 70 year shelf life either.
And, aside from having the setup to print stuff with, you still need the source material (presumably printing plates or whatever) which is where the actual forging comes in. Assuming it was printing plates lets say, you'd need to copy them to a microscopic level along with every dot on a matching comic book.
That's probably quite hard.
I think the problem is that people didn't know comics would be valuable. If you knew that, then just buy a bunch of the comics and store them safely. It's probably a lot less work, won't get stuck with fakes if you can't sell them, and it's 100% legal.
The one factor that might be hard for them to control is "aging". Sure, the paper will likely have aged the same, but maybe the ink ages differently on paper than on a bottle. (In both potential ways: The ink in the bottle may go bad, or it may age less than on paper.) I am really not qualified to even speculate.
But one thing I want to note is that this scenario does not strike me as too different from "what if I had bought or mined 100 bitcoin while they were still cents each", which would actually have required significantly less effort and even foresight.
I don't think anyone originally thought that comic books for kids sold at newspaper stands would ever become collector's items with such a massive value, so it would probably have been rather bizarre for someone to do what you suggested, especially since the many factors that you mentioned alone mean that some explicit planning for this scenario is likely required for things to actually fall into place that way. I'm eager to be proven wrong, of course.
It depends on if they get too greedy. One or two would probably slip in.
But once you get too many, something would be noticed. Everything would match, but the ink wouldn't have been on paper long enough, that kind of thing.
And the space and requirements to keep everything in wait - would be more hassle and expense than just stockpiling copies of every comic ever made.
Earl Hayes Press could probably still print them using the original process https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TS6x8dK2u0
The article doesn't explain what playtest cards are nor what is being caught by their detective work.
It doesn't even mention the word counterfeit.
I can guess what's happening here, but I'd like to know more concrete info about the scale and impact of this, how much people were paying for these cards, etc.
Upwards of $24k USD when you factor in buyer's premium for a recent one. (Not confirmed to be fake but an example of another prototype card)
This is probably near the high watermark of cost because it's one of the earliest versions but a signed one might bump it up even higher.
https://goldin.co/item/1995-pokemon-alpha-prototype-25-pikac...
https://goldin.co/buy/?search=pokemon%20prototype&sort=Highe...
As for the article, it's posted to a niche specific community site, they're naturally going to explain less because the readers already have the context. These cards are expensive and sought after and there's a plausibly massive number of fakes out there.
Yeah this is sorely lacking in context, even the title seems to expect the audience to already be familiar with whatever this is.
It seems to be a really niche Pokemon forum, so I'm not surprised that the post isn't written for a general audience.
This comment feels like a criticism that the audience was not considered, instead of you just not being part of the intended audience.
Printer dots also led to the arrest of Reality Winner who leaked an internal NSA document to The Intercept which published it unredacted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner
The KGB caught some Soviet dissidents the same way. They had a (mandatory) register of the unique imprint pattern of every mechanical typewriter.
- "Nightmare for the KGB: The Advent of Photocopy Machines"
- "In the early 1960s the Soviet ruling elite—in this case, the KGB’s Fifth Directorate, responsible for ideology and counter-subversion, and the Agitprop Department, the party’s main watchdog over “ideological” matters —imposed special procedures for introducing newly invented photocopying machines. The procedures were designed to prevent the use of photocopying machines for producing copies of materials viewed as undesirable by the authorities."
- "Decades earlier, a similar approach was used for typewriters. Proprietors of offices and stores had to provide local KGB branches with sheets of paper showing examples of the font of every typewriter they had. These sheets enabled the KGB, using technical procedures, to determine the origin of any typed text."
- "In one case that occurred at my present place of employment—the Institute of World Economy and International Relations—the KGB traced an “illegal” social-democratic-oriented journal advocating “socialism with a human face” to a typewriter belonging to the secretary of the Institute’s director. Only a few dozen copies of the journal had been produced, but this proved to be enough to put five or six young people in jail for a year. The Institute’s director fired his secretary, who had permitted her son-in- law to use her typewriter to produce the illegal copies."
- "The only typewriter I knew of that could not be traced by the KGB was one I had in my home. It had been presented as a gift to my father, Soviet statesman Anastas Mikoyan, when he made an official trip to East Germany and visited a factory there that produced typewriters."
https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/Eroding-the-Soviet-... ("Eroding the Soviet “Culture of Secrecy”, Sergo A. Mikoyan (2001))
Note that having the "only typewriter that can't be traced" soon becomes easy to trace, once they know it exists and the text doesn't match anything else.
This was a plot point in the oscar-winning movie "Das Leben der Anderen" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others)
Ideally she would be pardoned but only if she agrees to go by Leigh so we can stop pretending it's normal for someone to be named "Reality Winner".
Personally I think it's like the coolest name ever lol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_Riddle is a close second
Looks like we hugged them too hard: https://archive.ph/hKXoK
In case anyone ever wonders why their printer wont print a black and white document when its out of yellow? This.
One of the many reasons to buy a brother monochrome laser printer. I mean the convenience about not needing yellow, not necessarily extra privacy - that is still uncertain.
> Other methods of identification are not as easily recognizable as yellow dots. For example, a modulation of laser intensity and a variation of shades of grey in texts are feasible. As of 2006, it was unknown whether manufacturers were also using these techniques.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots#Comparab...
Yes, I would be stunned if a major mfg like Brother didn't have their own method of fingerprinting.
Is anyone producing HP LaserJet 4 reproductions? It was a ridiculously long time before anyone beat that printer.
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I think this rationale is defeated by the existence of monochrome printers.
Anyway, users also report this problem when running out of cyan or magenta. Either rich blacks are enabled or the printer is just a bad product.
No it's because color printers actually do use small amounts of color in the black parts of the image to make it look better. They act the same for all colors not just yellow.
Punch card technology!
At least that's what I thought of, with those dot patterns forming bits.
They're both forms of encoding.
I always thought that a near learning project would be training an ML on “real” cards and then detecting fakes. I don’t play the games but I was always thrown by how much effort went into counterfeits, but I guess there’s enough profit for someone. There’s usually something wrong with the registration or colors.
What is missing in the context here is that the cards mentioned in this article are not actually real. They never existed, and therefore they are not "counterfeits" of a real one, they are just made up. Someone just claimed to know someone that had playtest cards from back in the day. They are not a commercial product.
See here for a bit more background: https://www.cgccards.com/news/article/13347/
If you are willing to pull out a loupe you don’t really need ML. You can just look at the rosette patterns.
For Mtg cards, the green dot test is very easy to learn, and I’m not familiar with any fakes that pass it.
(Edit: arguably you have to worry about rebacking with the green dot test, but rebacking is typically pretty fishy looking.)
Pulling out a loupe and manually inspecting a card is a slow process if you have a few thousand cards (avg player).
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> There’s usually something wrong with the registration or colors.
That can be selection bias too.
Maybe the counterfeits where there is nothing wrong with the registration of colours are just not recognised as counterfeits.
Similarly how seemingly every hacker you can hear about in the news are bad at opsec. Because you wouldn't hear about them if they weren't.
I built one of these several years ago for MtG cards. Trained a neural network with a binary classifier on a cheap $20 USB microscope looking at examples of the backs of real cards vs. fake cards.
https://youtu.be/6_kKR7YgPF4
Sadly never got around to shipping it, because it worked really well. Ported it to the web, but never figured out the billing issue, and so it died during the delivery phase. From time-to-time, I still wonder if I should resurrect this project, because I think it could help a lot of people.
This was in the hacker Zeitgeist a few years ago, when "Secret Dots from Printer Outed NSA Leaker", though it's unclear whether the dots were used or if it was one of the other opsec failures.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14494818
> The combined sales across all auction websites likely exceeds $10M. Individual cards were selling between four to six figures, based on the variant and the popularity of the Pokemon.
Woah, I had no idea Pokemon cards could be so valuable (obviously I don't know much about Pokemon other than my kids use to play with them)
There's been a fairly high profile hype cycle around them for a few years driven by a few high profile creators/influencers making some huge stunt purchases and lots of speculation on the value of the cards. Feels very beany baby-esque to me but bubbles are lasting a long time these days so who knows how long it'll last.
Protip: That yellow dye is almost always fluorescent. 365-405nm light will make it light right up.
It makes one really wonder why this is not absolute basic step in the "authentication" process. You could pretty much automate this as part of documentation process.
I guess if the cards are easily rejected then the counterfeiters will improve their process.
I know nothing here but just assumed the card stock for all these collectible cards was unique, easily identified, and hard to counterfeit. I guess not.
Can NFTs solve this problem?
No, there is not a problem on Earth for which NFTs are a solution.
No.
Uh, not retroactively
Also probably not even going forward. What prevents me from printing a copy of a card and claiming it's the real card and the one registered on the chain is the forgery?
NFTs for tracking real items is fundamentally flawed as it requires people to perfectly and accurately update the ledger and never feed false information into it. Also how do you crack a pack when they're NFT tracked? The whole economy of TCGs is built around the blind box element of loads of people buying packs of cards.
always nice to see a Discourse Forum in the wild!
with-lots this information (in the game Pokémon/Pokemon TCG*), there so many-chances for misinformation of exact-words; however, its possible to realise from Titles, much more details in-print, art-work, these almost "easter eggs" actually printed-out
meta-data/"metadata", is 1 point to consider when seems "noisy", hopefully browsers take-care for having seen–noticed
However, its lucky to see these almost "behind-the-scenes" look at what is happening there. Hopefully people that contribute, realise these details, more, are what is happening! (even in January, 2025)
(thank-you for sharing)
*TCG (Tradable Card Game)
> Different brands use different dot encoding patterns, and not all of these can be decoded. The companies don’t reveal this information so any known pattern has been cracked by someone from the general public.
Ehhhhhhhhh, not always
My theory:
If you ever wondered why color printers with a separate black ink tank won't print a black and white document when it's low on color -- it's because they have to print the secret yellow dots for fingerprinting purposes and need the color ink to do so.
There's a couple of problems with the theory.
First, the reason inkjet printers use color ink for monochrome documents is pretty well known. While there is no doubt a degree of "profit optimization," there's a printing benefit to doing so. Most inkjet printers, because of the properties of the ink used, cannot produce very good blacks with only their black ink. It's standard to use some magenta and blue to 'deepen' the black which produces a subjectively better result. On many printers you can toggle this off, either on the printer or in the print driver. But, and here's where the profit optimization comes back, on a lot of cheaper printers especially you can't (although this might have more to do with the general lack of configurability of inexpensive printers). This technique is unnecessary for laser printers because of their different properties (toner is an opaque material bonded to the surface of the paper; ink is a liquid with a degree of transparency that is absorbed by the paper).
There's also an argument made by inkjet manufacturers that cycling the color cartridge is important to keeping the print head ready for use, although I don't think it's really that big of a motive since with some firmware work they could just run the cleaning cycle on the color cartridge for each print job (although, once again, a lot of this comes down to cheap printers being built around commodity controllers with very little configurability or intelligence in general).
Second, MIC-type dot markings are associated only with laser printers. The concept was developed within the laser printer industry and does not work as well on inkjets due to the higher level of bleed and poorer halftoning of very faint colors. I am not aware of any inkjet printers that print these types of dots; I would not be surprised to learn that there are a handful (particularly in the higher-end photographic market) but it's certainly not common. The EFF, for example, says that no inkjet printers do so. There's probably not much value to printing tracking dots anyway, because inkjet output is usually more obviously different from offset printing than laser (poorer color saturation and density), which makes inkjets unappealing for counterfeiting. There are, of course, a whole different class of "giclee" printers with excellent output quality (is HP Indigo still king?) but they're specialty devices and tracking dots only appear on consumer and office equipment.
If a better black color comes from mixing pigments, why not mix them and put it in to the black cartridge, instead of at print time?
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> "Most inkjet printers, because of the properties of the ink used, cannot produce very good blacks with only their black ink."
Many inkjets solve this by using two different black inks. One which is the K in the four CMYK "dye inks" for printing photos etc, and another "pigment black" for printing purely B&W text etc.
For most modern inkjet printers, there's a simple reason: there must be ink inside the printhead at all times[1] or some of the nozzles will dry out and clog.
[1]: https://superuser.com/questions/409473/how-to-print-in-black...
Solution/hack: buy one of those ink cartridge refill kits, but put black ink in the yellow cartridge. That way when you want to see the dots they should come up nice and clear?
Obviously this is not going to work out well if you actually print in colour.
The real solution/hack is to just print your doc at FedEx for 50 cents the three times a year you need something printed
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Wouldn't that just ruin the document you were trying to print?
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That would permanently destroy the yellow ink path.
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> they have to
Is this a federal (US) mandate or a law in any other country?
I've looked into it before and I didn't find anything suggesting that it's a law. It appears to be willful collaboration with the feds and other nation states, possibly to avoid the attention of regulators, but it's all done in secret so there's not a ton of info.
Along similar lines, scanners and commercial software packages like Photoshop attempt to detect EURion dots and the digital watermarking that replaced it in currency. Obviously open source software has no such thing because it would be pointless, and it's not illegal that it doesn't.
For whatever reason, these antifeatures seem to also be missing from commercial digital cameras.
> Is this a federal (US) mandate or a law in any other country?
No, its a backdoor regulation in the US (probably using the threat of actual regulation premised on controlling counterfeiting to get firms onboard) via agreements from manufacturers to act without regulation.
The legislations for the 35 member countries of the CBCDG can be viewed here:
https://rulesforuse.org/en/about-cbcdg
e.g. for the US dollar:
https://rulesforuse.org/en/currencies/us-dollar
Information on the CDS developed by the CBCDG is sparse:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Bank_Counterfeit_Deter...
It is in the US
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I want to buy a printer but I want it to simply print what I tell it to (which indeed is exactly how it should behave). What can I do?
We got open source 3d printers you can build at home __before__ open source regular printers that you can build at home
How come?
Because people aren’t okay with manual feeding, print times in minutes to hours, and 0.4mm resolutions on printed text.
open source plotters that fulfill these requirements do exist. Commercial solutions are just far more mature and accessible for printed text.
2-d printing is a hard, boring problem and many people increasingly print very little, especially hackers.
While most of the printer is pretty simple mechanically and electronically, inkjet heads and laser drums are going to be beyond the ability of most home hobbyists. Even dot matrix heads would be pretty complicated to fabricate with lots of tiny precise parts.
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It genuinely seems that a 3D printer is easier to build; the precision and resolution required is significantly less than for photo-quality (or even document-quality) printing, right?
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Because no-one, especially the kind of person who's into open-source, uses printers often enough for the problems to bother them, and because the existing commercial products are highly optimised and effective.
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The commercial printers are fine for all normal uses and absurdly cheap. Ink, less so.
Whereas 3D printers are a niche tech for tinkerers; playing with building the printer is as much a part of the fun as actual usable output.
Monochrome laser printers don't have tracking dots.
(* That I have seen evidence of.)
I wonder if a pen plotter could replace a BW printer, probably adequate only for certain types of documents.
Buy Fuji Dimatix print heads and build your own.
Good luck with your currency counterfeiting.
I'm curious how long it has been since an even half-way convincing fake could be printed on a home printer (even if it were totally unlocked). My guess is quite a while. Maybe you could do it for small denominations that don't have color shifting inks, but I'm pretty sure that paper that even sort of approximates the feel would make it not economically viable, even on a home printer.
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If, in our current world, the only reason you see for privacy is to commit a crime, then the shame is on you.
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No wonder the yellow in my printer is always empty!
especially the yellow in your b&w printer!
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When it comes to highly valuable collectibles, the chinese are very good at making fakes. Take a pricey watch, like the Rolex Daytona 116500LN (unobtaimium at a dealership, MSRP $13 K or so but impossible to get, so they went up to $40 K used [but never used])... Well you've got chinese counterfeit, like Noob factory and others, where they even number the revisions and each revision is better than the last one.
Journalists asks a counterfeiter "but how comes you improved so much between v5 and v6 and it's now impossible to tell the watch appart without opening it?" and the counterfeiter answers: "We watch your YouTube videos where you compared our v5 to a real one and see everything we missed that you noticed and we fix these".
Fakes are so good now a percentage of the parts can be swapped for real ones (meaning there's also now an issue of "frankenwatch": bad guy takes one real one and two fake ones and creates two "frankenwatch", which both have parts of the original, making them even harder to tell from real ones seen that they're each partially the real thing).
I've got all my Magic the Gathering cards from the nineties. Some are worth 4 digits a pop. I know there are insanely good chinese fakes now. There's one way to tell certain fakes with a magnifier but don't be fooled: chinese counterfeiters are watching all the YouTube vids about how to tell fakes from real cards and are enhancing their process. And if it requires "magic" fingerprint, they'll modify their printing process to be able to reproduce even those hidden dots.
Wizards of the Wokes (sorry, Wizards of the Coast) tried to fix the issue by adding holograms and foils and whatnots but even that the chinese can of course copy and, anyway, it's mostly the old, simplest to copy, cards that are worth $$$$ (except for some unique cards like the "One ring" from the "fat goldberry", "asian gandalf" and "black aragorn" edition of Lord of The Rings. Yup, Wizards of the Wokes went full DEI, so full left that their brains fell out of their skulls and they really did black aragorn, asian gandalf and fat golderry -- certainly as an homage to Tolkien's legacy and certainly to please Tolkien's fans). So Wizards of the Wokes: from the bottom of my heart, go fuck yourself!)
If they went through the trouble of printing fraudulent cards, why would they print the actual date?