Comment by Suppafly
2 months ago
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.
2 months ago
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.
That was a very interesting bit of phraseology there my friend!
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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.
Not if they print the write-up.
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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.
How do they even find you? Once they have your printer model and serial number, can they find the user?
I can see how this could be used to prove or disprove it was some suspect's printer, or if it was the same printer between documents. And that's already a lot. But somehow I doubt that they have the database of serial number to person.
For example you can pay with cash, and you can buy second hand.
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.
Reading the dots and cross-referencing the serial number with credit card purchases doesn't seem like a lot of effort. In fact it seems extremely minimal.
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Looks like printers don't do it if you're printing black & white.