Comment by Validark
2 months ago
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?
You cannot buy a car in Europe without:
- lights permanently on ("safety", definitely not for your ability to get lost in the dark)
- continuously stores logs of speed, brakes, seatbelts, signal, vehicle inclination, GSM connection etc ("safety", called "black box" in Europe, also warns the driver when local speed limit exceeded)
- permanent GSM connection ("safety", definitely not for tracking, pinky promise!)
- continuously monitoring the driver's head/face ("safety", called driver drowsiness warning)
- engine turns off when stationary (the default setting can't be changed by the user, but by a car service with the right tools)
- car brakes on its own ("safety", but it's so bad I turn it off every time I power it on, it brakes when someone nearby but not right in front of you slows down, cannot be disabled permanently)
- signals left/right at least 3 times
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Sure, you save money in gasoline usage but you spend in starter replacement.
What's the environmental impact of the burnt gasoline vs manufacturing and replacement of starters?
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Every western government pretty much.
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?
When I was a kid they told us: your freedom ends where somebody’s freedom starts. I still think it is valid and insightful.
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Every “freedom” has two sides. Positive and negative freedom. You don’t have the freedom to dump nasty chemicals into bodies of water (lack of positive freedom), but I have the freedom to not have carcinogens in my drinking water (negative freedom). Some examples are clear cut, in the sense that we as a society surely all agree on where the line should be between positive and negative, but all examples need to be discussed on an individual basis, because they’re all different in terms of where we draw the line. But you can’t use the slippery slope argument here, because the slope works in the other direction too for any given example, the more positive freedom you have, the less negative freedom you have.
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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.
Auto idle shutdown saves on gasoline but comes at the cost of increased starter wear.
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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.
Does it? Monochrome printers exist. It must either be the case that it's not viewed as necessary in this case, or there's some other way of encoding this information in black and white that color printers could use when not printing in color.
If you're never doing color prints, get a b&w printer.
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.
I mean when I send letters I want people to know it's from me 99.999% of the time, that's all.
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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.
Many microprocessors are capable of having selective updates and it may be the same processor which is fetching the update. You might think of their internals to be more like a crude file system.
Ok, next to impossible then. Maybe printing tiny white text on solid black background could help obfuscate the dots. Or using a pen plotter...
What if you print a page with a slightly yellow background? Would it know to use a different color for the tracking dots?
> 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.
I see where you coming from, but similarly I just don't think that a couple of microscopic yellow dots on my prints that carry the date and serial number are not a problem. It's not like I intend to forge anything.
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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...