Printers are the text book examples of why device manufacturing shouldn’t be left to big companies. You have tracking dots, spyware infestation, subscription for ink/toners, reporting of the cartridge as empty when you still have much left in it, refusal to print when unused color cartridges are empty, intentional bricking if 3rd party cartridges or ink is used, and utterly crappy firmware in general.
Inkjets require precision manufacturing. But assembling it or other types from components should be possible - like how desktops, mechanical keyboards, etc can be. We really need to ditch filthy mass market printers because DIY printers will be much better than anything they offer.
I’m pretty sure this measure was requested either by the government or some big three letter agency.
I doubt that, if all printers were manufactured by a government monopoly, you wouldn’t have this shit baked in. It would probably be way worse
I’m not at all asking for a government monopoly on making printers, if that wasn’t clear.
Open source printers
Use the 3D printer to make the 2D printer. Finally, we are moving in the right direction.
You can tape a pen to your 3d printer to use it as a plotter.
Honestly, yes. I love open source hardware
It’s insufferable how people will respond to “We shouldn’t let corporations do this” with “OK SO YOU WANT THE GOVERNMENT TO DO IT?!?!”
It’s insufferable that the answer is always “build your own.” Lemmy assumes that every single person on the planet is an engineer with enough free time to design, build, and troubleshoot every device they own.
It’s based in rugged hypercapitalist bootstrap thinking. If something is broken just do it yourself! Even though that’s never realistic, and even if it were, no one person can or should be expected to do everything.
I do think it shoukd be left up to (potentially big) companies; however, we should put restrictions on e.g. ink cartrige compatibility, just like what the EU is trying for smartphones and messagin right now.
It was requested by the secret service as a countermeasure for counterfitting. More frequently it’s been used to “catch other criminals”, at least that’s what they say.
More frequently it’s been used to “catch other criminals”
Germans are used to this already. It’s called “Salamitaktik” (pushed piece a piece).
I see. Sort of like what the Republicans/fascists are doing with, well, everything.
It helps catch morons copying classified materials.
It’s how Reality Winner got real fucked.
via Wikiedpia:
Both journalists and security experts have suggested that The Intercept’s handling of the reporting, which included publishing the documents unredacted and including the printer tracking dots, was used to identify Winner as the leaker. In October 2020, The Intercept’s co-founding editor Glenn Greenwald wrote that Winner had sent her documents to The Intercept’s New York newsroom with no request that any specific journalist work on them. He called her exposure a “deeply embarrassing newsroom failure” resulting from “speed and recklessness” for which he was publicly blamed “despite having no role in it.” He said editor-in-chief Betsy Reed “oversaw, edited and controlled that story.” An internal review conducted by The Intercept into its handling of the document provided by Winner found that its “practices fell short of the standards to which we hold ourselves”.
A technology that was made To Stop Criminals™ being used against a political whistleblower? Color me surprised! (thanks for sharing the link btw, didn’t know about that)
Color me surprised!
I can’t, I’m out of yellow.
Just use the Fake color (because we call it Fake News nowadays instead of Yellow Journalism).
I’ll see myself out.
You’re very welcome. It’s good to be able to show real-world examples so people are less skeptical. A lot of people won’t read a deep technical document describing printer surveillance, but they will read a paragraph excerpt from Wikipedia.
And they will argue that whistleblowing is actually a crime, because, uhm, it’s, uhm, yeah it’s illegal! And if it’s illegal to be a good citizen, then this is totally warranted and no scandal at all, because only bad people do illegal things!
Many people are willing to sacrifice a lot of people for the tiny chance of maybe stopping a criminal once.
Actual opinion some people hold: “We need to make end-to-end encryption illegal to stop criminals”
How on earth is that meant to work? Criminals are criminals. They don’t care whether or not it’s illegal. At this point, just declare all crime illegal and call it a day. At least that won’t be a huge infringement on honest people’s privacy and security.
Wait. Crime is not illegal? No wonder all those criminals are doing it.
A recent anti-organised crime operation set up a fake end to end encrypted phones and sold them to criminals, capturing all calls, messages, and internet traffic
If they hadn’t, a real version of the same would have been supplied to criminals, since it’s easy and cheap
A lot of people won’t read a deep technical document describing printer surveillance, but
…if you meme it, they will come!
To be fair Reality Winner sent her emails to the intercept from her government account, so she was fucked anyway and it was just a matter of time
Interesting. I remember reading a news article before 2017 stating that printers used to do this, but the practice has since ended because someone was able to prove they were doing it in the mid-2000s. At the time, I saw some people on Reddit claiming they just switched to a new, harder to detect method, and everyone was saying they were conspiracy theorists.
On wikipedia there’s some suggestion that methods that involve intensity of toner/ink across a document could be used to uniquely identify a machine but no such methods are currently publicly known (at least as far as the Wikipedia article has been updated)
Digimarc
Source: I work in flexography.
Those dots are practically invisible if you have the printed copy, they’re not going to be visible at all in a photography. Printers and their network leave a lot to logs behind, pretty sure they just check up the printed files of their network, found the document and who send the printer order and done.
So you think tracking her down with forensic methods that objectively exist is farfetched, but accessing the print logs of every printer in America to figure out which one printed the document is realistic?
Every printer in America? She wasn’t a random person accessing those documents in her local Starbucks. That was a secret document printed in a government computer.
It’s cheaper and easier to look at the print logs. Most business computer and printer solutions tie every print to a user and log at least the name of every document printed
The hidden code is for court cases where they wish to prove which machine made the print, they’re not very good for identifying which user printed something in a multi user environment
Wikipedia has a good article on it, including photos of what the marks look like. They’re practically invisible to the naked eye, getting them to show up usually requires additional steps like taking high quality scans and running them through some color filters, or using a UV light.
From the EFF coverage of it, it sounds like every laser printer probably prints these marks now. I’m not sure if inkjets or other printer types do or not.
They probably started with the inkjets. More so, considering that inkjets have turned into a money grabbing scam. You’re better off with a laser printer if you need only B&W.
Those probably have their own way of tracking
Sure they do. I’m just saying that laser printers are the lesser evil.
From the wiki they mention researchers created a tool to check the identification code yourself, or to anonymize documents you’re printing: https://github.com/dfd-tud/deda
Clearly a pain in the ass and not user friendly for the general public though.
From the EFF coverage of it, it sounds like every laser printer probably prints these marks now.
- every color laser printer
Ftfy
If you’re going to do illegal shit, or shit against the owner class, don’t use modern technology to do it.
Dot matrix FTW
Then they’ll just identify you by the sound of the printer being audible from down the street.
They even sound better
Are those still being made? Can a consumer buy one?
I don’t think they make them anymore but unsurprisingly most are still functionnal.
The challenge would be to find paper for it.
You can still buy both the printer and paper on Amazon.
They are still used in finance. There are a lot of antiquated technologies finance still uses because some random broker with millions of dollars on his book of business just says “nah, I am not using the new stuff”.
I know Tom Scott was able to buy one brand new on Amazon a few years back.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Good bot. Though, go tell your creator to consider including other invidious instances like yewtube as well, piped was not loading for me
Yes, see Amazon.
Typewriter and serial-killer bashed together article clippings are based anti-establishment.
Wasn’t there some way to fingerprint typewriters as well based on yhe exact shape of the letter stencils? I vaguely remember something like that being an actual thing for solving crimes
Each letter in a typewriter isn’t perfectly aligned and will be slightly higher or lower, this variation is distinctive to each typewriter.
So bend the keys afterward, got it thx
Kind of an an-prim take. Understand the technology you’re using. The only thing you should take for granted is that any opportunity tech has to spy on you has already been exploited by multiple outlets. Use your worst possible faith and you’ll probably still fall short of what’s happening.
Or do while making sure you 100% know WTF you are doing. Some modern tech, like onion routing and encryption, are still very useful.
But if you’re not the kind of person who can convert a 32 bit hex number to decimal in your head or recognize a JTAG port on a device when you see it, then yeah stay away.
Golden rule: always go for old tech, unless you have a specific reason for going modern.
Sorry to bring it to you, but printers are mostly retro technology.
I used to think that until having kids. Constantly have to print stuff off for their school to be signed or turned it.
Also my printer was amazing during Covid. Printed out coloring pages to occupy them.
Someone should tell Cannon, Pacific Office Automation, and my office that printers are retro then. Because my workplace operates off paper still, not my department, but everyone else.
Dear conspiracy theorists
Sorry i called you crack pots. Please pass the foil
I find that a large number of conspiracy theories are asking the right questions, just not providing the right answers. Does big tech want to control our minds with 5G towers and microchips hidden in covid vaccines? Probably not. Does big tech want to control our minds with social media and invasive advertising? Absolutely. Is the world controlled by a secret society of lizard people? Probably not. Is the world controlled by a not-so-secret society of billionaires and politicians? To a large extent. Even those awful racist or bigoted conspiracy theories start to sound somewhat
palpablepalatable if you filter out the racist or bigoted part. Do Jews make life for the rest of us miserable by controlling the economy? No. But replace “Jews” with “the owning class”, and suddenly it kind of makes sense.EDIT: Is the government putting chemicals in the water that turn frogs gay? No. Are corporations putting chemicals in water bottles that turn frogs into hermaphrodites? Literally yes
EDIT PART TWO - ELECTRIC BOOGALOO: Palatable, not palpable. Words are hard.
As someone who has worked in IT communications, nobody deploying 5G is doing anything differently than for 4G/LTE/3G/2G or even coax/DSL/fiber/whatever. The only functional difference is that it’s faster. It may operate with newer tech, faster chips, different frequency bands, different modulation techniques, etc… But at the end of the day, it’s just a means to get data from here to there. Nothing more.
Also, the government (or “the man” or “them” or whatever), already have an almost universal method to track every living person in the country. You willingly carry this tracker with you at all times; to work, to the park, to friends and family locations, etc… If you haven’t guessed yet, it’s a cellphone.
A big part of increasing the network speed on commercial wireless networks (cellular provider networks) is reducing cell size, aka, the amount of space each radio covers, and just increasing the number of cells (radios) serving an area. They know exactly which cell(s) your phone is connected to, where those cells are, which direction the antennas are facing and how far you are away from it (by signal strength, or rssi). This can be triangulated with other antennas that can “hear” the same signal, and all of their metrics (location, direction, distance), and that information can be quickly collected and cross referenced into a very accurate location.
This can be done without any software on your device, and very likely without having a valid service plan. As long as you’re in range and the cellular radio is on, “they” already know where you are. And you carry your phone with the radio online at all times, willingly. Pretty much once you get to have your own phone as a teenager, they know where you are and “they” have been able to track you since.
Having apps like Facebook and whatever that get your location information from the network and the app relays it to Facebook (or whatever corporate entity), is the equivalent for the corporate overlords. You just need to invite them in by having the application installed, and it can report that data to them.
Most do this entirely willingly and could not give any fewer shits about it.
This is not speculation, this is part of the technical capabilities of the systems. Whether or not the government or any legal entity is using the information for this purpose is up for debate, but the fact that it can be done isn’t in question. There are entire companies dedicated to building solutions which correlate connection data to geolocate connected devices with a high degree of accuracy.
A nontrivial part of the reason these systems exist is for e911, which can relay GPS information to emergency services. A system which does not work very well for most counties because their 911 systems are too old and underfunded. If it works correctly, your precise location and altitude (to determine if you’re on the ground floor or not), can be accessed by emergency services in the event that it is required. Usually those features are only accessible or activated if you actually dial 911 (or your country’s equivalent emergency number), but they’re built out and exist regardless of if you need/use it. This was made a requirement by the government since your physical address bound to the number you are calling from, is not necessarily where you are when you make the call. In the olden days of landlines, every phone number would come up with the service address when you called 911. Since the service address was the only location you could use that line from, that worked. Now that we’re almost entirely mobile, it’s not useful anymore, so this system was devised. Then the government promptly denied sufficient funding to 911 systems to implement their end of the system, while mandating that carriers set it up.
It’s stupid. But I digress.
The fact is, you are being tracked. It’s being done for your own good (re: emergency services), but it’s very easily abused by those who can access it. People like government agencies.
Whether they’re abusing it or not, that’s a question you’ll have to figure out for yourself.
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It’s a well known scientific fact that higher frequency waves carry more energy. For larger mammals, such as humans, these differences are trivial for the most part. Unless you’re standing in a location which is exposed to high amplitude and high frequency EM waves, the danger is generally nil. By high frequency, I’m talking about pretty much anything over ~10Mhz, and for high amplitude, I’m talking about power levels at or above 100W. Putting 100+W of power through an antenna is extremely rare, and due to things like attenuation, free space path loss, reflections, refractions, etc, unless you’re basically standing directly next to an antenna, in its transmission path, you’re fine. Bluntly, this is why cellular towers are set up the way they are. Usually an antenna mast will have a relatively small support pillar of some sort, usually a cylindrical “pipe” shape, or a set of support beams in an overlapping “x” shape, which narrows as it goes up. At the top it usually flares out for where the antennas are mounted, so if you climb up the mast, you end up behind the “business end” of the antennas; aka, they’re pointed away from you. This means that the vast majority of energy being produced is directed away from where you are. For everyone else, being on the ground or even in a nearby building, you’re too far away to be exposed to significant signal amplitude. We can it EIRP in the industry, or “estimated isotopically radiated power”. The EIRP drops off quickly in the first few meters after the antenna, as the signal expands outwards towards the service area; so even being within 15m is generally safe.
EM waves can be dangerous, specifically in the extremely high bands; IMO, this is what scares people. Extreme high band EM is dangerous at most power levels. These extreme high bands are capable of causing damage at the cellular level, possibly causing your DNA to break down. These are referred to as “ionising”. The bands that people most commonly know that are ionising, includes UV and X-ray. High band UV 2 and UV 3 are in this range, and x-rays are too. They’re all EM waves and they are extremely dangerous. These are all emitted by our sun, and mostly blocked by ozone. Some small levels of UV 3 might get through (hello skin cancer). What I want to point out is that these are all at, or above hundreds of terahertz in frequency. UV bands start around 800Thz. 80,000 times higher than 10Ghz. It goes up from there.
Light, which is also an EM wave is between 400-800Thz, and it’s widely considered harmless. Yet, common folks tend to start to freak out about EM above ~6 GHz because of a lack of understanding. 8Ghz is more than 100,000 times lower than the low band of UV (which is non-ionising). Any EM wave with sufficiently high transmission power is strong enough to cause damage, for most frequencies below 400Thz (aka, below visible light) would need to be significantly higher than what we normally use. For context, transmission power at the antenna for broadcast radio (eg FM radio stations), is usually around 100kW maximum per antenna system. These transmitters can be legally and safely placed in urban areas provided adequate separation between the antenna and the public, usually 30-40 meters. To contrast this, the broadcast power of WiFi at 2.4Ghz is usually set at or around 100mW (0.1W), with a maximum output of around 1W (legally at least). To further this example, microwave ovens use 2.45Ghz frequency EM to heat your food. This is usually combined with a very well insulated cage to prevent that energy from escaping, which both protects you and your home from being cooked, and also directs the energy towards the item being heated, improving efficiency. Most modern microwaves can emit around 1000W (or 1kW) of power. 2.45Ghz is, however, special, in the way that it directly interacts with water. This specific frequency can excite water on a molecular level to create heat. I won’t go much further into it than that. So it’s unique in the interaction it has. Something something resonant frequencies something something… Look into it if you’re curious. The point is that your 2.4 GHz WiFi is 1000-10000 times less powerful than your microwave. Other frequencies do not have the same effect on water or other molecules. If your microwave ended up emitting 3Ghz instead of 2.45ghz, you would have a microwave that consumes a lot of power, which doesn’t do anything useful.
I mention this to point out that the amount of power needed to affect something in favorable conditions is generally at or above ~800W of transmission power, in the equivalent of an EM “mirror” box. Consumer goods generally will never transmit above 1W. Even at 0.1W you can usually saturate your house, your yard, and your neighbors yard… At least enough to “see” the signal.
“5G” and “6G” mobile/cellular technologies operate in the gigantic band between 900MHz and 400THz (often on the lower side of that very broad range), well below the level of ionizing EM, and at power levels well below what would be dangerous. The largest 5G arrays run with power levels around 120W. Which is less than 1/8th the power of your microwave, and at a maximum of 40Ghz, well below ionising.
Scientifically speaking, 5G mobile carrier antennas are less dangerous than walking under a 1000W flood light, which people do without hesitation, or even a thought given to any possible danger from the exposure to the ~600Thz EM being emitted by the floodlight.
Bluntly speaking, it’s a stupid argument to be afraid of 5G for the transmissions themselves. You will not be harmed by them.
Thank you for taking the time write this, I wouldn’t have the patience to do it.
Nice write up. There is a guy that tried out how dangerous the microwaves are (tl:dr not very): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3hBRxwQXmCQ&pp=ygUgc3RpY2tpbmcgbXkgaGFuZCBpbiBhIG1pY3Jvd2F2ZSA%3D
Short term effects seem to be none so far. I wouldn’t stick any part of myself into one, but his video is still quite hilarious
That… Is definitely not recommended.
I only have a fairly basic grasp of physics and biology, and from what I know, the microwaves will heat up the water inside your cells… Specifically the 2.45Ghz emitted by the magnetron in a microwave “oven”. It will easily penetrate your flesh and heat you up from the inside out… Like, on a cellular level. The water inside your cells can very easily and quickly boil, causing the cell to explode… Especially when exposed to ~1000W of 2.45GHz EM energy. It’s non-ionising so the effects will be limited by the amount of exposure, and limited exposure won’t cause much damage. Your body will very easily heal, since you lose cells all the time. Prolonged exposure will kill you.
Also, activating a nearly 1kW magnetron in an open environment will have devistating effects on anything operating in the same frequency band, and likely anything on resonant frequencies, which will likely get you in trouble with the FCC (or local regulatory body), which can include aircraft, military operations, emergency services… It’s a long list. If they use radios as part of their normal operation, a powerful and unregulated transmission like this can basically jam their system making any legitimate broadcasts unintelligible. This can obviously put lives at risk.
With that said: do not do this.
I’m licensed to operate radio equipment in amateur radio bands up to 190W EIRP (if I recall correctly), and I don’t think I’ve ever used anything more powerful than 50W, I don’t own anything more powerful than 25W, and anything with the antenna attached to the radio (like a handheld radio) that I own doesn’t exceed 10W, most are 5W. For me, if I was using anything over 50W, I’d want a band pass filter on my antenna feed line to eliminate spurious emissions on resonant frequencies just to be extra careful.
That all being said, since the damage from this guy has already been done, I wouldn’t expect any further issues for him. I’m sure his biological systems have fully recovered from the exposure, and I don’t expect it to resurface again. If it was higher frequency (ionising radiation) then he would probably already have died, and even if he didn’t, he would be in for a lifetime of hurt, but yeah, 2.45Ghz is relatively safe by comparison.
Just to note, above x-rays are all the radioactive emissions that come from stuff like nuclear materials. Which is why they’re called “radioactive” … They’re actively emitting radio (EM) waves. Usually well into the petahertz and exahertz, while ionising radiation starts in the very high terahertz range.
1Ehz = 1,000Phz = 1,000,000 Thz = 1,000,000,000 GHz (For clarity)
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://m.piped.video/watch?v=3hBRxwQXmCQ&pp=ygUgc3RpY2tpbmcgbXkgaGFuZCBpbiBhIG1pY3Jvd2F2ZSA%3D
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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Regarding everything previous to your mention of Snowden – No. Simply no. We’ve already done exhaustive research, 5G isn’t even close to a high enough frequency
Does big tech want to control our minds with 5G towers and microchips hidden in covid vaccines
Oh they would like that though, it’s just not techically feasible.
That’s the worst part about those distractors.
Verified evils are so numerous as to invite a lifetime of agitation.
Instead people make up BS others have to refute or report on.
The entire reason they do it is because it validates their instincts to ignore the real evil in front of them. There’s a reason why Republicans in particular have embraced increasingly crazy conspiracies as their party marches onward towards actual fascism.
Asking the right questions, listening to the wrong people.
Sure, if you completely disassociate them from the answers that they act on (5G towers, lizard people, Jews, gay frogs) then yeah they’re just hunting for the answers.
They’re also refusing to accept evidence they don’t like. Like there are two examples that spring to mind: the fact that the earth is an oblate spheroid and the fact that trans people existing is a natural phenomenon in our species. For the former there are mountains of evidence and anyone who’s spent any time near an ocean knows it’s true. It’s just not what your eyes or feet notice. They’re questioning their assumptions but they came to a conclusion and accept all flimsy evidence rather than more solid evidence that it’s not true. And they never ask why. For what fucking reason would people spend billions fabricating this conspiracy?
For the latter these people see a group of people who violate social norms in a way that they aren’t comfortable with anc do ask why. But they then answer it maliciously without evidence and repeatedly reject evidence and in the process eventually find themselves conspiring to hurt that group preemptively. Similar thinking happens against Jewish folks.
I applaud curiosity, I didn’t get enough sleep last night because of my own, and I’ve done a science before. But conspiracy theorists give their curiosity to dark parts of their psyche and let it run wild
So replace the noun with “rich people” and it is true?
Yes. Antisemitism complains about the right things with the wrong target.
The anti semetics might be right, but only if the rich people who are doing the bad thing are also Jewish.
Bluntly, I don’t think they’re doing it because they’re Jewish, it’s because they’re rich and entitled. But not all rich people are Jewish and not all Jewish people are rich, so it’s likely that they’re wrong.
Still a fucked up thing to say/think.
They’re not right, because as you said the fact that some of the shitty rich people are Jewish isn’t why they’re doing the shitty things.
I would clarify, but I don’t give enough of a shit to bother.
Anti semites can eat all the dicks.
The EFF has some info about the practice - https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display-tracking-dots.
I imagine there are ways and means of obfuscating / anonymizing the dots such as blocking the printer from emitting them (e.g. an empty yellow cartridge that the printer perceives as full), modifying the firmware, using a burner printer, or using a mono laser jet.
As a side issue, most modern bank notes have a bunch of yellow circles integrated into the design on each side. They look random but they’re in a recognisable pattern called a constellation that enables devices like copiers / scanners to recognize when people are trying to copy money or other financial instruments like checks.
The link you sent has a period at the end so it doesn’t work when clicked.
It’s a tracking dot
Get a 3D printer, attach a pen to the extruder and use it as a plotter.
Soon: All ballpoint pens have a microscopic tracking code embossed into the ball like a stamp.
Switch out the pen every other line to keep the forensic team guessing
Crayons become the default.
Instruction unclear, stocked up on crayons and got raided by the fbi for suspicion of wrongdoing.
Switch to felt tip or fountain pens (microdots in the ink!)
All of this just makes me want an open source printer. Anyone know of a color laser printer which uses open source firmware?
This is part of the reason I still have an HP 4050DTN and an HP 5000DTN. Plain B&W, but absolutely bulletproof and lacking all tracking, subscription, or DRM bullshit.
Hell, I can still get overstuffed cartridges that can do 20,000 prints at 5% coverage. I’m on my third one in two decades and two degrees with my 4050.
Wait, how old is that? Because on Wikipedia it suggests that Xerox has been working on this at least since the 80s, and while it was only discovered in 2004, apparently everyone had been using these kinds of patterns for decades.
B&W vs Color
You cannot print nearly-invisible yellow dots with only black toner, no matter how much you want to.
Yep. HP P1102W here. I print a bunch for work and myself. Can’t even say how long a $20 toner cartridge lasts. I’m surprised when it finally runs low.
Thanks for name-dropping these. I’m kind of in the market for an old-ass printer after learning about this lol.
How does Mario read that if it’s on the back of the paper? Meme debunked.
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I see musk as more of a doctor robotnik.
Still an insult to both Wario and Dr. Robotnik!
It’s weird that when it comes to security companies are like “we got too many important things to be doing, like adding this quarters new shiny feature, we don’t have time to encrypt user data”.
You would think that when it comes to adding obscure tracking codes companies would be like “we don’t care what people print, it’s not our problem, we aren’t going to bother with tracking watermarks”. But, no, every company has tracking watermarks while cutting every other corner possible.
I mean, half the companies out there are barely able to get their software to work, meanwhile printer companies have this robust watermark system that never fails. I don’t understand these priorities.
Where’s my tinfoil hat?
Well for starters. Consumers in general have very little rights in the United States.
Meanwhile you don’t wanna fuck with either the Secret Service, The IRS, or the Federal Reserve.
People still use printers?
Why, what are you doing, carving your documents into a clay tablet with a reed?
All my documents are digital these days. I think I’ve actually had to print a document maybe like 5 times in the last 10 years and even then the people who I had to give them to agreed that it was a huge pain in the ass lol
Me, personally, I’m usually emailing them or reading them on a screen.
Tax filing and other government stuff is digital here. There’s certified services to send legally binding documents, too. Only thing lagging behind is Post with package returns.
I recently had to fax a document to the government, which meant I had to print the thing, then pay $12 at OfficeMax to send it. Absolute bedlam.
From time to time I have to sign a form that specifically says “Print and sign, no digital signatures”
I use Adobes “draw a signature” feature to do my squibble, then place it on the signature line taking at least a little care to make it look handwritten (So like a portion of my signature is dipping below the line etc.). Finally I print to PDF (Even if it is already PDF) and email that or use one of those fax apps if fax is absolutely required.
I haven’t had any such forms rejected (Well, at least not for “improper signature” or whatever) and I’ve been doing it on forms for well over a decade now lmao
Same happened to me two years ago. I signed up for a 30-day trial with one of those e-fax companies and after the doc was sent I cancelled. To be fair, my work had an account with that service so I already knew about it - but I knew I didn’t want to pay a buck a page just to pay my taxes… Hopefully you don’t need this advice in future but maybe it can come in handy just in case!
Why you did not use an app that can take a photo of a document? Even if you do not want to use free trial, they are still cheaper than $12 per single payment (usually a week of use).
Honestly, I’m not familiar enough with the world of faxing to know which apps are trustworthy, especially since the documents contained personal information. If I ever have to send another fax, I’ll consider it.
If it is paid app with lots subscriptions, most likely it is safe (or as safe as government). The biggest problem with those if somebody else steals your login info from their system. I do not believe they hunt or store faxes themselves if you delete the document after sending.
Just take a photo with a trusted regular camera app and then enhance it with imagemagick. I have this script, works like a charm:
convert INPUT_IMAGE.jpg -colorspace gray \( +clone -blur 15,15 \) -compose Divide_Src -composite -normalize -threshold 80% OUTPUT_IMAGE.jpg. Pretty sure you can also specify multiple input images, and imagemagick can merge it into a PDF file. For joining a really large number of images into PDF files (e.g.scans of entire books), you can convert each image individually, and thenpdunitethem. So something likefor i in *; do convert $i $i.pdf; done; pdfunite $(ls *.pdf | sort -n) output.pdfApps are bloat. Reject modernity, embrace shell scripts.
I agree.
Does it count if one uses an LLM to help compose the shell script? I mean, I can and have written gnarly scripts by hand but it can take half an hour to work out a single line sometimes for a simple task versus 10 minutes describing it in plain language.
Of course it “counts”! Whatever gets the job done! I personally am pretty bad with writing shell scripts, so I often use LLMs as “pseudocode compilers”. Like, I literally give it an entire program in pseudocode, and most of the time it can “compile” it to BASH or posix shell pretty well. Maybe some people might argue that it’s better to just sit down and learn shell scripting yourself, but I would argue that just by looking at or tweaking LLM-generated scripts you’re already passively learning the basic syntax and conventions. Not to mention that you can ask it to explain parts of the code to you!
app
no
An app isn’t going to fax the document, though, which is where I’d assume the $12 charge is really coming.
I am always pissed off when someone sends me a document to print, sign, scan and send back. You are still missing your stupid fax machine, don’t you?
I have no printer because it’s not worth the upkeep, so I have to walk down the street to a copy shop and print, sign, scan and send back my personal data there.
Thank you, fax machine person.
Across the street, lol. I don’t even have a copy shop in my town.
Fuck PDFs! Send HTML!
Fuck HTML! Trace an RTF on paper :D
Is pasting in your signature digitally not an option? That’s what I’ve been doing all my life, but then again the area where I live is quite progressive in terms of technology.
On a related note, someone should make an image filter that makes digital documents look like they’ve been scanned in. Would save a ton of paper and people’s time lol.
Problem with that is that simply pasting your signature is in no way legally binding. Someone could crop your signature out of a random document and then sign a bunch of papers with it.
With a paper copy you’re supposed to keep the hard copy (and so is the other party, that’s why you always sign in doubles).
Hell even printing, signing and scanning is quite vague in terms of legal value… You’d have to actually send the original hard copies by mail to be 100% covered. (With a registered letter at that).
Digital signing will supposedly make this whole process easier, but doing that digital signing can only be executed by a small amount of certified organisations. (As in everyone can digitally sign something with their own keys, but it won’t be legally recognized)
Not a lawyer, just someone who tried to figure out how signing legal documents works to include it in an inhouse program at work
scan and send back.
E-Mail.
sadly
I print a lot of study stuff on my job printers. I know is bad, but I can’t really study in a screen.
E-Reader?
I threw mine of the balcony when it refused to print again.
I’m not even kidding. It felt amazing. (I did clean up the mess tho)
I dismantled several cheap inkjet printers for parts. There are countless useful parts inside for my future DIY projects. 24-volt power supplies, several motors, pulleys, belts, hundreds of small bolts.
Yes. I rarely print documents, but as a hobby arts and crafter, I do print of lot of stuff for my projects. Screw inkjets, but they do have a really high resolution in photo mode, which is the only reason I haven’t ditched my nightmare printer for a laser yet.
At least printers are not people (anymore).
Sometimes don’t have a choice, at least here in AU there are lots of government institutions that still only accept paper copies of certified documents either snail mailed or physically handed in
Not me. If i need something printed once a year, there’s copy shops around.
Yes some of us still touch grass.
and we go 20 miles in the snow both ways to touch said grass, because I had an onion on my belt which was the style at the time.
Nineteen dickety two
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Why are a giant laptop or a monitor the only options? I read recipes off my phone all the time! No fancy set up required, I just read it while I’m cooking! I still don’t see how any of this is related to your original statement about “touching grass” though
Just need to scroll through 800 lines of garbage back story and hope they use the keep screen alive toggle! And it’s super easy scrolling with shit on your hands!
Not everything is made better by a 6 inch screen.
Or you could just screenshot the recipe… Still not clear on what any of this has to do with “touching grass” though
👌👍 phones easier
I fail to see how the one thing is related to the other 😕
This isn’t necessarily bad. It is made so forgeries can be detected.
Halfway competent criminals know how to prevent it. But at the same time, I am simply against any and all non-consensual tracking.
I have a similar stance on this as DRM.
What do you mean by non-consensual? You agree to the terms when you use that printer? I agree that I don’t like either it nor DRM, but you have a reasonable ability to read first.
It is not a choice when there are no alternatives.
It also can’t be used to track you if your printer is kept off the internet
public function getSecretTrackingCode() { return $this->wifiManager->getNearbySsidsSortedByStrength()->__toString(); }
That’ll be a whooole lot of searching
i heard about it almost 20 years ago, so it’s basically a common knowledge
I personally heard the flight speed of an unladen swallow when I was 13 therefore every single person on the planet should know that…???
C’mon, you can’t just tempt us with the knowledge of the flight speed of an unladen swallow and not give us the actual number!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://m.piped.video/watch?v=uio1J2PKzLI
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
African or European swallow?
The K in CMYK is grey, not black. The other ink tones are added to make it appear black.
Edit: It seems people don’t want to hear that. But sorry, that’s how CMYK works. Black is roughly C=75 M=68 Y=67 K=89 in most major colour profiles used for printing. When you tell your printer to print something black, it won’t use just Key (around 85-90% grey), and will apply normal CMYK blacks which use value from all 4 inks.
It’s been like this for 120 years and is not a “big printer” conspiracy. If you don’t like this, don’t use a CMYK printer. It’s just going to print CMYK values with CMYK inks like you told it to and none of those inks is black.
That’s not really the case (grey), but it’s what happens by default.
The K does stand for blacK. The four are mixed to create a richer black than the black alone would provide - which conveniently looks better and uses more ink.
The software and printer are more than capable of not using “rich black” outside of images, but even the solid black ink will look muted to people used to seeing the mud from all four colours in their 12 point Times New Roman.
A sad state really that in 2024 we still have an ink racket.
A little pedantic, but the K stands for Key.
My color laser printer uses only K to print blacK. It takes four cartridges, and I’ve only had to replace the C, M, and Y cartridges once in the 15 years or so I’ve owned it, because I almost never print pages with color.
It sounds like your printer has a true monochrome mode you can specify. Makes and models that are more user-hostile often use drivers that default to grayscale for non-color prints.
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