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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 fo

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...

bobim 2y ago
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?
- LeafItAlone 2y ago
  >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.
  - bobim 2y ago
    I mean when I send letters I want people to know it's from me 99.999% of the time, that's all.
    - ycombinatrix 2y ago
      I didn't buy a printer to send letters to Uncle Sam
    - vasco 2y ago
      More than 99.999% of all printed pages don't have the name of the person who printed them on them. I can't even come up with examples where the large majority of the material someone printed wasn't belonging to someone else, ie, printing a book, learning material, computer generated pictures, photographs, things like this. "Printing a letter" is something I doubt anyone is doing in any meaningful percentage that this makes sense. A person printing a single small book they didn't want to buy is printing more pages just that one time than they will ever print with their name on them in their whole life.
      - bobim 2y ago
        If it's not leaving my house who's gonna care for the yellow dots?
      - PinkSheep 2y ago
        > A person printing a single small book they didn't want to buy Oh btw, you've paid a "tax" to unknown entities for this too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
- p0w3n3d 2y ago
  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.
  - bobim 2y ago
    Ok, next to impossible then. Maybe printing tiny white text on solid black background could help obfuscate the dots. Or using a pen plotter...
  - nialv7 2y ago
    What if you print a page with a slightly yellow background? Would it know to use a different color for the tracking dots?
  - beardyw 2y ago
    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.
rascul 2y ago
I don't have an answer but it's something that EFF has been aware of. https://www.eff.org/issues/printers https://www.eff.org/issues/printers
gorgoiler 2y ago
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://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt Oddly, the HN post above this one right now on the front page is about Xerox source code: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42884133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42884133
- AndrewOMartin 2y ago
  If you have two minutes... Working on a Printer Paper Jam - Dylan Beattie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhlWSOQ4cC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhlWSOQ4cC4
- culi 2y ago
  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
trothamel 2y ago
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?
- p0w3n3d 2y ago
  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?
  - LadyCailin 2y ago
    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.
    - biofox 2y ago
      This is a refreshingly balanced take, which seems to frequently get lost in discussions. The more I think about policy, the more it resembles a multi-objective optimisation problem.
      - AtlasBarfed 2y ago
        Libertarianism is bunk because of this. It's not about freedom, it's about your freedom and no one else's. Libertarians say they are anti regulation, but I ask them if I can murder them to steal their property. Apparently they are all in favor of that regulation. Similar to anti gun control people. Ok, I'm your neighbor, can I arm myself with chemical and biological weapons? Or a conventional bomb that will definitely destroy the entire block? Hm, funny, they are in favor of some gun control.
lm28469 2y ago
Sometimes the invisible hand of the free market isn't so invisible and might point a gun at your business
4gotunameagain 2y ago
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.
- taurknaut 2y ago
  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.
  - 4gotunameagain 2y ago
    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.
    - glenstein 2y ago
      The essay "I've got nothing to hide and other misunderstandings of privacy" is about this idea. The short version is that it's not just about your innocence, but about how your data can be leveraged against you.
      - 4gotunameagain 2y ago
        I am a proponent of privacy. I do not feel my privacy threatened by the date and serial number on my inkjet prints. It is not an all or nothing.
        glenstein 2y ago
        Right, it feels like such things as being personally identified and tied to documents could never, when gestated by bureaucratic processes of third parties, possibly involve harm. And it's this kind of casual attitude of indifference which is exactly the mindset that the essay is intended to speak to.
illwrks 2y ago
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.
- deleted 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
RecycledEle 2y ago
> 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.
- wrfrmers 2y ago
  There's a story here that I would love to hear.
vasco 2y ago
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 https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/cds.html
- ActionHank 2y ago
  Yeah, but anyone using an Adobe project knows they don't own the product and that Adobe owns them.
ForHackernews 2y ago
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.

bobim 2y ago

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?

LeafItAlone 2y ago
>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.
- bobim 2y ago
  I mean when I send letters I want people to know it's from me 99.999% of the time, that's all.
  - ycombinatrix 2y ago
    I didn't buy a printer to send letters to Uncle Sam
  - vasco 2y ago
    More than 99.999% of all printed pages don't have the name of the person who printed them on them. I can't even come up with examples where the large majority of the material someone printed wasn't belonging to someone else, ie, printing a book, learning material, computer generated pictures, photographs, things like this. "Printing a letter" is something I doubt anyone is doing in any meaningful percentage that this makes sense. A person printing a single small book they didn't want to buy is printing more pages just that one time than they will ever print with their name on them in their whole life.
    - bobim 2y ago
      If it's not leaving my house who's gonna care for the yellow dots?
    - PinkSheep 2y ago
      > A person printing a single small book they didn't want to buy Oh btw, you've paid a "tax" to unknown entities for this too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
p0w3n3d 2y ago
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.
- bobim 2y ago
  Ok, next to impossible then. Maybe printing tiny white text on solid black background could help obfuscate the dots. Or using a pen plotter...
- nialv7 2y ago
  What if you print a page with a slightly yellow background? Would it know to use a different color for the tracking dots?
- beardyw 2y ago
  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.

rascul 2y ago

I don't have an answer but it's something that EFF has been aware of. https://www.eff.org/issues/printers https://www.eff.org/issues/printers

gorgoiler 2y ago

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://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt Oddly, the HN post above this one right now on the front page is about Xerox source code: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42884133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42884133

AndrewOMartin 2y ago
If you have two minutes... Working on a Printer Paper Jam - Dylan Beattie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhlWSOQ4cC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhlWSOQ4cC4
culi 2y ago
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

trothamel 2y ago

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?

p0w3n3d 2y ago
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?
- LadyCailin 2y ago
  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.
  - biofox 2y ago
    This is a refreshingly balanced take, which seems to frequently get lost in discussions. The more I think about policy, the more it resembles a multi-objective optimisation problem.
    - AtlasBarfed 2y ago
      Libertarianism is bunk because of this. It's not about freedom, it's about your freedom and no one else's. Libertarians say they are anti regulation, but I ask them if I can murder them to steal their property. Apparently they are all in favor of that regulation. Similar to anti gun control people. Ok, I'm your neighbor, can I arm myself with chemical and biological weapons? Or a conventional bomb that will definitely destroy the entire block? Hm, funny, they are in favor of some gun control.

lm28469 2y ago

Sometimes the invisible hand of the free market isn't so invisible and might point a gun at your business

4gotunameagain 2y ago

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.

taurknaut 2y ago
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.
- 4gotunameagain 2y ago
  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.
  - glenstein 2y ago
    The essay "I've got nothing to hide and other misunderstandings of privacy" is about this idea. The short version is that it's not just about your innocence, but about how your data can be leveraged against you.
    - 4gotunameagain 2y ago
      I am a proponent of privacy. I do not feel my privacy threatened by the date and serial number on my inkjet prints. It is not an all or nothing.
      - glenstein 2y ago
        Right, it feels like such things as being personally identified and tied to documents could never, when gestated by bureaucratic processes of third parties, possibly involve harm. And it's this kind of casual attitude of indifference which is exactly the mindset that the essay is intended to speak to.

illwrks 2y ago

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.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

RecycledEle 2y ago

> 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.

wrfrmers 2y ago
There's a story here that I would love to hear.

vasco 2y ago

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 https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/cds.html

ActionHank 2y ago
Yeah, but anyone using an Adobe project knows they don't own the product and that Adobe owns them.

ForHackernews 2y ago

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.