mastodon - Collegamento all'originale

We're going to wake up one day soon and discover that nobody makes printers any more that don't snitch on your activities to the Secret Police (b/c the public internet is dead, the olgarch social media is in the pocket of the aforementioned SP, and samizdat is … well, if your printer OCR's and emails it to the authorities that's you doing 10-20 years for "encouraging terrorism", innit).

Prolly time to buy a second-hand 1980s dot-matrix and a ribbon re-inking kit.
infosec.exchange/@briankrebs/1…

BrianKrebs (@briankrebs@infosec.exchange)

Attached: 1 image Oh how far you've fallen, Wirecutter. Recommending HP printers? Nuh uh. They all make you want to pull your hair out, but for my money Brother sucks way less. Unless you absolutely need photo quality printouts or something.
Infosec Exchange
in reply to Bob Dowling

snac - Collegamento all'originale

Paul Martin

An inkjet is great if you print a few times a week, but if you leave it idle any longer you risk the print head clogging. For infrequent use a monochrome laser can't be beaten. I have a second hand HP4250N (with duplexer) which is built like a tank and goes from doing nothing for months to printing out half a ream at once without complaint. I thought it was faulty once, but a new (off brand) toner cartridge fixed it.
in reply to Charlie Stross

mastodon - Collegamento all'originale

acb

also, computers. Throw away your smartphone/laptop (they all serve the oligarchs and/or CCP’s security organs), build something from a junkbox Z80 and program it in BASIC/assembly to do what you need. (Make sure it’s a genuine old Z80, and not a modern emulation running on an ARM SoC along with the obligatory layers of spyware.)
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in reply to Charlie Stross

mastodon - Collegamento all'originale

BeeCycling has moved

It's also important that people know that most printers print a code on their output that traces the printout back to that specific printer. It's usually in pale, unobtrusive yellow dots. (This is why your printer wants you to replace the colour cartridge even if you're just trying to print in black.) Created ostensibly to trace printers being used to counterfeit currency.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_…

digital watermark which certain color laser printers and copiers leave on every single printed page, allowing to identify the device with which a document was printed and giving clues to the originator

Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)
Questa voce è stata modificata (1 anno fa)
in reply to BeeCycling has moved

sharkey - Collegamento all'originale

Glowing Cat of the Nuclear Wastelands

Okay, so asking to confirm if I'm remembering correctly:

All color machines do the dots, this is why printers refuse to print if they don't have a working color/yellow cartridge... but fully black and white machines (typically only laser printers, and not color machines set to B&W only) do not do this. Am I remembering that correctly?

in reply to Glowing Cat of the Nuclear Wastelands

mastodon - Collegamento all'originale

Charlie Stross

@deathkitten @beecycling I have not tested this, but I suspect you can see the dot patterns if you print a test page using a sheet of black or pale blue paper (pale blue = yellow gives green). It's a hack on the human eye which has difficulty distinguishing yellow from a white background.
@BeeCycling has moved @Glowing Cat of the Nuclear Wastelands
in reply to Leszek Karlik

mastodon - Collegamento all'originale

Charlie Stross

@Leszek_Karlik Similar. There's an ancient Laserjet 3030—a B&W multifunction—gathering dust outside my office door, and an in-use colour laserjet in $SPOUSE's office from just before the enshittification kicked in—it has a JetDirect card for network printing over 10BaseT but and probably does watermarking but doesn't phone home or use anticounterfeiting measures.
@Leszek Karlik
in reply to BrianKrebs

mastodon - Collegamento all'originale

Charlie Stross

@briankrebs @franksting @kcarruthers I sincerely hope the NYTimes outsources all subediting and copywriting jobs for this sort of shitty clickbait to ChatGPT, then gets sued into a smoking crater in the floor of the Marianas Trench when somebody follows its suggestion and puts their baby through the dishwasher on a hot cycle.
@BrianKrebs @Frank’s Ting @Eldritch kcarruthers
in reply to Charlie Stross

mastodon - Collegamento all'originale

Ari "Second Breakfast" Jackson

I still have some old Apple dot matrix etc. printers. They're in good shape. I haven't thought about seeing if I could bring them back to life. 🤔

I do keep a basic, non-internet-connected Brother black-and-white toner printer around for bulk printing. That thing is incredibly useful.

Unfortunately I bought an HP tank printer over a year ago, but I haven't set it up yet. Maybe I need to rethink that choice, but it's way too late to return it. ☹️

in reply to Charlie Stross

mastodon - Collegamento all'originale

Tony Wells

Carbon paper is still made, I have some new stock. Typewriters are still made in small numbers, but awful quality, there are plenty decent 2nd hand ones that will likely last many more decades.
Mimeograph stencils can still be had, last I checked, from Japan , but it's very niche. However, like analogue film and various audio recording formats, if there's demand, someone will start making them .
in reply to Charlie Stross

mastodon - Collegamento all'originale

dr_barnowl

All printers capable of colour, as far as I know, print a virtually invisible pattern of yellow dots encoding their serial number onto every page, and have done for decades.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_…

I've directly witnessed a scanner get halfway though the EURion constellation on a tenner and just stop, halfway through the note.

digital watermark which certain color laser printers and copiers leave on every single printed page, allowing to identify the device with which a document was printed and giving clues to the originator

Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)

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