this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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iiiiiiitttttttttttt

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you know the computer thing is it plugged in?

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[–] FooBarrington@lemmy.world 124 points 3 days ago (8 children)

Fun fact: part of the reason your printer needs all toners is because it prints an identification pattern unique to the printer on every document (which uses those colors).

[–] irelephant@programming.dev 67 points 3 days ago (2 children)
[–] FooBarrington@lemmy.world 56 points 3 days ago

Don't worry, they hate you too!

[–] Zorsith@lemmy.blahaj.zone 45 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Its not even a "modern" printer thing. They've done this since the 80s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots

[–] irelephant@programming.dev 15 points 3 days ago

But now with modern printers they can have email addresses and locations.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 39 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Specifically, it mostly uses yellow in very faint dots imperceptible to the eye. I actually don’t know if it needs every color, or if it’s just yellow, or if it varies by printer.

Scanners and printers will also detect a pattern of dots which indicates “this is money,” embedded in various clever ways in the design of the art of the money of most countries, and refuse to have anything to do with the images.

You don’t own your devices anymore. And it will, steadily, get worse.

[–] bunnyBoy@pawb.social 34 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Pffft, this is some conspiracy bs, there's no way....

googles it

Oh shit... OH FUCK

Though, to be clear, it seems like there are already tools available that you can use to print a bunch of tracking dots all over the page, essentially 'hiding' the real tracking dots and making them unusable, so it's not impossible to get around. Still absolutely wild, and thanks very much for mentioning this, I learned something today.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 18 points 3 days ago

Inb4 downloading that tool becomes a felony

[–] bandwidthcrisis@lemmy.world 16 points 3 days ago (1 children)
[–] codexarcanum@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 3 days ago

I knew about tracking dots and anti-copy features of currency, but I had no idea it was such a secretive thing. This is wild stuff.

According to Wired.com, the banknote detection code in these applications, called the Counterfeit Deterrence System (CDS), was designed by the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group and supplied to companies such as Adobe as a binary module.[

That's so fucked man, imagine integrating some random binary module supplied by the world bank into your app and then keeping it completely secret. That's surely not the only opaque binary that these companies just load in, god only know how many backdoors and other malicious shits have been stuffed into major retail software.

[–] RVGamer06@sh.itjust.works 26 points 3 days ago

Tracking dots, right?

[–] MajesticElevator@lemmy.zip 14 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

Do anyone know a printer that doesn’t do that?

[–] FooBarrington@lemmy.world 16 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I'm pretty sure you just earned an entry on some surveillance list lol

[–] MajesticElevator@lemmy.zip 12 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I’m already on a couple ones so all good 😊

[–] ExtraPartsLeft@lemmy.world 9 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Black ink only printers can't print in yellow.

[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Unfortunately there are techniques that work with black and white printers too. I don't know if any have actually been implemented though.

[–] ExtraPartsLeft@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I hadn't heard that. I guess imperceptible grey is just as good.

[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 4 points 2 days ago

I can't find it now but IIRC it works differently - not by adding dots but by subtly modulation the laser power. It's more like traditional steganography.

[–] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Dot matrix printers don't do it.

[–] refurbishedrefurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org 15 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That doesn't require tracking when you're the only guy who still uses a dot matrix printer.

[–] Hupf@feddit.org 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm honestly kind of surprised there isn't an even more relevant xkcd comic.

[–] thyristor@lemm.ee 13 points 3 days ago (1 children)

So my black and white printer is untraceable!

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago

Pretty sure B&W toner is in fact untraceable. Anyone know different?

[–] adarza@lemmy.ca 7 points 3 days ago

those use yellow ink afaik.

the yellow went down when printing b/w only (which we usually did) on our old officejet pro that had separate tanks for each color.

[–] Ptsf@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago

Fun fact: your electronic devices that render graphics are completely capable and in my opinion almost certainly do this as well. We use a business version of it at our enterprise and while it is additional software layered over windows, it's completely imperceptible to the naked eye and I doubt such technology wouldn't be immediately rolled out as quickly as possible by pretty much everyone at a "top secret" level.

[–] HelixDab2@lemm.ee 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That is NOT the reason. FFS. If that was the case, you couldn't switch to B&W only printing when you're out of one of the cartridges, and, shocker!, you almost always can (assuming that you don't have the absolutely worst printer driver in existence).

I work in commercial printing, and I print in CMYK every single day. Almost nothing is absolutely pure cyan, magenta, yellow, or black. Printing pure black ends up looking like a very washed out charcoal grey. If you want 'rich black'--which is what most people think of as black, you need to us C,M, and Y. If you had a spectrophotometer and were creating color profiles for your printer, you'd be able to very, very quickly see that. (You'd also be able to see that the colors used in most inks and toners isn't strictly linear, and that you can start getting weird 'hooking' in colors once you exceed a certain ink volume. Some inks are much worse than others in that respect.) Depending on the RIP software that you're using, and how you create the color profile for the printer, you can specify exactly where greys switch from being monochromatic (K only) to using the full gamut.

It used to be really apparent with our old Roland printers, where you could easily see the individual pixels with a magnifying glass. Now we're using printers that are higher resolution--I think 600ppi natively, but I see enough dot gain in what we're printing on that anything past 150ppi is irrelevant--you can't see them.

There's a collection of images that I have to print regularly from one of our corporate clients. This collection of images is always sent as greyscale .tif files. When you look at them on-screen, they look fine. When you print them, they're washed out. The issue is that the RIP software sees the images in greyscale, and defaults to using K only. If I convert the images to RGB (which, yes, I know, it's weird that I print in RGB when the printer is CMYK, but trust me, it improves color slightly), then the printed image looks like the image on screen.

[–] superniceperson@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It may not be true for commercial printing, but it is absolutely true for all consumer printers made since the mid 1990s.

Some can produce B&W identification marks, but every consumer printers stamps every single page printed with identification marks with at minimum the printer model and serial number.

[–] HelixDab2@lemm.ee 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Right, but that's not the reason it won't print if you're out of a color. Especially since you can still print in B&W only mode. Or you certainly used to be able to, but I'm still using the same color laser from >10 years ago for home use, and an old Brother photo printer for things that need to be higher resolution.

If you use a Brother printer with ecotank cartridges, you can get an empty yellow cartridge and fill it with water if you're worried about tracking dots. You'll want to run a few cleaning cycles first to ensure that all the residual yellow is gone from the yellow print head.

...Or you can buy a typewriter at a pawn shop with cash, and dump it once you've written the ransom note/bomb threat. If you're counterfeiting stuff, you should probably consider the printer to be a consumable item that gets discarded and replaced after every batch.

Also, not every printer made since the mid-90s does that. See here

[–] MHLoppy@fedia.io 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] irelephant@programming.dev 1 points 2 days ago

Nice, thanks!

[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 19 points 3 days ago

And you're going to need cyan if you want us to photograph your house.

[–] affiliate@lemmy.world 13 points 3 days ago

i think life would be more fun if painters refused to paint things ugly and dull colors

[–] SeeMarkFly@lemmy.ml 11 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Sometimes is just want a copy of a blank page. No, not a blank page, a COPY of a blank page.

[–] Empricorn@feddit.nl 15 points 3 days ago (2 children)
[–] SeeMarkFly@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 days ago

A facsimile of a copy of a blank page? INTERESTING.

[–] torcherist@programming.dev 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Your fax will include b/w prints of the dust and other edge artifacts of the machine no doubt from the light

[–] Empricorn@feddit.nl 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

You think this is a game!? My fax machine has been detail cleaned, with a custom air-tight gasket sealing the scanner bed. It is situated in a pressurized clean-room with a HEPA filter, behind 2 security doors and monitored by closed-circuit cameras. I'm not an amateur faxer....

[–] torcherist@programming.dev 1 points 1 day ago

this guy faxes.