“(added 2017) Reminder: It appears likely that all recent commercial color laser printers print some kind of forensic tracking codes, not necessarily using yellow dots. This is true whether or not those codes are visible to the eye and whether or not the printer models are listed here. This also includes the printers that are listed here as not producing yellow dots.
This list is no longer being updated.”
THANK YOU FOR THE YELLING OF THIS INFORMATION. I CLEARLY WOULD HAVE OVERLOOKED IT LIKE FAINT YELLOW DOTS BUT YOUR CAPS HAVE HELPED ME BETTER APPRECIATE THE CONTENT.
It’s was a copy-and-paste from the website, and I fixed it within a minute of commenting. Crazy that you caught it in time.
Federation delays be like that
Solution: Buy your printers secondhand at yard sales using cash. Throw them away after printing your ransom notes.
Username checks out!
True story: I bought my current printer from a homeless man. I had actually found the printer in a box that someone had left on the curb across the street the night before, so I knew it wasn't stolen. I was going to take it home but was walking away from home at the time and didn't get a chance that night. The next day I saw it with the homeless man across the street and offered to buy it.
Man, that makes me mildly uncomfortable, I don't like that my printer is a spy.
I used to run a digital press that did this. It also made the print quality worse.
This is why they won’t let you print black and white without cyan or yellow!?
Yes, assuming your printer has a black cartridge. (Otherwise, it's because it legitimately needs all the colors to reconstruct a shitty black -- I don't know if they still make printers like that, though.)
Using C,M,Y in addition to black makes “rich black” in printing applications. Without the K or black component the best you can do is a dark brown.
You don’t need to use additional colors other than K for black, but they do make it a deeper more rick black.
Really only applies when you are printing photographs or high quality images. For text, its a rip off the uses more ink.
"Rich black" in CMYK is one thing, but not what I was talking about. Am I misremembering that some really old inkjets used to be just "CMY" (or maybe a slightly different set of three pigments, but either way no K) where they had to mix all three to get an approximation of black, and do any like that still get made?
(It's been long time since I've paid attention to any kind of printers other than lasers, LOL.)
Outdated list.
tl;dr assume all modern printers have some form of tracking
Hell, printers had this tech in 1990
But how safe from tracking would black and white lasers be? There is no evaluation at all on the chances.
Step 1. Figure out what type of pattern your printer uses.
Step 2. Introduce noise in every print that's undetectable to the eye, but completely ruins the forensics.
Step 3. Send ransom letters.
Lemmings, try your best to answer this question, if we're not able to print stuff privately it means we are doing everything else for nothing
TU Dresden Article about it. https://tu-dresden.de/ing/informatik/sya/ps/chair/news/geheime-daten-auf-dem-druckpapier-diplominformatiker-der-tu-dresden-entwickeln-verfahren-gegen-druckerueberwachung
It has a link to the App that decodes, what being embedded in the print and anonymize the prints, by scrambling the yellow dot patterns. https://dfd.inf.tu-dresden.de/
Can anyone list dell ones that don't, im to lazy to read
edit: theres none, anyone know in general dell ones that don't?
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