cross-posted from !boycottchina@sopuli.xyz: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/45608582

(note that many printers do this; this is a cross-post of a call to boycott Canon and Xerox specifically)

Most (if not all) color printer makers are printing unique tracking dots on every printed page. But some of them are transparent about it and disclose it to consumers.¹

In any case, in the mid-1980s Xerox and Canon developed the anti-consumer feature decades before it became known to the public in 2004. So certainly we can blame them for surreptitiously assaulting our privacy.

It’s the surreptitious element of this that is the most infuriating. Transparently disclosing the feature to consumers is the socially responsible approach because at least informed consumers know they are signing up for:

• reduction of print quality
• higher cost of consumables (more yellow consumption)
• loss of privacy
• inability to print a black document when yellow ink/toner is empty

Xerox and Canon should be boycotted not just for the anti-consumer feature but for concealing it.

¹ citation needed.. I don’t recall where I read that some printer makers are transparent about it. I would like to know which ones are transparent just from a standpoint of knowing where the integrity is.

update: foss circumvention proposal

https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/45652622

Most (if not all) color printer makers are printing unique tracking dots on every printed page. But some of them are transparent about it and disclose it to consumers.¹

In any case, in the mid-1980s Xerox and Canon developed the anti-consumer feature decades before it became known to the public in 2004. So certainly we can blame them for surreptitiously assaulting our privacy.

It’s the surreptitious element of this that is the most infuriating. Transparently disclosing the feature to consumers is the socially responsible approach because at least informed consumers know they are signing up for:

• reduction of print quality
• higher cost of consumables (more yellow consumption)
• loss of privacy
• inability to print a black document when yellow ink/toner is empty

Xerox and Canon should be boycotted not just for the anti-consumer feature but for concealing it.

¹ citation needed.. I don’t recall where I read that some printer makers are transparent about it. I would like to know which ones are transparent just from a standpoint of knowing where the integrity is.

Update- other threads on this topic:

• (law) https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/45605675
• (asshole design) https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/45653037
• (FOSS request for circumvention) https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/45652622

The linked thread shows people talking about a US regulation that requires printer makers to produce stegonographic tracker dots on every page printed

Can anyone cite the statute?

I suspect they are talking nonsense. Everything I have read on the topic mostly conceals the motivation of the printer makers. But my speculative impression is that the US gov secretly requested the feature and the printer makers were happy to accommodate because it leads to selling more yellow inks and toner. Plus it gives them a “good excuse” for blocking color printers from printing black docs when any of the color cartridges are empty.

But in any case, it would be interesting to get some concrete information about printer makers’ motivations. Why haven’t they been interviewed by the EFF?

UPDATE: someone suggested EU Directive 2014/62. But AFAICT from the wording that directive does not seem to force printer makers to watermark documents.

Suppose you’re writing an anonymous letter. Nice looking LaTeX fonts would be a bad choice because they stand out and create quite a bit of uniqueness. I figure MS Word is probably the most popular. So I had a look at the wordlike package. It’s dated 2006 and gives an error on this line:

\renewcommand{\@dotsep}{1}

To hack around it, I tried putting this in my preamble:

\makeatletter
\newcommand{\@dotsep}{1} % hack to avoid wordlike.sty error
\makeatother

That attempt at a hack has no effect. Any ideas?

Regarding the click bait title.. I have not yet had the need for making ransom demands which should probably use a genuine MS Word. But whistle blowing should be quasi-pseudo-anonymous to some extent. I thought wordlike would suffice. Of course I’m open to other approaches. Maybe just switching to a sans serif font would do.

The last answer on this page looks interesting but does not work with pdflatex.. only XeTex. There is another non-wordlike approach on this page I might play with.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/45188081

I am locked out of Github because the disposable email address I was willing to trust Microsoft with is no longer reachable. Every single login into GH requires an email confirmation. So if you cannot enter the 1-time access token, you’re fucked.

You might think a big corporation like Microsoft would not make such an amateurish mistake.

A long-ass time ago I had a big heavy laser printer that was well documented. It only had a parallel (LPT) port (to give an idea of the age). The documentation gave various control codes that could be sent to the printer. I vaguely recall sending plain text to the port and controlling things like font size using the control codes that were specified in the printer manual. I suppose that was a driver-free mode of operation.

Some LaTeX doc talks about how to produce a DVI file with printer control codes inserted wherever you want. So imagine if you have a cover letter followed by a document you intend to enclose with the letter. You would not generally want the first page of the document to print on the backside of the cover letter, but you might still want the doc to use full duplex mode. In principle, you could have the lp command send it in simplex mode but inject a control character that switches to duplex mode after the first page.

Of course you can inject a deliberately blank page but that’s sloppy. The digital version should have no blanks and the printed version should have blanks in certain places. The \cleartooddpage command is good for the latter but the former. I suppose the caveat is PDFs are disadvantaged and likely cannot handle printer control signals the way DVI can.

Printer manuals apparently no longer acknowledge the existence of control codes. So have we lost a capability because manufacturers insist on dumbing everything down for the stupid masses?

What about driverless printers? The CUPS docs mention that CUPS will become driverless. I really hope that does not mean CUPS is going to obsolete my current driver-dependent printer. But in any case, does driverless imply that there will be a standard for controlling printers, so e.g. we can send a signal mid-printjob to switch to full duplex?

Dumbing down of technology and competency over the past decade has led to a number of situations where sophisticated users are actually the ones being marginalised.

• PDFs are being wrapped with some exclusive JavaScript garbage that only works for GUI users. Terminal users are losing the ability to simply download PDFs. Links to files with a “.pdf” extension are often not actually PDFs anymore - they are HTML w/js embedded masquerading as PDFs. Mozilla is on board with this deception.
• Ethernet: public libraries have disabled ethernet ports, mostly. Some librarians even go apeshit when someone plugs into them (not understanding that it’s another way for wifi-less people to connect). You either subscribe to mobile phone service & disclose your number to pass the captive portal’s verfication, or you can fuck off, as far as the library is concerned. And yes, people are generally okay with /public/ libraries excluding people this way.
• The value of compatibility is totally lost. Young network admins just assume everyone runs the same latest browser as them, and that everyone has a recent model smartphone. If you don’t buy a new phone every couple years, they believe it’s your fault you’re excluded. The concept of design and engineering for compatibility is a lost competency. The word “compatibility” is becoming history despite the decline of interoperability. Soon dictionaries will tag the entry for “compatibility” with “(rarely used)”.
• We can no longer access public services like court system search tools, business registries, and public libraries book catalogs from a text terminal. The drive to dumb everything down has led to fancy UIs that work with fewer clients.
• Access restrictions block access to resources unless you have a non-Tor IP address. Sophisticated users know better than to expose their personal IP addresses while also exposing to their ISP where they go. Sophisticated users are in such a small minority that it’s trivial to oppress them.
• Using asymetric encryption to protect email payloads was a thing in the 90s. Who predicted that we would /devolve/ to 100% in-the-clear email payloads ~25 years later?

There are a lot more examples but to cut to the chase: How did we fuck this up?

Instead of teaching users to become sophisticated, as a society we just threw in the towel and decided we cannot teach people.. that they cannot even learn the speed and utility of terminals and keyboards. So we said “fuck it, give everyone a GUI and a mouse”. And so now we are at a point where even the technicians themselves seem to be helpless without a GUI and mouse, so they are oblivious to the demographic of users who are slowed down by their UIs.

Then we decided: since everyone has a GUI and a mouse, throw graphical CAPTCHAs their way. Surely no one uses terminals anymore, right? And why stop there.. get rid of documents (simple HTML).. make every webpage an /application/ instead, because surely everyone can run any random JavaScript we shoot their way.

This is not to say low tech users should be left behind. Indeed some people are truly incapable of terminals, scripting, Tor, PGP, etc. The problem is catoring for the tech illiterates exclusively results in disempowering sophisticated users.

It parallels the situation where classroom instruction moves so slow for some of the faster learners at the top of the class that they get bored and drop out of school, and waste their potential. I’m at a point where I’m fighting to retain an analog life because the digital workflows being pushed on us are so dumbed down that I just cannot accept being forced to click through shitty oppressive technology that forces interaction with tech giants and walled-gardens.

If I could choose between broadband with today’s garbage (ads, CAPTCHAs, Cloudflare, anti-bot, anti-tor, …) and 9600 baud dial-up to garbage-free text services that just work, I would seriously choose the latter. I am serious about that.

Anyone know of a template or sample doc that prints markers around the edge of an A4 paper?

Or even just a good centralised reference?

I can’t believe what shit results my searches are getting. Surely this must be a common need for millions of people. I am not going to go to the printshop, write down their printer model numbers, try to locate online manuals in an ocean of shitty manual sites, to try to dig up the printable area specs, which are likely untrustworthy anyway. I’ve done that before, and IIRC Canon specs were a lie.

Canons seem to have a quite large unprintable area. I know Ricoh does better. It would be useful to see a centralised table with the printable area specs of (at least) all the large industrial printers.

\documentclass[DIV=66, draft=true]{scrartcl} % The draft switch produces a ruler along the boundary of the printed space (which is controlled by the DIV value)

Update1: CUPS test print reveals unprintable area dimensions

It’s worth noting that the test page for CUPS gives “media limits” info. Which is vague but seems to correspond with the printer’s edge of printable area. It’s unclear if that comes from the printer driver or if the printer is somehow queried for that info.

This is of course only useful if you’re not using a print shop.

Update2: came up with code to generate a test print:

% Purpose:
%
% 1) Test whether the unprintable region documented in the printer specs is accurate.
% 2) If not, find the real dimensions.
% 3) Find the maximum DIV setting for the KOMAscript package that does not encroach into the unprintable area.
%
% Procedure:
%
% 1) Lookup the expected unprintable area dimensions for the printer under test.
% 2) Edit SetBgContents below to match the dimensions, which are added to (current page.*)
% 3) Trial and error/tuning: Set DIV=99 and compile. Then set DIV=9 and compile. Notice how the rectangle ruler gets smaller as DIV gets smaller. Find the max value for which the rectangle does not go outside of the violet rectangle.
% 4) With DIV at the max, fiddle with the size and position parameters of the large circle (in DeclareNewLayer). The goal is for the circle to touch the top and bottom edges of the paper.

\usepackage{scraddr}
\usepackage{scrlayer-scrpage} % needed for \cofoot
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc} % suggested to avoid ``OT1 encoding''
\usepackage{pict2e}
\usepackage{scrlayer}

\usepackage[firstpage=true, color=violet]{background}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{calc}

% from another suggestion below:
\SetBgPosition{current page.north west}% Select location
\SetBgOpacity{1.0}
\SetBgAngle{0.0}
\SetBgScale{1.0}
% \SetBgColor{black}

% The line width setting below specifies 1pt but it really looks thicker compared to other lines. Nonetheless, it gives a good thickness for the job.
\SetBgContents{%
  \begin{tikzpicture}[overlay,remember picture]
    \draw [line width=1pt]%,rounded corners=4pt,]
    ($ (current page.north west) + (4.2mm,-4.2mm) + (1pt,-1pt) $)
    rectangle
    ($ (current page.south east) + (-4.2mm,4.2mm) + (-1pt,1pt) $);
  \end{tikzpicture}}

% The following gives circles and must /follow/ the tikz stuff above.
\DeclareNewLayer[%
textarea,background,mode=picture,
contents={%
  \putC{\circle{\LenToUnit{\paperwidth}}}%
  \put(0.5\layerwidth,0.5\layerheight-3pt){\circle{\LenToUnit{\paperheight}-0pt}}%
}
]{showtextarea}
\DeclareNewPageStyleByLayers{test}{showtextarea}
\pagestyle{test}


\begin{document}
\phantom0 % There must be /something/ here or else 0 pages are generated. So we put an invisible phantom object.
\end{document}

I was reading EU Directive 2019/882 which mandates accessibility requirements for products and services -- not because I am disabled or impaired but I’m always looking for legal angles to use against enshitified products/services or to liberate data. Not much interesting law except this:

Section IV
Additional accessibility requirements related to specific services
…
(b) Services providing access to audiovisual media services:
(i) providing electronic programme guides (EPGs) which are perceivable, operable, understandable and robust and provide information about the availability of accessibility;

IIUC, the EPG tech is already baked into DAB radio standards. But many broadcasters do not exploit the option, and even fewer receivers make use of it. In fact I have never seen a DAB radio that exploits EPG info (only album art and metadata for what’s playing at the moment).

It falls a bit short of being complete. Broadcast services may have a legal obligation to send EPG info, but I see no requirement for hardware to exploit it.

(hope no one is bothered by the post-brexit irrelevance of this.. it’s the only free-world DAB forum in the threadiverse)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/41454997

Europe’s block on boycotting banks

No law directly prohibits boycotting banks AFAIK, but it’s effectively illegal to boycott banks because:

• It is illegal to be paid wages in cash in some (all?) countries.
• Some EU countries governments insist on tax payments by bank transfer. This is for all kinds of tax (income tax, property tax, and other forms of tax).
• EU level: all cash transactions above €10k are illegal in the whole of Europe. Most of western Europe reduces that limit to €1—3k.

Belgium’s ban on boycotting energy suppliers

Offgrid energy is illegal.

Denmark: you cannot boycott email, as of this year

Denmark eliminates the postal service this year. This essentially means you cannot boycott email because the snail mail option is generally gone. Exceptionally, you can perhaps send letters using UPS or FedEx, but that’s not really affordable if you are boycotting email. Not sure if hand-delivery is an option. Consider Germany, where postal boxes are not always public access and couriers are given a key to the lobby. If that happens in Denmark, then hand-delivery cannot be relied on.

US ban on boycotting Israel

You can boycott the US in the US if you want, but you cannot boycott Israel if your job is from the US government. This tyranny was showcased in Texas when a Palestinian school contractor who taught kids how to speak Arabic had to renew her contract. The new contract required her to agree to not boycott Israel. She could not in good conscious sign such a bizarrely oppressive contract, so she was let go.

Europe’s block on boycotting banks

No law directly prohibits boycotting banks AFAIK, but it’s effectively illegal to boycott banks because:

• It is illegal to be paid wages in cash in some (all?) countries.
• Some EU countries governments insist on tax payments by bank transfer. This is for all kinds of tax (income tax, property tax, and other forms of tax).
• EU level: all cash transactions above €10k are illegal in the whole of Europe. Most of western Europe reduces that limit to €1—3k.

Belgium’s ban on boycotting energy suppliers

Offgrid energy is illegal.

Denmark: you cannot boycott email, as of this year

Denmark eliminates the postal service this year. This essentially means you cannot boycott email because the snail mail option is generally gone. Exceptionally, you can perhaps send letters using UPS or FedEx, but that’s not really affordable if you are boycotting email. Not sure if hand-delivery is an option. Consider Germany, where postal boxes are not always public access and couriers are given a key to the lobby. If that happens in Denmark, then hand-delivery cannot be relied on.

US ban on boycotting Israel

You can boycott the US in the US if you want, but you cannot boycott Israel if your job is from the US government. This tyranny was showcased in Texas when a Palestinian school contractor who taught kids how to speak Arabic had to renew her contract. The new contract required her to agree to not boycott Israel. She could not in good conscious sign such a bizarrely oppressive contract, so she was let go.