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Printer tracking dots (en.wikipedia.org)
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[-] florencia@lemmy.blahaj.zone 47 points 1 month ago

One of the many reasons why I lost all faith in a person when I realize they're a conspiracy theorist.

The goddamn government tracking plans are on fucking wikipedia and they're worried about chips injected in a vaccine from some twitter shitpost.

[-] Anticorp@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago

We didn't know about these until 2004, which wasn't that long ago for some of us.

[-] ivanafterall@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago

It was twenty years ago for me.

[-] SupraMario@lemmy.world 7 points 1 month ago

The conspiracy people who post on Facebook are the ones that make me laugh, they'll post about shit like 5g and Bill Gates microchips.....on Facebook...while posting what they ate that day....no one needs to track you secretly when you post literally your every minute of your life.

[-] crapwittyname@lemm.ee 6 points 1 month ago

Yeah, this was an actual secret conspiracy for over 20 years, though. This is an example of a real collusion between global governments and corporations to track members of the public.

[-] ThePantser@lemmy.world 20 points 1 month ago

So they are purposely using extra ink for this and slowing down my prints? Bastards.

[-] mkwt@lemmy.world 23 points 1 month ago

Also why you need yellow ink to print a b&w document. Just in case you were actually trying to print out dollar bills.

[-] LostXOR@fedia.io 10 points 1 month ago

Hands cashier a black & white $100 bill. What do you mean it's fake??? It's just vintage!

[-] ivanafterall@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

Put some yellow dots on it next time and they'll be none the wiser.

[-] tal@lemmy.today 8 points 1 month ago

ink

Well, toner. Searching, I don't think that color inkjet printers can do this, would guess that the bleed is too much. Just color lasers.

I don't think that it'll slow down your print, believe that that's independent of ink deposition.

[-] Docus@lemmy.world 9 points 1 month ago

So the yellow dots became public knowledge 20 years ago, and other than a one liner that other tracking methods may exist, nothing about these other methods seems to be published. Surely the three letter agencies haven’t given up on tracking.

[-] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 10 points 1 month ago

I have another question as to why we don't have an open source paper printer.

[-] florencia@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 month ago

No market for it. Printers have already become so fucking cheap to make that the manufacturers can't survive unless they overprice their ink.

I'm tempted to see if I can't get some old daisywheel printer running on a modern Linux machine.

[-] jet@hackertalks.com 5 points 1 month ago

If you buy the same printer in different counties do the dots persist or change?

[-] ramble81@lemm.ee 12 points 1 month ago

I thought they were unique per printer not just type. More akin to a serial number instead of a model number.

[-] kersploosh@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 month ago

That is my understanding. And I assume the dot patterns are made by printers worldwide. The article mentions Dutch law enforcement using them, and German researchers studying them.

this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024
126 points (100.0% liked)

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