People still use printers?
and we go 20 miles in the snow both ways to touch said grass, because I had an onion on my belt which was the style at the time.
I recently had to fax a document to the government, which meant I had to print the thing, then pay $12 at OfficeMax to send it. Absolute bedlam.
Same happened to me two years ago. I signed up for a 30-day trial with one of those e-fax companies and after the doc was sent I cancelled. To be fair, my work had an account with that service so I already knew about it - but I knew I didn’t want to pay a buck a page just to pay my taxes… Hopefully you don’t need this advice in future but maybe it can come in handy just in case!
Why you did not use an app that can take a photo of a document? Even if you do not want to use free trial, they are still cheaper than $12 per single payment (usually a week of use).
Honestly, I’m not familiar enough with the world of faxing to know which apps are trustworthy, especially since the documents contained personal information. If I ever have to send another fax, I’ll consider it.
From time to time I have to sign a form that specifically says “Print and sign, no digital signatures”
I use Adobes “draw a signature” feature to do my squibble, then place it on the signature line taking at least a little care to make it look handwritten (So like a portion of my signature is dipping below the line etc.). Finally I print to PDF (Even if it is already PDF) and email that or use one of those fax apps if fax is absolutely required.
I haven’t had any such forms rejected (Well, at least not for “improper signature” or whatever) and I’ve been doing it on forms for well over a decade now lmao
I print a lot of study stuff on my job printers. I know is bad, but I can’t really study in a screen.
Why, what are you doing, carving your documents into a clay tablet with a reed?
I am always pissed off when someone sends me a document to print, sign, scan and send back. You are still missing your stupid fax machine, don’t you?
I have no printer because it’s not worth the upkeep, so I have to walk down the street to a copy shop and print, sign, scan and send back my personal data there.
Thank you, fax machine person.
Is pasting in your signature digitally not an option? That’s what I’ve been doing all my life, but then again the area where I live is quite progressive in terms of technology.
On a related note, someone should make an image filter that makes digital documents look like they’ve been scanned in. Would save a ton of paper and people’s time lol.
Problem with that is that simply pasting your signature is in no way legally binding. Someone could crop your signature out of a random document and then sign a bunch of papers with it.
With a paper copy you’re supposed to keep the hard copy (and so is the other party, that’s why you always sign in doubles).
Hell even printing, signing and scanning is quite vague in terms of legal value… You’d have to actually send the original hard copies by mail to be 100% covered. (With a registered letter at that).
Digital signing will supposedly make this whole process easier, but doing that digital signing can only be executed by a small amount of certified organisations. (As in everyone can digitally sign something with their own keys, but it won’t be legally recognized)
Not a lawyer, just someone who tried to figure out how signing legal documents works to include it in an inhouse program at work
I threw mine of the balcony when it refused to print again.
I’m not even kidding. It felt amazing. (I did clean up the mess tho)
It’s how Reality Winner got real fucked.
via Wikiedpia:
Both journalists and security experts have suggested that The Intercept’s handling of the reporting, which included publishing the documents unredacted and including the printer tracking dots, was used to identify Winner as the leaker. In October 2020, The Intercept’s co-founding editor Glenn Greenwald wrote that Winner had sent her documents to The Intercept’s New York newsroom with no request that any specific journalist work on them. He called her exposure a “deeply embarrassing newsroom failure” resulting from “speed and recklessness” for which he was publicly blamed “despite having no role in it.” He said editor-in-chief Betsy Reed “oversaw, edited and controlled that story.” An internal review conducted by The Intercept into its handling of the document provided by Winner found that its “practices fell short of the standards to which we hold ourselves”.
A technology that was made To Stop Criminals™ being used against a political whistleblower? Color me surprised! (thanks for sharing the link btw, didn’t know about that)
You’re very welcome. It’s good to be able to show real-world examples so people are less skeptical. A lot of people won’t read a deep technical document describing printer surveillance, but they will read a paragraph excerpt from Wikipedia.
And they will argue that whistleblowing is actually a crime, because, uhm, it’s, uhm, yeah it’s illegal! And if it’s illegal to be a good citizen, then this is totally warranted and no scandal at all, because only bad people do illegal things!
Many people are willing to sacrifice a lot of people for the tiny chance of maybe stopping a criminal once.
Interesting. I remember reading a news article before 2017 stating that printers used to do this, but the practice has since ended because someone was able to prove they were doing it in the mid-2000s. At the time, I saw some people on Reddit claiming they just switched to a new, harder to detect method, and everyone was saying they were conspiracy theorists.
On wikipedia there’s some suggestion that methods that involve intensity of toner/ink across a document could be used to uniquely identify a machine but no such methods are currently publicly known (at least as far as the Wikipedia article has been updated)
Those dots are practically invisible if you have the printed copy, they’re not going to be visible at all in a photography. Printers and their network leave a lot to logs behind, pretty sure they just check up the printed files of their network, found the document and who send the printer order and done.
So you think tracking her down with forensic methods that objectively exist is farfetched, but accessing the print logs of every printer in America to figure out which one printed the document is realistic?
It’s cheaper and easier to look at the print logs. Most business computer and printer solutions tie every print to a user and log at least the name of every document printed
The hidden code is for court cases where they wish to prove which machine made the print, they’re not very good for identifying which user printed something in a multi user environment
If you’re going to do illegal shit, or shit against the owner class, don’t use modern technology to do it.
I don’t think they make them anymore but unsurprisingly most are still functionnal.
I know Tom Scott was able to buy one brand new on Amazon a few years back.
Typewriter and serial-killer bashed together article clippings are based anti-establishment.
Wasn’t there some way to fingerprint typewriters as well based on yhe exact shape of the letter stencils? I vaguely remember something like that being an actual thing for solving crimes
Each letter in a typewriter isn’t perfectly aligned and will be slightly higher or lower, this variation is distinctive to each typewriter.
Kind of an an-prim take. Understand the technology you’re using. The only thing you should take for granted is that any opportunity tech has to spy on you has already been exploited by multiple outlets. Use your worst possible faith and you’ll probably still fall short of what’s happening.
Or do while making sure you 100% know WTF you are doing. Some modern tech, like onion routing and encryption, are still very useful.
But if you’re not the kind of person who can convert a 32 bit hex number to decimal in your head or recognize a JTAG port on a device when you see it, then yeah stay away.
The K in CMYK is grey, not black. The other ink tones are added to make it appear black.
Edit: It seems people don’t want to hear that. But sorry, that’s how CMYK works. Black is roughly C=75 M=68 Y=67 K=89 in most major colour profiles used for printing. When you tell your printer to print something black, it won’t use just Key (around 85-90% grey), and will apply normal CMYK blacks which use value from all 4 inks.
It’s been like this for 120 years and is not a “big printer” conspiracy. If you don’t like this, don’t use a CMYK printer. It’s just going to print CMYK values with CMYK inks like you told it to and none of those inks is black.
That’s not really the case (grey), but it’s what happens by default.
The K does stand for blacK. The four are mixed to create a richer black than the black alone would provide - which conveniently looks better and uses more ink.
The software and printer are more than capable of not using “rich black” outside of images, but even the solid black ink will look muted to people used to seeing the mud from all four colours in their 12 point Times New Roman.
A sad state really that in 2024 we still have an ink racket.
My color laser printer uses only K to print blacK. It takes four cartridges, and I’ve only had to replace the C, M, and Y cartridges once in the 15 years or so I’ve owned it, because I almost never print pages with color.
It sounds like your printer has a true monochrome mode you can specify. Makes and models that are more user-hostile often use drivers that default to grayscale for non-color prints.
This is part of the reason I still have an HP 4050DTN and an HP 5000DTN. Plain B&W, but absolutely bulletproof and lacking all tracking, subscription, or DRM bullshit.
Hell, I can still get overstuffed cartridges that can do 20,000 prints at 5% coverage. I’m on my third one in two decades and two degrees with my 4050.
Wait, how old is that? Because on Wikipedia it suggests that Xerox has been working on this at least since the 80s, and while it was only discovered in 2004, apparently everyone had been using these kinds of patterns for decades.
