If you’re going to do illegal shit, or shit against the owner class, don’t use modern technology to do it.
Dot matrix FTW
Then they’ll just identify you by the sound of the printer being audible from down the street.
Are those still being made? Can a consumer buy one?
I don’t think they make them anymore but unsurprisingly most are still functionnal.
The challenge would be to find paper for it.
You can still buy both the printer and paper on Amazon.
I know Tom Scott was able to buy one brand new on Amazon a few years back.
Yes, see Amazon.
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
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.
Dear conspiracy theorists
Sorry i called you crack pots. Please pass the foil
I find that a large number of conspiracy theories are asking the right questions, just not providing the right answers. Does big tech want to control our minds with 5G towers and microchips hidden in covid vaccines? Probably not. Does big tech want to control our minds with social media and invasive advertising? Absolutely. Is the world controlled by a secret society of lizard people? Probably not. Is the world controlled by a not-so-secret society of billionaires and politicians? To a large extent. Even those awful racist or bigoted conspiracy theories start to sound somewhat
palpablepalatable if you filter out the racist or bigoted part. Do Jews make life for the rest of us miserable by controlling the economy? No. But replace “Jews” with “the owning class”, and suddenly it kind of makes sense.EDIT: Is the government putting chemicals in the water that turn frogs gay? No. Are corporations putting chemicals in water bottles that turn frogs into hermaphrodites? Literally yes
EDIT PART TWO - ELECTRIC BOOGALOO: Palatable, not palpable. Words are hard.
Does big tech want to control our minds with 5G towers and microchips hidden in covid vaccines
Oh they would like that though, it’s just not techically feasible.
Asking the right questions, listening to the wrong people.
Sure, if you completely disassociate them from the answers that they act on (5G towers, lizard people, Jews, gay frogs) then yeah they’re just hunting for the answers.
They’re also refusing to accept evidence they don’t like. Like there are two examples that spring to mind: the fact that the earth is an oblate spheroid and the fact that trans people existing is a natural phenomenon in our species. For the former there are mountains of evidence and anyone who’s spent any time near an ocean knows it’s true. It’s just not what your eyes or feet notice. They’re questioning their assumptions but they came to a conclusion and accept all flimsy evidence rather than more solid evidence that it’s not true. And they never ask why. For what fucking reason would people spend billions fabricating this conspiracy?
For the latter these people see a group of people who violate social norms in a way that they aren’t comfortable with anc do ask why. But they then answer it maliciously without evidence and repeatedly reject evidence and in the process eventually find themselves conspiring to hurt that group preemptively. Similar thinking happens against Jewish folks.
I applaud curiosity, I didn’t get enough sleep last night because of my own, and I’ve done a science before. But conspiracy theorists give their curiosity to dark parts of their psyche and let it run wild
That’s the worst part about those distractors.
Verified evils are so numerous as to invite a lifetime of agitation.
Instead people make up BS others have to refute or report on.
The entire reason they do it is because it validates their instincts to ignore the real evil in front of them. There’s a reason why Republicans in particular have embraced increasingly crazy conspiracies as their party marches onward towards actual fascism.
The EFF has some info about the practice - https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display-tracking-dots.
I imagine there are ways and means of obfuscating / anonymizing the dots such as blocking the printer from emitting them (e.g. an empty yellow cartridge that the printer perceives as full), modifying the firmware, using a burner printer, or using a mono laser jet.
As a side issue, most modern bank notes have a bunch of yellow circles integrated into the design on each side. They look random but they’re in a recognisable pattern called a constellation that enables devices like copiers / scanners to recognize when people are trying to copy money or other financial instruments like checks.
The link you sent has a period at the end so it doesn’t work when clicked.
It’s a tracking dot
How does Mario read that if it’s on the back of the paper? Meme debunked.
People still use printers?
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.
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
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!
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
Across the street, lol. I don’t even have a copy shop in my town.
sadly
Sometimes don’t have a choice, at least here in AU there are lots of government institutions that still only accept paper copies of certified documents either snail mailed or physically handed in
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)
Yes some of us still touch grass.
I fail to see how the one thing is related to the other 😕
This isn’t necessarily bad. It is made so forgeries can be detected.
It also can’t be used to track you if your printer is kept off the internet
public function getSecretTrackingCode() { return $this->wifiManager->getNearbySsidsSortedByStrength()->__toString(); }
That’ll be a whooole lot of searching
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.
A little pedantic, but the K stands for Key.
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.
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