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Comment by deckar01 | Hacker News Reader

I tried to photo copy a dollar bill when I was a kid on a dinky inkjet printer. It printed half way then spit out something about counterfeit prevention. I scanned the bill, printed the top half, fed the paper back in, and printed the bottom half. This can only actually stop the completely unmotivated.

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You managed to defeat the first layer of defense - the warning. The yellow identifying dots were present on your printed copy, should you have decided become a precocious criminal successful enough to warrant the attention of the Secret Service.

That leads into a great example of how most OS "telemetry" is anything but safe or innocent:

1. Your printer probably puts a secret code into everything you print (not just money-like things) with the time and a serial number of the printer. [0]

2. Windows and MacOS constantly sends the serial-numbers of your connected devices back to the mothership. [1][2]

3. So when you print out a flyer that somehow annoys the regime, they read out the serial number, then call a buddy at Microsoft/Apple.

4. Now there are thugs knocking at your door to talk about how your picture was criminally mean to Dear Leader.

[0] https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d...

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.12506

[2] https://littlesnitchfirewall.com/macos-telemetry

Digressing a bit, the link [2] feels off to me borderline scam-like. The URL points to "littlesnitchfirewall" which is not the official link to the well known macOS firewall application: https://obdev.at/products/littlesnitch, and this doesn't seem to be affiliated with Objective development in any way.

Also, the home page of that "blog" points to a 404 not found, and the footer of the blog says: "Official blog of NetworkMonitor — network monitoring and macOS privacy insights." and I can't seem to find any application made for the Mac called "NetworkMonitor".

My mistake, I may have fallen for an impostor site when trying to find an approachable source, unfortunately the edit-window has closed.

Originally the comment was Windows/Microsoft-centric, and then I thought I'd better broaden it so that nobody makes the mistake of thinking Apple is significantly safer.

Do printers still do that? I wonder if the tracking dots are still there as well, haven’t used a printer in a while

I've always wondered if adding your own dots would throw it off

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