- cross-posted to:
- oshw
- cross-posted to:
- oshw
The OpenPrinter project (see the CrowdSupply project’s page) aims to create an open source repairable printer. It has some interesting features.
I was starting to believe the project was dead but they gave some news on their progress today : https://www.crowdsupply.com/open-tools/open-printer/updates/progress-update-and-details-about-our-nomination-for-a-french-design-award.
I post it here since the project is lead by french people and would be an alternative to many printer manufacturer.
I have apprehensions about it being inkjet as well, but the possibility of not having tracking dots in everything I print is a nice prospect. The privacy factor overrides my desire for laser
I solved this privacy issue by having all the ink nozzles dry out, so the dots can’t be printed.
Well, this is a disturbing new fact I learned today. 😅
Yes, it’s incredibly dystopian, but thankfully open source saves the day again with Deda
It’s not clear to me exactly what Deda does to anonymise a document before printing, they talk about masking the dots, but it seems to me that the easiest way would just be to create a list of all possible dot positions, and print a yellow dot on a random subset of them (or, indeed, all of them), so confounding anyone trying to identify the real dots. Ideally this would be a CUPS filter, so you could just set it up once and have all printouts anonymised.
That’s also something you can do with Deda. It’s a full analysis tool with reading, identification, creating custom dots, and masking dots. So for example, if you use openprinter for something subversive but want to avoid identification due to lack of dots, you could create fake dots to hide that your printer doesn’t use them
Considering it’s open source and on a roll, one could simply print like 1 mm a week and it would never dry out. Or whatever the minimum would be based on current conditions.
To evade tracking dots buy a used printer with cash.
Or just buy a black and white laser printer. Can’t print yellow dots with no yellow toner, and 99% of people I have ever met who need and use a printer do not need high-quality inkjet color prints, or even middling laser color prints, on a regular basis.