Does it not strike anyone else as wrong that a printer that you own has to do the bidding of the government instead of you? That you have to pay for it to be forensically watermarked against your own interests? And why have all these companies just taken orders from 3 letter agencies about this? Doesn't anyone have integrity? Isn't there anyone who believes that your own possessions shouldn't be made to conspire against you?
I guess the whole smartphone thing answers that question far better than a printer...
The origins of Free Software (or at least the GNU and GPL parts of the family tree) lie in this exact domain!
In the late 1970s Richard Stallman wanted to patch a faulty printer given to his by Xerox. They wouldn’t ship the source code though unless he signed an NDA:
Are there any open source printer projects out there? It doesn't seem like it should be too hard of a technology to crack considering we have stuff like the frame.work laptop
- lights permanently on ("safety", definitely not for your ability to get lost in the dark)
- continuously stores logs of speed, brakes, seatbelts, signal, vehicle inclination, GSM connection etc ("safety", called "black box" in Europe, also warns the driver when local speed limit exceeded)
- permanent GSM connection ("safety", definitely not for tracking, pinky promise!)
- continuously monitoring the driver's head/face ("safety", called driver drowsiness warning)
- engine turns off when stationary (the default setting can't be changed by the user, but by a car service with the right tools)
- car brakes on its own ("safety", but it's so bad I turn it off every time I power it on, it brakes when someone nearby but not right in front of you slows down, cannot be disabled permanently)
None of the things you mentioned are particularly an issue with the regulations, they legitimately assist in situations where they are meant to assist. If some feature is mildly inconvenient to you but saves the life of another human being then I feel you can live with the inconvenience.
If you made an argument about subscriptions for heater seating or carplay or some nonsense then you have a valid argument and is in the same line as DRM, mandated actual safety feature not do much.
Let me enable the features that I consider I might need, such as permanent logging of speed, seatbelts, inclination, etc. Let me disable the features I don't want when I don't want them.
Cars sold to the police have the option to not have their lights permanently on, so it is definitely possible / software setting, it's just inaccessible to regular users.
When some dude runs you over and your family can't prove they were speeding without the data you enjoy these things very much. It would've saved me quite a bit of headache for example.
Having data on every single thing someone does would be handy for all future crimes. Why don't we push for that level of surveillance. Because we are trying to balance with privacy.
It absolutely helps. It tells everyone that the car is on!
Anecdote: coming from a country where this is mandatory, visiting a country where it's not, I almost got run over because I assumed a car was parked when I glanced left before crossing the road.
Of course, might not prove that one or the other is safer, but it did show me how often I subconsciously use headlights as an indicator of off (=> stationary => safe) vs. on (=> potentially moving => potentially a "threat")
Because it's not always about you. A lot of examples on why these features are useful are about others who exist around you, not for your own convenience. You live in a society.
Lots of cars don't. You've been ranting about several things that aren't universal, as has been explained several times by several people in this thread. Why the breakthrough now?
> Does it not strike anyone else as wrong that a printer that you own has to do the bidding of the government instead of you? [...] Isn't there anyone who believes that your own possessions shouldn't be made to conspire against you?
That's the entire point. Our own possessions are made to conspire against us, and my point was "safety" with quotes. And you seem to support possessions conspiring against their owners in the name of "safety", but that's your choice. Most HNers are against this.
Your point is clumsily made, the examples you chose are bad ones if you're trying to demonstrate overreach.
There's also plenty of the overreach of the kind you're trying to demonstrate that doesn't come from the government, again, as has been illustrated multiple times within the thread. In fact, most of your examples do not come down as orders from the government at all, but the corporations, allowing you to vote with your wallet. I believe the free market is also quite popular on HN.
How is the black box a safety feature? The word "safety" is used by everyone nowadays when they don't have actual arguments for things they impose on others.
Well you see, if I'm driving too fast and I cause a crash - I might lie and claim I wasn't driving too fast.
The black box, by providing evidence to prosecute me, makes the roads safer for other people as while I'm in prison, I can't cause any further accidents. But it doesn't make me all that much safer, prison is a dangerous place.
What a bunch of BS. Are you blind to how the world works?
The only time a black box ever gets used for that stuff is when an agent of the state or corporation with deep pockets to buy power or other "more equal animal" is trying to get one over of one of us peasants.
When speed is a serious factor it is generally obvious from the results of the crash anyway.
The black boxes from the American Eagle jet and the black hawk helicopter have been recovered and will be used to figure out what happened, hopefully helping to prevent future tragedies.
Because it's only incidentally about the user(s) or public's safety. That only happens so much at those goals incidentally overlap with keeping the OEMs "safe" from regulators and ambulance chasing lawyers.
For cars sold nowadays, users can deactivate that every time they turn the car on, but the default cannot be changed without vendor specific OBD commands.
You should complain to your car manufacturer as it is a cheat to comply with emission regulation. If they meet it without it can be permanently disabled by the user.
This is wrong. You can turn them off. Even DRL. If your car cannot you should complain to the manufacturer or live in one of the very few states requiring it.
> engine turns off when stationary
My previous car had a button specifically to disable it and it did so permanently. My current one doesn't need to.
> car brakes on its own
This is a manufacturer choice. Buy another car. Mine can be user disabled permanently.
> signals left/right at least 3 times
Manufacturer choice, usually for the non-flip indicator mechanic, which you likely can configure. If you flip it fully it might only do one, you should try it.
The starters used in start/stop vehicles are far more robust than normal ones, and start/stop in hybrids often don't even use the normal starter to turn the engine over. Because vehicles are often kept for quite some time, most start-stop systems will autodisable after a certain number of cycles, so that they only use a given portion of the starter's expected life. (disables the start/stop system, not the starter itself)
Theoretically yes, however:
Currently Honda has a recall for ~40K vehicles as their start stop ends with stall.
Kia & Hyundai : 92,000 vehicles because the electronic controller for the Idle Stop & Go oil pump assembly may contain damaged electrical components that can cause the pump controller to overheat.
Chrysler (FCA US LLC) is recalling certain 2017-2019 Pacifica vehicles equipped with engine stop/start systems. A loose battery ground connection may result in an intermittent loss of power steering assist and/or a stall.
You add more complexity and there is more chance for things to break.
Also consider "Value" engineering, I can't find any data but I would be interested to see if the warranty periods for auto idle starters are longer or shorter than for the old style.
We saw this play out with the DEF system for engines, the systems were supposed to be robust and instead you end up with systems that break, harder to diagnose due to lockdown, and premature failure of components. I personal know of one manufacturer where the DEF tanks started failing after 6 months, the ammonia in the DEF was ingress into the sensors. This only started 2 years ago, so well after the systems were introduced.
Don't know, only one I've any experience of is Kia's which seems to use some sort of flywheel. I did look into it briefly, but all I found was indications that it saved over the life of the vehicle and wasn't shown to increase replacements (but that might only be that specific tech).
Why not toilet control - if you have not enough fiber in your ... the electronic money you have on the bank account won't be able to buy you more meat, suggesting vege instead.
But where is the limit of freedom? Where is the border we should stop before or fight for it somehow?
> When I was a kid they told us: your freedom ends where somebody’s freedom starts. I still think it is valid and insightful.
When I was younger, I thought this was a good idea. The problem with this rule is that where the boundary between "individual freedom" and "somebody else's freedom" lies varies a lot between different people (and cultures).
Every “freedom” has two sides. Positive and negative freedom. You don’t have the freedom to dump nasty chemicals into bodies of water (lack of positive freedom), but I have the freedom to not have carcinogens in my drinking water (negative freedom). Some examples are clear cut, in the sense that we as a society surely all agree on where the line should be between positive and negative, but all examples need to be discussed on an individual basis, because they’re all different in terms of where we draw the line. But you can’t use the slippery slope argument here, because the slope works in the other direction too for any given example, the more positive freedom you have, the less negative freedom you have.
Libertarianism is bunk because of this. It's not about freedom, it's about your freedom and no one else's.
Libertarians say they are anti regulation, but I ask them if I can murder them to steal their property.
Apparently they are all in favor of that regulation.
Similar to anti gun control people. Ok, I'm your neighbor, can I arm myself with chemical and biological weapons? Or a conventional bomb that will definitely destroy the entire block?
Neither on of those examples are guns. Also a libertarian wouldn't just accept you murdering them, they would obviously attempt to defend themselves. Your arguments are kind of weak.
Surely though limiting the government's positive freedom of ubiquitous surveillance, like this example of printers, is something that I'm sure would be resoundingly popular in a democratic society. This seems as clear cut as limiting the freedom to dump toxic chemicals into water supplies.
It is exceedingly popular in the general case hence why every slime-ball seeking to surveil people so that their pet issue can be enforced with an iron fist reframes it as freedom to dump toxic waste, drive 200mph in a school zone or print counterfeit dollars, etc.
An adaptation of printers most people never notice and which has been used to help catch criminals? I don't think you'll get the support you're expecting from the general public.
How is it anything like having your water supply poisoned. The printer thing doesn't noticeably affect anyone negatively unless they commit substantial crimes. Indeed it likely reduces costs of tracing the origins of printed material when that's important in a criminal investigation.
> The printer thing doesn't noticeably affect anyone negatively unless they commit substantial crimes
I'm not sure we have as universal agreement on what constitutes "crime" as you imply. Several whistleblowers have been convicted on the basis of printer watermarks - some of us certainly will fall on the side of preferring the existence of said whistleblowers in the federal government.
People generally don't care about making policy based on what is going to affect a whistleblower. The policy is done for the normal case. I'm not sure how much support you'd get on any issue if your argument is "but what about whistleblowers" other than in single-issue niche groups.
25 years ago the “hacker” community was more libertarian and would have been horrified at the idea of devices tracking individuals for some anomalous safety goal.
Some of those same people developed the surveillance state and the generation that followed thinks we should all wear Meta glasses at all times for “safety”. Meanwhile the advertisers and authoritarians behind them are snickering.
those are limits on squandering community resources. this requires you to use your resources (ink) for no benefit to you. to continue the bathroom theme it would be more like requiring your toilet to add rfid tags to your poops to track them downstream.
Does it? Monochrome printers exist. It must either be the case that it's not viewed as necessary in this case, or there's some other way of encoding this information in black and white that color printers could use when not printing in color.
Is the engine shutoff the government mandate, or is it an implementation by the manufacturer to reduce fuel consumption and thus emissions?
I mean I get the comparison - government requires your car to have a seatbelt and your printer to have identifiable dots and your scanner to be unable to scan money - but in the case of engine shutoff it's more the manufacturer's idea. I don't know who came up with the xerox code though.
There is a difference between government limiting what your device can do, versus government monitoring what you use your device to do.
Sure your engine may shut off to save fuel, but once you have finished driving and left your car, it no longer has any power over you. But tracking dots can forever be used to link a piece of document to your printer.
Good luck shredding everything and never let anything you print leave your control.
Printing something onto paper should not be a blanket opt-out of the 4th amendment.
As far as I understand it, the yellow dots thing comes from the US government stepping on the toes of Xerox and getting them to jump. Same thing with Biden getting COVID misinformation removed or Trump getting the entire tech industry to lurch to the far-right overnight. Both of those imperil the 1st Amendment[0], and the yellow dots imperil the 4th.
Now, let's look at the two other examples you provided. Automatic engine shut-offs[1] and water flow restrictors may be annoying, but they do not imperil constitutional rights like the watermarking dots do. If we were talking about the US government mandating tracking chips in every car, then it would be like the watermarking dots.
Of course "government mandated tracking chips" is old news. The stuff of conspiracy theories. You might even be able to sue the government to stop it.
The current meta regarding getting around the 4th amendment is using industry to violate people's privacy for you. Industry will happily violate people's privacy on their own, because there's money in spying on people, so all the US government has to do is buy from private spies[2]. And because this is 'private' action, 4A stays untripped, because our constitution is a joke.
[0] Not nearly to the same extent, of course. Biden bruised 1A's arm, Trump wants to dump gasoline on it and light it on fire.
[1] My mom's Tuscon has this 'feature' and it's genuinely annoying. First thing you do when you use the car is shut it off so that it doesn't get you T-boned trying to save gas.
No, a massive amount of the materials in use are printed, at the same time you can see the persistence of fraud of all types.
It’s little things like this that are needed to provide some ground truth. Without the writers observation these items would continue to be sold at high prices, everyone looses except the fraudster, and if they can be connected to a set of fake items in future then even better.
This seems a particularly harmless (and even beneficial) of hardware serving the interests of a wider society in reducing fraud rather than its owner in perpetrating fraud.
In general you put your name on documents you print. But true that if you are a reporter in some country you might want to print stuff anonymously. How easy it is to modify a printer firmware to scramble those dots?
More than 99.999% of all printed pages don't have the name of the person who printed them on them. I can't even come up with examples where the large majority of the material someone printed wasn't belonging to someone else, ie, printing a book, learning material, computer generated pictures, photographs, things like this.
"Printing a letter" is something I doubt anyone is doing in any meaningful percentage that this makes sense. A person printing a single small book they didn't want to buy is printing more pages just that one time than they will ever print with their name on them in their whole life.
I believe it is not firmware. Because of many reasons, one would be issuing firmware release for every machine would be impossible. It is probably lying so low in the hardware layer, one cannot simply remove or alter it without desoldering etc.
Many microprocessors are capable of having selective updates and it may be the same processor which is fetching the update. You might think of their internals to be more like a crude file system.
I just don't think that serial killers are enough of a problem to mess with printing. Surely there are more effective ways to deter people from this sort of behavior.
I see where you coming from, but similarly I just don't think that a couple of microscopic yellow dots on my prints that carry the date and serial number are not a problem. It's not like I intend to forge anything.
The essay "I've got nothing to hide and other misunderstandings of privacy" is about this idea. The short version is that it's not just about your innocence, but about how your data can be leveraged against you.
Right, it feels like such things as being personally identified and tied to documents could never, when gestated by bureaucratic processes of third parties, possibly involve harm. And it's this kind of casual attitude of indifference which is exactly the mindset that the essay is intended to speak to.
To "catch a serial killer" you'd need each retailer selling printers to track the ID and model number on a receipt, to be submitted to a central government agency and saved in a database. This is not what's happening in your country either, am I correct?
Instead this ordeal makes it possible for the government agencies, who do keep track of their own inventory to follow the tracks of those, who decided to leak documents to the outside world by printing them on printers at work. Like the outing of the whistleblower, courtesy of a journalist at The Intercept.
I find it interesting that this research seems to be (at a glance from reading that first page of the thread) coming from someone who owns some of these fraudulent cards (and could have just re-sold them and kept their mouth shut).
I had a friend whose home was full of movie memorabilia. The boxing shorts from Rocky, the journal from Raiders of the Lost Ark, props from Star Wars, etc. all professionally displayed in shadowboxes along with autographs and photos.
The only thing is that they were all fake. My friend's hobby wasn't collecting memorabilia, it was making fakes. He was quite open about the fact that none of it was real and would happily describe how he created each piece.
I remember reading an article about a guy who wanted to make a point about the antiques world, and made a copy of a very desired and rare old chair. He sold it for next to nothing to an antiques dealer without making any claims as to what it was or wasn't. Somebody thinking they'd found a steal bought it from the dealer and sold it on for a big profit. It eventually ended up at a museum, at which point the original maker approached them and told them it wasn't what they thought it was. They told him they were experts and could vouch for its authenticity, until he told them to x-ray it and they'd see modern screws hidden in it. Oops.
Edit now that I’ve read the article: I appreciate that it appears that the museum wasn’t dismissive of the claims and verified the forgery with their own analysis. But the original article was posted on the museum’s website, so who knows.
There's a whole fun additional layer of ethical replica hobbyists figuring out how to make replicas that are satisfyingly accurate to the original, but difficult for an unscrupulous third party to pass off as real.
One of my favorite examples is Gibson replica guitars with period-accurate serial numbers, but the serials are intentionally stamped during the wrong step in the painting & finishing process to signal that they weren't assembled at a Gibson factory.
He also shows off replicas from other companies etc. But for him it’s not about authenticity, it’s about the feeling of a prop. He build many cases for his props to showcase and here he goes into creatively expanding the universe of the movie by inventing items. Andre is very keen on weathering to give the prop some history. For me the most impressive build was his Hell Boy gun with bullets and all.
Gotta say, making collectibles sounds like a cool side project to do, and I'm confident there's a market for them.
Of course, Etsy is probably the main platform to sell these, and it's full of copycats so anything that looks like it could make money will quickly have cheaper made duplicates flood the market. And not just Etsy, inventions like the fidget clicker box and -spinner saw the might of Chinese manufacturing and drop shipping spin up almost overnight and flood the market with them.
I remember a case where a man was accused of forging a will. They figured out it was a forge because it used the Calibri font, Microsoft only added Calibri in 2007 and the document was supposed to be from a few years before.
I think it looks bad in print, too. I've had plenty of math homework printed from Latex. (I also dislike Times New Roman, it has the same "problems", just less extreme)
Similarly, there's also Rudy Kurniawan, who was a wine counterfitter. Went to Federal prison, deported, and now is in demand to produce wine again in Asia because of how good he was at it.
I wonder / I'm sure there's crypto counterfeiters out there at the moment, but like, advanced scams; back when Bitcoin first became a thing you could get BTC medallions made that contained your crypto wallet private key (not sure if it was embossed, digital, or on a piece of paper inside); a scam I can think of is to sell those as a physical way to sell BTC, then have all of them refer to the same address. Or attach a website to it with fake wallet amounts and values - that works pretty well in Eve Online's most famous / common scam, where a user is linked to a website showing the scammer's transaction history "proving" that they sent money to the victim and lots of others.
There is a film essay by Orson Welles called "F for Fake" about art forgery, an artist that creates forged works that gain value by being works of art in their own right, that then takes a sudden turn. I don't want to spoil it, but it's a fascinating look at art, truth and lies.
The UK show "Lovejoy" based on John Grant's novels is also related. Many episodes revolve around art fakes, and people's feelings towards owning, producing or selling them. It's a great watch with lovely romanticized countryside vistas and Ian McShane as the lead.
one of my favorite films by him. the candid nature of this in comparison to his other work along with the editing style always stood put. you get a much more personal look into Orson's mind as you watch him cut from the editing room narration to a party he's laughing and joking at, seemingly for no other reason than him having fun while realizing he's seeing small details slip that the subjects would normally not share
My father restored paintings. There are a great many fakes in circulation, either consciously or unconsciously.
A classic case is when an heir discovers that one of grandfather's badly preserved paintings is on the side. If it's not restorable, a new painting is made and reintroduced to the market in place of the old one, which is destroyed. The new painting benefits from all the traceability of the old one. Many experts are not fooled, but they don't get a commission if there's no sale, and nobody wants to have proof that their painting is worthless.
Fakes are only revealed when their number affects the quotation and sale. As long as everyone's making money, no one really cares.
Also this guy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Kujau
He became (in)famous for faking Hitler's diaries but also faked paintings, later going legal. There have been cases of others faking his replicas.
From what I understand in the topic the original Pokemon card inventor is involved in this as is a renowned card grading company (knowingly or not I leave out of the question).
So if this stirs up a large controversy, it might actually make the fakes, especially the signed ones, collectibles as well. Probably never the value they first had, but I hope the wistle blower can recover some of his losses.
An old employee using his home printer in 2024 to print up old mockups sounds more exclusive than actual prototypes from the 90s? What is your reasoning there?
Old employee prints out old mockups, fools everyone when he has them graded and sold at auction is also an exciting and rare story. Rare and interesting enough to make the rounds beyond the pokemon scene (as evidenced by us talking about it).
I'd agree that original prototypes would be cooler and more exclusive, but these cards are also unique thanks to the events around them. They are not just any contemporary printouts
The story is rare and interesting, sure. And you get to attach that story to 1-5 lots of cards before it gets real old and the value of those cards craters.
With legitimate prototype cards, you can have thousands of them retain value.
Well, depends on how many there are, who made them, if there's anything unique about them, and if the process is repeatable. If it's repeatable then that exclusivity goes out the window.
I worked for a gacha gaming startup early in my career. We were small so I did customer support besides engineering and got to know our whales quite well.
For every tech/finance worker who made hundreds of thousands a year and could afford to casually drop $5k a month on “collectibles”, there was easily 10 people who clearly were not making that much money but compulsively spending it for short lived dopamine hits.
It was kind of sad.
The one that really stuck with me was a social worker who worked with sick children making minimum wage, and spent all her spare cash on our product.
If you're interested in this kind of thing, Tavis King is one of the more knowledgable people with regards to mtg. Here's him mapping a booster to print sheet, to see how many Lotus' are still out there, possible to be opened: https://youtu.be/nnYe8FWTu_o?feature=shared&t=184
I remember reading a story about a (now) well-known MTG player. It was about their experience at one of their first tournaments, and had this detail about how during the tourney he got some pointers from Kai Budde (I think) on drafting - and in particular on print sheets.
My memory is fuzzy, but it was something like "Kai looked at a few of the boosters in a practice draft, and then was able to tell us (something) about the cards that should be in the remaining packs just by reasoning about print sheets."
I'm sure I'm getting the details wrong here - I'm not positive that it was Kai, and I don't have a good enough mental model of print sheets to know what was possible back then. And I think these skills aren't relevant today (?)
But I thought it was a fascinating detail. It's always fun to hear about the wrinkles that serious players of a game pick up on in order to find an edge.
(I've searched for the story a few times and haven't been able to find it; I just don't remember enough about it now)
edit: some discussion below, but I think the story here is approximately "Kai memorized all possible print runs, which was feasible to do back then, and was therefore able to back out which cards had probably been drafted and who was probably holding them" or something like that. Nothing about reasoning about runs across boosters!
There is a woman who found a way to game casino black jack and made millions out of it before getting caught. It's nearly impossible to replicate but it involved spotting imperfections in the way print sheets are cut up into individual cards.
I don't remember her name but she was an associate of poker legend Phil Ivey, and there's a whole documentary on YouTube about it. It's pretty fascinating what greed and a ridiculous level of risk tolerance can achieve.
Greed and cheating needn't be realted. The players are following this strategy to make money, presumably more than they should want. Whether they're taking it from moral or immoral sources should be a separate issue, imho.
They were actually changing the deck in way that survives shuffling, not just looking at the differences.
They were using the offset on the printing as a way to tell orientation of the card. Since auto shufflers never rotate the cards, any rotation they added would persist allowing a way to tell good from bad cards in future hands.
Yes that is why I mentioned it was nearly impossible to replicate. The final optimized method involved a lot of social engineering, which required to have very high standing in the casinos. She had to request, under the guise of superstition, a specific setup with a specific style of dealer, who never changed decks, and to be authorized to call out certain cards as "lucky" which the dealer would flip themselves.
It also required deep pockets, as just playing the shoe enough to sort it could take a few hours of regular gambling. That's the crazy thing, this elaborate setup just got them a few % edge on the house which they milked relentlessly.
I thought it was less that you could predict across packs and more that you could infer what card had been taken given what was left. That meant you had a better chance of not getting cut during the draft.
Yeah I'm sure I've fumbled some details here (sorry!) - I'm searching for this story again and haven't found it, but have found a few things about draft techniques that use print sheets[1] that focus on what you describe - reasoning about the original pack based on the current contents. The technique is pretty interesting!
Most of MtG’s secondary market value is protected by how difficult it is (or how costly it is) for cheap printers to match Cartamundi’s (and other global printers) offset printing processes. The number of counterfeit tests (green dot, black layer, Deckmaster, etc) that are simple and useful for basic users to determine counterfeits all trace back to the printing processes WotC uses.
I am amazed by how much value is protected by such a small technological detail
It relies heavily on the security and trustworthiness of the printer as well though, same as any kind of company where their product's value far outweighs its production cost (like cash money); I can imagine that before the big boom, employees would be able to take some cards / boxes / sheets home if they wanted to.
I worked on an application used in a paper factory that produced paper for banknotes. The entire point of the application was to make sure every single sheet of the paper was accounted for. There were unique barcodes printed on it as soon as it was dry enough to do so, and tracked throughout the production process.
Fun fact: confirming the proper disposal of damaged sheets required special privileges, and the name for the user role was "destroyer". So someone could rightfully claim their job title was "destroyer".
yeah, there is a lot of control of printing artifacts that are required. Some of those do make it out, either through QC issues [0] or through WotC itself gifting test print cards and full sheets to employees or as prizes. However, the ability to generate truly authentic MtG cards requires two things: million dollar Heidelberg offset printing machines and the original offset printing files for the card backs (which have not changed since release as far as I'm aware).
I remember trying to print out fake magic cards in the late 90s (I picked a non-valuable card). I used two passes: a dye-sub printer with a laser for the black text. It looked great to the naked-eye, but trivial to see the difference due to differing print technology under a microscope. I'm slightly surprised that examination of the CMY pattern in the color wouldn't have been sufficient to identify a fake.
[edit]
Just re-read the post and realized these were identified as fake just from the picture posted online. That makes a lot more sense.
In a game where there are rules about deck content, but scarcity around the existence of cards, I don’t see the ethical problem with counterfeiting a card for personal use.
If you add a fifth ace to a deck in the middle of a poker game, that’s cheating. If poker decks were printed without aces but aces were allowed, then why should anyone care how you got these four aces, as long as they were shuffled fairly into the deck? Just play the damn game.
> I don’t see the ethical problem with counterfeiting a card for personal use.
Neither does most of the community. We call it proxying. Of course it's not allowed in sanctioned play because the purpose of sanctioned play is to sell cards, but I've never been around a table in someone's basement who cared that the sol ring I just played is actually a mountain with "sol ring" scribbled on it in sharpie as long as there was no way of telling it from the other cards in the deck, it would be legal for a real sol ring to be in that deck and I played it according to the rules governing sol ring. There are different formats to magic and the one with the most extensive, and therefore expensive, list of permissible cards has competitive decks that run into the tens of thousands of dollars invested (https://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/vintage#paper). If you had to buy all of that every time you felt like playtesting a new deck people simply wouldn't do it.
I never played anywhere that allowed fakes but most players were ok with you taking a otherwise worthless card (hello Lapras my old friend) and marking the face to count as something else in Pokemon or otherwise.
Actual fakes were problematic as you can tell the back of the card apart generally.
What we used to do when I was a kid (before online stores were common to use, and had ~4 hours to the closest store selling magic cards so only got a new pack once a fortnight) was to use plastic sleeves for the whole deck. Then you can't really ser from the back if it's a printout or a real card.
you're going to sleeve it anyways, unsleeved card backs are too easy to mark. I've never played against or with an unsleeved deck in a magic tournament, even a draft.
I'm actually working on an open source digital card game with this in mind.
My favorite digital card games feel half way like scams in that if you really need a rare card for a deck, you can easily spend 50 or 60$ on packs and come up short. It's impossible to just pay 10$ and get the single card I need.
I don't think I'll be able to match the production values of MTG( the cards don't even have art, which is a both a stylistic choice and my own limitations), but I want something self hostable anyone can play.
You may be interested in the excellent rules engine and frontend to MtG. All FOSS and with real cards and art. I can't imagine the "official" games ever being as good.
this is significant news for me. I don't have the money for cardboard crack or its digital equivalent, and I used to play a lot with apprentice but apprentice didn't actually have a rules engine it just logged every state change and who initiated it and then counted on the players to play correctly. A functioning rules engine and real card art for free might be enough to get me back into the hobby, or at least back to reading articles and goldfishing myself
edit: oh my god it's got an adventure/overworld mode like the old microprose mtg game from back in the 90s. My heart doth soar, thank you so much for pointing this out!
I know that MtG scene in my city plays basically 100% on nicely done proxies ;)
Nobody has an issue with it. The courtesy is that it'd be nice for you to work towards a real deck if you play with it much, but it's not a hard rule or anything.
My understanding is that the inherent rarity of some cards is actually part of the game's balancing. If everyone can have every card (or worse, multiples of every card), then some vaguely game-breaking cards, or combinations of cards — that normally don't matter / aren't theory-crafted, because of their rarity — would suddenly be everywhere, in every tournament deck, creating a "dominant strategy" for the game, in turn necessitating those cards be banned. Even though those cards/combos would have been perfectly fine and fun and not-broken, had they stayed rare.
(Or at least, that's how MtG was originally designed to be balanced; I think this may have changed with MtG Online.)
That's usually balanced more by banning or restricting a card than by rarity. It may have been part of Garfield's early design to use card rarity to limit the meta but it simply doesn't work (instead of limiting the cards it would limit the competitive players to those who can afford the cards). Instead there are multiple formats with different sets of permissible cards, from the most permissible (vintage, which gives access to any card that has ever been printed and is not banned or restricted to 1 copy per deck) to the least (standard, which only gives access to cards from the most recently-printed sets). The deeper the card pool, the more expensive the format as those cards are not reprinted due to their gamebreaking power.
>It may have been part of Garfield's early design to use card rarity to limit the meta but it simply doesn't work
It works with how they imagined the game would sell: somebody in a game group convinced their friends to buy a few packs, they make decks, and play the game as a quick palette cleanser between longer board or roleplaying games. It's also the reason anteing cards was part of the original default ruleset: if people only made decks with a few packs of cards, the game would get stale. So ante meant the cards would rotate through the group and encourage them to alter their decks.
And then it was discovered that it is effective tactic to make money. You could sell all cards in the set for 50 or alternatively you could sell bunch of packs mostly filled with filler for 150 and get people buy quite lot of them to chase the limited set of strong and competitive cards.
It absolutely is and it absolutely should be. Secondary market is very real and some cards in certain products are expensive there. Something like the "The One Ring" one out of one unique card in MTG is clearly a type of lottery. That card had expected secondary market value in hundreds of thousands if not millions.
To me if we are going to regulate loot boxes, trading cards should be regulated as well. Or at least minors should be banned from buying them.
I thought this is governed by point-buy systems where you have a certain number of points to spend on your deck, and powerful cards just cost more points. Not an MtG player though, and I assume this also varies from play to play.
Now that people are having this discussion, I am remembering I have a family member that plays 40k, and they have both point buy systems and proxies, since the models are so damned expensive and change every four years.
Speaking of 40k, I'm curious if anyone has created a FOSS 40k-alike game, where every unit has a standard 3D-printable model that is itself a FOSS asset.
Not that that'd be too interesting on its own; but it'd almost certainly spawn a community of people creating and sharing derivative works of those standard models. Could be entire apps / package repositories / "character customization engines" built on snapping together standardized unit components like LEGOs and then printing the result.
Not sure about mainline 40k. But for Horus Heresy (official 40k spinoff of an earlier edition) there was an absurd amount of free or borderline free (think 5$ for a set of files to print an equivalent unit box that would have cost you $60 from GW, but you can print as many boxes as you want) community created content for resin printers. Not just units or vehicle models but also mix and match bits similar to what you're talking about (helmets, arms, legs, torsos, weapons, to customize both official and unofficial models). I remember being blown away by how many of the models were on par with or even better than what GW was offering for a fraction of the price. If you had or knew someone with a resin printer you could print 400-500$ armies for 20-30$ of resin. Most of the group I played with had at least half of their army printed out. And in a lot of ways it's "truer" from a hobbyist point of view because instead of buying a box of generic troops from GW and painting them according to their faction you could wildly customize beyond what the official troop boxes came with with printed bits and greebles. Some people came up with really creative and impressive stuff.
I always figured Lego was the way to go here. But Hasbro would never be dumb enough to license those properties.
It would be cool however if someone took a standard Lego set and rearranged the pieces into a number of units. So everyone knew if you wanted a DingleHopper you would buy this kit and get one DingleHopper and three Jiggamadoos, and trade those to your friend for a pair of Whatsits.
There are indeed formats which work this way (https://canadianhighlander.ca/points-list/), but unfortunately the most-played formats (Commander, Standard, Modern..) don't have any such restrictions which means the investment required for competitive play is prohibitively high.
On the other hand, the ridiculous costs mean it's very easy to find like-minded people to play casually with using bootleg cards.
Even canadian highlander is barely an example. That list is pretty small and for most decks it's only blocking a couple cards from being included. A typical deck is around 60% rares.
Oh for sure, if it's about the game then using "counterfeits" is not a problem at all; many proprietary card games (like Uno) can be played using regular playing cards which are a literal dime a dozen or cheaper.
But this isn't about the actual card game though, but the collector's market where grading companies sign off on the authenticity and quality of in this case 30 year old playtesting cards. I feel bad for the people that did get scammed, on the one side they should've known better because these were too good to be true, but on the other they put their trust in the grading company. I hope the grading company gets serious repercussions for letting this pass, surely they of all people should know about the printer dots to determine counterfeits and age?
You definitely don't want actual counterfeits to exist in the game at all. Even if they're for personal use, they'll end up getting into the supply, and someone gets screwed over because they don't know any better. Instead we use "proxies" which aren't meant to be passed off as the real thing, but represent it in-game. They usually have a different art, or a different card back, or some other obvious difference from the real deal.
That would still be irrelevant for the game, it would only be relevant for the traders. The game would still work exactly the same if the model were that you would go to WotC with a specified deck, and they would print it for you, at a standard cost per card, or even if they cost more for more powerful cards. It would kill the trading, of course, but that's entirely unrelated to the actual MtG game.
> In a game where there are rules about deck content, but scarcity around the existence of cards, I don’t see the ethical problem with counterfeiting a card for personal use.
Where there are high prices of cards, any convincing counterfeit would be poor optics. Game play with non-convincing counterfeits is accepted in many places (i.e. proxies).
The problem is that there are many places where non-convincing counterfeits are NOT accepted, which is (at least part of) the reason why there are so many convincing counterfeits now.
In the case of Pokemon or MTG, it's very important that the back of the cards look the same across the years and generations, so that the opponent can't see what the other player is playing. Of course, with MTG people often use card sleeves so it's a bit moot.
Writing the name of the card you want it to be in sharpie on the front of a real (but cheap) card trivially solves this problem for cases where card sleeves are not in use.
Yep this. We should be fighting 'pay to win' systems like this. Afterall the wealthy person who can afford these rare cards will have a natural advantage.
Imagine if dnd was sold in a way that only a few player's handbooks had fireball and if you had it, you could cast it.
Its a shame these systems caught on instead of more ethical systems. I hope Gen Z ends up burying this consumerist junk.
Pokemon is significantly better at this than other trading card games (like Magic):
- The rarest cards in every set are usually just alternate art versions of other, more common cards from the set.
- They release products with more powerful cards that have become popular recently, to increase the supply.
- They release good decks based on what is popular in tournaments at a good price ($25-$40, iirc).
- They release copies of tournament winning decks at a really good price (like, $15 for the whole deck). These are proxy cards—they have a different back, they, don't have foil, the printing isn't as high quality. But if you wanted to try out a good deck, they're incredibly cheap.
TCGs are inherently predatory, but Pokemon seems to realize it's played mostly by kids.
Not just wealthy, but also the charismatic. The couple of weeks when I knew about baseball cards and they were still something anyone cared about, I realized that one of the kids I knew was trying to sweet-talk everyone into trading them one card we had for a few cards he had.
I had no idea what the meaning of the trade was, I just knew that I was probably being tricked, based on the vibes he was putting out. And that was the last time I was interested in loot boxes.
Because part of playing the game for "bring your own deck" competitions is the time/effort/money that went into acquiring the cards. It's as much about "making the best deck you can with the cards you can get your hands on" as it is about just making the best deck you can.
But that effectively just makes it a game about measuring how much disposable income you have.
To put it another way, any 15 year old kid can put in the time and effort to assemble a great deck, but may not have the money. Should that kid not be allowed to compete on that basis alone?
There are different kinds of tournaments. Some of them are setup so the really rare cards aren't even allowed, some put a limit to one (for, like, a black lotus), some disallow them, some are only the current cards, and some you get a set of random cards when you start. There's all kinds of different tournaments, and the ones where you're allowed to use those rare cards work under the assumption they're valid.
To be honest, I haven't been to a MtG tournament in decades, so take that all with a grain of salt. But it should be _relatively_ accurate.
Yup, in video games it's called pay to win nowadays, and it's the exploitative nature of collectible card games with their booster packs etc.
I mean I don't mind so much, I had a MTG period some years ago (we'd play during work breaks) and got two of the same card (one of the Planeswalkers), which appreciated in value to about €35 at the time; I sold them online and recouped a lot of the money I had put into the hobby. That said, I will have a look to see how much that card is worth nowadays <_<.
edit: phew, just a little less than it was ~10 years ago.
Someone else made a subtle assertion that the sponsors of the event expect commerce to occur at the event. I don't have any reason to doubt that's the case.
> I'm slightly surprised that examination of the CMY pattern in the color wouldn't have been sufficient to identify a fake.
If I'm understanding the post correctly, these counterfeit cards were claimed to be from an early playtest which would in fact have been printed on normal consumer/office grade printers and not using a commercial large scale printing process. Some of the fakes are noted to actually have two sets of dots, one set from the original printer and another from whatever was used to make the fakes.
I remember my son really wanting a copy of The Nightmare before Christmas which Disney wasn't selling at the time because, at least then, they regularly let movies go out of print.
I found a "used" copy on AMZN which was obviously a fake with inkjet printing on the box and the disc, metadata on the disc indicating it was a DVD+R, etc.
I've gotten new movies on DVD-Rs from Amazon before. Also clearly pirated since they just played the movie when you put it in rather than a forced showing of the FBI warnings &c.
So, knowing nothing about Pokemon, it was lost on me if 2024 was legitimate or not (I suspected not, but it seems the article kind of assumes you know when the cards should have been made).
> Millions of Dollars of Prototype Pokemon Cards May Be Forgeries, Retired Creatures Employee Involved
> The authenticity of the Pokemon TCG’s famous “prototype cards” are now being called into question.
> Last year, hundreds of prototype Pokemon cards began to sell in collecting circles from the personal collection of Takumi Akabane, one of the original creators of the Pokemon TCG. He worked at Creatures until 2008. He recently attended events to sign some of the cards. Grading company CGC worked closely with Akabane to verify the cards’ authenticity.
> The prototype cards represent the earliest days of the TCG, produced in 1996 before Base Set released in Japan. They show the progression of Pokemon cards from their “proof of concept” stage where they used their Red & Green sprites to their beta designs that used their final artwork from Mitsuhiro Arita and Ken Sugimori.
I've asked chatgpt to explain to me the pokemon card craze, and it gives a long answer, but I still don't understand the videos of people shoving shopping carts full of big boxes of Pokemon cards...
It's the offshoot of the "everything bubble" during the pandemic, lots of people buying up things that in hindsight were collectible / scarce / worth a lot of money; Pokemon cards and boosters ended up being worth hundreds of thousands, same with sneakers, lego sets, etc.
The market has of course adjusted, lego's bread and butter seems to be high cost items marketed as collector's items. I mean at the same time I'm confident all of these companies are themselves filling up warehouses with the intent of drip-feeding these into the market for low volume, high revenue sales, whilst keeping the actual production run volume of these a closely guarded secret.
It's interesting, I remember comic collecting got really hot in the 90s (after 50s - 70s kids grew up in the silver age of comics). Wonder if every generation's favorite childhood nerd collectibles just hits a point where the generation has real purchasing power, decides to buy that Charizard card they always wanted as a kid, and a bubble develops.
Oh this is a long game? I thought there was an immediate trade/return/game involved. I didn't realize Pokemon had legs like these... so out of the (game) loop.
Some of it is scalping. Buy product that's not going to be reprinted and sell it for more soon after. Pokemon generally will reprint big sets as needed though so it's less of an issue.
The fact that a large grading company would not check such a basic type of forgery makes it seem like they're in on the scam. This sounds similar to what happened with video game grading company Wata, who were alleged to have fraudulently inflated the value of games they were grading:
That theory doesn't make too much sense; if they were both in on the scam and aware of the printer metadata, surely they would have asked for a different version before signing their name to it.
IMO it's more likely that "grading" is just a joke.
This is a good point! My assumption was that they actually do have a high baseline of fake rejection and gave these a fair analysis, given that they would want to maintain credibility and have multiple write-ups on their web site about how they closely analyze submitted cards to detect counterfeits. I wonder if there are any independent tests out there on how well they actually detect and reject fakes sent in for grading by normal people.
Yeah, we had a global financial meltdown in 2008 because it turned out the people who graded securities didn't look too closely at what they were grading; turns out customers wanting their bonds rated wouldn't choose rating agencies that applied an inconvenient level of scrutiny.
It'd be naive to expect the pokemon card industry to be better regulated.
I don't think you're talking about the same thing.
Part of the 2008 financial crisis was that lenders were giving loans out to anybody, and then even though information was available showing the low likelihood of paying back those mortgages the rating agencies rated the bundles of mortgages as high quality low risk.
So the problem starts with loans going to anyone, but the crisis was caused by ratings agencies wanting to keep clients rather than do their jobs.
It sounds like they suspect someone who helped design the original Pokemon trading card game - Takumi Akabane. A prominent investor claims to have gotten the cards directly from him and doesn't care if they're fake as a result.
Maybe the original designer wants to make a few more dollars.
Akabane or the buyer could be the original source of the fakes, but the grading company CGC was responsible for "verifying" that they were authentic before they were sold at auction:
IDK about PSA specifically, but I've collected comics, video games, toys, etc and the one commonality between all of them is that there are these big "grading" companies that charge money to seal your stuff in a plastic box with a label at the top that indicates its "grade" and there is always a scam of some sort. Sometimes they're not actually investigating the goods with any real scrutiny, sometimes they have a conflict-of-interest involving a well-stocked seller, sometimes they're directly manipulating the market. There's always something with these guys.
Also a lot of their income comes from convincing people who aren't educated on the market to grade extremely common items that will never be worth any significant amount of money no matter what "grade" they get; not actually a scam in that case but it shows you what their real priorities are.
I've also seen them set up booths at sci-fi conventions where you can pay to have them "authenticate" things you got signed by celebrities. In this case the authentication is entirely separate from the signature so there's nobody who can actually testify that they witnessed William Shatner signing your crap, only that they know your crap and William Shatner were in the same convention center at the same time.
I don't think it's an overt scam, but let's put it this way: as with auction houses, there is a disconnect between the service the company is providing and what the buyers think they're getting. And the companies have no special interest in correcting that.
For grading companies and for auction houses, the goal is to move the highest possible volume of goods at the highest possible valuation. They're not going out of their way to root out non-obvious fraud. They operate with the assumption that 99% of the traffic they're handling is legitimate, and of the 1% that's forged, only a small fraction of the buyers will ever find out. On the rare occasion it blows up, they can apologize and settle for an amount much less than what it would take to investigate every specimen with great zeal.
From stories of same exact card being graded for different ratings at different times. Would indicate that they are less perfect in their service than they might market. Difference in grade can change the value.
So as whole the process is quite questionable at times.
Not to even talk about some things slipping through or being questionable in documenting.
Difference in grade basically DETERMINES the value. Even small steps down from perfect greatly diminish a card's value. Basically IGN review scale levels of drop-off.
Something can be subjective, without being a scam.
Are you suggesting they are deliberately misleading people, or are you saying grading is not consistent and is subjective based on circumstance around when the item is graded.
The service being sold is the objectivity of the grading process, otherwise anyone could just decide they have a high grade item.
This sort of thing happens all the time in grading – a later reveal shows that earlier gradings were obviously incorrect in the mind of any collector. That means that they have such a poor objective process as to be no better than subjective analysis.
Graders ultimately sell reputation. Like currency, grading only works if you believe in it. Don't believe the grader? Then their word isn't worth anything. This means as more and more of these issues happen, graders will struggle to retain that trust, and when it disappears it disappears rapidly.
> my understanding was that the point of grading a card was to have a verified, objective rating of the card's condition.
> If grading is subjective, then I don't see the value of the process
This made me curious to check the PSA grading standards, turns out it's both.[0]
Personally, as a very young kid I collected baseball cards, unfortunately for me, this was the very late 80's & early 90's. While I have some cards that are my favorites, would be pointless to grade cards that are practically worthless.
>> While it's true that a large part of grading is objective (locating print defects, staining, surface wrinkles, measuring centering, etc.), the other component of grading is somewhat subjective. The best way to define the subjective element is to do so by posing a question: What will the market accept for this particular issue?
>> Again, the vast majority of grading is applied with a basic, objective standard but no one can ignore the small (yet sometimes significant) subjective element. ... The key point to remember is that the graders reserve the right, based on the strength or weakness of the eye appeal, to make a judgment call on the grade of a particular card.
"Heritage Capital Corp. and Numismatic Certification Institute. Also named in the action were Steve Ivy and James Halperin, prominent numismatic figures. A consent order was signed agreeing to establish a $1.2-million fund for collectors who purchase the NCI-graded coins from Coin Galleries Inc. of Miami."
FYI, these yellow dots are part of a Secret Service program to fight counterfeit currency. It was big news a couple decades ago and is well understood in art/printing circles. There are host of similar programs to protect printed money.
EURion is a funny[1] kind of DRM, what caught the fake Pokemon cards is Xerox DocuColor[0], a watermarking technology.
The difference is that DRM is designed to prevent you from copying something, while watermarking is designed to make you dox yourself if you copy something. I've yet to see evidence that EURion et. all actually stop counterfeiting, but watermarking has been very effective at finding counterfeiters.
[1] Most DRM is intended to enforce copyright; but the state is not asserting copyright over the image of a banknote. There are cases where it is legal and moral to completely reproduce a faithful image of a banknote, and those cases are much broader than the various exceptions to copyright that exist.
> but watermarking has been very effective at finding counterfeiters.
Whistleblowers, too. That's believed to be how they got Reality Winner, because the documents published by The Intercept contained those tracking dots.
Eurion is part of a series of programs that stop some high-end scanner, printers and editing software from handling currency. Try scanning/editing/printing a eurion note and you will run into roadblocks. That makes it a type of DRM.
Not really, the firmware just adds the dots automatically to the rendered print. It's just datetime and the serial in most of the version of this. What's expensive about that?
It is expensive at scale. In a world where each gram of CO₂ is taxed. "Windows Timer Resolution: Megawatts Wasted"[0] - Microsoft has since added coarse timers and coalescence.
Printers probably use more ink keeping their heads clean in inkjet printers than they ever do printing these dots on the page. And even if it is expensive the customers bear that expense and send it right back to the printer companies. However many microliters of ink a customers' printers use is just more ink bought from the manufacturer.
I'm not sure but again this probably required very little time to implement. The printer already has to process the rendered image adding an extra layer probably took a day to hammer out the first versions.
It's also potentially useful for business customers too to be able to where a document was printed from without central print dispatch and tracking.
Kind of, most version it's just the serial number which is a very soft dox. Going from that to the identity of a real person is really hard if you don't have the investigative powers of the state or have hacked the printer manufacturers registration data (if the person even bothered to register their printer).
Maybe they are, but some of these fakes were authenticated by a third party whose entire job is to serve as a trusted authority for collectors, so they're even bigger idiots for not noticing such a well known tell. This throws everything they've ever graded into doubt.
Precisely this! This seems like a hard thing to spot from a layperson's perspective, but this is literally the purpose of their company, and these printer identification dots seem to be quite well-known in art and printing circles! This should never happen and the fact it did definitely should bring some reputational harm to CGC.
Are they? They passed off all these cards and will likely get away with it. The people left holding these cards are the ones who got 'screwed'. Though collecting, and paying high premiums, for pieces of cardboard backed by barely anything at all probably means they were screwing themselves to begin with. (IE A game of pokemon with 100% proxies is just as fun as a game of pokemon with no proxies)
I guess when I called them idiots the context in my mind was "how could they think they could get away with it using digital printing".
They've committed fraud, plain and simple. As a consequence now all things like this may get closer scrutiny and fakes like these will be binned.
For some reason I'm reminded of the fake wine guy... taking advantage of the fact that valuable wines are kept as investments, so he faked them... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Kurniawan
The first seller of record can simply say 'A customer brought these in, I bought them after getting them cgc rated. The rating agency signed off on them so I had no idea that they could be forgeries' .. repeat back for their seller ad infinitum.
TIL printer dots! Also curious if someone more familiar with this space/community could provide more backstory here. Reading some of the comments in the forum, it seems like 1) these "beta cards" surfaced a while ago and have been a contentious topic since, 2) a card authenticator business is involved. What's the scale of this scheme? What's the impact going forward/how much money is tied into this?
It looks like CGC - one of the big card graders - has touted their ability to grade some very early Pokemon The Card Game playing cards (even alpha test cards printed in very low numbers). Here is their grading scale on their site https://www.cgccards.com/news/article/13347/
People have purchased these CGC cards on ebay assuming they were legit based on the above certifications. It looks like total cards is something like 6 test decks of 26 cards of the alpha prototype - so the rarest example is fairly small, but I think it goes up as they got to later pre-release versions. Furthermore, there are some cards that were signed by Akabane (a co-creator of the game) and those have the presence of the yellow dots - meaning those are most likely not legit pre-production cards. One of those signed cards was sold for $200k I believe - https://www.cgccards.uk/news/article/13661/
So total financial impact of this directly in low millions?
Thank you! Looks like CGC is in a tough spot. The grading guide struck me as quite vague.
> CGC Cards utilized all the tools at our disposal to help document and authenticate these cards, compiling vast resources for comparison with future submissions. A very thorough process is in place for the authentication and grading of these cards using ones verified by Mr. Akabane.
In an ideal world, it seems like there should be publicly shared, repeatable methods/standards for authenticating cards to avoid issues (whether complicit or an honest mistake) like this from a single central authority.
What personal info is printed in these yellow dots? Are they present if I print from Linux? Brother colour laser owner here.
Edit, from [1] posted in this thread it looks like date printed and printer serial number are printed. And if it's done by the printer firmware it wouldnt help to use OS drivers.
Not sure but I'd expect it's handled at the printer firmware level and not controllable from the OS. It would be pretty weird to let the user modify such a "feature" without even having to disassemble their printer.
This is something that's pretty well known in the magic the gathering community. Some of us who trade in older cards to play certain formats have jeweler's loupes to check this stuff.
Basically none in practice, but there are some hybrid collector-players who like the idea of building decks from their collection as opposed from all decks, and bristle at the idea of someone else not doing that. (And of course the collectors and WoTC themselves like to push for it because it makes them money: WoTC officially pretends that the secondary market doesn't exist but their actions make no sense if they aren't crafting their ~~loot boxes~~ booster sets with the idea of rare and valuable cards driving a lot of the demand).
(I personally think that if you want to force everyone to pay for product, play sealed or draft. Then everyone's on an even playing field budget wise, and it's more interesting than just net-decking. I'm sympathetic to the fact that WoTC needs to make money, I'm not sympathetic to their approach of chasing whales and making large chunks of the game basically inaccessible by their definition of 'legitimate play')
Some formats, but you can always play sealed which removes the ability to bring in outside cards at all. You either get your own pool of cards or draft from a shared pool so it's more down to your skill in building a deck (or luck pulling the right card from a pack you opened or it getting passed to you because the player before you didn't need it and wasn't drafting for value).
There's cheaper strategies in most formats though that you can still get wins with, Red Aggro decks are usually pretty cheap to build and have a decent win rate. You'll rarely place highly in tournaments with it but that's true for most people and most decks.
No there's usually a wide variety of viable strategies, which have different costs associated with them. There's a price of entry but once everyone is on that level you still have to play well.
Colloquially, I think people call this 'pay to win'. If there's not one single price of entry that delineates someone playing vs not playing, i.e. if money spent results in any power level difference between players, that's pay to win, even if there's a ceiling to how much paying more than just buying a starter deck will get you.
Organized Play official events require authentic cards, but nobody is stopping people from using a printer for kitchen-table style games.
Personally, having used printed paper inserted over top of a real card, I'd rather stick with real cards. Otherwise, I'd just go digital in this day and age.
You can buy mid-quality proxies on Chinese sites for about $0.30/card that feel accurate and typically are only distinguishable from real ones on fairly close inspection.
That is not true. Try playing a $0.30 Underground Sea at Eternal Weekend and see how many rounds it takes before you get caught. Old cards have specific hues, imperfections, etc, that are not replicable in modern proxies. I have some Legacy proxies for local events that are proxy-friendly, and literally the first game I played someone noticed as soon as I put the card down that it was fake because it was printed way too well.
Your example doesn't invalidate the comment you were replying to.
(And I can also vouch at the quality of proxies that I bought for dirt cheap, so that I could keep my real cards at home. I bought from a few different companies, and some are very good, some not so much.)
Not really but the official line is you can't use proxies. Practically the only reason a judge would have to inspect your deck is if they suspected you were cheating by registering an incorrect list or pre-sideboarding or something, but most judges aren't going to care about proxies.
The few annual tournaments in Vintage typically do allow players to show up and register their deck is present, then put it away in a travel safe and play with proxies. That's for decks that can easily be worth 50-100k.
There are unsanctioned events that allow proxies but it can put a store's wpn status at risk. For most competitive tournaments you need real cards, but a lot of competition for legacy and vintage are on mtgo (the old online magic client) now which is much cheaper and has rental services.
If this is authoritative, I don't think so. It's really for the card got damaged in the current tournament so it's a marked card in a deck, or the card is valid, but only available as a foil which would feel different than other cards unless you were playing a foils only deck.
Originally the rule was specifically for cards damaged during the tournament. If a card was in acceptable condition at the start of the tournament but became marked during play you'd be required to substitute it for a proxy, and then acquire a real replacement before the next tournament.
Bridge tournaments don't require the players to bring their own royal court to hold. Everyone gets to use cards proxying the various kings, provided by the tournament.
MTG tournaments become a test of playing skill, deck building skill, and the skill to have enough money to buy important limited production cards. It is what it is, but sometimes it feels gross.
"official" means run by wizards of the Coast, so essentially the money grab. I suppose it has some benefits in terms of not getting anyone who's swapping cards there overpaying for a reproduction too.
Basically two things are driving after market value. Use in tournaments and collectability. And after market value drives the demand for sealed product(one directly from Hasbro via distributors and then stores).
I really don't understand why no legislation is targeting this market that is exactly like loot boxes.
There's no reason not to allow them. You might legitimately prohibit them if unsleeved, but in sleeves there's no difference. Tournaments that aren't run by WotC do allow proxies, though I think Star City Games limits you to 5 proxies, which isn't enough to solve any budget problems. Again, obviously, there's no reason as far as gameplay goes. SCG does traffic in used cards.
The guys who run tourneys are also often guys that participate in the secondary market heavily. Having an 'open to any proxy' tournament would screw their bottom line. The whole point of them running tourneys is to keep excitement in the game and sell more cards on the secondary market.
well if you're collecting something, it's age kinda matters?
maybe a counterfeit that's also from the 90s would have a similarly interesting story, but one from last week is much less interesting than the possibility of a beta card from the first set of a game inherently, and so less collectible.
When it comes to playing the game between friends outside official tournaments, you are basically correct (though some use cost as a power level limiter).
When it comes to trading, you don’t want to accidentally pay a premium for something you won’t be able to resell. Lots of players view trading as, more or less, leasing cards. Valuable cards typically have fairly stable prices (though there are notable exceptions). Buy for a dollar sell for somewhere between 0.75 and 1.25.
The commenter shared an oddly specific situation where the dots would not print, the knowledge of which implies something I won’t say, but will leave up to you to decipher.
Yes, it's very cool that I can print some protest leaflets or political posters, and have the police at my door the next day because "my" printer betrayed me thanks to a literal corporate-state conspiracy.
How do they even find you? Once they have your printer model and serial number, can they find the user?
I can see how this could be used to prove or disprove it was some suspect's printer, or if it was the same printer between documents. And that's already a lot. But somehow I doubt that they have the database of serial number to person.
For example you can pay with cash, and you can buy second hand.
The amount of effort required to track a specific serial number printer to its buyer means that the police are only ever going to get THIS involved if your protest leaflet happens to include original CSAM or snuff imagery.
Reading the dots and cross-referencing the serial number with credit card purchases doesn't seem like a lot of effort. In fact it seems extremely minimal.
There is no central database of printer->owner mapping.
There is not even a per-vendor database of printer->owner mapping.
To chase this kind of evidence a detective will have to a) find a technie to decode the dots for them, b) contact the printer manufacturer and ask if they can map a serial number to a retailer. c) contact the retailer to ask if they can map a serial number to a store. d) IF the store keeps a track of who buys which serial number, they can look that up, but otherwise e) ask for a rough data range of when that printer serial # was sold (query restock levels, etc, this MAY be doable via the retailer corporate level. and f) examine store CCTV if the printer was purchased within the X months that the store keeps their footage for.
It's at best a 3 day job, but in reality it will take a week for all the back-and-forthing with the various contacts, and there's a very very good chance that any one, or all, of the contacts will want a warrant.
It's not happening for a trivial 'someone posted a poster criticizing immigration policy', it might happen for a kidnapping (possibly if it's someone famous), particularly heinous CSAM user or rape, almost certainly for a murder or direct child abuse, and definitely for serial killers.
And all it takes for the whole week to be pointless is the criminal to buy a printer from a yard sale or somewhere else where cash can be used to buy a used printer.
Reminds me of a friend that was selling "signed" comic books in high school. He did it for pocket money, infrequently and never exceeding $50 profit.
And there were many before him. Wikipedia writes that "in 2016, a relic of True Cross held by Waterford Cathedral in Ireland, was radiocarbon dated to the 11th century by Oxford University."[1]
Even funnier to me, there are relics of real people around, it used to be a big thing historically. So there's some saints or whatever where there's 3 or more "arm of X" floating around, multiple heads for the same person, all kinds of fun stuff.
I don't get why yellow isn't subsidised for all the printers
I'm running out of yellow despite hardly ever printing any colour
or is this printer manufacturer's subtle protest
The way humans construct "authenticity" and negotiate the ship of Theseus is going to provide so much fodder for the AIs to entertain themselves.
Like my father-in-law interrogating me about being vegetarian at the dinner table, the sardonic Socratic dialog really writes itself...
"OK; but now what if I were to selectively replace the molecules of one and only one pigment with a visually identical analog that is slightly modified to be more stable over time and with respect to UV exposure—could THAT still be an original card?"
> No, it will be detected as fake due to colorimetry.
That is a different question. You are answering if the usual methods would authenticate it as an original. I believe you are right that they wouldn't. Thus it would probably be worthless.
But that makes sense. There are many modifications you can do with a card which will render them useless and no longer recognised as an original.
For example you can burn the card to ash. They would not be even detected as a pokemon card, but they are still an original pokemon card (if they were ever) which got burned into ash.
Some people in the magic community alter cards (painting over them to expand the artwork or such) and take some pride in doing this only with original authentic cards. It's interesting, since it won't even clearly resemble the original card at the end.
It would be incredibly funny if these cards are actually genuine and someone just didn't bother to set the clock (year) correctly on their printer.
(But I don't believe this is the case and am not sure if available printers back in 1996 would even emit these patterns in this form. Just noting in this case the device's knowledge of date and time is also a factor of uncertainty.)
In the thread a few prototype cards that turned up before the current ones[1] are checked and they do have 1996 dates in the dots. So at least some printers at the time did have them.
But there’s also a batch identified as “high quality” that don’t have dots on the front printing, which if genuine would point to some printers not doing it at the time.
[1] There were like, 3, and the thread has a spreadsheet showing that well over a thousand prototypes were graded in the last few months. Not sus at all.
One way to check could be to insert the serial number into various printer manufacturer's warranty check pages to see if anything pops up. Some companies (like Lexmark) require a model number first (which was not present for the example), but others (like Brother) will accept just a serial.
OT: I've wondered about printed forgeries, but in the context of comic books rather than cards.
Suppose someone in the 1960's had bought a printing press of the same make/model as what was being used to print Marvel comics. Suppose they also bought a large supply of the same ink and the same paper and the same staples. They then wait.
Then decades later they can see which 1960's Marvel comics have become valuable collectables. The early '60s was when Marvel introduced Spider-Man, Thor, the Fantastic Four, Doctor Strange, Iron Man, the Avengers, the Hulk, the Black Widow, and the X-Men for example, many of which went on to fetch hundreds of thousands or even millions for mint condition copies.
They they use their vintage press, ink, paper, and staples to print mint condition forgeries.
I suppose it'd be easier for someone to buy one of each of the comics, rather than an industrial size printing press used to print comics and hold onto it for 70 years.
I dont think ink, on it's own, has a 70 year shelf life either.
And, aside from having the setup to print stuff with, you still need the source material (presumably printing plates or whatever) which is where the actual forging comes in. Assuming it was printing plates lets say, you'd need to copy them to a microscopic level along with every dot on a matching comic book.
I think the problem is that people didn't know comics would be valuable. If you knew that, then just buy a bunch of the comics and store them safely. It's probably a lot less work, won't get stuck with fakes if you can't sell them, and it's 100% legal.
The one factor that might be hard for them to control is "aging". Sure, the paper will likely have aged the same, but maybe the ink ages differently on paper than on a bottle. (In both potential ways: The ink in the bottle may go bad, or it may age less than on paper.) I am really not qualified to even speculate.
But one thing I want to note is that this scenario does not strike me as too different from "what if I had bought or mined 100 bitcoin while they were still cents each", which would actually have required significantly less effort and even foresight.
I don't think anyone originally thought that comic books for kids sold at newspaper stands would ever become collector's items with such a massive value, so it would probably have been rather bizarre for someone to do what you suggested, especially since the many factors that you mentioned alone mean that some explicit planning for this scenario is likely required for things to actually fall into place that way. I'm eager to be proven wrong, of course.
It depends on if they get too greedy. One or two would probably slip in.
But once you get too many, something would be noticed. Everything would match, but the ink wouldn't have been on paper long enough, that kind of thing.
And the space and requirements to keep everything in wait - would be more hassle and expense than just stockpiling copies of every comic ever made.
The article doesn't explain what playtest cards are nor what is being caught by their detective work.
It doesn't even mention the word counterfeit.
I can guess what's happening here, but I'd like to know more concrete info about the scale and impact of this, how much people were paying for these cards, etc.
As for the article, it's posted to a niche specific community site, they're naturally going to explain less because the readers already have the context. These cards are expensive and sought after and there's a plausibly massive number of fakes out there.
The KGB caught some Soviet dissidents the same way. They had a (mandatory) register of the unique imprint pattern of every mechanical typewriter.
- "Nightmare for the KGB: The Advent of Photocopy Machines"
- "In the early 1960s the Soviet ruling elite—in this case, the KGB’s Fifth Directorate, responsible for ideology and counter-subversion, and the Agitprop Department, the party’s main watchdog over “ideological” matters —imposed special procedures for introducing newly invented photocopying machines. The procedures were designed to prevent the use of photocopying machines for producing copies of materials viewed as undesirable by the authorities."
- "Decades earlier, a similar approach was used for typewriters. Proprietors of offices and stores had to provide local KGB branches with sheets of paper showing examples of the font of every typewriter they had. These sheets enabled the KGB, using technical procedures, to determine the origin of any typed text."
- "In one case that occurred at my present place of employment—the Institute of World Economy and International Relations—the KGB traced an “illegal” social-democratic-oriented journal advocating “socialism with a human face” to a typewriter belonging to the secretary of the Institute’s director. Only a few dozen copies of the journal had been produced, but this proved to be enough to put five or six young people in jail for a year. The Institute’s director fired his secretary, who had permitted her son-in- law to use her typewriter to produce the illegal copies."
- "The only typewriter I knew of that could not be traced by the KGB was one I had in my home. It had been presented as a gift to my father, Soviet statesman Anastas Mikoyan, when he made an official trip to East Germany and visited a factory there that produced typewriters."
Note that having the "only typewriter that can't be traced" soon becomes easy to trace, once they know it exists and the text doesn't match anything else.
One of the many reasons to buy a brother monochrome laser printer. I mean the convenience about not needing yellow, not necessarily extra privacy - that is still uncertain.
> Other methods of identification are not as easily recognizable as yellow dots. For example, a modulation of laser intensity and a variation of shades of grey in texts are feasible. As of 2006, it was unknown whether manufacturers were also using these techniques.
The Laserjet 4000 series outperforms them, is just as secure, and is the last line developed before HP quality plummeted under Carly. The problem is the cartridges are out of production and the NOS ones have a rubber toner seal that crumbles when the sealing strip is removed. You do get 10k pages on a base cartridge which blows away modern laser printers.
I recall that for a decade or more there were third parties selling remanufactured LJ4 cartridges. I had someone explain to me we don't throw away the empties because we get a deposit on them.
No it's because color printers actually do use small amounts of color in the black parts of the image to make it look better. They act the same for all colors not just yellow.
I always thought that a near learning project would be training an ML on “real” cards and then detecting fakes. I don’t play the games but I was always thrown by how much effort went into counterfeits, but I guess there’s enough profit for someone. There’s usually something wrong with the registration or colors.
What is missing in the context here is that the cards mentioned in this article are not actually real. They never existed, and therefore they are not "counterfeits" of a real one, they are just made up. Someone just claimed to know someone that had playtest cards from back in the day. They are not a commercial product.
Avg player doesn't buy a few thousand cards at a time. If you buy a high value card from a random seller you should always check it unless you trust them from references.
People only pull out slower tools for valuable, forgery worthy cards.
If someone is buying 1000 $1000 dollar cards, it’s still worth it lol.
Even cheap forgeries cost money to produce, so I wouldn’t expect a lot of low value cards to be forged. If you sort out the valuable cards and do random sampling, you can probably catch the most problematic cases.
I built one of these several years ago for MtG cards. Trained a neural network with a binary classifier on a cheap $20 USB microscope looking at examples of the backs of real cards vs. fake cards.
Sadly never got around to shipping it, because it worked really well. Ported it to the web, but never figured out the billing issue, and so it died during the delivery phase. From time-to-time, I still wonder if I should resurrect this project, because I think it could help a lot of people.
This was in the hacker Zeitgeist a few years ago, when "Secret Dots from Printer Outed NSA Leaker", though it's unclear whether the dots were used or if it was one of the other opsec failures.
> The combined sales across all auction websites likely exceeds $10M. Individual cards were selling between four to six figures, based on the variant and the popularity of the Pokemon.
Woah, I had no idea Pokemon cards could be so valuable (obviously I don't know much about Pokemon other than my kids use to play with them)
There's been a fairly high profile hype cycle around them for a few years driven by a few high profile creators/influencers making some huge stunt purchases and lots of speculation on the value of the cards. Feels very beany baby-esque to me but bubbles are lasting a long time these days so who knows how long it'll last.
It makes one really wonder why this is not absolute basic step in the "authentication" process. You could pretty much automate this as part of documentation process.
I know nothing here but just assumed the card stock for all these collectible cards was unique, easily identified, and hard to counterfeit. I guess not.
Also probably not even going forward. What prevents me from printing a copy of a card and claiming it's the real card and the one registered on the chain is the forgery?
NFTs for tracking real items is fundamentally flawed as it requires people to perfectly and accurately update the ledger and never feed false information into it. Also how do you crack a pack when they're NFT tracked? The whole economy of TCGs is built around the blind box element of loads of people buying packs of cards.
with-lots this information (in the game Pokémon/Pokemon TCG*), there so many-chances for misinformation of exact-words; however, its possible to realise from Titles, much more details in-print, art-work, these almost "easter eggs" actually printed-out
meta-data/"metadata", is 1 point to consider when seems "noisy", hopefully browsers take-care for having seen–noticed
However, its lucky to see these almost "behind-the-scenes" look at what is happening there. Hopefully people that contribute, realise these details, more, are what is happening! (even in January, 2025)
> Different brands use different dot encoding patterns, and not all of these can be decoded. The companies don’t reveal this information so any known pattern has been cracked by someone from the general public.
If you ever wondered why color printers with a separate black ink tank won't print a black and white document when it's low on color -- it's because they have to print the secret yellow dots for fingerprinting purposes and need the color ink to do so.
First, the reason inkjet printers use color ink for monochrome documents is pretty well known. While there is no doubt a degree of "profit optimization," there's a printing benefit to doing so. Most inkjet printers, because of the properties of the ink used, cannot produce very good blacks with only their black ink. It's standard to use some magenta and blue to 'deepen' the black which produces a subjectively better result. On many printers you can toggle this off, either on the printer or in the print driver. But, and here's where the profit optimization comes back, on a lot of cheaper printers especially you can't (although this might have more to do with the general lack of configurability of inexpensive printers). This technique is unnecessary for laser printers because of their different properties (toner is an opaque material bonded to the surface of the paper; ink is a liquid with a degree of transparency that is absorbed by the paper).
There's also an argument made by inkjet manufacturers that cycling the color cartridge is important to keeping the print head ready for use, although I don't think it's really that big of a motive since with some firmware work they could just run the cleaning cycle on the color cartridge for each print job (although, once again, a lot of this comes down to cheap printers being built around commodity controllers with very little configurability or intelligence in general).
Second, MIC-type dot markings are associated only with laser printers. The concept was developed within the laser printer industry and does not work as well on inkjets due to the higher level of bleed and poorer halftoning of very faint colors. I am not aware of any inkjet printers that print these types of dots; I would not be surprised to learn that there are a handful (particularly in the higher-end photographic market) but it's certainly not common. The EFF, for example, says that no inkjet printers do so. There's probably not much value to printing tracking dots anyway, because inkjet output is usually more obviously different from offset printing than laser (poorer color saturation and density), which makes inkjets unappealing for counterfeiting. There are, of course, a whole different class of "giclee" printers with excellent output quality (is HP Indigo still king?) but they're specialty devices and tracking dots only appear on consumer and office equipment.
There's a couple reasons that I know of, plus I suspect it may be cheaper for the manufacturer. One is that the media type selection in the printer driver (especially glossy vs. matte) changes the ink composition used for black, and you wouldn't have the ability to adjust that if it was premixed. Another is that "automatic" use of color inks for black is an RGB thing; when printing CMYK the same thing is done but it's actually part of the original data. That is, a "deep" black in a CMYK image will have non-zero CMY. Another way to put this is that the whole "we have to use color ink to produce black" is basically an artifact of a mapping problem between how RGB additive-color and CMYK subtractive-color look for black. If you prepare a CMYK graphic you can put down a sample of "100% black" or CMYK 0,0,0,100 and whatever your editing tool considers "black," like CMYK 60,40,40,100, and you'll find that they look quite different printed. But people working in the CMYK space expect to be able to control that to their preferences; people printing documents get it done automatically as a convenience.
Photo-quality inkjet printers sometimes use two different black cartridges, I'm not sure what exactly goes into the composition of the two. Art reproduction inkjet printers (giclee) can use 10, 11, even 12 different pigments to get optimum reproduction across the whole gamut. It gets very technical.
> "Most inkjet printers, because of the properties of the ink used, cannot produce very good blacks with only their black ink."
Many inkjets solve this by using two different black inks. One which is the K in the four CMYK "dye inks" for printing photos etc, and another "pigment black" for printing purely B&W text etc.
For most modern inkjet printers, there's a simple reason: there must be ink inside the printhead at all times[1] or some of the nozzles will dry out and clog.
Solution/hack: buy one of those ink cartridge refill kits, but put black ink in the yellow cartridge. That way when you want to see the dots they should come up nice and clear?
Obviously this is not going to work out well if you actually print in colour.
Yep. Last time I thought it'd make sense to have a printer, cause I was printing lots of stuff for a wedding, it ran out of ink oddly quickly then broke soon after I refilled it. Also jammed a lot and wasn't easy to get the right drivers for it.
I forget what I spent, maybe $150 by the end and 4 hours of dealing with it. Never again.
The ink cartridges that come with the printer aren't full, and have never been as far as I can remember. That's one of the reasons a cheap printer costs as little as a set of ink for the same printer (the other obviously being the "give away the razor, sell the blades" business model employed)
Where I live, every 7-11 has an office copier/printer/scanner machine that also does photo printing you can use for a few cents. That's been good enough for my twice-a-year printing needs. It even comes loaded with sticker paper so you can print out custom stickers, pretty fun.
Well, yes. But the OP was suggesting/suspecting his printer prints security dots even when printing in B&W. This could be a good way to reveal them for analysis purposes.
I've looked into it before and I didn't find anything suggesting that it's a law. It appears to be willful collaboration with the feds and other nation states, possibly to avoid the attention of regulators, but it's all done in secret so there's not a ton of info.
Along similar lines, scanners and commercial software packages like Photoshop attempt to detect EURion dots and the digital watermarking that replaced it in currency. Obviously open source software has no such thing because it would be pointless, and it's not illegal that it doesn't.
For whatever reason, these antifeatures seem to also be missing from commercial digital cameras.
> Is this a federal (US) mandate or a law in any other country?
No, its a backdoor regulation in the US (probably using the threat of actual regulation premised on controlling counterfeiting to get firms onboard) via agreements from manufacturers to act without regulation.
Strictly speaking, no such law exists. My understanding is that it’s a request from the secret service that all of the printer manufacturers have agreed to comply with for counterfeiting reasons.
While most of the printer is pretty simple mechanically and electronically, inkjet heads and laser drums are going to be beyond the ability of most home hobbyists. Even dot matrix heads would be pretty complicated to fabricate with lots of tiny precise parts.
It genuinely seems that a 3D printer is easier to build; the precision and resolution required is significantly less than for photo-quality (or even document-quality) printing, right?
Previous discussions on hackernews (see this comment [0]) claim that the paper handling hardware is part of the problem. It's apparently quite difficult to do reliably (thus all the 90s jokes about paper jams) and all the known solutions are locked up under patent
I wonder if part of that problem could be solved by going back in time, and printing on something like the accordion-folded paper favored by dot-matrix printers, or even a full roll of 8.5 inch wide paper that then gets sliced into 11 inch long chunks after the ink is applied?
Then we just have to solve all the other problems :)
Because no-one, especially the kind of person who's into open-source, uses printers often enough for the problems to bother them, and because the existing commercial products are highly optimised and effective.
Even if nobody is building a printer from scratch, I'm surprised there isn't some kind of open source firmware project (like there is for, say, digital cameras) just in order to avoid all the driver nightmares people complain about.
Digital cameras have a stable(ish) lens interface, so people use a smaller number of models for longer. Consumer inkjet printers are so cheap and change so often that there is no single model that's popular enough for people to coalesce around (and people who do care about e.g. a printer that works well on Linux will research and buy one that's known to work well on Linux - printers are pretty much a commodity, whereas people have strong feelings about their camera hardware and want to use a particular camera with different firmware instead of changing cameras)
I'm curious how long it has been since an even half-way convincing fake could be printed on a home printer (even if it were totally unlocked). My guess is quite a while. Maybe you could do it for small denominations that don't have color shifting inks, but I'm pretty sure that paper that even sort of approximates the feel would make it not economically viable, even on a home printer.
There's only like ~55 billion us banknotes in circulation (according to uscurency.gov). It wouldn't surprise me to find out that banks' counting machines scan each of them, and put the serial number and location into a database, and that database flags bad serial numbers and things like "this serial number is also claimed to be in a vault 1000 miles away" - causing the bill to be flagged, set aside, and turned over to the secret service.
The working set of data needed for this type of thing could probably be stored in a couple TB - small enough to be in a single (beefy) server's RAM.
Such a database could be sharded out insanely easily, too. Rather than having 1 BEEFY server with a couple TB of RAM, you could do a couple dozen servers with a more modest 256 GB, with each server having a strictly defined subset of serial numbers (ie, one server could handle notes with serial numbers ending in 00 or 01, another handling 02/03, etc.), and the load balancing becomes extremely simple.
Yeah, that was my point: these rules aren't really preventing counterfeiting, because even if you were allowed to print currency on a home printer, it wouldn't work, because it would be trivially obvious as fakes. It sounds like you are saying that making trivially obvious counterfeit bills is still possible, which seems like it even further supports the fact that these rules aren't very useful.
In our current world, I don't see a reason to own a printer.
If there is someone sending out printed communications that needs that level of security, and wasn't committing a crime, I'd love to hear about it. Because it'd seem like they'd have to completely avoid the mail system, leaving fingerprints, or licking the envelope.
When it comes to highly valuable collectibles, the chinese are very good at making fakes. Take a pricey watch, like the Rolex Daytona 116500LN (unobtaimium at a dealership, MSRP $13 K or so but impossible to get, so they went up to $40 K used [but never used])... Well you've got chinese counterfeit, like Noob factory and others, where they even number the revisions and each revision is better than the last one.
Journalists asks a counterfeiter "but how comes you improved so much between v5 and v6 and it's now impossible to tell the watch appart without opening it?" and the counterfeiter answers: "We watch your YouTube videos where you compared our v5 to a real one and see everything we missed that you noticed and we fix these".
Fakes are so good now a percentage of the parts can be swapped for real ones (meaning there's also now an issue of "frankenwatch": bad guy takes one real one and two fake ones and creates two "frankenwatch", which both have parts of the original, making them even harder to tell from real ones seen that they're each partially the real thing).
I've got all my Magic the Gathering cards from the nineties. Some are worth 4 digits a pop. I know there are insanely good chinese fakes now. There's one way to tell certain fakes with a magnifier but don't be fooled: chinese counterfeiters are watching all the YouTube vids about how to tell fakes from real cards and are enhancing their process. And if it requires "magic" fingerprint, they'll modify their printing process to be able to reproduce even those hidden dots.
Wizards of the Wokes (sorry, Wizards of the Coast) tried to fix the issue by adding holograms and foils and whatnots but even that the chinese can of course copy and, anyway, it's mostly the old, simplest to copy, cards that are worth $$$$ (except for some unique cards like the "One ring" from the "fat goldberry", "asian gandalf" and "black aragorn" edition of Lord of The Rings. Yup, Wizards of the Wokes went full DEI, so full left that their brains fell out of their skulls and they really did black aragorn, asian gandalf and fat golderry -- certainly as an homage to Tolkien's legacy and certainly to please Tolkien's fans). So Wizards of the Wokes: from the bottom of my heart, go fuck yourself!)
I guess the whole smartphone thing answers that question far better than a printer...