I guess the whole smartphone thing answers that question far better than a printer...
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:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt
Oddly, the HN post above this one right now on the front page is about Xerox source code:
Working on a Printer Paper Jam - Dylan Beattie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhlWSOQ4cC4
My shower doesn't use as much water as I'd like, as the government mandates a flow restrictor.
Why not printers?
Which government, what car feature?
It sounds like idling shutoff that saves you money, reduces pollution, and reduces fuel consumption, eg when you stop to wait for traffic lights?
But where is the limit of freedom? Where is the border we should stop before or fight for it somehow?
I've not heard of any car where you can't turn this off. There is no switch anywhere to turn off watermarking in your printer.
If the government is going to require this, they need to subsidize the yellow ink that I never use, but have to constantly replace.
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.
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.
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.
[2] This knowledge has been public domain since at least 2011: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/social-media-is-a-tool-of-the-c...
What do you mean? I’m confident that 95%+ of the documents I print do not have my name, or the name of anyone who has ever been in my house, on them.
Welcome to the Western Business World. You must be new here.
If you let Fed.Gov pwn your customers, they help you get your product to market.
If (like me) you refuse to help Fed.Gov own your customers, the they shut you down, as they did to me.
Good luck fighting the government.
When you want to forge something, or send your manifesto after serial killings ?
And what are you paying extra ? 0.01 USD per yellow ink cartridge, that is already wildly overpriced due to profiteering schemes ?
I'd happily pay that 0.00001% if that means a stupid serial killer gets caught once in a while.
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.
https://blog.erratasec.com/2017/06/how-intercept-outed-reali...
The police found it very difficult to investigate because no-one wanted to have paintings they had spent money on to be discovered to be fakes.
The forger was given community service, changed his name to match the artist and served his sentence by painting and signing a mural.
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.
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.
If you kill Santa Claus, you must become Santa Claus!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Beltracchi
But he didn't change his name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Tetro
Pretty close to this story, which may have exaggerated a few things.
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.
https://www.elitefourum.com/t/many-of-the-pokemon-playtest-c...
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.
Hopefully that's not the case here, but it's definitely not just a "money to burn" thing..
edit: If you want the very technical version, here's a video from his own channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwnYLvWdNd8
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!
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.
I am amazed by how much value is protected by such a small technological detail
[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.
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.
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.
(Or at least, that's how MtG was originally designed to be balanced; I think this may have changed with MtG Online.)
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?
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).
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.
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 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.
Served Disney right.
This article seems to give a clearer picture:
https://www.pokebeach.com/2025/01/millions-of-dollars-of-pro...
> 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.
https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/grading-firm-wata-i...
IMO it's more likely that "grading" is just a joke.
It'd be naive to expect the pokemon card industry to be better regulated.
Or llc's by departments of state
Maybe the original designer wants to make a few more dollars.
"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."
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.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
[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.
Whistleblowers, too. That's believed to be how they got Reality Winner, because the documents published by The Intercept contained those tracking dots.
Is that a legal requirement on paper somewhere?
It seems like an expensive feature to add if not required.
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?
This reddit thread has more reddit style conversation about it w/ some data mixed in https://www.reddit.com/r/PokeInvesting/comments/1ibjlch/poke...
> 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.
Are these dots why some printers refuse to print b&w when you have no yellow left?
Uh, I mean, because it's because colour ink makes your blacks blacker. Yeah, that's it.
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.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots#Compar...
(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')
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 don't want it causing a complication with prize money or etc if you try to play in a regional tournament and get dqed by this I assume
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.
Reproductions can be fine, but anyone can do them on the cheap.
Brother CMYK printers only skip printing the MIC if they think they're printing an internal test page in maintenance mode.
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]
Authentic collectibles are a timeless scam.
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?"
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
What would their chances of fooling people be?
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.
That's probably quite hard.
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.
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.
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.
This is probably near the high watermark of cost because it's one of the earliest versions but a signed one might bump it up even higher.
https://goldin.co/item/1995-pokemon-alpha-prototype-25-pikac...
https://goldin.co/buy/?search=pokemon%20prototype&sort=Highe...
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.
- "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."
https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/Eroding-the-Soviet-... ("Eroding the Soviet “Culture of Secrecy”, Sergo A. Mikoyan (2001))
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_Riddle is a close second
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots#Comparab...
Anyway, users also report this problem when running out of cyan or magenta. Either rich blacks are enabled or the printer is just a bad product.
At least that's what I thought of, with those dot patterns forming bits.
See here for a bit more background: https://www.cgccards.com/news/article/13347/
For Mtg cards, the green dot test is very easy to learn, and I’m not familiar with any fakes that pass it.
(Edit: arguably you have to worry about rebacking with the green dot test, but rebacking is typically pretty fishy looking.)
That can be selection bias too.
Maybe the counterfeits where there is nothing wrong with the registration of colours are just not recognised as counterfeits.
Similarly how seemingly every hacker you can hear about in the news are bad at opsec. Because you wouldn't hear about them if they weren't.
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.
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)
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.
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)
(thank-you for sharing)
*TCG (Tradable Card Game)
Ehhhhhhhhh, not always
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.
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.
[1]: https://superuser.com/questions/409473/how-to-print-in-black...
Obviously this is not going to work out well if you actually print in colour.
Is this a federal (US) mandate or a law in any other country?
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.
How come?
(* That I have seen evidence of.)
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!)
