I'm beginning to think the MIB show up to any nerd's house who starts an equivalent of OpenWRT project, for printers. Can't have untracked speech, need to be able to surgically strike certain founts of inconvenient memes. This sort of thing is why my craigslist sourced b&w laser printer is on its own VLAN with a CUPS server playing go-between. Nobody consented in an informed manner to Niantic's operation for the last decade+. Nobody consents to their every print being traceable. There is nothing, <i>nothing</i> about the product or process which warns the device owner or user that "Lack of obvious visible identifiers in the output does not mean it is identifier-free (steganographic identifier)." Just like nobody consents to the Universal Machines in our products being locked down to the point that even we the owners can't repurpose them as we see fit. We as peoples have come to accept the barrage of insults from commercial and state entities, that it's either a shit-sandwich or no-sandwich at all (plus a beating). Louis Rossmann's Consumer Action Taskforce (CAT) is becoming a great anthology of what I am talking about in this regard.<p>It's time to fight back! Let's start hacking the good printers out there, get their firmwares replaced with something viable, and start divorcing this nonsense. These tracking dots and other steganographic tracking methods exist precisely to track people like me and silence me, people who point out the occulted control methods, people who spread memes deemed information hazards and malinformation by the giant onyx squid.<p>[/rant]