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by jimbob45 1912 days ago
So I guess if you wanted to print something untraceably, the solution might be to print your message out on newspaper from a non-local city?
6 comments

Type writer, mimeograph, stencils - if you're just doing text or intend for large distribution.

Buy a cheap printer with cash, from a location several hundred kilometers from you.

Go to a non-local Staples, FedEx, Kinkos with a USB stick, pay with cash for copies/printing. Better yet, pay someone else to do it for you.

A throwaway printer is probably your best practical option.

Other than that, using a vintage dot-matrix printer with a low enough resolution (e.g. a 9-pin head) that it's unlikely to have either the smarts or the resolution needed to make this work.

Of course, this just means that if you are conspicuously buying a curated collection of vintage printers, you're providing another type of evidence.

Imagine The Wire episode when Presbo tells McNulty, Daniels, and Lester that the C-level execs were printing out their instructions on burner printers
Maybe you could 3D print a plate containing the document you want to print, raised and mirrored (like a printing press, but without movable type), and then ink the plate and press it onto a blank piece of paper.
I mean, at this point, might as well just 3d print a moveable type...
EFF seems to think that all modern laser printers have some form of tracking dots, whether or not they've actually been able to detect them [1].

They don't say anything about inkjet, though. Unclear if this is because of a fundamental limitation of inkjet printers, lack of interest, or just because inkjet printers kind of suck compared to laser. :P

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

Or a non-fancy laser printer?
Also i'd like to mention https://github.com/dfd-tud/deda