[everdrive]

>Note that all printers have "invisible to the human eye" yellow dotcodes, which contain their serial number, and in some cases even the public IP address when they've already connected to the internet (looking at you, HP and Canon).

I've got a black and white brother printer which uses toner. Is there something similar for this printer?

[gramie]

I believe that this only exists for colour printers. The official reasoning was to trace people counterfeiting money.

[nwallin]

It's only there for color printers.

A tiny yellow dot on white paper is basically invisible to the human eye. Yellow ink absorbs blue light and no other light, and human vision is crap at resolving blue details.

A tiny black dot on white paper sticks out like a sore thumb.

[IshKebab]

Yes, the data can be embedded by modulating the laser.

But I've only seen research showing that it's possible. As far as I know nobody has demonstrated whether actual laser printers use that technique or not.

[cookiengineer]

> black and white brother printer

excellent choice, that's what I am using. Also it's Linux / CUPS compatible and without a broken proprietary rasterizer.

[contingencies]

Same thing here. A few years ago I bought three brands of printer-scanner combos for our R&D office, returned the others. Brother was the least broken despite still not being perfect. Issues include broken scanning drivers and fake toner warnings at ~1/3 level.