r/technology • u/Well_Socialized • 24d ago

Social Media Reddit Is Restricting Luigi Mangione Discourse—but It’s Even Weirder Than That: The website is attacking the users that made it the front page of the internet.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250313203719/https://slate.com/technology/2025/03/reddit-elon-musk-luigi-mangione-censorship.html
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u/Narrator2012 24d ago

Samizdat (Russian: самиздат, pronounced [səmɨzˈdat], lit. 'self-publishing') was a form of dissident activity across the Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the documents from reader to reader. The practice of manual reproduction was widespread, because printed texts could be traced back to the source. This was a grassroots practice used to evade official Soviet censorship.

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u/fragonomicon 24d ago

The practice of manual reproduction was widespread, because printed texts could be traced back to the source.

To anybody that's unaware, every printer you've ever owned has had Printer Tracking Dots specifically so your government can identify the unique source of printed paper.

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u/Lucky-Clown 24d ago

Time to look into refurbishing some of these old printers

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u/ILPC 24d ago

No printer is safe no matter how old. They were added from the beginning. The very first xerox had them, there are declassified cold war intelligence docs about it. They used them early in the BTK investigation they could tell his notes came from the college printers in wichita but weren't able to narrow it more than that until he sent that disc decades later.

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u/tahlyn 24d ago

An old second hand printer, however, should be harder to trace. Buy a printer second hand in cash and only use it for the intended purpose before disposal.... and how will they know who owns it?

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u/klavin1 24d ago

"who did you sell that printer to?"

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u/harriettehspy 23d ago

The person paying cash…

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u/MagicAl6244225 24d ago

Black and white printers would seem incapable of making this particular mark.

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u/Sadrith_Mora 24d ago

Ah, a reason to break out the ole' mimeograph

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u/SamSibbens 24d ago

You could modify a 3D printer to write text with a pen

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u/ridicalis 24d ago

Could get a vinyl cutter to do this even easier. They're basically glorified plotters already (even shows up as a plotter in device listing), just with a razor instead of a pen.

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u/Ultrace-7 24d ago

You can also defeat this with multiple printers. Print something innocuous, such as a single period, through one printer, and then the thing you're printing, through another. Two separate sets of tracking dots will be printed, confusing efforts to decode the pattern.

This works best if the two printers are the same model, since that would help to ensure that they use the same of the four known encoding schemes. Also, in theory, the best way to mask this would be to print the first sheet(s) days or even weeks apart from the actual printing, to help ensure a broad dispersal of tracking dots which would be impossible to decode.

This is a lot of effort to go through for something which might not get checked, of course, but it's good to know that there are options available.

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u/galaxy1985 24d ago

Typewriters

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u/withywander 24d ago

Trick the printer into thinking the yellow cartridge is still there when it's not.