(Because if they don't... who knows; their printer shipment could be delayed at customs, their accounting practices could receive extra scrutiny, there could be a witness that says the CEO was seen at the scene of that murder. Who says the US is not a police state?)
Also, why not get one of these yellow-dot printers and just have your printer driver add additional yellow dots to it? Then when you counterfeit money, the Secret Service will go after someone else. BRILLANT.
Its easier to disable a security measure you know than praying there isn't a security measure you don't know.
There is still a chance of a redundancy but I believe it is somewhat lower - as normally companies would do the bare minimum to comply with a directive like this one.
The trouble is that, for one dubious reason or another, a lot of modern laser printers will refuse to print without a complete set of cartridges that report that they contain sufficient toner. Whether the colour in question is actually required and whether enough toner is physically present do not seem to be relevant.
Because I'm guessing that would be a fast read.
1) Why do manufacturers do this? Is it for their own internal warranty control / tracking, or is there a broader federal mandate motivating this?
2) The dots are only useful in after-the-fact analysis, correct? If I print something and then there's reason to suspect me they can print something, compare, and verify, but there's no mechanism to find the initial document and find the printer, correct?
This seems like a lot of effort to prevent the stupidest form of counterfeiting, and doing nothing against the real problem.
Then again, I wonder if they'll stop accepting cash for printer purchases if enough people did that (like they did with iPads)
I'm actually a bit spooked by this and it must be illegal somewhere. Well done EFF for publicising this.
I won't be registering my laser printer any time soon.
They could always use the lego printer http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1397675