First, the reason inkjet printers use color ink for monochrome documents is pretty well known. While there is no doubt a degree of "profit optimization," there's a printing benefit to doing so. Most inkjet printers, because of the properties of the ink used, cannot produce very good blacks with only their black ink. It's standard to use some magenta and blue to 'deepen' the black which produces a subjectively better result. On many printers you can toggle this off, either on the printer or in the print driver. But, and here's where the profit optimization comes back, on a lot of cheaper printers especially you can't (although this might have more to do with the general lack of configurability of inexpensive printers). This technique is unnecessary for laser printers because of their different properties (toner is an opaque material bonded to the surface of the paper; ink is a liquid with a degree of transparency that is absorbed by the paper).

There's also an argument made by inkjet manufacturers that cycling the color cartridge is important to keeping the print head ready for use, although I don't think it's really that big of a motive since with some firmware work they could just run the cleaning cycle on the color cartridge for each print job (although, once again, a lot of this comes down to cheap printers being built around commodity controllers with very little configurability or intelligence in general).

Second, MIC-type dot markings are associated only with laser printers. The concept was developed within the laser printer industry and does not work as well on inkjets due to the higher level of bleed and poorer halftoning of very faint colors. I am not aware of any inkjet printers that print these types of dots; I would not be surprised to learn that there are a handful (particularly in the higher-end photographic market) but it's certainly not common. The EFF, for example, says that no inkjet printers do so. There's probably not much value to printing tracking dots anyway, because inkjet output is usually more obviously different from offset printing than laser (poorer color saturation and density), which makes inkjets unappealing for counterfeiting. There are, of course, a whole different class of "giclee" printers with excellent output quality (is HP Indigo still king?) but they're specialty devices and tracking dots only appear on consumer and office equipment.

[1]: https://superuser.com/questions/409473/how-to-print-in-black...

Obviously this is not going to work out well if you actually print in colour.

Is this a federal (US) mandate or a law in any other country?

How come?

The police found it very difficult to investigate because no-one wanted to have paintings they had spent money on to be discovered to be fakes.

The forger was given community service, changed his name to match the artist and served his sentence by painting and signing a mural.

So if this stirs up a large controversy, it might actually make the fakes, especially the signed ones, collectibles as well. Probably never the value they first had, but I hope the wistle blower can recover some of his losses.

https://www.elitefourum.com/t/many-of-the-pokemon-playtest-c...

My memory is fuzzy, but it was something like "Kai looked at a few of the boosters in a practice draft, and then was able to tell us (something) about the cards that should be in the remaining packs just by reasoning about print sheets."

I'm sure I'm getting the details wrong here - I'm not positive that it was Kai, and I don't have a good enough mental model of print sheets to know what was possible back then. And I think these skills aren't relevant today (?)

But I thought it was a fascinating detail. It's always fun to hear about the wrinkles that serious players of a game pick up on in order to find an edge.

(I've searched for the story a few times and haven't been able to find it; I just don't remember enough about it now)

edit: some discussion below, but I think the story here is approximately "Kai memorized all possible print runs, which was feasible to do back then, and was therefore able to back out which cards had probably been drafted and who was probably holding them" or something like that. Nothing about reasoning about runs across boosters!

I am amazed by how much value is protected by such a small technological detail

If you add a fifth ace to a deck in the middle of a poker game, that’s cheating. If poker decks were printed without aces but aces were allowed, then why should anyone care how you got these four aces, as long as they were shuffled fairly into the deck? Just play the damn game.

If I'm understanding the post correctly, these counterfeit cards were claimed to be from an early playtest which would in fact have been printed on normal consumer/office grade printers and not using a commercial large scale printing process. Some of the fakes are noted to actually have two sets of dots, one set from the original printer and another from whatever was used to make the fakes.

I found a "used" copy on AMZN which was obviously a fake with inkjet printing on the box and the disc, metadata on the disc indicating it was a DVD+R, etc.

Served Disney right.

IMO it's more likely that "grading" is just a joke.

Maybe the original designer wants to make a few more dollars.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

The difference is that DRM is designed to prevent you from copying something, while watermarking is designed to make you dox yourself if you copy something. I've yet to see evidence that EURion et. all actually stop counterfeiting, but watermarking has been very effective at finding counterfeiters.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots

[1] Most DRM is intended to enforce copyright; but the state is not asserting copyright over the image of a banknote. There are cases where it is legal and moral to completely reproduce a faithful image of a banknote, and those cases are much broader than the various exceptions to copyright that exist.

People have purchased these CGC cards on ebay assuming they were legit based on the above certifications. It looks like total cards is something like 6 test decks of 26 cards of the alpha prototype - so the rarest example is fairly small, but I think it goes up as they got to later pre-release versions. Furthermore, there are some cards that were signed by Akabane (a co-creator of the game) and those have the presence of the yellow dots - meaning those are most likely not legit pre-production cards. One of those signed cards was sold for $200k I believe - https://www.cgccards.uk/news/article/13661/

So total financial impact of this directly in low millions?

This reddit thread has more reddit style conversation about it w/ some data mixed in https://www.reddit.com/r/PokeInvesting/comments/1ibjlch/poke...

Are these dots why some printers refuse to print b&w when you have no yellow left?

And there were many before him. Wikipedia writes that "in 2016, a relic of True Cross held by Waterford Cathedral in Ireland, was radiocarbon dated to the 11th century by Oxford University."[1]

Authentic collectibles are a timeless scam.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Cross

But there’s also a batch identified as “high quality” that don’t have dots on the front printing, which if genuine would point to some printers not doing it at the time.

[1] There were like, 3, and the thread has a spreadsheet showing that well over a thousand prototypes were graded in the last few months. Not sus at all.

I dont think ink, on it's own, has a 70 year shelf life either.

And, aside from having the setup to print stuff with, you still need the source material (presumably printing plates or whatever) which is where the actual forging comes in. Assuming it was printing plates lets say, you'd need to copy them to a microscopic level along with every dot on a matching comic book.

That's probably quite hard.

But one thing I want to note is that this scenario does not strike me as too different from "what if I had bought or mined 100 bitcoin while they were still cents each", which would actually have required significantly less effort and even foresight.

I don't think anyone originally thought that comic books for kids sold at newspaper stands would ever become collector's items with such a massive value, so it would probably have been rather bizarre for someone to do what you suggested, especially since the many factors that you mentioned alone mean that some explicit planning for this scenario is likely required for things to actually fall into place that way. I'm eager to be proven wrong, of course.

But once you get too many, something would be noticed. Everything would match, but the ink wouldn't have been on paper long enough, that kind of thing.

And the space and requirements to keep everything in wait - would be more hassle and expense than just stockpiling copies of every comic ever made.

This is probably near the high watermark of cost because it's one of the earliest versions but a signed one might bump it up even higher.

https://goldin.co/item/1995-pokemon-alpha-prototype-25-pikac...

https://goldin.co/buy/?search=pokemon%20prototype&sort=Highe...

As for the article, it's posted to a niche specific community site, they're naturally going to explain less because the readers already have the context. These cards are expensive and sought after and there's a plausibly massive number of fakes out there.

- "Nightmare for the KGB: The Advent of Photocopy Machines"

- "In the early 1960s the Soviet ruling elite—in this case, the KGB’s Fifth Directorate, responsible for ideology and counter-subversion, and the Agitprop Department, the party’s main watchdog over “ideological” matters —imposed special procedures for introducing newly invented photocopying machines. The procedures were designed to prevent the use of photocopying machines for producing copies of materials viewed as undesirable by the authorities."

- "Decades earlier, a similar approach was used for typewriters. Proprietors of offices and stores had to provide local KGB branches with sheets of paper showing examples of the font of every typewriter they had. These sheets enabled the KGB, using technical procedures, to determine the origin of any typed text."

- "In one case that occurred at my present place of employment—the Institute of World Economy and International Relations—the KGB traced an “illegal” social-democratic-oriented journal advocating “socialism with a human face” to a typewriter belonging to the secretary of the Institute’s director. Only a few dozen copies of the journal had been produced, but this proved to be enough to put five or six young people in jail for a year. The Institute’s director fired his secretary, who had permitted her son-in- law to use her typewriter to produce the illegal copies."

- "The only typewriter I knew of that could not be traced by the KGB was one I had in my home. It had been presented as a gift to my father, Soviet statesman Anastas Mikoyan, when he made an official trip to East Germany and visited a factory there that produced typewriters."

https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/Eroding-the-Soviet-... ("Eroding the Soviet “Culture of Secrecy”, Sergo A. Mikoyan (2001))

> Other methods of identification are not as easily recognizable as yellow dots. For example, a modulation of laser intensity and a variation of shades of grey in texts are feasible. As of 2006, it was unknown whether manufacturers were also using these techniques.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots#Comparab...

Anyway, users also report this problem when running out of cyan or magenta. Either rich blacks are enabled or the printer is just a bad product.

See here for a bit more background: https://www.cgccards.com/news/article/13347/

For Mtg cards, the green dot test is very easy to learn, and I’m not familiar with any fakes that pass it.

(Edit: arguably you have to worry about rebacking with the green dot test, but rebacking is typically pretty fishy looking.)

That can be selection bias too.

Maybe the counterfeits where there is nothing wrong with the registration of colours are just not recognised as counterfeits.

Similarly how seemingly every hacker you can hear about in the news are bad at opsec. Because you wouldn't hear about them if they weren't.

https://youtu.be/6_kKR7YgPF4

Sadly never got around to shipping it, because it worked really well. Ported it to the web, but never figured out the billing issue, and so it died during the delivery phase. From time-to-time, I still wonder if I should resurrect this project, because I think it could help a lot of people.

Then we just have to solve all the other problems :)

The working set of data needed for this type of thing could probably be stored in a couple TB - small enough to be in a single (beefy) server's RAM.

"Printing a letter" is something I doubt anyone is doing in any meaningful percentage that this makes sense. A person printing a single small book they didn't want to buy is printing more pages just that one time than they will ever print with their name on them in their whole life.

Many ppl speculate on TCGs just like other securities

There's cheaper strategies in most formats though that you can still get wins with, Red Aggro decks are usually pretty cheap to build and have a decent win rate. You'll rarely place highly in tournaments with it but that's true for most people and most decks.

Guy B: LOOK EVERYONE, "GUY A" WINKED AND NUDGED!!

There is not even a per-vendor database of printer->owner mapping.

To chase this kind of evidence a detective will have to a) find a technie to decode the dots for them, b) contact the printer manufacturer and ask if they can map a serial number to a retailer. c) contact the retailer to ask if they can map a serial number to a store. d) IF the store keeps a track of who buys which serial number, they can look that up, but otherwise e) ask for a rough data range of when that printer serial # was sold (query restock levels, etc, this MAY be doable via the retailer corporate level. and f) examine store CCTV if the printer was purchased within the X months that the store keeps their footage for.

It's at best a 3 day job, but in reality it will take a week for all the back-and-forthing with the various contacts, and there's a very very good chance that any one, or all, of the contacts will want a warrant.

It's not happening for a trivial 'someone posted a poster criticizing immigration policy', it might happen for a kidnapping (possibly if it's someone famous), particularly heinous CSAM user or rape, almost certainly for a murder or direct child abuse, and definitely for serial killers.

And all it takes for the whole week to be pointless is the criminal to buy a printer from a yard sale or somewhere else where cash can be used to buy a used printer.

No such thing with the 4k?

When I was younger, I thought this was a good idea. The problem with this rule is that where the boundary between "individual freedom" and "somebody else's freedom" lies varies a lot between different people (and cultures).

It also required deep pockets, as just playing the shoe enough to sort it could take a few hours of regular gambling. That's the crazy thing, this elaborate setup just got them a few % edge on the house which they milked relentlessly.

To be honest, I haven't been to a MtG tournament in decades, so take that all with a grain of salt. But it should be _relatively_ accurate.

I mean I don't mind so much, I had a MTG period some years ago (we'd play during work breaks) and got two of the same card (one of the Planeswalkers), which appreciated in value to about €35 at the time; I sold them online and recouped a lot of the money I had put into the hobby. That said, I will have a look to see how much that card is worth nowadays <_<.

edit: phew, just a little less than it was ~10 years ago.

Part of the 2008 financial crisis was that lenders were giving loans out to anybody, and then even though information was available showing the low likelihood of paying back those mortgages the rating agencies rated the bundles of mortgages as high quality low risk.

So the problem starts with loans going to anyone, but the crisis was caused by ratings agencies wanting to keep clients rather than do their jobs.

Banks had plenty of options, they purposefully decided not to use them.

Edit now that I’ve read the article: I appreciate that it appears that the museum wasn’t dismissive of the claims and verified the forgery with their own analysis. But the original article was posted on the museum’s website, so who knows.

One of my favorite examples is Gibson replica guitars with period-accurate serial numbers, but the serials are intentionally stamped during the wrong step in the painting & finishing process to signal that they weren't assembled at a Gibson factory.

I have a (casual, goofy) deck with some proxies and I earnestly cannot tell the difference when they're sleeved.

https://github.com/Card-Forge/forge

It works with how they imagined the game would sell: somebody in a game group convinced their friends to buy a few packs, they make decks, and play the game as a quick palette cleanser between longer board or roleplaying games. It's also the reason anteing cards was part of the original default ruleset: if people only made decks with a few packs of cards, the game would get stale. So ante meant the cards would rotate through the group and encourage them to alter their decks.

On the other hand, the ridiculous costs mean it's very easy to find like-minded people to play casually with using bootleg cards.

[0] https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/windows-timer-r...

This sort of thing happens all the time in grading – a later reveal shows that earlier gradings were obviously incorrect in the mind of any collector. That means that they have such a poor objective process as to be no better than subjective analysis.

Graders ultimately sell reputation. Like currency, grading only works if you believe in it. Don't believe the grader? Then their word isn't worth anything. This means as more and more of these issues happen, graders will struggle to retain that trust, and when it disappears it disappears rapidly.

If grading is subjective, then I don't see the value of the process and would consider it a scam, personally.

Having data on every single thing someone does would be handy for all future crimes. Why don't we push for that level of surveillance. Because we are trying to balance with privacy.

The only time a black box ever gets used for that stuff is when an agent of the state or corporation with deep pockets to buy power or other "more equal animal" is trying to get one over of one of us peasants.

When speed is a serious factor it is generally obvious from the results of the crash anyway.

Some of those same people developed the surveillance state and the generation that followed thinks we should all wear Meta glasses at all times for “safety”. Meanwhile the advertisers and authoritarians behind them are snickering.

> Does it not strike anyone else as wrong that a printer that you own has to do the bidding of the government instead of you? [...] Isn't there anyone who believes that your own possessions shouldn't be made to conspire against you?

That's the entire point. Our own possessions are made to conspire against us, and my point was "safety" with quotes. And you seem to support possessions conspiring against their owners in the name of "safety", but that's your choice. Most HNers are against this.