They wouldn’t be able to track the printer to you from the fingerprint in that case, but if you ever end up on their radar, that printer is damning evidence even if all the memory on it is pristine clean.

They don’t follow a standard protocol because the industry is dominated by just a few players, and it isn’t in their interests to do that since they want to make customers dependent on them. The industry is dominated in part because the fingerprint tracking creates extra overhead that’s harder for smaller or starting businesses to deal with.

They don’t just have to maintain a database. They have to handle all of the logistics of accurately collecting and entering the data for it. They need legal counsel to get it right. They need to work with distributors and/or retailers to get an idea where they’re going so a fingerprint can be linked to a retail purchase. They have to deal with the inevitable subpoenas at a minimum, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they fulfilled requests without a legal order. It becomes a lot of extra labor beyond just making and selling printers.

We’d have quality printers if it was legal to make an open source one. Unfortunately, every printer is legally required to be a snitch and uniquely fingerprint everything it prints with a discreet dot matrix so the feds can track you down if you print something illegal.

So now, the only companies that can make and sell printers are those capable of and willing to maintain a database of all the printers they sell and the fingerprint they add to all prints.

Your printer is absolute shit because it’s a snitch.

It’s a dying problem, but it’s gonna take a while to finish dying off. Linux is currently mostly used by more technically capable people, so avoiding the terminal has historically been a lower priority compared to getting things to work at all. I think that’s changing as things get increasingly stable and usable with support for popular things like gaming. Once that base functionality is there, more and more attention will turn to polishing the UI and finding ways to hide the terminal.

People are down voting you like your defending them, but you’re not, and you’re right. It sounds like a lot of money, but for Apple, it’s just an adjustment to the profits they made doing this.

Oh god /pol/ is the hot spot now? I can only imagine the cess pit.

Even if legally yes, good fucking luck living through it. If you’re gonna do it, even legally, you better get them all and fucking disappear. At bare minimum, you’re getting an unholy beating by any cop that gets their hands on you. Probably find an excuse to just shoot you.

But then how are they supposed to collect data?

Musk bought Twitter because he fucked around trying to manipulate the stock price and accidentally made an agreement he couldn’t back out of. He tried. He failed. He was forced to buy it according to the terms he previously specified.

I don’t. I’m sure it doesn’t.

You can’t see the cables from the surface. If the maps don’t include them, which was a point I already made, they may have no idea at all what they’ve done, and they may not have any reasonable way at all to predict it. There’s almost 200 million square miles of ocean. How likely do you think it is to drop anchor on a cable? It’s not a reasonable concern a huge portion of the time, and, again, I’m not convinced they know they’re there.

Sure, but will the ocean let your boat stay still? Waves get really big, and storms can lead to intense winds. I don’t see it as entirely unreasonable for these accidents to happen. They should be rare, but with the volume of ocean traffic we have, they kind of are. That isn’t to say we couldn’t do better, but I’m not sure this is a problem that can be 100% solved.

I’m not an expert, but that may not be entirely feasible. Accidents happen. Even if you want to designate no anchoring zones, what about in a bad situation? What if the cable is new and the boat is using maps a year or two old? Do the maps those boats use even include these cables so they can even try to avoid them? Who enforces it in international waters? It’s messy.

And now Mullvad has all the data

The Minsk Agreements only exist as a direct result of Russia shitting on the Budapest Memorandum. The Budapest Memorandum was signed in 1994, and Russia promised to never violate Ukrainian sovereignty if they gave up nuclear weapons. The Minsk Agreements were signed as an attempt to end Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine, whose sovereignty you may recall they promised to never violate just 20 years prior.

Poor widdle Russia had no agency, NO CHOICE, but to invade. They were OBLIGATED to violate the Budapest Memorandum and attempt to seize Ukraine.

he is threatening the reputation and profits of the NFL franchise. This is a more dangerous act than the violation of any law

Holy shit, is it physically possible to lick corporate boot any harder online?

He may be as dumb as one, but he’s more of an oligarch.

Their point is that the Heritage Foundation’s real purpose is to target Wikipedia editors, not address antisemitism. HF doesn’t really give a shit, but it’s a convenient pretext for starting to go after editors.

Oh well it’s in a doodle on the internet, must be gospel-grade truth.