On 13/07/2019, Jonathan Drews <> wrote: > Hi Folks: I need some recommendations on what brand of printers will > work > with Ghostscript (Postscript). The cartridges for my 15 year old HP > Deskjet have gotten too expensive. I know Xerox makes some > Postscript printers. Are there any other manufactureres of Postscript > printers? I am running OpenBSD 6.5 as a desktop. Any advice would be > appreciated. Also, I just want to use printcap and lpd. I would like to > avoid CUPS. Kind Regards, > Jonathan
I don't have advice on what's a good PostScript printer or PS printer brand, however here's why I personally consider Xerox a bad vendor and bad actor, because here's what's wrong with my Xerox Phaser 6130N: * It comes with steganography built in.[1][2] They never tell you about this. Do you trust that NONE of the recipients of any letters you print will ever extract the stego-info establishing a link between that printer and you, making that printer more or less personally identifiable to you? (That's assuming you're not in huge free-for-all communal living with a very large unmonitored "anyone can print here" pool.) Do you trust all recipients to not sell that valuable info to the highest bidder or national political police[3], so in case you ever engage in any whistleblowing[4] or activism, or truthful journalism about, say, Venezuela, Russia, Iran, the Five Eyes and the NSA will already have your info on file?[5] Btw., if you register your purchase like Xerox want you to, that link to you is established by default. Apparently they've a built-in RTC too since they secretly timestamp your documents as well; because *that's* useful to you. All without your prior knowledge and consent. So they advertised a printer that I bought and paid them for based on their offer and representation, but unbeknownst to me at the time, the printer had a surveillance anti-feature built in that significantly undermines my privacy every time I use it. Xerox do not let me turn the spy dots off either, because they're not there for me, they're there against me. If I sold the girl next door an electric shower with a camera built in that spies on her without her prior knowledge and consent every time she uses it, what would you think of me? That's what I think of Zerox, and I'm keeping that typo because nomen est omen. Worse, Xerox apparently pioneered this. They invented this. It wasn't just, some secret court in a totalitarian country forced them to. They went out of their way to mislead their customers into significant vulnerability and privacy liability. In this, Xerox's business by misrepresentation and then exploitation is unethical to the point of fraud, and to the extent it's organised and they've done this secretly, in bed with TLAs, Xerox are a RICO. Do you want to buy a printer from your friendly neighbourhood RICO? I would have sued their arse over it, it was just, I was not doing so well at the time, and couldn't deal with fighting an additional battle, so I felt I had no choice but to keep using the printer for the time being, and that's turned into years, and in fairness, I still have issues. Not everyone is equipped to get into a fist fight with a RICO. That doesn't mean I approve or consent, just that my energy and options are limited. * The printer has alignment issues. They're not severe, but if you do any crafting etc. where you expect the page to be exactly centered, it won't be. I've never figured out how to fix this on the printer, and trying to compensate elsewhere is a PITA. * The printer has colour management issues. They're not severe, but a colour page may be printed a tad too dark, and compensating in e.g. GIMP by brightening things up there before printing is a stupid hack. * The printer has toner adherence issues, where a full-colour print may throw lots of toner onto the paper and especially some of the darker toner won't properly stick to the paper and may flake off. This may be related to the colour management issues too, i.e. it's trying to fuse an excess of toner. In fairness, I now buy refill toner because fuck giving Xerox any more money, and it may be that this is slightly worse on non-original toner -- maybe. I'm sure Xerox would eagerly say that's the only reason, but in my experience, not really. Also, any deliberate incompatibility with third party COTS toner is an anti-feature too. Oh, and Xerox put an ID chip in their toner cartridges too for pretty much mostly that reason. * The fuser broke too soon, after not much use and had to be replaced. I'm sure Xerox would also pick up on that as an excuse for the toner adherence issues, but not in my experience, it's happened before as well. Apparently a plastic cogwheel split just from heat from just leaving the printer on standby, which I didn't even do that long or that often, not anything like in a commercial office. Is there an alternative? I still don't know, but would also appreciate advice, just like you. It is of course possible that any non-Xerox vendor not known to include printer steganography may include some anyway, just in a more sneaky way not currently known. I don't think that exculpates Xerox. On this too, any advice or insight would be welcome. Ian PS: I've never gotten just printcap and lpd to work, but that's probably because I'm wildly incompetent. It's probably best not to ask me for printer setup and configuration advice. [1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganograpy#Printed> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code> [2] And yes, I've confirmed and looked at the dots with my own eyes. [3] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Bureau_of_Investigation> [4] what's happening to Julian Assange being the textbook example how dangerous an activity even merely whistleblower-supplied journalism can be, not to mention how dangerous whistleblowing is [5] Xerox printers. Chilling effects guaranteed. Well, once you figure out that we're tracking you.
