Free Republic

Greetings computer guru FReepers, In 2009, my sister bought, new, an HP CLJ9500MFP color laser printer/copier. Over the past 2 years things were going along well. Until about a week ago. Last week, she started getting an error "REPLACE TRANSFER KIT" and the printer would not print the jobs she tried sending to it. Now the Transfer Kit is supposed to be good for 200,000 copies, and she has only printed somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 copies. When she checks the available supplies for the toner and transfer kit, the printer shows that 94% is still available on the...

Tiny dots produced by some laser printers are a secret code that can allow the government to track down counterfeiters, a new study concludes, raising the hackles of privacy advocates. The Electronic Frontier Foundation said its researchers recently broke the code behind the tiny tracking dots and said the US Secret Service confirmed that the tracking is part of a deal struck with selected color laser printer manufacturers to identify counterfeiters. "We've found that the dots from at least one line of printers encode the date and time your document was printed, as well as the serial number of...