A story about printer drivers.. Never thrust them. 20+ years ago, when Euro banknotes were new and were still considered toy money..:
*Some* people intended to made a joke and scanned one of these and tried to print it out in black/white.
The result: The printer driver noticed, printed half of the note only and threatened the user with legal actions, prison, provided an url to report himelf etc.
This makes someone wonder what could have happened if there was an established internet connection..

Jo22, that's hilarious. I didn't know it was illegal to photocopy banknotes. Who would be fooled by such a thing?

I didn't know it was illegal to photocopy banknotes.

Well duh, potential attempt of forgery. Although such restrictions across the world is typical lack of understanding of technology from older generation in most governments, which enforce such laws.

Errius wrote on 2020-09-12, 16:08:

Jo22, that's hilarious. I didn't know it was illegal to photocopy banknotes. Who would be fooled by such a thing?

Where I work we had a cashier accept a photocopy of a $100 bill.
Some people just do not pay attention.

Aren't most printers able to detect bills and will refuse to copy or scan them? I remember reading about this at some point

Yes, they identify it by certain pattern on banknotes. Only main ones though, like dollar and euro. Nobody cares about currency from some african republic.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-09-12, 17:16:

Yes, they identify it by certain pattern on banknotes. Only main ones though, like dollar and euro. Nobody cares about currency from some african republic.

Just out of curiosity, I tried making a copy of a $20 bill with my All-in-one, (HP Envy 4520) and it did make a copy.
But it is out of black ink so it looks real bad.

Hm, it seems modern law will allow to photocopy dollar with some restrictions (color, size, etc). That's why your HP printed it.

I had a similar experience with an ESS driver, called Maestro or something like that. It was on a Toshiba laptop with Win98. There was a file in CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT that did who-knows-what, it didn't seem to be necessary either in DOS or Windows. I commented it out, and then it reappeared! I think I came up with a hack to make it stay out, but it's been too long to remember.

Another thing I recall was having two bootable partitions on my harddisk, because the BIOS would let you select booting from C: or D:, and then installing Win95 to one of the partitions and the installer would screw up the other partition so that it wasn't bootable anymore (＃`Д´)

More recently I took a harddisk out of a used laptop and put it in a different one running a different version of Windows. One of the laptops must have had LoJack for Laptops on it. There were a couple of files named RPCNET or RPCNETP that would appear in the SYSTEM32 directory and would cause an error message when booting. Couldn't delete the files from inside Windows. If I deleted them from DOS they would reappear later. Eventually I used a sector editor to search the whole harddisk and found hidden copies of the files. Cleared those out and deleted the ones in SYSTEM32 again and it stayed dead.

I scanned an old style (normal size heads) $20 bill on a late 90s scanner without issue. I guess posting it would be against the law. 😀
I've never tried it on my current scanner (which isn't really that much newer).

Not quite the same as the topic, but I had a Windows 95 game that would automatically update my video driver while it installed. The newer driver was broken on my PC. I suppose I must have been able to reinstall the old driver but that game wasn't worth the trouble.

I want my retro computers to do what I tell them to do and behave, enough with the hand holding! We've got enough of that on our modern rigs

That's how I feel about all computers.
My newest computer is a modern laptop that misunderstood our relationship. I disabled "secure boot" and installed Windows 7 in Test Mode. I'm not ashamed.

What about using a Deskjet 690C, a 12/600PS or other old color printers from the 90's?

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-09-12, 17:46:

Hm, it seems modern law will allow to photocopy dollar with some restrictions (color, size, etc). That's why your HP printed it.

Normally a printer driver won't threaten you with legal action* because that isn't necessary. Modern banknotes contain hidden features (patterns, special textures, holograms) that will prevent an accurate copy from being made because the scanning device in the scanner/printer/photocopier can't handle those security features and the resulting image will have artifacts showing it is fake.

The dollar has long been a notable exception to this, but that has changed in recent times.

* Frankly, this sounds like an urban legend.

Boohyaka wrote on 2020-09-12, 14:46:

Hopefully this can trigger a funny topic - what are your drivers horror stories? I'd say posting about 300+ MB printer drivers could be considered cheating, but please share anyway 😁

Not only printer drivers, audio, video and (some) network drivers make huge installations as well.

Fortunately, except audio drivers (that usually installs their own volume/equalizer/effects application), you can do "minimal" installs for those drivers via the device manager... if you have the tools needed to unpack them first.

Jo22 wrote on 2020-09-12, 16:05:

A story about printer drivers.. Never thrust them. 20+ years ago, when Euro banknotes were new and were still considered toy mon […]
Show full quote

A story about printer drivers.. Never thrust them. 20+ years ago, when Euro banknotes were new and were still considered toy money..:
*Some* people intended to made a joke and scanned one of these and tried to print it out in black/white.
The result: The printer driver noticed, printed half of the note only and threatened the user with legal actions, prison, provided an url to report himelf etc.
This makes someone wonder what could have happened if there was an established internet connection..

Not only banknotes, but passports and ID documents are forbidden as well. In most office printers / copiers that limitation is written at firmware level, but I don't think they'd report you.

There are some articles on internet about how the machine identifies a legal document, it's not a secret. As a hint, copiers would make a copy of a banknote if zoomed/stretched beyond some limits... but keep on mind that color printers also prints a pattern that makes easy to relate a copy with a unique machine (the pattern codifies the serial number).

How can anyone be fooled by those copies? Just remember that there is a huge leap in quality between home machines, office machines and production printers. And even an "average" quality banknote can pass as an original on a dark, noisy, dirty bar or night club.

Miphee wrote on 2020-09-13, 07:37:

What about using a Deskjet 690C, a 12/600PS or other old color printers from the 90's?

Most stuff that came in floppies won't make a huge installation, and 90's stuff is not likely to connect to internet. Still they could alter your autoexec/config, but (except winprinters, and those usually didn't have DOS drivers) no printers would need to install something on your init files.

And even an "average" quality banknote can pass as an original on a dark, noisy, dirty bar or night club.

You can't replicate certain texture and metal/plastic strip of modern currency on such hardware. So chance of success is increasingly low.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-09-13, 08:34:

And even an "average" quality banknote can pass as an original on a dark, noisy, dirty bar or night club.

You can't replicate certain texture and metal/plastic strip of modern currency on such hardware. So chance of success is increasingly low.

Precisely. Banknotes use special paper that isn't easily available outside the bank note printers (which usually have very high physical security).

Well, there's the Trident TGUI-9440 1MB SVGA PCI Graphics card that used to default to 75 Hz under Windows 95 making it almost unusable in any graphics mode other than standard VGA with the paltry VGA monitors I could get back then. Any color depth above 16 colors at 640x480 or higher would cause it to run at maximum refresh (75 Hz) - this caused it both not to work, and for anything running at a compatible resolution that would accept that speed to be very dark on some of the worn out, burned out picture tubes I had at the time. To get it to work I had to run it in safe mode, and hack the registry to force a 60Hz mode, or other apropriate refresh, for all modes being used.

My Diamond MX300 sound card had the same issue - modifying autoexec.bat to add DOS driver initialization, even though I selected to not install DOS support when installing the driver. Really annoying, and happened every boot. Luckily there are modded drivers to prevent this. But another way to prevent this nonsense is making autoexec.bat read-only.

My Soundblaster live sb220 w9x driver just takes up just above 150MB for standard install (that's the whole package). With advanced options I can choose the driver only, which reduces the install to just 65MB.

No other w9x capable soundcard I have, best more then 10MB...
So... What on earth were the creative people thinking when clogging up what's supposed to be a few driver files?

There was some HP "all in one" printer/scanner/fax that a relative bought for her computer which at the time was a mostly outdated, 2nd hand Cyrix M2 machine she bought on a budget. It was running Windows 98 and was just used for basic Office and web browsing type stuff. It did those things fine, as this was before the internet turned into scripting hell.
I think her RAM was somewhere around 64-96MB.
The printer "driver" was a big bloated application that ate most of the RAM and slowed her computer to a crawl. That application had to be running or the printer wouldn't work. That "driver" was intolerable, so we had to return it.