> And that typed text is way, way cleaner than any typewriter I’ve seen.
Pedantic point: electric typewriters (which have existed since the 1960s) do type in a way that looks exactly like this.
(In fact, note that the text on the real employee ID card, shown later in the article, doesn't look any less clean! It's just set in a different, narrower font.)
The smudginess of mechanical typewriters comes from 1. them striking (and especially, releasing) at the same speed you're depressing the key, and 2. having many of the keys necessarily approach the ribbon from an angle.
The keys being swung weakly by your fingers, also has the additional implication that the ink ribbons used in mechanical typewriters have to be soft and squishy (so: made of cloth), and use thin inks. These properties ensure a transfer from even a low-velocity impact. But the trade-off is that cloth ink ribbons transfer only a rough outline of what's struck; and thin inks are high-bleed inks.
An electric typewriter, playing out a pre-buffered line with a crisp, predictable report, using linear actuators and a rotating-ball type-head to bang a tape ribbon loaded with high-viscosity ink onto the page, can create text indistinguishable from books/newspapers of the same period, or from modern laser-printer reproductions of the same font faces. They're essentially character-at-a-time letterpresses!
(Also, ignoring electric typewriters for a sec: inks bleed more on thin, cheap paper. But this is [a forgery of] an employee ID card — where, for durability, a nice heavyweight paper or cardstock would have been used. You're always going to get a better-looking result inking such paper.)
> An electric typewriter, playing out a pre-buffered line with a crisp, predictable report, using linear actuators and a rotating-ball type-head to bang a tape ribbon loaded with high-viscosity ink onto the page
The machine you just described is an IBM Composer, except the ribbon was not "high viscosity". Rather it was essentially solid, being a carbon ribbon with a mylar back.
Most electric typewriters were not Composers, so they did not pre-buffer lines. In fact most electric typewriters were not Selectrics so they didn't even use a ball. The IBM Executive for example used swinging type bars just like a manual typewriter, and it produced excellent copy that was frequently used as a master for offset lithography. (Source: Me. I used to own a print shop.)
The presence or absence of swinging type bars, pre-buffering, or balls makes no difference. Carbon ribbons and the repeatability of impression that electric provides are what matter.
Swinging type-bars in general weren't a problem; it was the kind of swinging type bars used in (later) "manual" mechanical typewriters that were. (And also, that's not what I mean by "buffered.")
The oldest (late 1800s) mechanical typewriters were designed simply, with type mechanisms engineered under the assumption of a slow hunt-and-peck typist who would only be pressing one key at a time.
And this worked well, until typing as a skill developed, and people began to activate keys concurrently (with one type-bar potentially beginning to swing forward, before a neighbouring type-bar finished its return.) This caused the neighbouring type blocks on the end of the bars to end up binding together — usually at the end of their bars' travel, causing both keys to remain stuck down.
According to folk history, this type-bar-binding problem was solved in part through the development of the QWERTY layout — moving frequently-successive English-language letter-pairs so that they wouldn't be done using neighbouring keys. Regardless of the veracity of that, this still didn't truly solve the problem — early QWERTY typewriters still end up binding for many common words.
Later mechanical-typewriter manufacturers sought to solve this problem "for real", through internal engineering tweaks. Look up patents from the early 1900s-1920s, and you'll see many of these proposed. But one two-part approach stood out, and became nearly-universally adopted:
1. chamfering and carbon-lubricating the edges of the type blocks on the end of the type-bars; and then
2. allowing the type-bar linkages a bit of horizontal travel.
These two tweaks together, allowed the type blocks on the end of the type-bars to slip past one-another (at least when travelling at differing velocities, or with one rising and the other falling.) And this virtually eliminated binding — but not without trade-offs.
Mechanical typewriters with these fixes, have a slight looseness to the type-bars, and so a slight random wobble in the horizontal placement of type on the page (especially when the key was depressed slowly). And if two neighbouring keys are depressed in quick succession, either one or both keys are liable to shove the other slightly, resulting in one having quite a bit of horizontal displacement, and even a slight "edge-on impact" where one side of the type doesn't get fully inked onto the page. These characteristics can be easily observed in type specimens from the early 1900s, to the point that they are often used to date such specimens.
Nobody wanted to use these typewriters for professional typesetting if they could help it; they were just too "sloppy" at that point. (The earlier designs weren't, but the typebar-clash problem was just too bad for any "modern" professional typist of the era to volunteer to use them.)
The introduction of electromechanical typewriters in general, allowed large changes to the type-bars and type, for the same reason that drive-by-wire in cars allowed large changes to the transmission and linkages: without a sloppy human in the circuit, things could be far more crisp. Key-clashes could be solved without mechanical slop; and so the mechanism could be tightened back up.
At first, electromechanical typewriters — having nothing like a memory — were instead wired in a blocking fashion to avoid key-clashes. If you pressed two neighbouring keys in quick succession, the second key would "jam", refusing to depress until the first one returned. Essentially, all neighbouring pairs of keys were interlocked. This made typing on them very annoying — but required no fiddling to unstick, just a very attentive approach to typing, involving watching/feeling for unstruck keys, immediately stopping to re-key them. And the results were very crisp. So these typewriters were one of the first "enterprise hardware" — forced on typists (who didn't like them, but did tolerate them) by companies who wanted clean typed reports.
The next natural step was to turn the blocking solution into a non-blocking / asynchronous one. This was done through one-key buffering — with the typewriter using two loops of analogue(!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory as registers, to hold alternating key actuations and then play them back out. For most key actuations, this replay was instantaneous, with the electrical linkages to the type-bars being actuated concurrently. But neighbouring keys, again through electrical interlocks, would "put a hold on" their sibling key's replay (if that was the key struck) until their own replay was done. (One could compare/contrast these typewriter mechanisms with pinball-machine mechanisms, both being invented around the same time.)
When digital electronics came along, the delay-line memories were now storing digital serial codes instead of parallel electrical voltages; and the number of bits able to be buffered and refreshed in the delay-line memory increased, so multiple keypresses of neighbouring keys, or the same key, could be buffered as fast as they could be pressed, and then replayed in sequence. (Some early computer TTYs were built using this sort of typewriter platform!)
Some electronic typewriters in the late 1960s also switched from delay-line memory to the just-invented shift-register memory — which made them much more accessible to the mass-market, rather than only institutional buyers.
And now we get to the original IBM Selectric Composer: it used magnetic tape for memory — and didn't immediately replay it, instead buffering indefinitely until you manually trigger replay.
Which, mind you, isn't what made the Composer really good for printing. The thing that did that, was that the buffering allowed it to measure text and then typeset it using proportional-width type. But this actually required you to type everything twice (in immediate mode) or for it to read the magnetic tape twice (in buffered mode) — so really, the advancement here wasn't the memory, it was the compute. The ability of the Composer to accumulate the widths of keypresses, given a loaded table of widths of glyphs for the font in use, into an accumulator register, was what made "online" proportional typesetting possible.
The Composer's use of external magnetic tape, also enabled the use of a cheaper sibling (the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_MT/ST) to input the text and test-print it monospaced; while the Composer would just be used for proportional-type replay. In this use-case, the Composer itself was essentially playing the role of a typesetting machine, rather than a typewriter.
But in terms of printing monospace text cleanly, the Composer wasn't any big advancement. Everything above since the first blocking-key electric typewriter was printing monospace text cleanly. Look at type from (expensive, niche) electrical typewriters from the 1930s on — they'll be crisp†. Telegrams from the period were printed on such machines, and look great.
† Well, okay, there'll be some bleed; those ultra-crisp type edges did indeed only come along with polymer ink ribbons, and those were introduced/popularized along with the first Selectrics. But — presuming a fresh cloth ink ribbon — the type will always be fully inked, square on the page, not smudged, no wobble, no unwanted horizontal offset, etc. Mechanical-linkage typewriters had all of those problems!
It's just that nobody really cared about any of that (other than those companies wanting really clean-looking reports), since nobody was doing offset-lithography mastering using monospace typefaces.
It's only once the marketable use-case changed (with the Composer) that people really started to notice that typewriters had slowly become as good at producing a nice typeset page as a professional publishing house was.
You might be interested in this video about why Gen Z is starting to use typewriters again [0]. In a word, focus. They say they are often too distracted from writing when using a computer as it is easy to surf the web instead of writing your paper, so having a single purpose utility rather than a multipurpose one is actually a boon.
Sounds like we need a single-purpose Linux distro that only runs a word processor. Of course that's not nearly as interesting as using a physical typewriter, but it sure is easier than scanning all those typewritten pages using OCR.
Theres a whole category of products that is just a keyboard with a tiny 3 or 4 lines of text lcd. (google electronic word processor, or Tandy WP-2).
Probably not as popular today as they were back in the early 90s before everyone had a Pc, but I think they're still manufactured.
There were word processors with storage - I can’t remember how they worked but a dedicated typewriter doesn’t mean you can’t also get an electric copy.
I built something similar using a spare ThinkPad x220 I had lying around and a minimal Debian installation. I would prefer something closer to the AlphaSmart Neo line of digital typewriters, though.
Sounds like they need to learn how to deal with this. Turning off notifications might help as well. Eventually typewriter will not work as it's a mind issue and not a tool issue imo.
I don’t think this is true. They might struggle with distractions elsewhere but if they’ve created a ritual out of writing in this distraction free environment they’ve created it will probably always work for them (and maybe better over time). Having the experience of doing things without distraction might also help them ignore distractions elsewhere.
By way of analogy, learning to swim in calm waters helps you learn to swim in rough waters by giving you the experience of what swimming is even like.
For a long time I blamed myself for things being difficult. But self knowledge surely includes knowledge of how conditions affect your nervous system. Totally plausible a given nervous system works better with a typewriter than any networked device. Even like when you have to take a break from the thinking you will be more productive pacing or taking a walk on the grounds than flipping over to y combinator.
Make it easy to be good isn't just a parenting precept, it works to manage yourself as a mature adult as well.
I read an anecdote once that novelist Jonathan Franzen writes on a laptop which has had the WiFi card removed and Ethernet port glued shut. He's pretty successful so whatever works imo.
As someone who was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of two and have dealt with it my entire life I gotta completely agree with you. The quest for quiet is impossible. You will never have completely stimulus free environments. The way our bodies work competes against this whole idea. If you're in a dark room your eyes adjust. If you are in a quiet room your ears basically have a compressor built in. Everything that was in the shadow or in the quiet will eventually make itself known. Thrive in noise, thrive in distraction, thrive in chaos.
Edit: but one thing that is incredibly important is partitioning your workspace. Perform work where work should be performed and keep that separate from where you automatically do leisure activities or seek out pleasurable distractions.
That feels a bit like saying you disagree with farm automation so you fired your oxen and pull the plow yourself now.
There's no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I'm empathetic to the people that feel like they can't focus in commercial operating systems, but their only option is to adapt or fall off. Making MacOS or Windows into a usable and non-distracting environment is basically the only way I have been able to make money in the tech industry. If I told my boss I was switching to a typewriter for efficiency purposes, I'd be gone before the end of the day.
It doesn't even need to be code; I simply can't turn in work physically. If I type out my project notes or Kaizen report in a typewriter, I'll be asked to make a digital copy next. This isn't just programming, everywhere you go is digital-first and would vastly prefer a digitized copy from the start as opposed to OCRing a photo of my typewritten document.
Again - for personal use, go crazy. Nostalgic stuff is fun! This is not a solution for 90% of the workforce though and I would argue that relying on a typewriter for isolation is harming your professional prospects. Apply to any job and compare the reactions you get bringing your typewriter to the first interview with the reactions you get from bringing your laptop.
It's not a strawman at all. The parent claimed "The typewriter is them dealing with it" and I am listing all of the different ways a can typewriter impair you personally.
If you don't care about the way people perceive you, how productive you are, how accessible your work is or how error-proof your product is, maybe a typewriter is for you. I cannot imagine a practical application (even casually) where you would benefit from a typewriter over a word processor and inkjet printer. I say this as someone with a typewriter not 20 feet away from where I'm standing now; they suck.
You are still missing the point of why they use a typewriter. With a word processor on a computer, I can easily start browsing TikTok instead of writing my paper. Not so with a typewriter. Of course, it has its own cons compared to a computer as you state, but to say there are no "practical applications" is wrong, as evidenced by the fact that people do in fact use typewriters as I've stated. If it were not practical at least in some small way, they wouldn't be using it.
> With a word processor on a computer, I can easily start browsing TikTok instead of writing my paper.
Is that a personal problem, or a computer one though? Many people (myself included) have zero issue ignoring Twitter and Instagram while we work. In fact, typing on a computer is much easier than using a typewriter for a number of reasons:
- Don't need to buy ink ribbons or paper to continue typing
- Don't need to stop and switch out stamps to change your typeset
- Can infinitely reproduce a single document as many times as you want
- No white-out or paper strips required when you make a mistake
I don't know if you've ever used a typewriter before, but it should simply be common knowledge that it's the slower and more distracting way to type. Every second you spend using a typewriter instead of getting comfortable with a computer is wasted effort. Every time you take your typewriter apart to make a simple change, that's time you could be spending writing uninterrupted on a digital medium.
> Is that a personal problem, or a computer one though? Many people (myself included) have zero issue ignoring Twitter and Instagram while we work.
Then it's not for you, continue using a computer. It's a personal problem solved by the use of a single purpose technology rather than a multipurpose one, as I've initially stated.
I have used a typewriter and while it can be slower than a computer, some wasted time is better than wasting all one's time because one can't focus and distracts themselves instead. Sounds like you still simply don't get it, and I'm not sure how I can explain it further as I've restated my points several times now that those who use it can't focus when writing on computers.
I don't get it. I also have a typewriter and would rather use Vi to type a term paper than even entertain the thought of switching out LATEX typesets. It's a no-brainer, it's far, far easier to dumbify your computer than it is to modernize a typewriter.
Creative writing can be better accomplished with a typewriter. Imagine yourself in a cabin in a forest, with no electricity. That's extreme, but you get the idea.
Also, having a physical copy of your work >feels< safer.
And amazingly, people did that for a century or so before word processors came along...published books and magazines, too. And before the typewriter, there was pen on paper. People really were creative before computers!
Nah, if you don't set up on a train station platform and do all your work from there you simply have a mind issue and should learn how to deal with distractions
Career writers have been using "dumber" text editors and computer systems to better mentally isolate their work for decades. It's not even an attention thing.
People need all sorts of excuses to just calm their mind and say it’s some disorder.
But I’ve literally never met someone who genuinely tried meditation and it didn’t help them.
I used to run a meditation group at work and the dozen or so people who consistently showed up reported that it changed their life. And I’m no expert I just do breathwork and concentration on a single object like a red dot sticker.
They rather use medication or spend money buying gadgets and toys.
Oh well. Not my problem when the solution is literally built in.
Don't get me wrong, I do believe that behavioural approaches should be tried first. On the other hand, framing the failure of behavioural approaches being the result of not making a genuine attempt is harmful. It may dissuade them from finding more effective treatments for their particular case, or at the very least delay them seeking help.
Medication isn't something they just hand out to anyone who asks. The reason it exists is because there is a large body of scientific research that all points to it helping treat disorders such as ADHD, whether you believe it or not. Meditation may also provide benefits, although there is less scientific evidence today that it does.
>People need all sorts of excuses to just calm their mind and say it’s some disorder.
Get off your high horse. My brain is literally, physically, developed wrong. It's broken. I need treatment, medication, therapy, not a fucking meditation tape. Not that meditation is bad or wrong or worthless, because I used to like it, but it's not medicine.
Do you also insist people with bad vision just try looking harder? Maybe squint a little bit more? Who needs glasses, the fix is built right in!
I am in my 20s and I use a typewriter somewhat regularly to journal. I was raised on computers, getting the jumble from my brain onto paper is faster with a keyboard than a pen/pencil and paper. And a typewriter is nice and analog - no screen, no lights, no battery. I'm disconnected, focused, and performant.
but I'd really like to bring my own keyboard and have the e-ink display at a more ergonomic height. Combine that with Vim, and that'd be something I'd use
You might enjoy some of the full-fledged e-ink tablets (with folio keyboards, iPad style) on the market right now. Some even run Android, so you could definitely find a way to run Vim.
I was just looking at some today but the biggest downside right now is that they're pretty expensive for what you get.
It's kind of surprising that there are no "typewriter OS" based on Alpine Linux, but it's always has to be paired with hardware sales to go past prototype stage as a business, and even then the viability is dubious.
I used to love doodling and drawing, but as soon as I start to write my hand cramps up. I take hand written (short notes) for work and I struggle to read them a month or so later when the context is gone.
I also really struggle to spell, and will consistently get common words wrong.
BUT on a keyboard I can type almost as fast as I can think - and I can also spell 90% better - I don't know how it happens but it is like the words 'flow' out of my fingers when i type - and I can easily spell words that if you asked me how to spell I wouldn't have a clue. Also if you asked me to find you a key on a keyboard I'd have to look - but when I'm typing my fingers just know where they are.
I'm a 44 yo successful man, but I still don't know my alphabet well (for example I couldn't start in the middle or recite it backwards) - but put me in front of a keyboard and I can type all day long (note - I am VERY thankful for spellcheck though!)
I always had similar problems in school growing up. A few things that I've found helpful:
- Try a larger pen. It helps you maintain your grip on the pen without as much effort.
- Try a pen with less viscous ink. If you're used to ballpoints, this can mean e.g. a rollerball. This lets you write without putting much pressure on the page, which at least for me significantly helps to avoid hand cramps. (I use fountain pens these days myself which write with even less pressure, but rollerballs are a more familiar starting point.)
Thanks, I think for me part of the cramp is a mental block - I spent a long time hating writing (and English lessons in particular) and being told I was bad at it/lazy.
but as soon as I could type my essays I loved English and writing.
No it hasn't. Just 1.5 years ago I tried all the latest OCR tools, including AWS, GCP and Azure services, and none of them could consistently and reliably read a receipt printed at a store.
I was OCRing documents with ABBYY or Tesseract in 2000s if not a little bit earlier. I have been OCRing text documents with my phone for the last 6 years or so, with Prizmo.
The iPad, with the Apple Pencil is pretty much there. It’s actually amazingly good. I have terrible handwriting, and it doesn’t seem to have a problem with it.
If anyone ever tried using a Newton, there was a series of Doonesbury comics[0] about its awful handwriting recognition.
I got pretty good at writing with the Newton, but it was me adapting rather than the Newton understanding my natural handwriting (which is fairly neat given my parents are both teachers).
Yup, iPad and Apple Pencil do an amazing job, either with the built-in Notes app or several third party apps. Even better with a screen protector like the Paperlike that gives a little tooth to the screen to make it a bit more like writing on paper.
Oh, I personally don't currently use them. This was in the past, starting from playing around with my Dad's manual typewriter. Took typing course in 8th grade on a manual. Owned a Smith Corona electric in high school. Used IBM Selectrics for school newspaper, etc. I'm old. :-)
Yes, used in the past. I don't currently use them, though I think they are cool mechanical marvels, especially IBM Selectrics. Those were way too expensive to own personally, but were common in offices. My personal typewriter was a much cheaper Smith Corona electric.
For a comment easily disproved by a simple google image search which returns plenty of examples of selectric output where the characters have anywhere to a very subtle but not perfect (like in the badge) alignment, to examples where the characters have "visible at arm's length" vertical and horizontal, and even rotational, issues?
I used to use one, so I was curious. It was hard to find good info by googling, but I eventually came across a presentation which claimed that the Selectric carbon ribbon "consists of a carbon wax coating on a polyethylene base":
> Pedantic point: electric typewriters (which have existed since the 1960s) do type in a way that looks exactly like this.
Wrong. Literally gooogle "selectric type sample" and see dozens of examples of them not typing anywhere near in a perfect line. Maybe machines with very low hours or kept in excellent condition might have excellent spacing, but there's plenty of examples of them obviously not having perfect spacing.
you can also see inconsistent letter spacing, more obvious on some fonts than others, but you can see some characters are connected and others aren't. And no, it's not just the position of the character relative to others on the ball.
As the author points out, these characters have perfect vertical alignment.
Then go look at high speed footage of the 'golfball' in action and you can see the substantial deflection caused by how fast and forceful the movements are. You can see the entire assembly is bouncing around as the rails it's on flex:
To be fair, the specimen shows some misalignment as well, e.g., the "S" at the very beginning is up and a bit to the left, the "Y" is shifted to the right, and there are small irregularities in "NGST", as well. However, I don't think that they add up in a sensible manner.
Notably, the Red Cross invoice is much worse: additionally to what has been noted in the article already, why would you have a hyphen in "Verkäufername"? Also mind the reoccurring use of "#" for "Nummer", which would have been rather unacceptable in a formal German document.
The image provided is so low resolution that this is probably a side effect of the edges of the characters being on the boundary between pixels on the camera's sensor.
Magnify it to full screen and you'll see what I'm talking about.
Now go back and look at the samples I linked to, where you can clearly see vertical misalignment.
I remember everyone in my school system had selectrics when I was a kid, and I assure you, they could produce text that was all over the place. Probably because the ones in a public school saw heavy use / were not properly maintained and serviced to the degree required.
Edit: We can all pretend it's perfectly aligned print, but, regardless, whether purposefully manufactured or genuine, there are obvious misalignments in that image.
There is so much wrong with the faked Red Cross invoice
1) A German date is always written DD.MM.YYYY
2) PLZ not ZIP
3) „Wir danken für ihr Unternehmen“ is a bad translation for „Thank you for your business“ … but it means a complete different thing -> „Thank you for your company“
But I‘m still impressed how much effort this guy put into all this. And I‘m sure my friends would have bought me this badge, because they had no idea it‘s fake.
- Germans use commas as the decimal separator, while periods are only used to separate thousands.
- As stated in one of the linked mastodon posts, the abbreviation for the Deutsche Mark was DM, not DEM
Also, I have no idea how the seller thought the German Red Cross would emboss their paper with a circle of stars. If anything, embossing the cross itself would make the most sense. Probably they had the tool on hand from another forgery where it may have made more sense.
To say nothing of the fact that embossing a document in Germany, and Europe in general, is extremely rare and certainly not common on your garden variety receipt or invoice (basically never). They were a bit more common pre-90’s though.
Without the aim of trying to insult anyone, frills like that are more common in the US when trying to emphasize the official nature of documents (e.g., notary public embossing).
Even so, on top of all that, it would make exactly zero sense for the embossing to be the EU stars.
It isn’t even the European stars – the Flag of Europe always had 12 stars, whereas the embossing has 16 stars.
“Ah, 16 stars, because Germany has 16 federal states”, you'd say at first thought. But while the German Red Cross organization has sub-organizations, the Landesverbände, those only partially mirror the modern 16 federal states. Some Landesverbände predate the modern federal states and are instead for more traditional German regions. Instead of a single Landesverband for the state of Nordrhein-Westfalen [1] there are two Landesverbände, one for Nordrhein, one for Westfalia-Lippe. In Lower Saxony there is an extra Landesverband for Oldenburg, in Baden-Württemberg there is an extra Badischer Landesverband. That makes 19 regional sub-organizations, but there aren’t 19 stars.
And all of these 19 regional subs predate 2001. I can’t really see a reason for the DRK in 2001 to use 16 stars.
[1] Nordrhein-Westfalen (North Rhine Westfalia) was created forcefully by the British Military Administration in 1946 out of the former prussian provinces of the Rhine and parts of Westfalia (and small Lippe!) in the creatively named "Operation Marriage". Nobody thought a union between the lively Rhinelanders and the laconic Westfalians (and the Lippians!) could work given the differences – but it seems to work mostly great. Nobody thinks of seceding. Must be the first time in history.
Thank you!
So, to paraphrase a Cunningham's Law, "the best way to make a good fake on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong fake."
Future defrauders will love both Cabel's post and this discussion :)
I’ve seen this suggested elsewhere, and I’m not sure I buy into this logic. He’s using deductions based on a broad set of otherwise well known facts and conclusions that would be available to anyone who thought about it enough, and paid close attention to detail. Nothing in this article is arcane knowledge, or even especially esoteric. It isn’t even exhaustive, as additional imperfections have been identified by commenters on the article and in this very thread.
That it’s collected in this one post might be somewhat useful to someone specifically seeking to produce a counterfeit ID badge made to appear as if it had been created circa mid-1970s, but only to a limited extent as the processes used at the time for such things varied much more widely than they would today.
There’s also the fact that the person who performed this fraud was successful, despite this being reported to eBay by multiple sources before the auction concluded. So there’s not much motivation to expend the additional time and energy drilling down farther on tiny details, if their inaccuracy hasn’t caused them to fail thus far.
If anything, I’d imagine this will be useful to prop designers and miniatures hobbyists, who will exert substantial effort to achieve maximal accuracy just for its own sake.
'guy'/'guys' is used without a gender context in certain regions, more like synonyms of 'folks '. I hear "hey guys" routinely in SoCal said without intention of labeling people.
Only in the plural form though, right? I'm in the UK, where the usage you describe is common too, but reading "this guy" like in the comment above, I would assume they're talking about a man.
Even then it's highly context-dependent. Ask any heterosexual man "how many guys have you kissed in your life?" and not a single one of them is going to consider this instance of "guys" as encompassing women.
Your understanding is common in the US as well. Singular “guy” would read as “man” or “boy” while the plural “you guys” can read as gender neutral (though some argue that “you guys” should be avoided in mixed gender groups for being inadequately inclusive). I would expect there are some regional US differences in usage and reactions.
Another red flag: this invoice was issued just days before the EURO was introduced in Germany (1st of January 2022). Invoices issued in these times would have surely shown the amount in EUR as well.
So if you type 459 on a keyboard, a natural jump to something in the middle would be 68. 4-5-9, then 6-8 quickly. Right hand finds another letter "L" and then jumps back into the usual 59.
This is not definite but adds slightly to the suspicion.
Even funnier is that when googling I see some examples of actual invoices/receipts by the German Red Cross. But of course they would need to know what to actually google ;)
I mean I appreciate the effort put into it and to the untrained eye this looks good enough for e.g. movie props. I wonder if the creator is just a professional scammer or works in the movie / reproduction industry?
I find myself fascinated by the forged DRK invoice. At first glance it looks like the shitty desktop formatting common to 2001, its in a German two ring binder, crumpled and yellowed.
But then there are multiple things which are obviously and subtile off, the most glaring is the obviously AI-translated phrase at the bottom. I'd love to know the mind of the forger. They did put some serious work into the invoice but then AI-translated an idiomatic American phrase (wrongly!) which wouldn’t by used on a German invoice.
It’s accepted that the US movies and television industry can’t get contemporary Germany right [1], often for economic limitations of the productions, but something that still get’s me is when the badly pronounced dialogue was obviously written in idiomatic English and only then translated mindlessly word for word, as if other countries cultures and languages are semantically the same, only the words are different. Maybe that’s what happened with the forger - you can’t know there would be differences if you don’t have a sensibility for difference.
>It’s accepted that the US movies and television industry can’t get contemporary Germany right
The US movies and television industry can rarely get any language right. This reminds me of the Dutch-speaking scene in Oppenheimer which no Dutch speaker can understand [1]. It's like a sped-up pronunciation of a nonsense Dutch sentence by an English-speaker trying to speak a horrible German accent.
Also, in "Spider-Man: Far From Home", a 2019 movie with a 160M budget, they go to "The Netherlands" which was shot in Chech Republic, and it looks like Prague but with tulips, with a Polish actor supposedly talking Dutch. And then Spider-Man gets arrested and thrown in a "Dutch" jail which does not look at all like a Dutch jail, but is obviously some middle-european building, which makes sense as "Amsterdam" was shot in Prague too
The video you linked to says that in the movie it's explained that Oppenheimer spoke German, and learned Dutch in a short amount of time. If so, him speaking Dutch with a German accent seems appropriate, if slightly exaggerated.
However a novice in a foreign language will speak more slowly than natives, not more quickly, even if reading a prepared speech (as was likely the case in that setting, and especially given the advanced language used that no beginner would have mastered), so not sure what the thinking was there.
Haha this had me chuckle as a native Dutch speaker.
I will admit that they nailed the German-Dutch accent.
However, the weird choice to use “translatie” which, while technically is a Dutch word, wasn’t common even back in the period this is supposed to take place and feels more like a lazy translation of… well the English word “translation”, combined with, what I can only describe as “just blurt it out as fast as you can” direction, makes this very comical.
> AI-translated phrase at the bottom. I'd love to know the mind of the forger. They did put some serious work into the invoice but then AI-translated an idiomatic American phrase (wrongly!) which wouldn’t by used on a German invoice.
This is especially stupid because LLMs like ChatGPT CAN output phrases that wouldn't be out of tune. I assume the forger got that phrase by literally asking the LLM to translate an english phrase to german, rather than asking the LLM what would be a good german phrase to use.
> literally asking the LLM to translate an english phrase to german
I tried it a few times on arena.lmsys.org and given the prompt "Please translate "We thank you for your business" into German", the most common result was "Wir danken Ihnen für Ihr Geschäft", I got one bad result from some random tiny model and some more extensive responses from Gemini with suggestions for more idiomatic expressions. Modern LLMs are typically smart enough to understand this nuance when translating to German.
That’s an interesting result. I’ve re-run your prompt with one change (made it “translate idiomatically” instead) to guide models towards a more natively German mode of expression and a few actually came back with a more appropriate phrase than that literal translation.
Would you’d like to share? The most analogue I can come up with would be ”Danke für Ihren Einkauf” – but that wouldn't be printed on an invoice. The only place where I can see such a sentence would be on thermoprinted receipts from POS, those small boilerplate nobody reads.
That’s my point: You can make a semantically and possible idiomatic translation but it would be still _culturally_ wrong to use it in this context.
When we forged some documents it had a photo of a grotesque in the background. We worked out where it was and photographed it ourselves. Had to stand on a trash can to get the angle.
We joked our documents were high quality than the original, which they were.
Used them for years.
Do it. It all makes sense after actually doing it yourself. People think forgers copy pixel by pixel but it's remaking assets.
We guessed the iso standard on the barcodes. We were no experts. We probably got it right, but you have to do this on every asset.
I'm surprised that neither the blog post nor the comments here yet mentioned another obvious giveaway to the forgery:
The photo and card inside the plastic lamination show signs of wear. Parts of the photo are rubbed off around the edge, and the paper is stained. At the same time, the lamination is relatively clean. How does that make any sense? That's suspicious, even without seeing Espinosa's badge.
[edit: the photo of Espinosa's badge shows a worn lamination and clean, unworn paper and photo]
On top of that, the lamination has a cutout so it can be attached to a lanyard or retractor. The cutout shows no sign of wear.
It's as if the forger imagined company badges work like library cards: You keep them in your wallet, and only remove them to check out a book. In the forger's head canon, the company must have later decided to laminate the badges (without replacing them!) and require everyone had to wear them visibly (hence the cutout).
Retractable lanyards weren't a thing in the 70's and would never be used for a landscape format ID. These would have been clipped to a pocket or collar.
Sure, but the point is that the hole shows the badge is meant to be clipped to something and worn in a visible place. As such, it will naturally bump into things and the lamination will accrue wear marks.
Probably depended how security conscious where you worked was. Pretty common into at least to 80s was a clip that attached to your front shirt pocket which pretty much everyone had and badge readers weren’t mostly a thing. If security were laxer you often just kept the badge in your pocket. But as another comment notes you didn’t tend to just keep your badge in your wallet.
Also, as cool as it is, I don't think it would have been worth 3000DEM in 2001. Adjusted for inflation it's worth almost 3000 of today's USD.
That was just a month after the release of the original iPod, that eventually brought back Apple to relevancy. Apple was still the small competitor that Microsoft kept alive to avoid more problems in their anti-trust lawsuit.
Exactly. At this time, people were either giving or throwing away vintage Apple products because most had very little value in the secondary. I know I did too.
Very good point! I was an Apple fanboy back then, and I bought quite a few vintage Apple things on eBay for next to nothing at the time. Even 10% of the stated amount would have seemed quite expensive for this item in 2001.
What was even the point of faking the DRK invoice? How does that in any way mean the item is real? If it’s just some charity sale, I don’t think the item would be authenticated
It’s an attempt to create plausible deniability — “I bought it from someone else who said it was real.” The problem being that no one would think such a thing was valuable back in 2001; Apple was in much better shape than in the mid-90’s, but it wasn’t that far from Dell suggesting they shut down the company. ebay really should yank this person’s account.
Do we have aby indication that that's true? They are trying (and apparently succeeded) to sell something that's quite obviously fake. Whatever else they claim should be viewed in the light of that lie.
Apple was a far smaller, less significant company in 2001. Much less chance that someone would go to the effort to make a fake employee 10 badge back then.
Calling Apple small and insignificant in 2001 is just…not factually accurate. As someone who lived through that time I don’t really know what the most useful citation to provide you would be. If you knew what a computer was, you knew what Apple was many times over, and how they were the revolutionary™ brand even back then. For goodness sake, 2001 is post-iMac by several years/generations.
Apple's perceived status was bigger in USA than elsewhere. Don't know about Germany, but in Poland Mac at the time was pretty much pigeonholed into few artistic endeavours[1] or DTP - you were most likely to see something Mac related because a publishing company preparing ads made a screenshot on a mac when trying to make and showing webpage in a web browser.
[1] And by 2001 was not that far from there being reasonable discussion whether you should not instead get an Atari ST if you wanted to do electronic music. (there was sorta ecosystem for ST as midi controller that was still surviving, at least in Poland, partially thanks to disco scene)
Back in 2003 I bought my first Mac, an PowerBook 12" which I love(d). Nobody else I knew had a Mac, only a professor at my university.
A few month later Apple released Mac OS X 10.3 „Panther“, to be sold still on DVDs in shrink-wrapped boxes. There was only one, small, store in my city which sold Apple stuff. Not an Apple Store, those are still very rare in Germany, but a chain local to Germany (which went out of business this year). For the release of Panther they made an evening party, for enthusiasts.
My city has a population of 0.5 million but it is part of a metropolitan region of 5 million people. That local shop would have been the shop for at least half of the region.
Including me there were less than 20 enthusiasts there that evening. You felt like a part of an obscure BDSM cult or something.
Apple in public opinion then was mostly inexistent in Germany. Partly because of the marketing incompetence of the Apple D-A-CH local organization, but also because Apple then had the image of a computer only for graphic designers with no practical usage for other computing and seen as hugely overpriced. Germany was and still is rather cheap in regard to computers. A big tech store chain at the time was using the slogan “Geiz ist geil” (“Parsimony is sexy”).
"Apple was a far smaller, less significant company in 2001" != "Apple were small and insignificant"
If you were into computers in 2001 you'd have heard of Apple, for the general population I'd bet a reasonable percentage would have had little knowledge of them then, and key to the argument here - far far less knowledge or interest than people would today.
Regardless of their significance at the time, there's no way a bit of Apple memorabilia would have commanded the same price or interest then as it would now. Be like selling an autographed John Oliver photo in 2005. He was hardly insignificant on the UK comedy scene at that time, he had a radio show, was on TV shows. But he was _far less significant_ than he is now
I owned a computer in 2001 in Germany and was at best vaguely aware Apple made computers. From 2001 onward they became known for making really good MP3 players though
> For goodness sake, 2001 is post-iMac by several years/generations
Oh come on, G3 is 1998, G4 is 2002.
No other objections though. My favourite anecdote about that time is what Sex in the City had a MacBook, specifically PowerBook G3, as, well, a solid part of the story and even had a dedicated episode!
I think its mildly interesting that Apple went through the trouble of making employee ids when they have 10 people. That seems a bit superfluous at that size. Unless of course they made them when they were larger, and still just added numbers for people.
I think it aligns with the strategy of pretending to be bigger than you are so you can attract business customers.
An old startup I worked at used customer IDs in communications that started from an arbitrary 5 digit number to give a false impression of our customer base.
similarly it's used to be super common to get checkbooks starting with a higher check number cause some places were cautious of taking check #1 from someone assuming they didn't have any sort of credit history.
That was really common among shareware developers back in the day, one guy sort of pretending to be a big serious company. I suspect Tim Sweeney was joining this trend but also mocking it with the name "Epic MegaGames".
It's definitely not how people act these days, at least with indie/solo game developers.
Maybe some portion of the 2000 organic players were also running bots?
I ran some personal bots back in the Diablo 2 days with D2Loader and some shareware bot plug-in I bought on a shady site for like $12 in ~2003-2004 or so. Wish I could remember the name.
Apparently there are modern versions of D2Loader type software. I haven’t really followed the game or the bot scene much these days, but I like the cat and mouse game in general across the physical and virtual space. Red teaming scratches that itch I guess.
Another angle I've seen is different types of id numbers within an organization start with a different digit, even if they're all the same length. The CRM system doesn't care, but it prevents mixups on the human side
It's both for "corporate social capital" and for practical necessities.
Employee IDs pretty much start happening when you end up getting actual space that isn't your garage or repurposed residential buildings, especially if you're doing manufacturing of any kind.
Then you might want to have employee IDs if only for minimal security (contractors! Visitors!) or workplace safety reasons (tracking who was left in the building, for example).
It is, also, a sign of "making it somewhere", yes - along with some of the above parts also making up the "corporate social capital".
Similarly using customized paperwork, having logos, branding style etc. all helps to build up a company image that might help in landing sales or investors or whatever.
Oh man, I was getting in on that Mastodon thread at the time (particularly scrutinizing the "receipt", like how it shows fresh creases/folds despite having supposedly been in a plastic sleeve and squished between pages in a binder for 20+ years), and hoped there would be enough momentum that the fraudulent item would be pulled. I'm very disappointed to learn someone actually bought this fake stuff. Sad times.
The other thing with the receipt is that the dimensions are off: it is not tall enough, it seems like it's printed on US Letter paper, whereas in Germany it definitely would be printed on A4 paper, which is taller than Letter.
This would be the biggest tell as I don't even know where you would buy Letter paper in Europe. It's hard enough to buy A4 in the USA. I'm in the USA and I'm a jerk who prints things on A4 and mails them out just to make sure they don't fit in anyone's filing system.
A4 is a bit smaller than US legal, based on a glance at wikipedia.
Surprised it's difficult to get over there. I thought it'd be desirable for design work.
I have a hard time feeling bad for someone who can be that uncritical before spending $1000. At that point the buyer is clearly looking to spend money for good feelings, not artifacts, so they probably actually got their money’s worth.
Yes, they buy a piece of paper for memories and they have it. Real or fake is irrelevant as this whole thing with collection and art is irrational. It must just look real enough to you and your guests to serve its purpose.
The detective work was fun I'm sure but ultimately unnecessary. The burden of proof lies on the seller. Stuff like this is fake by default unless it comes with a certificate of authenticity issued by some trusted party. There's a reason that entire industry exists. Believe me there are much, much better fakes than this one sold online for pretty much every collectable in existence.
You're saying I could gain a lot of money by issuing fake certificates of authenticity and then answer, "Yes, it is authentic," to anyone who calls and asks?
> You're saying I could gain a lot of money by issuing fake certificates of authenticity and then answer, "Yes, it is authentic," to anyone who calls and asks?
No, you make the money by offering to sell real certificates of authenticity to authenticate the fake certificates of authenticity to people who those who calls and asks.
The first step is removing the "fake" part. You can issue authentic certificates of authenticity. If your certificates are based on some expert verification that you do, people will actually pay you, can you imagine that! ;)
And yes they would want you to say "yes/no, it is/isn't authentic" to anyone who calls and asks.
But if you screw up your records and say "yes" to fake certificates of authenticity that imitate yours then people will stop paying you very quickly. (Also you may end up in jail)
On August 9, 2010, Symantec completed its approximately $1.28 billion acquisition of Verisign's authentication business, including the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificate Services, the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) Services, the Verisign Trust Services, the Verisign Identity Protection (VIP) Authentication Service, and the majority stake in Verisign Japan.
The crypto is the middle part. "certificates of authenticity" have to cover the top and bottom ends. The sibling comment referred to the top. At the bottom, Verisign had a DUNS and payment dance that had more appearance than substance in determining authenticity.
The assumption was that a trusted third party exists. Since you trust it, by definition, you can contact it to confirm authenticity of the certificate.
(To those that might dismiss this as snark, look up the definition of currency. And if you find that adventure interesting follow up by reading the excellent book “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari for an easy read that thoroughly explains the concept in an afternoon of reading. In that book it is called “shared delusions” instead.)
I feel as if the article is missing the important detail that eBay auctions are full, absolutely full, of fake/timewaster bids.
I've basically given up on the auction format entirely because of the number of people that try to "pull out" not realising that their offer is binding.
eBay is so full of garbage I don't understand how they have $10bn of revenue. Yes, that's billions. But then maybe there is a huge garbage market opportunity out there.
They're a pretty reliable source for used electronics. I go to them every time my favorite out-of-production camera breaks and I want to get another of the same model.
The reality is that eBay is full of great electronics and car parts, and sell shitloads of both. Also most things on amazon that are just drop shipped alibaba stuff can be found on eBay for cheaper and less marketing bullshit.
You tell them so that they can get a refund from ebay, if you catch them in time, also so they don't end up accused of fraud when they try to resell it.
I just assume most everything with any date related value, rarity, antiques, etc sold on Ebay ... are fake or fake-ish.
I casually collect coins and on Ebay there are known high volume scammers selling fakes or coins with heavily doctored images, Ebay doesn't care.
It's to the point that I only by cheap stuff when it comes to thinks I collect that is less likely to be faked or I just don't collect at all. Sad situation.
I participate in a community that has some historical literature, where early editions of our literature fetch fairly significant premiums. It’s a relatively obscure community, so there’s a pretty limited market.
There are some extremely well-done forgeries. I am told they come from China, but I suspect the means to make them, are available in many venues.
I heard a story about a guy that purchased a Winchester rifle from an estate auction. It was one of those old western-style guns, with the repeater action. As an original, it was worth a great deal.
He took it to an expert, who almost immediately declared it a forgery. He said it was mainly because it was in too good a shape. It was supposed to be over 150 years old, and looked like it was only ten years old.
I have also heard, from a watchmaker I knew, that Rolex forgeries are so good, that even seasoned watchmakers are fooled, and the only way to tell, is to open the watch.
Not trying to be rude, but this doesn't seem like anything anyone would care about, but this definitely not the case.
There are a lot of comments that are nice and thoughtful, which isn't uncommon or anything but surprising to me. I guess forgery is pretty cool, but an old apple badge for some plain Jane apple person?
A sideline question: In Jason Bourne movie there are a few shots showing the protagonist faking passports. Does such technique (looks like no advanced tools are used) exist or just a film fantasy?
Most rich countries now use passports with an RFID chip which contains a copy of all the data in the passport and a digital signature.
They also host a server allowing trusted third parties to verify that a given passport is still valid (ie. Not withdrawn).
The combination of those mean you will never edit details on a passport, but you might be able to copy a passport 1:1, because the security is only mifare classic.
Depending on the intended use, copying 1:1 is kinda "useless" as well, as the picture is also included in the RFID chip. Some of those "quick entry" machines many countries are apparently are doing face matching between the person standing there and the picture embedded in the RFID chip.
You can actually read the photo from your passport with an Android phone. Some of the info in the machine readable area is required as a salt, so you can't do a remote scan of a closed passport.
I think anyone needing "fake passports" usually gets them from stolen identities (or stealing a passport from someone similar looking) and getting a new one issued. Probably easier in countries that don't require the passport to be sent back for another one to be issued.
There's a fascinating snippet relating to this in the book Rise and Kill First by the Israeli national security journalist Ronen Bergman. Apparently faking passports could take months, at least in 2010 for the Mossad. Traditionally the Mossad would call off operations if they didn't have enough fake passports, but the new director decided to cut corners and reuse passports. This contributed to one of their most humiliating failures.
Busy spy crossroads such as Dubai, Jordan, India and many E.U. points of entry are employing iris scanners to link eyeballs irrevocably to a particular name. . . . For a clandestine field operative, flying under a false name could be a one-way ticket to a headquarters desk, since they’re irrevocably chained to whatever name and passport they used.
In a Tom Clancy book they talked about terrorists just buying the commercial equipment used to make ID's. On Silk Road, I remember some guy claiming to sell British passports genuinely made from within the UK government.
I bought a fake id 30 years ago that used the actual backs from Rhode Island DMV that they acquired somehow, but then faked the fronts. Equipment like that can absolutely go missing.
I used to make fake IDs that reused both the plastic backing and the hologram layer from a real license. I spent some time creating a template in Photoshop that I ink-jetted onto photo paper. The final result was very close to the real thing in all aspects: look, thickness, weight, “bendyness”, real hologram, and light transmission (i.e. the bouncer shining a flashlight through the back of the ID would see what he expected to see. A bit of translucency)
I never got around to modifying the data on mag stripe. I just dragged a hard-drive magnet over it until it didn’t scan at all.
My takeaway from all that? The hologram that was used to strengthen the official IDs had an unintended side effect of making the fakes easier to believe.
Depends on the security features of the passport. Most modern passports are highly secure. A 1960s passport from an African country would have lacked security features and been much simpler to fake or modify.
I don't know about the legality of forging an old employee badge, but I find it amusing that apparently the forger broke, for totally no reason, the Geneva Convention protection of the Red Cross symbol, signed into law in many many countries worldwide.
Always interesting to see people who grift like this. My Dad used to engrave and restore guns. He was quite good at it, and so good that at one point the manufacturer's representative from Colt told him at a gun show that had my Dad not told him he would have sworn the revolver he was looking at had not been restored.
I asked him if he ever got people trying to get him to "enhance" the value of their guns and he laughed and said, "Ayup, all the time."
Art and antique forgery has always been kind of fascinating to me for that reason.
Did I understand correctly that your dad was so good at restoring guns that they didn't appear to have been restored? Could you explain what they means?
It means that to an expert on the item in question the appearance of the item is completely consistent with its age. Sort of like people who can make a painting recreating the brush strokes, paints, etc. such that it is difficult, if not impossible, to tell it apart from the original. Now in this case it is a bit different since it is an "original."
My Dad never did anything that would make someone looking at the gun think it was some other version, the most common 'ask' there was that Colt Single Action Army (SAA) revolvers, which are famously "The gun that won the west", original generation (i.e. produced from the original Colt dies and tooling by Colt) are more valuable than second, or third generation guns. An expert in Colt firearms can look at an SAA revolver and tell you from which generation it was made with some level of certainty.
But lots of guns were abused and stored poorly and developed rust or other imperfections. My Dad was able to cure those imperfections and restore the gun to a condition it would have, had it been stored properly its entire life. And yes, that did increase its value, mostly because the gun just looked better.
Pedantic point: electric typewriters (which have existed since the 1960s) do type in a way that looks exactly like this.
(In fact, note that the text on the real employee ID card, shown later in the article, doesn't look any less clean! It's just set in a different, narrower font.)
The smudginess of mechanical typewriters comes from 1. them striking (and especially, releasing) at the same speed you're depressing the key, and 2. having many of the keys necessarily approach the ribbon from an angle.
The keys being swung weakly by your fingers, also has the additional implication that the ink ribbons used in mechanical typewriters have to be soft and squishy (so: made of cloth), and use thin inks. These properties ensure a transfer from even a low-velocity impact. But the trade-off is that cloth ink ribbons transfer only a rough outline of what's struck; and thin inks are high-bleed inks.
An electric typewriter, playing out a pre-buffered line with a crisp, predictable report, using linear actuators and a rotating-ball type-head to bang a tape ribbon loaded with high-viscosity ink onto the page, can create text indistinguishable from books/newspapers of the same period, or from modern laser-printer reproductions of the same font faces. They're essentially character-at-a-time letterpresses!
(Also, ignoring electric typewriters for a sec: inks bleed more on thin, cheap paper. But this is [a forgery of] an employee ID card — where, for durability, a nice heavyweight paper or cardstock would have been used. You're always going to get a better-looking result inking such paper.)