I believe it is not firmware. Because of many reasons, one would be issuing firmware release for every machine would be impossible. It is probably lying so low in the hardware layer, one cannot simply remove or alter it without desoldering etc.

Many microprocessors are capable of having selective updates and it may be the same processor which is fetching the update. You might think of their internals to be more like a crude file system.

What if you print a page with a slightly yellow background? Would it know to use a different color for the tracking dots?

Ok, next to impossible then. Maybe printing tiny white text on solid black background could help obfuscate the dots. Or using a pen plotter...

>In general you put your name on documents you print.

What do you mean? I’m confident that 95%+ of the documents I print do not have my name, or the name of anyone who has ever been in my house, on them.

I mean when I send letters I want people to know it's from me 99.999% of the time, that's all.

I didn't buy a printer to send letters to Uncle Sam

More than 99.999% of all printed pages don't have the name of the person who printed them on them. I can't even come up with examples where the large majority of the material someone printed wasn't belonging to someone else, ie, printing a book, learning material, computer generated pictures, photographs, things like this.

"Printing a letter" is something I doubt anyone is doing in any meaningful percentage that this makes sense. A person printing a single small book they didn't want to buy is printing more pages just that one time than they will ever print with their name on them in their whole life.

If it's not leaving my house who's gonna care for the yellow dots?

> A person printing a single small book they didn't want to buy

Oh btw, you've paid a "tax" to unknown entities for this too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy