So at this point it should basically be taken as a given that all printers leave some sort of identification mechanism on whatever they print. My question is, how do we avoid this?
The most obvious solution seems to be to buy a printer off of craigslist. That way, the feds wouldn't be able to link the serial number back to you. Of course I'm skeptical of anyone who would sell a 'good as new' HP OfficeJet Pro 8600 for only $40. Even they're not planning to rob you, and if it's not broken as hell, I'd think that there's still a significant chance of it having some sort of malware on it. It doesn't make sense to me that someone would sell a perfectly good printer for that cheap.
The obvious solution to this seems to be to frequent yard sales. It doesn't seem likely that someone would be willing to stage an entire yard sale just to give someone a malware-infected printer.
Another question that I would raise is that now that so many printers are internet-enabled, what are the chances that they could broadcast their serial numbers over the internet? If they could do this, then there's no sense in trying to buy at a yard sale. Should we just avoid web-enabled printers altogether?
So, how do we do it guys? How do we btfo the feds on printers?