#label maker technology

[superlabels]

Innovative Tamper-Proof Labelling Solutions for FMCG Brands

In the highly competitive fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry, product authenticity and safety are paramount. As counterfeit products become more sophisticated and consumers grow increasingly vigilant, tamper-proof labelling has transitioned from a luxury to a necessity. Among the most effective security measures are hologram labels, which not only protect products from tampering but also enhance brand recognition. Thanks to modern advancements in label maker technology, FMCG brands now have access to secure, reliable, and visually distinctive labelling solutions.

Super Labels is at the forefront of this evolution, offering advanced capabilities in custom sticker printing, hologram labels, and roll form labels via high-performance sticker label printers. Our expertise in label printing ensures that every product receives the tamper-evident protection it needs—without sacrificing design aesthetics or on-shelf impact. Whether you’re packaging food, beverages, personal care items, or pharmaceuticals, our secure labelling solutions help brands maintain consumer trust and comply with regulatory standards.

Tamper-proof hologram labels play a critical role in safeguarding consumer safety and preserving brand reputation. Even a single instance of tampering can severely damage customer confidence and result in serious health risks. At Super Labels, we use advanced printing technology and precision techniques to create unique holograms that are exceptionally difficult to duplicate. These labels serve as visible indicators of authenticity, deterring counterfeiters and providing consumers with peace of mind.

Our high-resolution sticker label printers allow for the production of intricate holographic designs with specialized visual effects. Combined with roll form label formats, our solutions are perfect for high-volume production while ensuring consistent quality across different packaging types. From high-security seals to visually striking branded labels, we provide labelling solutions that are both practical and eye-catching.

As secure labelling becomes increasingly crucial, Super Labels continues to lead the industry by leveraging cutting-edge technology and deep sector expertise. We help FMCG brands stay ahead of counterfeit threats with tamper-proof labelling that enhances product safety and strengthens consumer engagement.

[chemicalarospec]

it's real and they wrote a sequel

[vcqrupvt]

How To Create a Simple Customer Referral Program?

Counterfeit products are harmful for buyers, businesses and economies worldwide. To combat this issue barcode scanners are emerging as a powerful tool in the fight against counterfeit goods.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

What kind of bubble is AI?

My latest column for Locus Magazine is "What Kind of Bubble is AI?" All economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some of them leave behind wreckage that can be salvaged for useful purposes, while others leave nothing behind but ashes:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Think about some 21st century bubbles. The dotcom bubble was a terrible tragedy, one that drained the coffers of pension funds and other institutional investors and wiped out retail investors who were gulled by Superbowl Ads. But there was a lot left behind after the dotcoms were wiped out: cheap servers, office furniture and space, but far more importantly, a generation of young people who'd been trained as web makers, leaving nontechnical degree programs to learn HTML, perl and python. This created a whole cohort of technologists from non-technical backgrounds, a first in technological history. Many of these people became the vanguard of a more inclusive and humane tech development movement, and they were able to make interesting and useful services and products in an environment where raw materials – compute, bandwidth, space and talent – were available at firesale prices.

Contrast this with the crypto bubble. It, too, destroyed the fortunes of institutional and individual investors through fraud and Superbowl Ads. It, too, lured in nontechnical people to learn esoteric disciplines at investor expense. But apart from a smattering of Rust programmers, the main residue of crypto is bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.

Or think of Worldcom vs Enron. Both bubbles were built on pure fraud, but Enron's fraud left nothing behind but a string of suspicious deaths. By contrast, Worldcom's fraud was a Big Store con that required laying a ton of fiber that is still in the ground to this day, and is being bought and used at pennies on the dollar.

AI is definitely a bubble. As I write in the column, if you fly into SFO and rent a car and drive north to San Francisco or south to Silicon Valley, every single billboard is advertising an "AI" startup, many of which are not even using anything that can be remotely characterized as AI. That's amazing, considering what a meaningless buzzword AI already is.

So which kind of bubble is AI? When it pops, will something useful be left behind, or will it go away altogether? To be sure, there's a legion of technologists who are learning Tensorflow and Pytorch. These nominally open source tools are bound, respectively, to Google and Facebook's AI environments:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

But if those environments go away, those programming skills become a lot less useful. Live, large-scale Big Tech AI projects are shockingly expensive to run. Some of their costs are fixed – collecting, labeling and processing training data – but the running costs for each query are prodigious. There's a massive primary energy bill for the servers, a nearly as large energy bill for the chillers, and a titanic wage bill for the specialized technical staff involved.

Once investor subsidies dry up, will the real-world, non-hyperbolic applications for AI be enough to cover these running costs? AI applications can be plotted on a 2X2 grid whose axes are "value" (how much customers will pay for them) and "risk tolerance" (how perfect the product needs to be).

Charging teenaged D&D players $10 month for an image generator that creates epic illustrations of their characters fighting monsters is low value and very risk tolerant (teenagers aren't overly worried about six-fingered swordspeople with three pupils in each eye). Charging scammy spamfarms $500/month for a text generator that spits out dull, search-algorithm-pleasing narratives to appear over recipes is likewise low-value and highly risk tolerant (your customer doesn't care if the text is nonsense). Charging visually impaired people $100 month for an app that plays a text-to-speech description of anything they point their cameras at is low-value and moderately risk tolerant ("that's your blue shirt" when it's green is not a big deal, while "the street is safe to cross" when it's not is a much bigger one).

Morganstanley doesn't talk about the trillions the AI industry will be worth some day because of these applications. These are just spinoffs from the main event, a collection of extremely high-value applications. Think of self-driving cars or radiology bots that analyze chest x-rays and characterize masses as cancerous or noncancerous.

These are high value – but only if they are also risk-tolerant. The pitch for self-driving cars is "fire most drivers and replace them with 'humans in the loop' who intervene at critical junctures." That's the risk-tolerant version of self-driving cars, and it's a failure. More than $100b has been incinerated chasing self-driving cars, and cars are nowhere near driving themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Quite the reverse, in fact. Cruise was just forced to quit the field after one of their cars maimed a woman – a pedestrian who had not opted into being part of a high-risk AI experiment – and dragged her body 20 feet through the streets of San Francisco. Afterwards, it emerged that Cruise had replaced the single low-waged driver who would normally be paid to operate a taxi with 1.5 high-waged skilled technicians who remotely oversaw each of its vehicles:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html

The self-driving pitch isn't that your car will correct your own human errors (like an alarm that sounds when you activate your turn signal while someone is in your blind-spot). Self-driving isn't about using automation to augment human skill – it's about replacing humans. There's no business case for spending hundreds of billions on better safety systems for cars (there's a human case for it, though!). The only way the price-tag justifies itself is if paid drivers can be fired and replaced with software that costs less than their wages.

What about radiologists? Radiologists certainly make mistakes from time to time, and if there's a computer vision system that makes different mistakes than the sort that humans make, they could be a cheap way of generating second opinions that trigger re-examination by a human radiologist. But no AI investor thinks their return will come from selling hospitals that reduce the number of X-rays each radiologist processes every day, as a second-opinion-generating system would. Rather, the value of AI radiologists comes from firing most of your human radiologists and replacing them with software whose judgments are cursorily double-checked by a human whose "automation blindness" will turn them into an OK-button-mashing automaton:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

The profit-generating pitch for high-value AI applications lies in creating "reverse centaurs": humans who serve as appendages for automation that operates at a speed and scale that is unrelated to the capacity or needs of the worker:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

But unless these high-value applications are intrinsically risk-tolerant, they are poor candidates for automation. Cruise was able to nonconsensually enlist the population of San Francisco in an experimental murderbot development program thanks to the vast sums of money sloshing around the industry. Some of this money funds the inevitabilist narrative that self-driving cars are coming, it's only a matter of when, not if, and so SF had better get in the autonomous vehicle or get run over by the forces of history.

Once the bubble pops (all bubbles pop), AI applications will have to rise or fall on their actual merits, not their promise. The odds are stacked against the long-term survival of high-value, risk-intolerant AI applications.

The problem for AI is that while there are a lot of risk-tolerant applications, they're almost all low-value; while nearly all the high-value applications are risk-intolerant. Once AI has to be profitable – once investors withdraw their subsidies from money-losing ventures – the risk-tolerant applications need to be sufficient to run those tremendously expensive servers in those brutally expensive data-centers tended by exceptionally expensive technical workers.

If they aren't, then the business case for running those servers goes away, and so do the servers – and so do all those risk-tolerant, low-value applications. It doesn't matter if helping blind people make sense of their surroundings is socially beneficial. It doesn't matter if teenaged gamers love their epic character art. It doesn't even matter how horny scammers are for generating AI nonsense SEO websites:

https://twitter.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509

These applications are all riding on the coattails of the big AI models that are being built and operated at a loss in order to be profitable. If they remain unprofitable long enough, the private sector will no longer pay to operate them.

Now, there are smaller models, models that stand alone and run on commodity hardware. These would persist even after the AI bubble bursts, because most of their costs are setup costs that have already been borne by the well-funded companies who created them. These models are limited, of course, though the communities that have formed around them have pushed those limits in surprising ways, far beyond their original manufacturers' beliefs about their capacity. These communities will continue to push those limits for as long as they find the models useful.

These standalone, "toy" models are derived from the big models, though. When the AI bubble bursts and the private sector no longer subsidizes mass-scale model creation, it will cease to spin out more sophisticated models that run on commodity hardware (it's possible that Federated learning and other techniques for spreading out the work of making large-scale models will fill the gap).

So what kind of bubble is the AI bubble? What will we salvage from its wreckage? Perhaps the communities who've invested in becoming experts in Pytorch and Tensorflow will wrestle them away from their corporate masters and make them generally useful. Certainly, a lot of people will have gained skills in applying statistical techniques.

But there will also be a lot of unsalvageable wreckage. As big AI models get integrated into the processes of the productive economy, AI becomes a source of systemic risk. The only thing worse than having an automated process that is rendered dangerous or erratic based on AI integration is to have that process fail entirely because the AI suddenly disappeared, a collapse that is too precipitous for former AI customers to engineer a soft landing for their systems.

This is a blind spot in our policymakers debates about AI. The smart policymakers are asking questions about fairness, algorithmic bias, and fraud. The foolish policymakers are ensnared in fantasies about "AI safety," AKA "Will the chatbot become a superintelligence that turns the whole human race into paperclips?"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

But no one is asking, "What will we do if" – when – "the AI bubble pops and most of this stuff disappears overnight?"

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

tom_bullock (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/tombullock/25173469495/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[the-altered-sequence]

Dev Character Profile

Dev, originally labeled E4-17 "Project Slatefire" is a last-wave genetically Altered supersoldier created by Caduceus Technologies before the Fall. He escaped during the revolt of soldiers against their creators and fled. Ashton/E12-19 found him and they stuck together, trying to survive a world that hates them.

Dev is 6'1" and of average build, perhaps a bit on the stocky side. His eyes are a rich gold. He is Altered to resemble a sphynx cat in head and tail, but retains human shape everywhere else. Like a sphynx cat, he is completely hairless. His skin has been reinforced with a fire resistant carbon fiber. It adds a little strength and resistance to shallow wounds but mainly serves as fireproofing and heat tolerance well over that of an unaltered human. His fireproof skin appears grey and lightly metallic, similar to the shine of graphite. Like all Altered, he has enhanced strength, stamina, and senses.

He was originally manufactured to breathe fire, but has lost the ability as of the end of book 1, Bound to Ashes. He bears a sprawling, gnarled scar across the sternum from the incident. These burn scars were later built upon after the events of book 2. He often feels self-conscious about the scars on top of his already unusual appearance and isn't seen shirtless very often.

Dev has always carried himself cautiously. As a young adult, he fears the real world and the unconscious, relentlessly accosted by PTSD and trauma. Despite a life of being hunted, his trusting nature was what brought the Altered together with the human survivors. After the events of book 3, he's had a bit of a "reset", and has shed a significant layer of anxiety he used to wear. This came at a cost: he still, years after the incident that left him with a traumatic brain injury, has lingering brain fog and a somewhat unreliable memory. Some memories have been erased completely. But he remains steady and is often praised for his even keel. (He would say his mind feels pretty rocky most of the time.) He is thoughtful and cautious, a great foil to his more impulsive partners. Dev values his alone time and often feels overwhelmed when the spotlight is on him for too long. He prefers to retreat into nature where he hunts with bow and arrows of his own craft. Dev is a maker. His mind flows comfortably with tools in his hands. He finds accomplishment and fulfillment in helping and protecting their settlement, but his true pride comes from a successful hunt and a clean kill, or perhaps when working on the fire fighting teams, accurately reading a fire and knowing how to quench it. (He is definitely the guy tending the bonfire with intense dedication, well after everyone has gone to bed.) As he's gotten older, he's explored ecology and biology. He often spends his free time foraging, promoting food plants in the neighboring wilderness, and hunting wild boar and other feral pests to help feed not only the voracious appetites of his fellow Altered but the many humans he, against the odds, now calls family. Dev's loyalty outpaces all else--he doesn't think twice to step in and risk it all to defend his found family and romantic partners, Ashton and Sybil. Despite the doubt and social anxiety, Dev understands the key factor that leads to survival: working together as one.

In what little spare time the post-apocalypse allows, Dev has also gotten pretty good at cooking.

[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

“By simply existing as women in public life, we have all become targets, stripped of our accomplishments, our intellect, and our activism and reduced to sex objects for the pleasure of millions of anonymous eyes.

Men, of course, are subject to this abuse far less frequently. In reporting this article, I searched the name Donald Trump on one prominent deepfake-porn website and turned up one video of the former president—and three entire pages of videos depicting his wife, Melania, and daughter Ivanka. A 2019 study from Sensity, a company that monitors synthetic media, estimated that more than 96 percent of deepfakes then in existence were nonconsensual pornography of women.”

Recently, a Google Alert informed me that I am the subject of deepfake pornography. I wasn’t shocked. For more than a year, I have been the target of a widespread online harassment campaign, and deepfake porn—whose creators, using artificial intelligence, generate explicit video clips that seem to show real people in sexual situations that never actually occurred—has become a prized weapon in the arsenal misogynists use to try to drive women out of public life. The only emotion I felt as I informed my lawyers about the latest violation of my privacy was a profound disappointment in the technology—and in the lawmakers and regulators who have offered no justice to people who appear in porn clips without their consent. Many commentators have been tying themselves in knots over the potential threats posed by artificial intelligence—deepfake videos that tip elections or start wars, job-destroying deployments of ChatGPT and other generative technologies. Yet policy makers have all but ignored an urgent AI problem that is already affecting many lives, including mine.

Last year, I resigned as head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board, a policy-coordination body that the Biden administration let founder amid criticism mostly from the right. In subsequent months, at least three artificially generated videos that appear to show me engaging in sex acts were uploaded to websites specializing in deepfake porn. The images don’t look much like me; the generative-AI models that spat them out seem to have been trained on my official U.S. government portrait, taken when I was six months pregnant. Whoever created the videos likely used a free “face swap” tool, essentially pasting my photo onto an existing porn video. In some moments, the original performer’s mouth is visible while the deepfake Frankenstein moves and my face flickers. But these videos aren’t meant to be convincing—all of the websites and the individual videos they host are clearly labeled as fakes. Although they may provide cheap thrills for the viewer, their deeper purpose is to humiliate, shame, and objectify women, especially women who have the temerity to speak out. I am somewhat inured to this abuse, after researching and writing about it for years. But for other women, especially those in more conservative or patriarchal environments, appearing in a deepfake-porn video could be profoundly stigmatizing, even career- or life-threatening.

As if to underscore video makers’ compulsion to punish women who speak out, one of the videos to which Google alerted me depicts me with Hillary Clinton and Greta Thunberg. Because of their global celebrity, deepfakes of the former presidential candidate and the climate-change activist are far more numerous and more graphic than those of me. Users can also easily find deepfake-porn videos of the singer Taylor Swift, the actress Emma Watson, and the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly; Democratic officials such as Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; the Republicans Nikki Haley and Elise Stefanik; and countless other prominent women. By simply existing as women in public life, we have all become targets, stripped of our accomplishments, our intellect, and our activism and reduced to sex objects for the pleasure of millions of anonymous eyes.

Men, of course, are subject to this abuse far less frequently. In reporting this article, I searched the name Donald Trump on one prominent deepfake-porn website and turned up one video of the former president—and three entire pages of videos depicting his wife, Melania, and daughter Ivanka. A 2019 study from Sensity, a company that monitors synthetic media, estimated that more than 96 percent of deepfakes then in existence were nonconsensual pornography of women. The reasons for this disproportion are interconnected, and are both technical and motivational: The people making these videos are presumably heterosexual men who value their own gratification more than they value women’s personhood. And because AI systems are trained on an internet that abounds with images of women’s bodies, much of the nonconsensual porn that those systems generate is more believable than, say, computer-generated clips of cute animals playing would be.

As I looked into the provenance of the videos in which I appear—I’m a disinformation researcher, after all—I stumbled upon deepfake-porn forums where users are remarkably nonchalant about the invasion of privacy they are perpetrating. Some seem to believe that they have a right to distribute these images—that because they fed a publicly available photo of a woman into an application engineered to make pornography, they have created art or a legitimate work of parody. Others apparently think that simply by labeling their videos and images as fake, they can avoid any legal consequences for their actions. These purveyors assert that their videos are for entertainment and educational purposes only. But by using that description for videos of well-known women being “humiliated” or “pounded”—as the titles of some clips put it—these men reveal a lot about what they find pleasurable and informative.

Ironically, some creators who post in deepfake forums show great concern for their own safety and privacy—in one forum thread that I found, a man is ridiculed for having signed up with a face-swapping app that does not protect user data—but insist that the women they depict do not have those same rights, because they have chosen public career paths. The most chilling page I found lists women who are turning 18 this year; they are removed on their birthdays from “blacklists” that deepfake-forum hosts maintain so they don’t run afoul of laws against child pornography.

Effective laws are exactly what the victims of deepfake porn need. Several states—including Virginia and California—have outlawed the distribution of deepfake porn. But for victims living outside these jurisdictions or seeking justice against perpetrators based elsewhere, these laws have little effect. In my own case, finding out who created these videos is probably not worth the time and money. I could attempt to subpoena platforms for information about the users who uploaded the videos, but even if the sites had those details and shared them with me, if my abusers live out of state—or in a different country—there is little I could do to bring them to justice.

Representative Joseph Morelle of New York is attempting to reduce this jurisdictional loophole by reintroducing the Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act, a proposed amendment to the 2022 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. Morelle’s bill would impose a nationwide ban on the distribution of deepfakes without the explicit consent of the people depicted in the image or video. The measure would also provide victims with somewhat easier recourse when they find themselves unwittingly starring in nonconsensual porn.

In the absence of strong federal legislation, the avenues available to me to mitigate the harm caused by the deepfakes of me are not all that encouraging. I can request that Google delist the web addresses of the videos in its search results and—though the legal basis for any demand would be shaky—have my attorneys ask online platforms to take down the videos altogether. But even if those websites comply, the likelihood that the videos will crop up somewhere else is extremely high. Women targeted by deepfake porn are caught in an exhausting, expensive, endless game of whack-a-troll.

The Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act won’t solve the deepfake problem; the internet is forever, and deepfake technology is only becoming more ubiquitous and its output more convincing. Yet especially because AI grows more powerful by the month, adapting the law to an emergent category of misogynistic abuse is all the more essential to protect women’s privacy and safety. As policy makers worry whether AI will destroy the world, I beg them: Let’s first stop the men who are using it to discredit and humiliate women.

Nina Jankowicz is a disinformation expert and the author of How to Be a Woman Online and How to Lose the Information War.

[cuddles-with-dragons]

More Fives + Bad Batch Shenanigans

Fives: Do crabs think people walk sideways? Echo: ...Fives, what the hell.

Fives: Everyone, calm down! We're grown-ups, let's deal with this like adults! Crosshair: So, we're just going to wing it and hope for the best? Fives: Obviously. Now, Tech, pass the shovel.

*Everyone is playing Scrabble together* Fives: I will put 'A' down to make 'A'. Hunter: I will add onto your 'A' to make 'AT'. Crosshair: I will add onto your 'AT' to make 'RAT'. Tech: I will add onto your 'RAT' to make 'BIOSTRATAGRAPHIC'. Fives: *flips the board*

Crosshair: Are you laughing at that video of Fives and Echo fighting? Tech: No. Tech: I'm laughing at the comments.

Fives: When will Ted himself...finally show up to the talk? Wrecker: The final boss. Tech: You guys know TED talks stands for technology, entertainment, and design talks, right? Fives: I will not let Ted hide behind these lies any longer!

Fives: Tech noticed only today that he can label his email inboxes, but he took apart his entire bloody laptop two weeks ago. Crosshair: This reminds me of the Tech who couldn’t turn on the coffee maker, but remembers about 500 digits of pi. Fives: I’ll be delighted to inform you that this is the very same Tech.

Crosshair, to Echo: If Fives doesn't say "I'm King of the world" within an hour on that boat, I will let you use my rifle. Fives, within 5 minutes of getting on the boat: I'M KING OF THE WORLD!!!

Fives: I want you back... Crosshair: 3 words, 8 letters. Say it, and I'm yours. Fives: I got food? Crosshair: ...you know me so well.

Hunter: I hate you with every inch of my body! Crosshair: That’s not a lot of inches.

[desertfangs]

VC Silly Headcanon Friday - Holiday Gift Edition

Bringing this back because why not? This is a game where I ask a question and you share your fun or silly (or depressing whateves) VC headcanons about it! You can share in the comments, reblog, make a post and tag me (or not), send it to my ask box, whatever makes you happy! This is just for funsies!

What is the most fun Christmas/Holiday gift your favorite vampire has ever received? Not necessarily the best gift but the one they definitely had a blast with and really enjoyed!

For example, I believe in the 80s Daniel made the mistake of getting Armand a label maker for Christmas one year, and for a while there, everything on Night Island suddenly had a label on it. Daniel even awoke one night to find his coffin labeled "Beloved." At least it helped organize the boxes and boxes of stuff Armand had in the cellar?

I like to think one year at Trinity Gate, Armand got Louis a Blackberry and it was the first cell phone he didn't immediately "lose."

For Daniel, I think one year (maybe 86?) it was a motorcycle, given to him by Armand because he thought Lestat's was cool and he subsequently took it all over the place (sometimes with Armand). And then later, after his sanity started to return, it was an iPod that he could use to listen to music, help block out noise (in his head and otherwise), and enjoy radio shows/podcasts. It helped him come back to the world and get acquainted with some of the technology and stuff that he'd missed.

But enough about my headcanons!

What are some of the most fun gifts the vampires have recieved for the holidays? No wrong answers, that's the beauty of headcanons!

[taperwolf]

Posting about finding that braille labeler reminds me that I've long meant to talk about the underlying technology of the embossing labeler. I have something of a collection of them, and I just took a bit to take some pictures and label samples.

Fundamentally these all work the same way — a disc has a number of "petals" around its edge, each with a raised character. A strip of vinyl tape, with a sticky backing covered by a protective plastic film, rides through a slot in the labeler and passes either through or alongside the wheel. You spin the disc to select a character, and squeeze the handle, forcing the raised die to press through the tape. The tape both takes the shape of the die and turns white as it gets thinner, leaving you a raised, contrasting character embossed in the tape. Letting go of the squeeze handle generally advances the tape to the space for the next character.

Until the advent of small printing label makers, these were practically the only game in town for labeling tools, household items, and the controls on homebrew electronics.

This is a recent example of the style that's been predominant since at least the 1980s. It's sized solely for ⅜" tape (or 9mm) and is very straightforward to use: turn the wheel to select your character, and squeeze the grip. "Cut" is its own character, represented by scissors.

And this one is a shrunken version of the same; I'm uncertain of the manufacturer, but I think I got it amongst scrapbooking supplies back when that was big.

These two are together because they share one feature: the same kind of interchangeable die wheels; between the two models I have two identical "American 150" wheels and a third "Vertical" wheel. The Sears model (left) also takes the long- discontinued ¼" (6mm) tapes, and can print either in "wide" or "condensed" mode; it stores a roll of tape inside, where the Dymo model on the right lets the tape roll's caddy clip onto the back, and can only print in "wide". They both have separate cutting mechanisms: the Sears's is the extra white squeeze handle on the underside, while the Dymo uses the raised white button on top.

The Dymo 1570 also has changeable wheels, but I don't have any spares that fit it; both it and the Reizen RL-350 Braille Labeler take both ⅜" (9mm) and ½" (12mm) tape. Unfortunately the only ½" tape I have is the clear type that came with the Reizen, so it's less legible to the sighted than it could be. The cutter on this Dymo works the same as on the Sears model, while the Reizen has a cutting space on the wheel.

[mariacallous]

The Fruit Union Suisse is 111 years old. For most of its history, it has had as its symbol a red apple with a white cross—the Swiss national flag superimposed on one of its most common fruits. But the group, the oldest and largest fruit farmer’s organization in Switzerland, worries it might have to change its logo, because Apple, the tech giant, is trying to gain intellectual property rights over depictions of apples, the fruit.

“We have a hard time understanding this, because it’s not like they’re trying to protect their bitten apple,” Fruit Union Suisse director Jimmy Mariéthoz says, referring to the company’s iconic logo. “Their objective here is really to own the rights to an actual apple, which, for us, is something that is really almost universal … that should be free for everyone to use.”

While the case has left Swiss fruit growers puzzled, it’s part of a global trend. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization’s records, Apple has made similar requests to dozens of IP authorities around the world, with varying degrees of success. Authorities in Japan, Turkey, Israel, and Armenia have acquiesced. Apple’s quest to own the IP rights of something as generic as a fruit speaks to the dynamics of a flourishing global IP rights industry, which encourages companies to compete obsessively over trademarks they don’t really need.

Apple did not respond to requests for comment.

Apple's attempts to secure the trademark in Switzerland go as far back as 2017, when the Cupertino, California–based giant submitted an application to the Swiss Institute of Intellectual Property (IPI) requesting the IP rights for a realistic, black-and-white depiction of an apple variety known as the Granny Smith—the generic green apple. The request covered an extensive list of potential uses—mostly on electronic, digital, and audiovisual consumer goods and hardware. Following a protracted back-and-forth between both parties, the IPI partially granted Apple’s request last fall, saying that Apple could have rights relating to only some of the goods it wanted, citing a legal principle that considers generic images of common goods—like apples—to be in the public domain. In the spring, Apple launched an appeal.

The case now moving through the courts deals only with the goods for which the IPI refused the trademark, which an IPI official said could not be disclosed without consent from Apple, because the proceedings are still pending, but which include common uses such as audiovisual footage “meant for television and other transmission.”

Mariéthoz says that the Fruit Union is concerned because there is no clarity on what uses of the apple shape Apple will try to protect and because the company has been very aggressive in pursuing things that it perceives as infringements on its trademarks. “We’re concerned that any visual representation of an apple—so anything that’s audiovisual or linked to new technologies or to media—could be potentially impacted. That would be a very, very big restriction for us,” he said. “Theoretically, we could be entering slippery territory everytime we advertise with an apple.”

Over the past few years, Apple has pursued a meal-prepping app with a pear logo, a singer-songwriter named Frankie Pineapple, a German cycling route, a pair of stationery makers, and a school district, among others. The company fought a decades-long battle with the Beatles’ music label, Apple Corps, which was finally resolved in 2007.

An investigation in 2022 by the Tech Transparency Project, a nonprofit that researches Big Tech, found that between 2019 and 2021, Apple filed more trademark oppositions—attempts to enforce its IP over other companies—than Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, and Google combined. Those companies also have trademarked common terms such as “Windows” or “Prime.”

Apple has precedent in Switzerland. In 2010 the trillion-dollar company got a small Swiss grocers’ cooperative to enter into an out-of-court agreement declaring it would never add a bite mark to its logo—a bright red apple inside a shopping caddy—something which, according to the cooperative’s president at the time, was “never planned.”

Things haven’t always gone Apple’s way, though. In 2012, Swiss Federal Railways won a $21 million settlement after it showed Apple had copied the design of the Swiss railway clock. In 2015, an existing “apple” trademark in Switzerland, obtained by a watchmaker in the 1980s, forced Apple to delay the launch of its popular Apple Watch in the country.

Apple is asking only for rights over a black-and-white image of an apple. However, according to Cyrill Rigamonti, who teaches intellectual property law at the University of Bern, that might actually give it the broadest possible protection over the shape, allowing it to go after depictions in a wide range of colors. “Then the question [would be], is there a likelihood of confusion with regard to some other not-exactly-identical apple?” he says.

Irene Calboli, a professor at Texas A&M University School of Law and a fellow at the University of Geneva, says that in Switzerland, anyone who can prove prior history of using a disputed sign has protection in a potential trademark dispute. That means it might be hard for Apple to enforce its trademark on organizations that have used the apple symbol for decades.

However, she says, big, rich companies can often scare smaller businesses into compliance. “The system is very much skewed toward those who have more money,” she says. Just the threat of expensive litigation against a huge company like Apple can be enough to intimidate people and stop them from doing “something that might be perfectly lawful.”

Calboli says that the global trademark business is self-sustaining. “Lots of people make a lot of money over these rights by registering them,” she says. IP rights authorities “are as guilty as the lawyers, because offices want revenues, so they issue registrations for stuff companies don’t need. That’s our trademark industry.” Smaller companies, such as Switzerland’s apple growers, might need to learn how to work the system to protect their own assets, she adds. “We are dancing, and it is difficult to stop the dance. Since the system is like that, better that everybody uses it rather than just the big ones.”

A decision by the Swiss court will not be known for months, possibly years. For the Swiss apple growers, “millions” are at stake if they have to rebrand following a decision. “We’re not looking to compete with Apple; we have no intention of going into the same field as them,” Mariéthoz says, adding that one of the biggest gripes the 8,000-odd apple farmers he represents had with the attempted fruit grab was that, “you know, Apple didn’t invent apples … We have been around for 111 years. And I think apples have been around for a few thousand more.”

[superlabels]

Innovative Tamper-Proof Labelling Solutions for FMCG Brands

In the highly competitive world of fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), product authenticity and safety are critical concerns. As counterfeit products become more sophisticated and consumers more vigilant, tamper-proof labelling is no longer optional—it’s essential. Among the most effective security measures are hologram labels, which not only protect products from tampering but also enhance brand recognition. With modern advancements in label maker technology, FMCG brands now have access to secure, reliable, and visually distinctive labelling solutions.

Super Labels is at the forefront of this evolution, offering advanced capabilities in custom sticker printing, hologram labels, and roll form labels through high-performance sticker label printers. Our expertise in printing labels ensures that every product receives the tamper-evident protection it needs—without compromising on design aesthetics or on-shelf impact. Whether you’re packaging food, beverages, personal care items, or pharmaceutical products, our secure labelling solutions help brands maintain consumer trust and regulatory compliance.

Tamper-proof hologram labels are vital for protecting consumer safety and preserving brand reputation. A single incident of tampering can cause significant damage to customer confidence and lead to serious health implications. At Super Labels, our use of advanced label printers and precision printing techniques ensures that each hologram is uniquely secure and extremely difficult to duplicate. These labels serve as visible indicators of authenticity, deterring counterfeit activity and giving consumers peace of mind.

Our high-resolution sticker label printers make it possible to produce intricate holographic designs with specialized visual effects. Paired with roll form label formats, our solutions are ideal for high-volume production while ensuring consistent quality across various packaging types. From high-security seals to visually appealing branded labels, we deliver labelling solutions that are both practical and eye-catching.

As secure labelling becomes increasingly important, Super Labels remains a trusted industry leader, leveraging forward-thinking technology and deep sector expertise. We empower FMCG brands to stay ahead of counterfeit threats with tamper-proof labelling that strengthens product safety and deepens consumer engagement.

[shippingcannons]

Working as a young person in a museum also means being worshipped as Technology Person. Today I figured out the label maker and received such high praise you would think I single handedly solved all their problems and not just created more problems (we don't have the right label rolls)

[vcqrupvt]

Why Need Build Customer Loyalty? A Comprehensive Guide

VCQRU is a leading anti-counterfeiting solutions company in India, offering one-stop solutions for anti-counterfeiting, custom QR code, smart packaging, labels stickers, and e-warranty solutions with dynamic QR code.

Read more:

[uwlmvac]

The technologically sophisticated stoves of today are the latest in a long line of such appliances. If you could visit a mid- to late 19th-century logging camp in northern Wisconsin, you might find an iron stove such as this one, found at a Rusk County site, used for cooking and heating. This nearly complete stove was found in pieces from the surface down to a depth of 35 cm (17.7 inches). The entire stove top was present. Other parts contained identifying labels. One piece was embossed with “P. Mack/ Pattern Maker/ Empire Stove Works.” A section of the front was embossed with the brand name “Golden Harp”--and, fittingly, among the fragments were stove doors with raised and molded harps. Other parts included portions of the sides, interior, burner lids, a grill, and three matching legs. Two linear depressions found on either side of the stove might indicate that the location was a “State of Maine” camp. This kind of camp, which would have been prominent in the region from the 1840s through the 1860s, consisted of a fairly simple structure with a single, multipurpose room (Rohe 1986:18). However, the few diagnostic artifacts found at the site suggest a time frame later in the 1800s, possibly the 1890s.

Rohe, Randall  1986    The Evolution of the Great Lakes Logging Camp, 1830-1930. Journal of Forest History 30(1):17–28.

[dementedspeedster]

Okay now I wanna see the Thad and Lonnie kiddo 🚼

Accepting || send me a 🚼 and a ship I’ll use a doll-maker to design what I think a child between our two muses would look like @peranarkia

Name: Katherine 'Kat' or 'K' Machin-Thawne

Gender: Female (for now; I also get nonbinary/genderqueer vibes from her.)

Pronouns: She/Her (for now; later on in her I could see he being open to he/him and they/them as well as she/her. In general, she just doesn't care about gender or how people perceive her, so long as she can focus on her projects and be herself.)

Powers: None

Appearance-wise you can clearly see a good mix of Lonnie and Thad in her, though not really one over the other. Sure, she's got short red wavy hair and yellow eyes, which are obvious from on who they come from, her facial structure is a good mix of them both. Her hair isn't as curly as Lonnie's but it's definitely wavy and somewhat unable to be tamed at times. Her hair also take on that messy and sort of voluminous style Thad has. Body-wise: She's pretty lithe, around the same height as Lonnie (so around 5'10; maybe just a touch under, but still taller than Thad), and has a fit physique. Also sun-burns easily much to her chagrin as someone who likes running.

Fashion-wise: As a base point she has more style in general and opinions on fashion than Thad. She definitely has a MCR Danger Day's era fashion wise at one point. Her "lab wear" is the most comfortable and lax you'll see her in, which constitutes old T-shirts, sweats, (proper eye-wear and closed foot-wear, of course), and a lot of oil/grease stains from her work.

Personality-wise: K is the mischievous sort who toes the line when it comes to trouble. She's always testing the limits of what she can get away with.

She is social and likes socializing with others (especially on robotics forums and the like), but she has moments where she blends in and is quiet in the sense that she watches other people very closely.

With parents like Lonnie and Thad, and I assume being in contact with not one but two different AIs, I can see her developing an interest in technology, hacking, engineering, coding, and those sorts of skills. Starting from a place of learning how things work and then developing toward testing out the limitations of technology.

Specifically her particular interest would be in robotics.

She would be the sort who would try (and succeed) in creating miniature versions of Gundams or Zoids. And you can bet that she would make some for Craydl and MAX to pilot/use as physical bodies for them to walk around and explore in.

In her teen years should would definitely sneak out in the middle of the night to participate in underground robot fights. Y'know, kinda like BattleBots, but more extreme. She would take no prisoners.

She's got the stubbornness and competitive streak from both Lonnie and Thad. And she doesn't like being wrong.

As an adult she could easily go the 'mad scientist' sort of route, but instead of that she is trying to make society better for people, but her ways of going about it aren't always appreciated.

Her goals are not destruction or causing chaos, but rather she sees the system as slow/corrupt/doesn't work, and instead goes beneath it in order to reveal truths or force them into the light and in ways they can't be ignored.

She might take on a necessary evil sort of role in order to work toward her goals. It's just how she's perceived by society.

She doesn't care for labels overall. Good? Evil? Whatever. She's just doing what she feels is right/best.

She definitely has jokingly said/threatened that she can always become a mad scientist if things don't work out for her.

[dertaglichedan]

KEY POINTS

Cargill, the largest privately held company in the U.S. with $165 billion in 2022 revenue, is investing for the long game in plant-based food and a world which it forecasts will need 70% more protein over the next three decades.

The agribusiness giant got into the market later than buzzy startups including Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, as well as traditional rivals Tyson Foods, Hormel Foods and Smithfield Foods, but it is growing its alternative-protein portfolio including lab-grown beef, chicken and fish made from animal cells.

The plant-based protein boom has stalled, with buzzy startups humbled and food giants retreating, but Cargill forecasts 70% more protein consumption over the next 25 to 30 years. "That protein has to come from somewhere," says its chief technology officer and head of R&D, Florian Schattenmann.

The plant-based protein boom has stalled, with buzzy startups humbled and food giants retreating, but Cargill forecasts 70% more protein consumption over the next 25 to 30 years. “That protein has to come from somewhere,” says its chief technology officer and head of R&D, Florian Schattenmann.

Cargill

Cargill is hardly a household name among consumers — even though it’s the largest privately held company in the U.S., with $165 billion in revenue in its fiscal year 2022. The 158-year-old Minneapolis-based agribusiness giant produces a slew of branded and private-label meats and food ingredients and offers a wide range of agriculture-related products and services.

In the last few years, flying somewhat under the public radar, Cargill has also become a formidable player in the plant-based meat industry, which has come back down to Earth after its meteoric rise about a decade ago, when venture-capital-backed disruptors Beyond Meat

and Impossible Foods came on like gangbusters. Traditional meat companies, including Tyson Foods, Hormel Foods and Chinese-owned Smithfield Foods, jumped on the bandwagon, and the marketplace was soon flooded with faux beef, chicken and sausage.

Strategically, Cargill joined later in the game, and is now positioning itself to win the food fight that its competitors started.

In February 2020, almost a year after Beyond Meat’s IPO, Cargill introduced private-label plant-based patties and ground products for global retail and foodservice markets. Later that year, the company came out with a branded line — called Crave House, featuring plant-based burgers, ground, meatballs and sausages — for those same markets, as well as e-commerce channels. Additionally, Cargill began marketing several plant-based protein ingredients, made from soy, pea and wheat, to food and beverage manufacturers worldwide.

“We are a unique player,” said Florian Schattenmann, Cargill’s chief technology officer and head of research and development. “We have everything from the ingredients to the final meat-processing and distribution, and don’t play in fancy brands. That’s our strategy. I wouldn’t say it’s tempered, but deliberate and thoughtful, knowing where our strengths are and not overbuilding in watching the market.”