Word of the month: anti-feature
"Something that works against your customers' interests"
Brilliant!
EFF dinks HP Inc finks in rinky-dink ink stink
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has written to HP Inc demanding it reverse its attempt to prevent any third-party ink cartridges or refilled cartridges from working in its Officejet Pro printers. HP Inc, and many other printer makers, have traditionally sent users a Doomsday warning message when anything but their own …
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Tuesday 27th September 2016 19:51 GMT Ron 10
They leave out some points I consider an important factor - breaking and entering, destruction of private property, theft of the money spent on non-HP cartridges, time and effort lost to cause the machine THEY OWN to fail.
Much of these things also need to be slapped up against Microsoft by federal regulators. MS has decided you computer no longer belongs to you by depriving owners of control and access to their own property and use of the property as they choose.
Much as I dislike Federal meddling, HP, MS, and many others need to be stopped. We are having our rights stomped on every day by usurping and altering the manner in which we use our private property.
It is essentially breaking and entering and the taking of property. The idiotic law preventing people from seeing manufacturers code for any purpose, seems to be decidedly oriented to companies rather than consumers (wow, what a surprise that lawmakers only seem to favor big money).
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Tuesday 27th September 2016 21:41 GMT a_yank_lurker
@ Ron 10 - Since it is the user's kit, they have the right to use any compatible supplies with it. This is a variation of using DRM to prevent users from using third party supplies. Now if the feral prosecutors were really doing their jobs they would be hammering Slurp and HP on various criminal charges.
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Tuesday 27th September 2016 23:04 GMT Suburban Inmate
Indeed. In fact years ago I remember these sort of things were passed off as bugs. How times change!
It is also insane from an environmental point of view. I have a Deskjet D5160 so HP have almost certainly not released a firmware update for that in aeons, let alone since I last fired it up to print something. In fact I so seldom print that my worry isn't the refilled carts being detected but them drying out so far that even an isopropanol paddle can't revive them.
Where was I? Oh, right, yes, the environment! Selling equipment as a 'loss leader', such as an inkjet for £20 encourages waste, i.e. unnecessary upgrades. Skewed markets are rarely any good for the consumer or the environment.
IMHO, HP and chums should be regulated to sell the goddamn printer and make a profit there by having a competitive product for the price. Then they are free to sell their carts and try to make a profit there by having a competitive product.
HP, If some folk aren't too bothered by slightly 'downmarket' inks and re-used print heads then perhaps your cartridges are just a smidgen overpriced? By all means gouge the hell out of corporates on a service contract, until a competitor comes and outcompetes....
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Tuesday 27th September 2016 20:24 GMT The Man Who Fell To Earth
If an individual did this, they go to jail.
Now how is this different from me gaining entry to a computer system under false pretenses and disabling it's functionality? I believe in the US, I'd be sent to the pokey for violating some combination of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) 18 U.S. Code §1030, the Access Device Fraud Act 18 U.S.C. § 1029, and the Communication Interference Act 18 U.S.C. § 1362, and a few others I'm probably overlooking.
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Wednesday 28th September 2016 01:24 GMT Mark 65
Re: If an individual did this, they go to jail.
I believe that, once they've finished jamming other major offenders in the arse in the courts, the EU will crack down on this as it is anti-competitive at the very least. Ford cannot mandate you only use tyres they supply or petrol etc. The actions they undertook by activating the "feature" 6 months after releasing it (and I believe transferring ownership of the division) makes me think more than a fine could be in the offing here.
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Wednesday 28th September 2016 00:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
Why are printers special?
If you bought a replacement cartridge for a water filter that did not work because it was too small and the water flowed around it or a cartridge for a plug in air freshener that evaporated within a day because it had a different chemical make up you would just put that down to buying third party counterfeit refills but for some reason that does not apply to printer ink cartridges which I guess are at least an HP trade secret if not covered by patient and other legal protection.
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Wednesday 28th September 2016 08:57 GMT Olivier2553
Re: Why are printers special?
But once you have found a compatible water filter cartridge that works with your filter, the manufacturer of the filter will not come to your home at night to change their system so that you cannot use the compatible cartridge.
I think it would be no problem if the printer was meant to work only with genuine supply from day one. But applying a modification, in a deceiving way, so something that was working, and that was not advised as not possible, suddenly stop working, is another matter altogether,
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Saturday 8th October 2016 23:42 GMT Saigua
Re: EFF Misnomer?
It could be Electronic Amnesty Foundation, out opposing the bricking penalty for printers and freeing PS4 from the obligations of PS2 or stopping systemic cruelty to odd version dot releases.
And it's not about advancing the bar or engineering per se, but more the people trying to live paperless and choose their own shared multi-head console without first shaking NIST (NBS?) .
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Wednesday 28th September 2016 12:25 GMT Valerion
They deserve a mega-slap
Imagine if this was, say, Ford, and they somehow pushed out an update that prevented you from filling up your car unless you were at one of their own petrol stations. Which happen to charge 5 times the price for fuel.
The uproar would be debated by the government within days.
Same should apply here.
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Wednesday 28th September 2016 22:45 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: They deserve a mega-slap
"Does the Tesla charging system have a proprietary plug?"
Yes, but you can use adaptors to charge from "standard" charging points or from a standard mains socket too. But you can't plug a non-Tesla car into a Tesla charging point.
So , quite similar to pre-update HP, ie you can use non-HP ink carts in an HP printer but you can't use HP ink carts in a non-HP printer.
This HP change would be like Tesla sending out an OTA update stopping their cars from charging unless it identifies a genuine Tesla charge point is connected up.
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Wednesday 28th September 2016 13:31 GMT ianmcca
Illegal and unfair practices
IiRC, the EU dropped it's unfair practices case against IBM when IBM agreed after much resistance to publish interfaces between products, allowing competitors to compete fairly at a product level rather than only at the solution level, and allowing customers to create the solution that suited their needs.
The same rule ought to apply to printers and ink cartridges. Today, when you think you are buying a printer you are in fact buying a printing solution because you are locked into a single supplier who can overcharge (as IBM used to do) for other parts of the solution.
I would love to see the printer companies fined enough to affect their bottom lines for this blatantly illegal practice, but I don't see any sign governments want to take this on.
My own reaction has been to stop using inkjet technology. I use print shops for photos and an ancient HP B/W laser printer (ink cost .3pence per page) for the occasional business letter and document I need to print.
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Monday 3rd October 2016 20:13 GMT ComedyIsn'tPretty
Pay Later, Not Pay now.
As an alternative point of view. I just had to purchase a new printer/scanner/copier and decided on an HP model partly because it cost $60. $60 was much cheaper than any other brand. Now the fact that this model is locked to use $25 HP ink cartridges is probably one reason why the printer could be offered at $60.
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Sunday 16th April 2017 14:02 GMT Goobertee
Re: Pay Later, Not Pay now.
My wife is a elementary teacher. When she moved to a new school and went to set up her new room, her administrator told her to look at the weekend newspaper ads (this is the USA) and pick the cheapest color inkjet she could find. My wife then called me and asked me to look at the ads for her. I'd bet the whole school could hear me screaming, "Noooooo!!!!" from six miles away.
I sent my wife an email to take to the administrator that I would buy a reasonably priced (found a Dell for $120) color laser which would remain mine forever, if the school would buy the replacement toner cartridges. The administrator agreed. I put several quite visible tags with my name (not my wife's) on the printer and everybody was happy, My wife retired and we have a nice low-mileage color printer.
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Tuesday 4th October 2016 12:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
code of conduct in the making?
maybe everyone selling "auto-update" stuff should be required to do this sort of thing:
- Reverse the firmware update (should the customer choose to do this, they go back to functionality available at the time they purchased the item)
- Apologise to customers.
- Promise not to abuse the update process and use it for security updates only
- Publicly disclose the impact of each future software update
- Warn customers if supplier intends to remove useful product features after they’ve bought the product.
and then offer a refund if an update removes functionality or features that the customer purchased - such as the freedom to use 3rd-party ink cartridges ...
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Sunday 9th October 2016 05:02 GMT Saigua
HPE has bug bounty cheering; get those MITM cartridge cozzies sent 'round!
Well, they have a bug bounty program https://firebounty.com/bug-bounty-program/4/hp so it the next log that hits 120 pages before INK OUT for a cartridge color you don't even love should let one take it out on a variety of select 'secure cartridge-printer communications.'
For example, can the printer tell that the cartridge inside it used to carry specialty inks used in vaccination labs, has a large family of colors (BEIGE 89257, BEIGE 89119, BEIGE 89740...) that have recently radicalized and traveled to color labs that also do human trafficking, eaten the chips out of several stockroom neighbors, and then trained for 3 months to put bows on replacement supplies with notes 'Please change ink when it whinges {top secret intelligence emoji}?'
Biting the hand that feeds IT
