HP CEO Says They Brick Printers That Use Third-Party Ink Because of … Hackers::The company says it wants to protect you from “viruses.” Experts are skeptical.
Imagine if they put engineers time and money into developing faster, lighter, printers or faster, easier to use scanners or next generation OCR software or some sort of enterprise printing solution that doesn’t make me want to throw up.
No. Physical DRM only.
Also, their laptops and business workstations have been quite bad in my experience.
HP trying to pull a “Google” and say it’s all for our own protection. :)
Amazing how completely absurd things like this come out of their mouths and they expect people to believe it. Insulting is what it is. We’ve had an HP AIO printer for a decade + that is “bricked” because of their stupid DRM. I can’t even use the scanner because we have non-HP ink. Never gonna buy another HP product.
So what they are saying is, their design is so terrible that a drm module can cause their printer to become a vulnerability on the network.
Or they are just lying for profits…
Either way, they’ve already gone beyond any level of integrity I can support. I already wasn’t buying any HP products and will continue not doing so. What else can you do?
It unfortunate given their reputation of old. Current management is trying to milk any remnants of that reputation, but they’re not the same: just another scammy consumer products company with shitty products. Cross them off your list and let them fade. Always remember that sometime cheap or even free is just not worth it
It’s always so sad to see how far HP has fallen. They used to be such an innovative company and produce so many good products but then they decided to not anymore.
So the bricking is because there are chips in the ink cartridges. And why are there chips in the cartridges? Because HP wants to charge exorbitant rates for ink.
What harm are they saying these “hackable” cartridges can even do? Brick the printers? So they are preemptively bricking the printers because… the hackers might… brick the printers? Makes sense! I expect better from corpo technobabble. This is just idiotic.
Site won’t let me read the article, but if I remember correctly from another one of these threads, they’re saying that a hacked cartridge could be used to load malware onto the computer itself. If true, the printer itself is hilariously insecure, as are the drivers they provide.
Right? Instead of bricking the printer they can make their software secure. But we all know the reality is they want to punish anyone who dares to buy third party ink which is why they ignore vulnerabilities, and probably created them in the first place. Just a sad state of affairs. Part of me wants to believe consumers and even corporations will rebel against this obvious BS, but they’ll probably make bank.
Not saying it’s correct, but it would be an interesting way to make sure the printer you installed ink in had “upgraded” firmware. Make the ink carry the firmware and flash when installed…
