HP CEO Says They Brick Printers That Use Third-Party Ink Because of … Hackers

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 482 points – HP CEO Says They Brick Printers That Use Third-Party Ink Because of … Hackers
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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.

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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.

That's literally a crime. HP exceeded authorized access to your computer (specifically, the microcontroller in your printer) in order to damage it. I don't know if the criminal complaint should be directed to the FBI or the FTC, but either way, you should file one.

You put the wrong thing in and they take away all functionality.

I, once again, am forced to ask...when do we start burning things?

When will you start burning things? What - specifically - would it take?

I think that basically would be the same answer as your question.

Edit:. Sorry, looks like you probably had this conversation already. Half of the comments look deleted on my end .

Honestly I already admitted it somewhere else. This is just me being chicken shit to fight the first match. But it will take is me being able to blend into a mob that's already someplace.

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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

What if they DIDN'T have a chip in the ink cartridge, and just used it as a container that could be refilled and used in every printer they made? No hacking the cartridge then.

No, that's crazy talk!

No but see then you could get hacked through...uh...nanobots in the ink! Yeah. Real problem, totally possible, definitely happens.

Meanwhile, here in reality land:

People are downgrading their firmware to ancient versions likely containing old CVEs because fuck HP and their printer cartridge mafia.

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.

I don’t know. They’ve been fucking up for a while now. At least back to the whole compaq mess.

Makes perfect sense. Bill Gates puts Chinese 5G into third party printer ink. It's used to activate the spikes in vaccinations.

What gives Space Lasers their bright pure red color?

Thats actually a misunderstanding the lasers aren't any brighter but the stuff they put in the chemtrails that makes the frogs gay adds a bright glow around the laser.

And the stuff they put in chemtrails are the original RNA packets that will change your DNA. The covid vaccine is what activates them.

(But seriously, pretty much every covid vaccine conspiracy is just the chemtrail conspiracy repackaged.)

Why you gotta call out the psyops groups out there, you know how hard they're already working. There's no time for coming up with new campaigns when the old ones work so well.

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.

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. :)

I'm not big on gambling. But I feel I could bet that their software/firmware is so bad that someone could still hack the network via the bricked printer

Oh. The ink is the issue. I see. My bad HP. I thought hackers hacked using software.

Anybody saying they "protect against viruses" in 2024 is selling something to boomers.

There is nothing quite like a company praying on the ignorance of people who don't know that you can't get a virus on your devices by using 3rd party ink. The ink itself cannot do anything on its own to harm your PC, as far as I'm aware.

Well… turns out they have a serial connection from the printer to the cartridge, all in the name of DRM. And you could put nefarious things on the chip of the cartridge, which would then be able to connect to the computer through the printer. All because of them wanting to thwart third party cartridges, so a problem of their own making, basically.

HP is doing what now?

Sounds to me like HP themselves are the hackers, exceeding authorized access in order to destroy people's property. Prosecute HP!

Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 (CFAA) is a United States cybersecurity bill that was enacted in 1986 as an amendment to existing computer fraud law (18 U. S. C. § 1030), which had been included in the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. Prior to computer-specific criminal laws, computer crimes were prosecuted as mail and wire fraud, but the applying law was often insufficient.

^to^ ^opt^ ^out^^,^ ^pm^ ^me^ ^'optout'.^ ^article^ ^|^ ^about^

more often than not, it's in the name of security

But whose security?

Profits security.

Surely this actually cuts into their profits in the longer term? More and more people will simply refuse to buy HP hardware. If they don't, they deserve to get grifted to high heavens and back at this point.

If they actually bothered to care about the long term, a lot of these companies simply only care about near term and maybe maybe medium term profits

What kind of "experts" are they? I don't know much about hacking but I call bullshit.

Some YouTuber said the only evidence if this was an hp document of their internal testing. So instead of fixing the security hole they monetize it.

"Some youtuber"? Lol great source you have there. But yes, it's been reported that it was HP's lab that found what they concluded could somehow maybe be used as an attack vector. And other security experts have disagreed with that statement. Who knows.

(and yes I know the irony of me not providing any source at all)

That's not irony, that's hypocrisy.

Their source is better than your source. They at least indicated that it was word-of-mouth and didn't try and present it as anything but that.

Maybe my communication was poor. Or maybe we have different definitions of hypocrisy. I never meant to claim my info to be of higher trustworthiness. Had I meant to do that I would have dug up my source, which would have been easy to do. Without source I'm just a rando commenting and I just wanted to highlight the humor in sourcing specifically "some youtuber", which is the go-to source for crackpot theories (not YouTube, but poorly defined unknown random person on YouTube). My intention was not to be the bringer of the truth. I apologize for any confusion.

If there are viruses that can infect a printer from a grey market ink cartridge, 9:1 HP released it into the wild, on purpose. They already know how to write viruses, all of their printing software qualifies.

Wow, I really thought I broke the last printer I had at the office. Turns out it was HP. Too bad they replaced it with another HP.