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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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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.
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.
What kind of “experts” are they? I don’t know much about hacking but I call bullshit.
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
the poor defenseless users, of course 🙏
Is “users” a new way of saying shareholders?
Think of the kids… security.
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.
Their industrial 3D printers (multi jet fusion) revolutionized the market
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.
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.
When I watch YouTube I’m usually in total brain drain mode and details have to be really interesting to be remembered.
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.
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…
Especially since they sell brand new printers for the price of about 3 ink cartridges.
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.
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.
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.
This makes me want to spread malware through HP printers
Careful or they’ll hire you!
