The company says it wants to protect you from “viruses.” Experts are skeptical.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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"? 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)
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.