Technology

Can someone tell me why this is even necessary? Network printing has existed for almost as long as printers have and doesn't require the cloud. There are standard protocols for discovering printers on the network and sending prints to them. I'm on Linux, have never installed printer drivers or even manually set up a printer, and I can print just fine over the network, it just knows which device is a printer and I can send prints to it with a single click. It even knows what the printer's capabilities are, for example whether it can print double sided. Are people so afraid of the system print dialog that they insist on using HP's app or something?

Damn HP! My three year old laptop that I mostly de-crappified was just updated with a pop up selling HP extended warranty. They made it look like a system dialog, there was no “quit”, and “send personal data to HP” was selected by default.

I had to explicitly select to not sending data, explicitly select to make the choice permanent instead of bugging me later, before clicking ok

Never again HP, never again. It’s so sad to see a formerly great engineering company stooping this low as just another sleazy huckster

I've yet to meet one person who I think is dumb enough to subscribe to this.

So what happens if on the off chance someone decides to use the government purchasing system for COTS purchases and convince the SCIF to use one of these HP printers, and then try printing TS//SCI or other highly classified national security documents on the printer? Asking for a friend.

Time to snif out the packets and replace them with cool things like

"BDSM_training_Gangbang_at_HPHQ_tuesday.pdf"

And the like. We could even just flood their database until they decide to block us.

Unless you are a business getting printers on commercial leases, do yourself a favour and just buy a Brother laser printer and stop having issues with printers and start saving money as well.

The whole printer-as-a-service thing felt odious from the get-go, so the first thing HP should have done was to front a whole lot of good faith: Don't spy on the customer. Don't sell the data you get. Encrypt all data that gets passed between printer and HP and don't look at anything except what is necessary to service the printer.

That HP couldn't even make this step seems to imply they don't care, or assume their customer base is just that easy to abuse, that it has to throw in lease terms, data collection and contrived inconvenience to halt service. That tells us the whole plan was created as a grift from the beginning, rather than a well-intended service that corrupted in time.

Maybe HP shareholders aren't using enough lubricant.

You'd have to be a complete mental deficient to go out and consciously decide to buy a brand new HP product in 2024. Every single day it's more bad publicity for HP and yet they don't receive any consumer backlash that lasts longer than the breath required to complain about it.

I haven't owned a printer in, like, 10 years and I know I'm not an outlier. This sort of shit isn't necessarily going to bring me back into the fold.

I miss my Epson Stylus Color, had it around until i couldn't find cartridges for it anymore because.. built-in obsolescence.

The first thing to do is not connecting a printer to internet.

I feel like corps have gotten bored with "you will own nothing and you will be happy" and moved on to "you will be owned and you will be happy." Like, damn, people are absolute livestock in a freaky fucked-up way. You "buy" something and it sits there extracting value from you. You "rent" something and it gets to enjoy the utility you provide, for a time.

Just seems like "ownership" is totally screwed-up wrong, y'know? One can't have anything any more, it's all corporate property they let us pay to install into our own lives for them. grumblegrumblegrumble!

So, public espionage, no one sane should accept this behavior for something they paid for.