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Cryptography To Frustrate Printer-Ink Piracy
Zack Melich writes with news of a new front about to open in the war printer manufacturers wage with cartridge counterfeiters, refillers, and hardware hackers. A San Francisco company, Cryptography Research Inc., is designing a crypto chip to marry cartridges to printers. There's no word so far that any printer manufacturer has committed to using it. Quoting: "The company's chips use cryptography designed to make it harder for printers to use off-brand and counterfeit cartridges. CRI plans to create a secure chip that will allow only certain ink cartridges to communicate with certain printers. CRI also said that the chip will be designed that so large portions of it will have no decipherable structure, a feature that would thwart someone attempting to reverse-engineer the chip by examining it under a microscope to determine how it works. 'You can see 95 percent of the [chip's] grid and you still don't know how it works,' said Kit Rodgers, CRI's vice president of business development. Its chip generates a separate, random code for each ink cartridge, thus requiring a would-be hacker to break every successive cartridge's code to make use of the cartridge."
That's absurd enough when applied to simple copyright infringement, but there's absolutely nothing illegal about after market ink. In fact, these sort of shenanigans should be illegal themselves. Let the printer manufacturers compete fairly.
Decided to buy a different printer.
It is Defective by Design. Don't buy this stuff
The company's chips use cryptography designed to make it harder for customers to use off-brand and counterfeit cartridges.
Fixed that for you.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Here we go again. "Official" printer ink is more expensive than heroin, but instead of competitive pricing, they go hand in hand with RIAA's marketing folks (read: more competition equals pricier products).
If they had ink cartridges with aggressive pricing in the first place, people would buy the factory-made ink simply because it would sound like a safe choice. At least I would.
Full Tilt
Most certainly, but it seems to be almost cyclical.
1. Corruption becomes out of control
2. Profit!!
3. Locals get pissed, get corruption back to acceptable levels.
4. Locals become complacent, stop keeping their good eye on officials
5. Corruption becomes out of control
6. Profit!!
I'm no genius but, I can see a slight pattern developing here.
Linux Zealots: Smarter than Mac Zealots, but still zealots.
... for the "pirates". Since this is going to make "official" ink cartridges more expensive, this will firstly raise the "pirates"' revenues, making it more rewarding to produce counterfeit cartridges to begin with. Duh. Each time in history, when something was forbidden or made illegal, the criminals made more money, like during prohibition in the 30s. As soon as the prohibition was cancelled, the alcohol mafia gangs had to look for different businesses. When will people learn.
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
Anyway, reverse engineering for compatibility purpose is protected by law in several European countries but you know, when we try to make a law to force compatibility between devices, this is dubbed a "anti-iPod, anti-Apple" law...
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Epson and Lexmark both lost class action suits brought against them for building technical blocs in thier hardware which would lock out 3rd party ink carts. And if the printer companies think they would survive a concerted effort by Indian and Chinese vendors to replace them in the home/SOHO market they are smoking the same weed that the RIAA uses. So I say let them try. They will see that market dry up.