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."

Comments

Cryptography instead of Quality

[haakondahl]

I hope any printer manufacturer engaging in this sort of anti-competitive skullduggery is punished HARD in the marketplace. I do not want the manufacturer of anything I buy encrypting it so that I cannot use MY possession as I wish. With all due respect to the special problem of digitized Intellectual Property and other reproducibles, I do not want my car-maker to lock me into only using their strangely constructed non-interchangeable tires and wheels UNLESS as in the case of say, a Corvette or other exotic, there is a compelling QUALITY interest.

I bought an EPSON CX 5200 and it turned out to be a lemon. There was no fix, no refund, it just sucked after about a year. It was a hundred-dollar Jackson Pollock(sp?) machine, and the reason was that the experimental ink cartridge design was crap. My printer would work just fine if the business model were not to use cheap printers to lock you into expensive ink cartridges. My printer would print, if that were the goal of the printer-makers.

I will never buy another EPSON, and I'm glad to say so to so many people. Unless, of course, they were to come out against this encryption nonsense.

Off-topic my ass... he hit the damned nail!

[macraig]

He hit the damned nail on the head, you idiot anonymous mod. How is this NOT "digital rights management"?

This firm has designed hardware/firmware that would let printer manufacturers digitally restrict your use of their product, i.e. the printer, by preventing OEMs from making alternative cartridges and you from having choices. Isn't that rights management? If a competitor actually succeeded in creating a knockoff, you'd see a repeat of the stunt Lexmark pulled with toner cartridges: they'd sue in court under the provisions of the DMCA. In this case, this sleazebag Cryptography Research would no doubt jump in with a patent infringement suit, as well.

It's bad enough that average people are such a complete disappointment; when I see people here mod like that, even Slashdot disappoints me.

Re:Be careful, I wil buy another NEW printer

[Technician]

Maybe they should have a simple page that says "total costo over a year", where you input how many pages you plan to print and it will compare a printer against the others.

The manufactures fudge the numbers if they are published at all. Case in point, my old HP 722c printer used a large color cartridge. They came out with a newer 950c printer. You had a choice of the half full cartridge (at the same price point as the old 722 cart) or the high capacity cart for almost double the price. They touted the new cart as a bargain because it printed oh so many more pages and at higher quality.

I checked online... The first thing I noticed in the fine print is the comparison of apples and oranges.

The page count for the 722c printer is based on 15% page coverage. The page count for the 950c cart is based on 5% page coverage.

It's not that hard to adjust the 722c's page count based on using 1/3rd the ink for 5% coverage instead of 15% coverage. If I didn't pay attention to the details, I may have missed it. Needless to say, the newer 950c became a spare printer while I ran the 722c to the point the belt broke. The replacement belt is under the price of one cart for the 950c. My only problem is the color carts for the 722 are getting harder to find.

Due to the price of ink and the reduced price of photo prints, I no longer print photos at home. The printer manufactures have priced themselves out of the market and left the market wide open for photofnishers to take the market. With all the digital cameras out there, the printer manufactures are leaving lots of ink and photo paper unsold.

With the high cost of ink, many are very stingy with full color prints.