HP Gives Printers Email Addresses

Barence writes "HP is set to unveil a line of printers with their own email addresses, allowing people to print from devices such as smartphones and tablets. The addresses will allow users to email their documents or photos directly to their own — or someone else's — printer. It will also let people more easily share physical documents; rather than merely emailing links around, users can email a photo to a friend's printer. 'HP plans to offer a few of these new printers to consumers this month, and then a few more of the products to small businesses in September.'"

Comments

This

[CSFFlame]

could never ever be abused in any way.

Re:This

[CarpetShark]

Nope. It's not like printers have been hacked with less to work from.

Re:This

[Locke2005]

The addresses will allow users to email their documents or photos directly to their own -- or someone else's -- printer.

Let the printer spamming begin!

Re:This

[tomhudson]

The addresses will allow users to email their documents or photos directly to their own -- or someone else's -- printer.

Let the printer spamming begin!

You mean it hasn't already?

It's not like anyone could ever have predicted this from, oh, the FAX SPAM problem?

How would you like to accidentally staple a printout of this to the last page of your report to the boss?

(nice way to thin out the competition at the office, though)

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

I foresee lots of Goatse emails to HP printers in the not-too-distant future...

Re:This

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

At least all the veterans of the fax machine spam campaigns will feel relevant again...

Re:This

[evilbessie]

But think of the new paradigm of email/fax spam, a synergy of such epic proportions as to usher in a new Zeitgeist.

Sorry.

Re:This

[idontgno]

Multimedia spam convergence.

DO NOT WANT!

Re:This

[Obfuscant]

How would you like to accidentally staple a printout of this to the last page of your report to the boss?

Oh, dude, how 1980's. As soon as this printer shows up in the office, you're going to be emailing your report to his printer, and HE'LL be accidentally stapling that last page to the report for you.

Re:This

[Romancer]

This is an obvious opportunity to have an open source alternative. A simple program to recieve email from any address the user wants and let them add a custom subject field "password" that allows them to print remotely.

The idea isn't that great but if there's an HP driver version compared to even the most basic OSS version with the actual options to avoid spam delivery then it's a good thing for us. Not saying that people will print more or that they need to print from a device that they carry with them anyway, but if HP thinks there's a market a quick programmer could show them up very easily.

And the subject field / sender whitelist combo would be a good alternative to the so far unknown "features" that they fail to mention in the real article. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07printer.html?ref=technology

Re:This

[the_fat_kid]

you sir (or madam) are truely thinking outside of the box.
I find your ideas fascinating and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

HP thinks there is a market because it allows them to put more "smarts" in the printer (now it needs to understand many document formats in order to render them) and gives them a long term revenue stream (what, you thought that email address was FREE???).

Re:This

[clone53421]

How would you like to accidentally staple a printout of this to the last page of your report to the boss?

I’m dying of curiosity but hesitant to click because I suspect it might be somewhat NSFW...

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no swearing or nudity if that helps your decision.

Re:This

[realityimpaired]

that'd actually be pretty easy to set up, using a procmail filter on an incoming mail server. you can already filter by subject line and execute a command on the incoming e-mail if it matches a specified filter. coupled with something like fetchmail if you're not running your own mail server (or more likely, if your mail server isn't on the same network as your printer), you could easily write a set of filters and scripts that would redirect specific e-mails to a printer. :)

Re:This

[Voyager529]

I find your ideas fascinating and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

...so post your printer's e-mail address!

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume that link is NSFW?

Re:This

[tomhudson]

As another poster pointed out - no swearing, no nudity, and I'll add that there's no racism, no Nazi stuff (just in case someone in france wants to take a look), no religious stuff (neither the Pope nor Mohammed), no links to affiliate programs, it's not an ad trying to sell you anything, or an illegal download, or anything else. It's even hosted at google, so no drive-by downloads.

Re:This

[hpa]

I did exactly this back in 1991 to deal with printing from a computer behind a two-way firewall with extremely restrictive permissions. The easiest protocol which was permitted through the firewall was email, and it automatically meant queueing was handled properly.

Re:This

[Philip K Dickhead]

Hi, HP! Thanks for intercepting my document! Oh, say hi to that nice Mr. Tice for me too, will you?

What class of carrier are you now? Not that it much matters - I guess that having both HP and the US Government in possession of my personal information and private, proprietary information is really both safer and more convenient. Just keep NSA on the bcc line, OK?

Re:This

[dotgain]

"Smarts" in the printer?!?! No, sir - this featurette will be part of the wonderful HP Driver & Utility package, now available on a single disk thanks to BluRay technology. It'll run from your PC. And when I say PC, I mean the one you basically 'give' to the HP drivers.

Re:This

[CronoCloud]

Snarl! Hiss!

For two reasons:

1. I know about Jennifer Usher from the various transgender oriented USENET newsgroups and am not a fan at all.

2. Transphobia. Using a picture of a transperson in a derogatory way, is not cool, even if it's Jennifer Usher.

Re:This

[jackal40]

Can't wait to see some use smarts to spam the crap out of this printer. I will laugh heartily!

Re:This

[nospam007]

HP is in the ink business, the printers are sold at a loss, so this is actually a good idea for them.
Every spam message earns them money.

Re:This

[t35t0r]

It could, but only within the organization since I can setup email printing to only accept from certain email servers within a range of IP addresses. Within an organization it's easy to find out when someone is abusing something, and when that does happen there are consequences for that person within that organization. I'd have to blame the admin for leaving this wide open to the whole world.

Re:This

[PPH]

I can just imagine the first wave pf spam: 8.5x11 color photo quality coupons for printer ink refills.

Re:This

[geirlk]

Would you believe HP haven't considered this already?

To me it looks like a ploy to sell even more overpriced printer ink/toner

Re:This

[tomhudson]

I know about Jennifer Usher from the various transgender oriented USENET newsgroups and am not a fan at all.

Then I would suggest you should check what's been going on in the newsgroup that Usher pulls the most crap in - a.s.srs.

You might also want to check Jennifer Usher: Part 1 - Attacking transsexuals and transgenders, Gov't worker: I can out people on my own time, Ushers threats to sue me (which started half a decade ago when I proved Usher was a liar), Usher's crapfest in my journal, trying to trivialize rape, trying to justify not calling it rape to another slashdotter, and lots more. (Note: slashdot fails to show all the posts because of a "too-deeply-nested" bug - go to a.s.srs for direct links.

Transphobia. Using a picture of a transperson in a derogatory way, is not cool, even if it's Jennifer Usher.

Usher has been pushing a transphobic hate agenda on the Internet for almost a decade. Hence the label "transquisling". Usher spent years attacking other people in news groups strictly based on their appearance, all the while claiming that "unlike them", that Usher "passed as a woman at work." When I got fed up with Usher attacking several others back in the middle of the last decade, I exposed Usher's claims about passing at work as a lie. Usher is only getting what Usher has been dishing out for a decade. Karma is a bitch.

People should not be judged on their appearance - I've said that many times. However, if someone is going to attack someone for years else based on their appearance (as Usher did to Willow and others), they'd better not be living in a glass house.

Re:This

[skine]

This just reminds me of my mother's Gateway laptop that started having popup ads for Gateway after two years.

There's no reason HP couldn't do something similar with their printers.

Re:This

[Anonymous Coward]

Ploy or not, they should have had this a long time ago.

As others have said, you can set this up yourself. For text, it's probably as simple as show [msgnumber] | lpr -P printername running on a daemon that will execute whenever the inbox gets bigger.

But on Windows....god I don't even try to program Windows.

Re:This

[PopeRatzo]

Multimedia spam convergence.

DO NOT WANT!

Too late, brother. They're called "commercials".

Re:This

[dwywit]

Given HP's history of what it likes to install on a Windows machine when one of its printers is attached, I'd expect the driver and utilities for this feature to top out around 3 PB, give or take a few TB.

Re:This

[barzok]

HP could be doing it today, without the printer having an email address. Do it through the drivers on the host system.

Re:This

[petermgreen]

Most network printers afaict default to accepting print jobs and even adminitstration control from anyone who can directly connect to them. Usually this isn't too much of a problem because home users and small buisnesses are usually on NATed networks and larger companies hopefully have someone who knows what they are doing.

These printers OTOH presumablly connect outbound to some HP controlled server that accepts emails on thier behalf. That means if HP don't get this right they could be very vulerable to attack.

Re:This

[petermgreen]

If I was designing a system like this I'd probablly do the conversion at the mail processing box and send something lower level (maybe PCL, maybe something even lowere level) to the printer.

Why put all that smarts in the printer where it will only be used occasionally when you can centralise it and therefore keep it busy all the time?

Re:This

[mlts]

Even better, how about a list of either PGP/gpg public keys (fingerprints or actual keys stored), or S/MIME keys (either by fingerprint or key material, or trusting the certificate?)

This way, unless the key is compromised by malware that knows exactly what it is doing, it would be extremely difficult to send spam to the printer.

Of course, as a pale second, a passphrase would work, but E-mail is easily forged, and non encrypted E-mail can be sniffed to glean contents.

Re:This

[martin-boundary]

This is not a good idea. There's no reason to reinvent an ad-hoc, insecure method of resource access authentication over SMTP (aka passwords in the subject), when secure and proven methods of authenticating to a local network with proper access control lists already exist.

SMTP is for email. A mail server has no business deciding who gets access to the local printer.

Re:This

[geirlk]

I'd say anything but mail myself though. Atleast until I have an idea how they're hoping to solve the spam problem.

We run our own mail server (privately), so for myself I'm not particularly concerned. But if the solution is built on an outsourced solution, eg. myprinter@print.hp.com, then no thanks.

PS: What's wrong with FTP? The overhead you get by sending document attachments by mail is unnecessary at best.

Re:This

[networkBoy]

it's not too bad. poor taste, but not overly NSFW.

Re:This

[skids]

Because transmitting giant PCL streams over a wide area network connection is fail.

Even the lowly 2000's Deskjets -- everything after that PPA debacle -- has a several-MHz CPU with every doodad you'd expect minus an MMU. They used to skimp on RAM, but there's basically no reason to anymore. They decided there just wasn't enough savings to be had in silicon to compensate for the increased development cost.

I mean, they'd actually have to spend man hours to compile the debug code out of their production images if they skimped :-)

Good thing for me they didn't (see sig.)

Re:This

[Locke2005]

If it's reachable by SMTP, it's probably reachable by IPP -- you know, a protocol actually designed to support internet printing.

Re:This

[CarpetShark]

This is an obvious opportunity to have an open source alternative.

IPP seems fine to me :)

Please.

[JesseL]

Tell me these will use at least a whitelist to determine which emails get printed. I don't need a stack of full color Viagr@ spam in my printer tray.

Re:Please.

[conares]

Hell no! Goatse for everybody!

Re:Please.

[AnonymousClown]

...or at least a queue that can be examined and the option to delete things before anything is printed.

email addresses for printers a dumb idea anyway. I very rarely print (legal documents that require a signature) and when I do, it's on something that costs a lot less than a HP printer - Brother or Kodak.

Re:Please.

[CannonballHead]

Because e-mail "from" can't be spoofed ... hm.

Re:Please.

[networkconsultant]

I am Prince Steward from Nigeria and I have need of your ASSISTANCE PLEASE; it has come to my attention.....

Re:Please.

[dsavi]

Whitelist? Oh no. They're gonna get rich from all the ink this uses!

Re:Please.

[Brett Buck]

I don't need a stack of full color Viagr@ spam in my printer tray.

Speak for yourself!

Re:Please.

[Joce640k]

Especially when they start sending the 200Mb attachments...

Re:Please.

[Runaway1956]

Is whitelisting even necessary? I'm no networking guru, but I can permit or deny internet access, in either direction, on any port(s) or protocol(s), for any machine on my network. Give me one of those silly printers. I'll wrap that bad boy up, snug as a bug in a rug. And, Wireshark will quickly find out if I missed anything, like a "phone home" feature.

Re:Please.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but at the very least, you're much less likely to come home to a giant stack of V1aGr4 spam, as long as you're not stupid enough to whitelist the printer's email address...

Re:Please.

[Firehed]

Still, with a whitelist you'd have to know a valid sender. It's by no means foolproof, but it's a tremendous improvement over nothing at all. Well, until you get your email account hacked and spam harvesters know that you@gmail.com has the following three @myhpprinter.com (or whatever) email addresses in its address book.

That being said, if they just run everything through gmail's spam filter, it would probably be fine. That thing is absurdly accurate - at least in my experience.

Re:Please.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like all the fax spam that gets sent out to many offices.

Better yet would be a hidden command to make then grow legs and try to take over the household. I think we need to establish a few laws for these printers before they hit the market.

Re:Please.

[sexconker]

Real nerds still refer to it as Ethereal.

Re:Please.

[nine-times]

Whitelists work because spammers often don't know which "from" address to spoof.

Re:Please.

[Beardo the Bearded]

WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER
We noticed that you are running low on black toner
WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER
We noticed that you are running low on black toner
WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER
We noticed that you are running low on black toner
WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER
We noticed that you are running low on black toner
WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER
We noticed that you are running low on black toner
WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER
We noticed that you are running low on black toner
WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER
We noticed that you are running low on black toner
WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER
We noticed that you are running low on black toner
WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER
We noticed that you are running low on black toner
WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER
We noticed that you are running low on black toner

Re:Please.

[Anonymous Coward]

sorry, you're not on the whitelist

Re:Please.

[Zerth]

These printers presumably do not contain an email server, just a mail reader(once again showing that any project will eventually expand to read mail).

It'll phone home to HP's mail server, out of your control. Although I suppose you could use deep packet inspection to choke off any transfer you don't like, it'll probably just keep retrying, clogging your email print queue.

Re:Please.

[clone53421]

Whitelists don’t work because spammers often do know which “from” addresses to spoof.

Re:Please.

[clone53421]

Um, just a thought, but if you buy one of those printers, maybe you wanted the e-mail-to-print feature? with, at the least, a whitelisting ability, because otherwise it would be completely unusable due to spam.

Re:Please.

[budgenator]

We know how widely the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) on port 631 is used; just because it implements access control, authentication, and encryption, avoiding the inevitable spam problem makes it much better for this purpose than any kludge using email protocols. If we could only teach the crew at geek squad to set it up and teach the clueless users how to use it, we'd be much better off.

Re:Please.

[Hotawa Hawk-eye]

Of course not.

The Vi@gra spam will be in black and purple, with occasional areas of dark green. Why use any other colors?

Actually I was thinking about that color scheme in terms of what would consume the most ink, but when I think about it in the context of Viagra ... somebody pass me the brain bleach, would ya?

Re:Please.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's racist!

Re:Please.

[zelbinion]

Why all that hassle? I'm sure any spam message sent to a printer will have the evil bit set (see: RFC3514), so you can just tell the printer to ignore those messages... Simple!

Re:Please.

[JesseL]

This is about implementing the most technically elegant solution for printing from mobile devices, it's about keeping HP's printer business in the black.

Seeing as this is being pushed by the printer company who is worried over the fact that people are printing less, and not by the manufacturers of cell phones and web tablets that don't really have any reason to implement any kind of printing subsystem in their OS or applications; maybe that would explain the decision to use email?

Re:Please.

[nine-times]

Ok. You have my email address. It's public. What email addresses do I have whitelisted?

Re:Please.

[Obfuscant]

It'll phone home to HP's mail server, out of your control. Although I suppose you could use deep packet inspection to choke off any transfer you don't like,

It doesn't take deep packet inspection to stomp on every outgoing connection attempt from my printer. I can think of NO reason for a printer to make outgoing connections to anywhere, much less accept them from any site outside my own network.

Re:Please.

[sabernet]

I want one further: to enable print from email, you would have to push a little button(may have an envelope or something on it), and the print feature would only work for any new email for the next 10 mins before the feature disables again.

Re:Please.

[Pharmboy]

I don't need a stack of full color Viagr@ spam in my printer tray

1. Buy Georgia Pacific Paper, Inc. stock
2. Create printer with email address
3. ?????
4. Profit!

Re:Please.

[LoverOfJoy]

One of the other addresses in the address book of your mom's (or boss's or client's) infected computer? Or maybe your mom's (or boss's or client's) own address.

You're right that they likely don't have your whitelist addresses if they just found your email publicly posted on a website like slashdot. If they somehow got your address from another person's infected computer the odds are a bit higher that they can find a whitelisted address.

Re:Please.

[EdIII]

LOL. Yeah, You missed EVERYTHING on this one.

Understandable though. You approached it like an IT person. Now go to the wall, bang your head against it furiously 10 times in a row and consider the USER. Banging your head just helps you think like one.

The user will not care about white listing or security, or any other reasonable consideration we can come up with in 60 seconds on /. about this ridiculously, deliciously, stupid idea.

This was a marketing exec over at HP that thought of a cool feature and rammed it down the developers throats.

Users are lazy. Instead of opening up the email, opening up the attachment, and clicking print they can now give that email address to people OUTSIDE OF THE COMPANY. Bob from ABC Whatmacallits needs to send an invoice. Great, just send it this email address that will print out in accounting. Less work for the user, same work for Bob.

People will share this email address as an easy way to get things printed without having to do as much work as before. Simple as that.

You try whitelisting the email addresses or IP addresses for that and generate a hundred support calls.

What I find more interesting, and you should too, is that the email address may be hosted by HP. A whole other can of worms to be sure.

Re:Please.

[dotgain]

If by 'Real nerds' you mean 'wankers who like to deliberately use less-common (sometimes obsolete) and more confusing terms just to gain some sense of self-importance by explaining themselves and (un)correcting people all the time', then yes.

But I would wager that most 'Real nerds', when installing such a package on their system (you probably use the term "Winchester Disk" here), would refer to a package by the name they look it up with. Otherwise, keeping track of all the forking and renaming would be rather hard on one's memory. Oh, sorry, I mean to say "core", like your Real Nerd (TM) would.

Re:Please.

[TheRaven64]

Your post has given me an excellent idea. We create a line of printers containing a small bomb, set to explode after a predetermined time. We advertise this as a feature, but use lots of buzzwords. A short while later, we eliminate the market of people who buy stupid things because they contain buzzwords. Companies will then have to market their products to the survivors by providing actual features.

Re:Please.

[TheRaven64]

There's no need for step 1. The people doing step 2 already sell printer ink at a higher price, per unit mass or volume, that gold dust.

Re:Please.

[nine-times]

So they can find *a* whitelisted address... maybe. And once they have my mom's email address, I can take her off the whitelist. I can call her and say "Yo mom, fix your shit."

But generally the problem with whitelists is not that spammers are clever enough to spoof whitelisted addresses. The real problem with whitelists is that we all get a lot of email from random unexpected sources, so we usually can't only allow whitelisted email in. A whitelist on a printer like this would probably work fairly well, since you don't want it to receive print jobs from unexpected sources.

Re:Please.

[Anonymous Coward]

But then you already knew that spammers can tunnel through your Whitelist with nine.times@gmail.com, right?

Re:Please.

[Pharmboy]

You know, it is perfectly acceptable for a paragraph to have more than one sentence in it.

Re:Please.

[Zerth]

It doesn't take deep packet inspection to stomp on every outgoing connection attempt from my printer. I can think of NO reason for a printer to make outgoing connections to anywhere, much less accept them from any site outside my own network.

Well, if you don't actually want to use the service at all, you probably want a different printer.

Re:Please.

[Reziac]

How about something like using the SUBJECT field for a password? Easy to give to someone who wants to send you something, and No password, No print. And no reason you can't have more than one, maybe with restrictions attached to some of them, like size of document, or only good for a particular sender. Essentially Q&D network admin stuff.

Re:Please.

[SharpFang]

I had this idea to send out cyanide pills advertizing them through spam as viagra

Re:Please.

[Obfuscant]

Well, if you don't actually want to use the service at all, you probably want a different printer.

Show me where I said I don't want the service at all. I responded to someone who thought that it would take "deep packet inspection" to prevent the printer from calling home to HP, and I pointed out the fallacy of that statement.

By the way, doesn't everyone have an email alias for printing already in their /etc/aliases?

Re:Please.

[Anonymous Coward]

For maximum effect, the bombs inside the printers would need to explode before their buyers procreate.

Therefore, sex should set them off immediately.

I think we're on the right track here.

Re:Please.

[clone53421]

There’s been enough spammers using gleaned e-mail addresses from infected computers and forging the headers to show that it can, at least, be done. Looks like it comes from someone you know, you’re more likely to open it. If more people started using whitelists the practice might become more common.

Also, “yo mom fix your shit” isn’t going to solve it. The spammer already has the address book and can continue to spam all of her friends with a forged From: header. They don’t need to do it from her computer... any other computer would do just as well.

Re:Please.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, Sony has already patented and implemented that idea.

Re:Please.

[nine-times]

Oh, you mean the highly technical instructions, "yo mom, fix your shit" aren't actually going to be sufficient? Shoot, I was sure that would work. My post was supposed to be highly detailed instructions on how to fight spam.

Look, I'm not dumb and I do actually know what email spoofing is. In fact, half of the time if you got spam from your mom, it's not because your mom was compromised, it's because your uncle got hacked. When spammers get ahold of an address book, they'll sometimes email one person in the address book while spoofing another address in the book instead of the address book owner. It makes the email look more legitimate without making it obvious who has been compromised.

Still, if we could rely on whitelists and not worry about unexpected senders, then eliminating spam would be much easier and much more fool-proof. Spoofing isn't that big of a problem as it is, and if it were the main problem with email, it wouldn't be too hard to fix.

Re:Please.

[Zerth]

Show me where I said I don't want the service at all. I responded to someone who thought that it would take "deep packet inspection" to prevent the printer from calling home to HP, and I pointed out the fallacy of that statement.

Considering this thing has to phone home to retreive the emails to print, preventing it from phoning home would cause it to stop working.(see the original post)

If you are completely preventing the printer from communicating with HP's email server, I assume you don't want to use their service. If you are selectively censoring the transmissions, I'm assuming you are doing some sort of inspection of the packets.

By the way, doesn't everyone have an email alias for printing already in their /etc/aliases?

Anybody who has an /etc/alias probably doesn't need this service:)

Re:Please.

[sl149q]

I don't know why you assume that it will require communicating with HP's email server....

It would be trivial to just enter an email address and server name into the printer, then select imap/pop... It could be on gmail, hotmail, your local intranet, whatever...

The tricky bit is making sure you know what file format, what printer options, and have some minimal authentication. But none of that rises much above simple scripting or at worst a simple app. E.g. a PDF or similar attachment. Plus an XML file for the rest.

These type of gateways have been around for decades. The only new part is building it into the printer.

Re:Please.

[bhiestand]

Ok. You have my email address. It's public. What email addresses do I have whitelisted?

I see a lot of spamming that puts the "to" address in the "from" field. Apparently most people whitelist themselves?

Re:Please.

[nine-times]

Yeah, I see that a lot, but I'm not sure the logic behind it. It seems like it'd be terribly easy to catch for a variety of reasons. My spam filters catch those every single time.

Re:Please.

[Abstrackt]

How about something like using the SUBJECT field for a password? Easy to give to someone who wants to send you something, and No password, No print. And no reason you can't have more than one, maybe with restrictions attached to some of them, like size of document, or only good for a particular sender. Essentially Q&D network admin stuff.

I could see an intrepid group of spammers registering a site with a name like myhprinter.com and harvesting not only valid email addresses but also a lot of passwords when people make typos.

Re:Please.

[clone53421]

Considering this thing has to phone home to retreive the emails to print, preventing it from phoning home would cause it to stop working.(see the original post)

You’d still be able to print normally to the device. Regular print jobs don’t go through HP’s server.

You would, however, also defeat a lot of features that HP has created if you indiscriminately blocked all of its phone-home functions. HP printers can automatically phone home when they’re running low on toner, for instance, and they’ll ship you a new cartridge even before the old one empties out.

Re:Please.

[Reziac]

The way I'm thinking, the passwords would be easy for the printer's owner to change, so if a password was compromised, it would be obvious after the first bogus print job. I'm looking at this as something average non-IT people could do -- put a teeny little webserver in the printer, where all it does is cough up a form that the owner used to input usernames (sender's email addy) and a password for each address. NOT asterisked, since no one else will see it and you want Average Joe to be sure what he typed.

It could also have a function to email an "invitation to print" to Yonder Sender, with a hash that has to be present in the reply before the print job is accepted. Random Spammer's junk printjobs won't have that information, so they'd be rejected from the print queue.

Essentially what I'm going for is closed two-way communication (so printer is not available to random strangers) with simple-to-manage authentication. I gather some network printers already do something similar but I've never heard anything but swearing from the IT guys who manage 'em.

Yeah, it would mean you'd have to exchange a pair of request/invite emails first. But why would anyone want random images arriving unannounced anyway? (Well, unless your idea is to collect printed porn without having to look it up yourself :)

Re:Please.

[InfiniteWisdom]

Surely you mean:

WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER
We noticed that you are running low on black toner
WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER
We noticed that you are running low on black toner
WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER
We noticed that you are running low on black toner
WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER
We noticed that you are running low on black toner
WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER
We noticed that you are running low on black toner
WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER
We noticed that you are running low on black toner
WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER
We noticed that you are running low on black toner
WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE RUNNING LOW ON BLACK TONER
We noticed that yo

Re:Please.

[marcosdumay]

Your email address is a good initial bet. It is public, you know.

Re:Please.

[sexconker]

Protip: Wireshark IS Ethereal
The only difference is the name.

I bet you call BP "Beyond Petroleum".
I bet you call Pizza Hut "The Hut".
I bet you call Mountain Dew "Mtn Dew".
I bet you'll now call any display with a DPI over 300 a "Retina Display".

Re:Please.

[nine-times]

Nope, that's not going to work on my mail server.

Re:Please.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know why you assume that it will require communicating with HP's email server....

But then HP couldn't charge you for it on a monthly basis! You could just do like the GP and use your own mail server and an /etc/alias...

Re:Please.

[Obfuscant]

Considering this thing has to phone home to retreive the emails to print, preventing it from phoning home would cause it to stop working.(see the original post)

I don't recall anything in the original post saying it had to phone home to be able to print. The original article was rather sparse on details.

If you are completely preventing the printer from communicating with HP's email server,

I would have assumed it had its own SMTP server if it is going to have an email address. If it doesn't, then it doesn't really have its own email address, now does it?

The point was and still is, the person who said they needed to do deep packet inspection in order to keep it from phoning home was wrong. That's the only point I was making. Period.

Re:Please.

[Anonymous Coward]

facepalm.jpg

Re:Please.

[dotgain]

This situation actually warrants double_facepalm.jpg, but thank you.

Re:Please.

[CarpetShark]

From that perspective (documents for everybody), it would be very cool to be able to mass-email a lot of printers around the world, instantly leaking hard-copies of secret government documents, say.

Spam

[MrEricSir]

Now HP will finally make money off all those v1@grA ads I keep getting.

Too late?

[TrippTDF]

This could have been amazing ten years ago... but printers as a technology on the whole seem to be dying out to me. I knew fewer people that have them, as there is very little that needs to be printed anymore.

Re:Too late?

[Steve Newall]

We thought it was in 1998 when we did it with our InnMail system http://www.thefreelibrary.com/AlphaNet+Hospitality+Systems+and+Loews+Hotels+Expand+Long+Standing...-a020787415 We had a fax server service that converted e-mail's to faxes. Anyone subscribing to our system received a dedicated e-mail address and a dedicated fax number. This could be forwarded to any fax machine where ever you were. We finally discontinued the service last year.

Re:Too late?

[MLCT]

Not in any work environment, though as a consumer device this will likely pique the interest of the SOHO community rather than any large scale stuff.

I would judge in the world of work more is being printed now than ten years ago, not less.

Re:Too late?

[Megahard]

You clearly do not work for the government.

Re:Too late?

[ducomputergeek]

Unless you run a business. We have a Samsung CL-315 color laser on the network and I'm always printing stuff like NDA's and other legal contracts usually in duplicate. One to keep in the office, another to keep at the safe-deposit box at the bank. We get internet through our office complex which I have no control over how it is firewalled and NATed. It would be nice sometimes to email a document to the office to be printed and signed by the President of the company.

Re:Too late?

[ChefInnocent]

I dunno, I found new used for plotters recently, and combined with a color printer, I can do new stuff I didn't think about before. I've been making stencils to do wood working. I've also made some stencils for my roommates cakes. Using an inkjet printer, we can substitute the ink cartridges for food coloring cartridges and print onto sugar paper or fondant (very thin). Can also make game pieces using the cutter/plotter and using a laser printer to print onto sticky paper.

I've stopped thinking about printers in the traditional sense where I print stuff to read on paper, but started to use them in more of a home-fabrication sense. I've been tempted to try to construct one of those 3D resin printer from a kit to print using molding chocolates.

Re:Too late?

[fermion]

There is context to what HP is doing. It has to do with smart phones that take pictures but doesn't have built in printing capability. Form what have read, this has lead people to look at pictures but not print them. Sure there are solutions, but they are not really 'plug and play'. If it is hard to print, HP does not sell ink.

Recall what the printer manufacturers did when everyone started taking digital pictures. They put memory slots in the printer and software that would one-touch print the various picture formats. This was nothing that technical people would use, we all had computer with photo editing suites and high end printers, but for the mom wanting to print pictures of the kids is was a great way to sell ink.

This is all that is happening now. Someone has some snaps on their smart phone or feature phone with email. They want to print it but they don't really want to mess with the computer. They don't have a memory card that will work with the old printer. They don't want to go the marketplace and download the app and set up the printer. So they email. It works. One touch plug and play printing. They use ink that HP sells.

The other context to this is that ten years ago houses were not networked the way they are now, and network kit was not so cheap. Ten years ago a card or box to network a printer wold be north of $200, and a networked printer would be north of $1000. Now HP sells a network ready printer for $100 and most houses have a ethernet port to plug it into.

Re:Too late?

[aliquis]

.. and HP noticed!

Re:Too late?

[JustABlitheringIdiot]

So what about a small portable photo printer, something capable of printing 4"x6" photos max. It's powered with a standard battery, I'm picturing something from a netbook. Connectivity includes a USB port, bluetooth, and card slots for the most common phone memory cards and perhaps some of the more common cards from digital cameras (microSD, SD, etc.). It's not necessary to support all of the types of memory cards b/c it's targeted at a specific audience. No need for drivers, printer detects the phone/card as a mass storage device. With a small screen on the top (use that new flexible screen type stuff) for selecting what to print. The print media and ink come as a package with the media in cartridges and enough ink to print that many photos, say 25 at a time or so.

Re:Too late?

[marcosdumay]

Well, ok that is the market they want to cover. But I disagree that it has any measurable size. First, you'll have to have your PC and printer turned on, that is messing with a PC. Then, you'll have to discover that email address, and mess with a phone (what is harder than messing with a PC) by sending the email. Given that you are in front of your PC (required for turning it on), why don't you just plug the phone and print the photo?

Now, I guess the reason mobile devices don't normaly come with printer drivers is that you don't carry your printer with you. Taking a picture far from home, and sending it home for printing isn't very compeling. One'll probably want to have the printed document NOW. That can't be done. Obviously, somebody will find a use for printing things at home while far away, it is just not a big market, and can already be filled with current printer and some simple software right.

Re:Too late?

[DutchUncle]

Maybe the problem isn't smart phones that take pictures, but phone services that try to lock those pictures inside the phone unless you pay data fees to email them out (rather than allowing data transfer).

Re:Too late?

[rdnetto]

The thing is, most people don't use email on their phones, which means it won't be set up. A far simpler and more powerful solution would have been to put a small HTTP server into the printer, so that you could upload documents to print via a HTTP POST form and even specify scaling, no. of copies, etc.

Why is this news?

[djsmiley]

At work we have printers and scanners you can email to, from Ricoh.

Not sure what this is getting on slashdot for exactly?

Re:Why is this news?

[BobMcD]

Welcome to slashdot. A few pointers:

1) Not everything here is 'news'.

2) Not everything here is 'for nerds'.

3) Not everything here will make sense to any one given person.

4) Commenting 'why' has approximately zero chance of modifying any of the above.

Enjoy your stay!

Re:Why is this news?

[tomhudson]

At work we have printers and scanners you can email to, from Ricoh.

Email address or it didn't happen!

Re:Why is this news?

[Quarters]

Because Ricoh never put out a press release in hopes that the gadget websites would run it as news and someone would submit that 'news' to Slashdot.

Re:Why is this news?

[Venerable Vegetable]

I was thinking the same. Each printer (including the small desktop models) at my work can be emailed to and from, which works excellent with printing, scanning and faxing (receiving and sending). I've seen the same printers for sale at normal consumer shops...

If I understand correctly though, it will have a preconfigured, easy to set up web-based email adress om a HP server. Basically bringing the normal enterprise functionality to home users.

That would be fairly neat, but also rather useless and easy to abuse.

Re:Why is this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

epson aculaser here, also quite a few years old already.... not that i couldnt set up a machine with cups and other goodies to do exactly the same with any printer...

Re:Why is this news?

[treeves]

Because *home* users don't buy Ricoh printers but they buy many HP (and Canon and Epson and Lexmark) printers? Just a guess.

Re:Why is this news?

[Andy Dodd]

I don't know if our Xerox MFDs can be emailed to, but:
1) You can scan stuff and have it emailed to you
2) They have a "Secure Print" feature where you set a PIN number for your print job and it won't actually print it until you go there and enter the PIN.

Re:Why is this news?

[jmorris42]

> Each printer (including the small desktop models) at my work can be emailed to and from,
> which works excellent with printing, scanning and faxing (receiving and sending).

Yea, we have Oki multifunctions that send and receive email. All you do is specify an smtp and pop3 server on the setup page. Even does authenticated smtp if you need it. But you are right, it doesn't sound like this sort of useful feature set is what HP has in mind.

> If I understand correctly though, it will have a preconfigured, easy to set up web-based email adress om a HP server.

Translation from marketing to geek:

If I understand it correctly, newer HP printers will be leased, not sold. They will be forever tied to hp.com where they will reserve the right to send any print job they decide to 'their' printer.... that YOU buy the insanely expensive ink for. Just wait for the EULA update that specifies the maximum time you can allow their printer to go without ink.

Re:Why is this news?

[Beardo the Bearded]

Number 2 is to comply with... certain standards. I'm not sure how one would be able to print to the printer in the normal room and still comply with those standards, but it's there.

More accurately, how could one PRINT AT ALL and still comply with those standards?

Re:Why is this news?

[omglolbah]

Even better if you have a "safeprint" system.
You print from your laptop anywhere in the building and go to the nearest machine, swipe your card and print.

And it just works.

Re:Why is this news?

[CAIMLAS]

Yeah, no kidding. It's not bad enough that we've got the (relatively rare) office printers with preconfigured mail servers and half a dozen+ variants of BSD which all come with sendmail as part of the base install - nevermind all the zombie machines out there - now we're going to have every cheap deskjet out there with an email address (and likely, the ability to be exploited via an internal mail server of some sort).

Re:Why is this news?

[t35t0r]

I agree, we've got a canon imagerunner that can do this.

Re:Why is this news?

[arth1]

The difference is that your Ricoh printers have to be controlled by a PC that does the actual e-mail attachment conversion for you. HPs new printers are supposed to take a subset of native formats, and convert them inside the printer itself.

A flip side is, of course, that it will be a subset. I can imagine people e-mailing the printer formats it doesn't know how to convert, and get an error message back (or worse, an OK, because something else in the e-mail printed). In true modern-HP fashion, they're making a problem that's "good enough" for most, but useless for anyone more advanced than auntie Peggy Sue and uncle Billy Bob.

Or, to put it another way, if HP ever made a SOHO router, it would likely not support UDP, ICMP or ability to actually configure routing yourself. But it'd be cheap, glossy black, have a one-button configuration, and come with a voucher for 10% off your next ink purchase. And if you took it apart, you'd find that it wasn't made by HP at all, but was an ultra-cheap Wistron or similar ODM design.
I look at my HP-41CV and wonders what happened to HP.

Re:Why is this news?

[tomzyk]

4b) Commenting 'why' has approximately 100% chance of getting a smart-assed response.

Re:Why is this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

What exactly do you email TO your scanner? What does it do with the information?

Re:Why is this news?

[DutchUncle]

I'm betting your work systems are configured to accept emails only from within your company, or perhaps even from your company computers. This is trying to accept emails from *anywhere* - your phone, your camera . . anyone who broadcasts to all of the HP addresses . .

I really hope this has some form of verification..

[Mysticalfruit]

1. Spambots sending your printer garbage...
2. DDOS somebody's printer with a combo of tubgirl / lemonparty / goat.se
3. ???
4. Profit?

So they will be easier to hack now?

[Joe The Dragon]

So they will be easier to hack now?

How long before a bug in the email app is found and mass printers get hacked?

Re:So they will be easier to hack now?

[CarpetShark]

How long before a bug in the email app is found and mass printers get hacked?

I think they'll start with the traditional printers before moving on to your new-fangled mass printers.

Faxing

[SlamMan]

And so now we're back to fax spam? Thanks HP!

Re:Faxing

[Mysticalfruit]

Now, you'll get a print out from your printer telling you you're out of ink and at the bottom will be a coupon you can cut out... Note: the coupon will be white lettering on a black background and will probably take an entire 8x11 sheet of paper...

Re:Faxing

[Anonymous Coward]

And so now we're back to fax spam? Thanks HP!

At least there is a good part.

How many days until we get a post on TheDailyWTF regarding a PHB asking their employee to send them an email with a blank word document, because their printer is out of paper?

Re:Faxing

[squallbsr]

So, HP is going retro, they couldn't think of anything new so they re-invented the fax machine!

Invent! - they need to rethink that tagline...

Re:Faxing

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but this time spam arrives in technicolor, rather than this ugly B/N fax spam. Can we call it progress ?!?

Re:Faxing

[$RANDOMLUSER]

And so now we're back to fax spam? Thanks HP!

Not to worry. It'll be protected by The Most Secure Windows Evar(tm).

Re:Faxing

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're like me, you're kept awake at night trying to conceive of a way to combine the physical waste of fax spam with the volume of email spam. Well looks like I'm finally getting some sleep tonight! Thanks HP! And thank you Apple! Just think, none of this would have been possible if you'd just shipped the iPad with a single damned USB port!

Re:Faxing

[clone53421]

Slight correction: You were almost out of ink. You are out of ink now.

Re:Faxing

[clone53421]

This one doesn’t need a dedicated phone line though.

Re:Faxing

[eugene ts wong]

Note: the coupon will be white lettering on a black background and will probably take an entire 8x11 sheet of paper...

That's what I call masterful humour. I would have never thought of that in a million years, but going along that train of thought, I would make the printer try to print a 8.5" x 11.5" document on a 8.5" x 11" sheet of paper, thus, forcing out 2 pieces of paper due to a "bug". Of course, the second page should contain the exact same blank black background.

Re:Faxing

[The Archon V2.0]

This one doesn’t need a dedicated phone line though.

No, just a high-speed Internet connection. Which tech-unsavvy can't-use-a-PC grandma won't have and would thus be equivalent to a dedicated phone line.

Everyone else will just e-mail themselves the document and print it when they get to their PC, since the seconds saved per document hardly seems worth the money/time cost of buying/setting up a new printer. Unless it's a 50 page document, of course. But then if you run out of ink halfway through you get to the printer to find it's not printed anyway.

Re:Faxing

[clone53421]

No, just a high-speed Internet connection. Which tech-unsavvy can't-use-a-PC grandma won't have and would thus be equivalent to a dedicated phone line.

Tech-unsavvy can’t-use-a-PC grandma isn’t who they’re marketing this to.

Everyone else will just e-mail themselves the document and print it when they get to their PC, since the seconds saved per document hardly seems worth the money/time cost of buying/setting up a new printer.

It’s a handy feature. If it comes included with certain makes of HP printers, and they’re already in the market for a new printer, it’s something to put things more in favour of the HP product.

As far as its use... well, it’d be identical to that of a fax machine. Ever-so-slightly easier than having someone e-mail you the file and printing it out yourself... and you don’t have to turn on a computer to get the document.

horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Michael Kristopeit]

who can't already print from their existing email client?

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

People who aren't on the same computer/network as their printer?

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people need to keep a landline around only because their technologically hampered work still sends or requires faxes. Efax, etc., blah blah... it's absurd having to pay for this.

This won't change anything soon, of course. But hopefully it will kill fax entirely by 2015.

(BTW, you do know most people can't even figure out how to print an e-mail, right? This isn't for you.)

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[schon]

who can't already print from their existing email client?

ipad users.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[icebraining]

CUPS supports three different printing protocols over TCP (which means, over the Internet). IPP (Internet Printing Protocol), for example, is ten years old, and it supports access control, authentication, and encryption.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Michael Kristopeit]

so your solution is to let anyone print to any printer on your network as long as they can guess or sniff the email address?

there are already many more secure solutions that allow printing from the internet.

plugging in inherently insecure email to fill the gap is a lazy solution, seemingly employed to get around explaining router port forwarding to stupid users, which would enable outside access to a print server running on the printer (the correct solution that my canon printer uses)

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[newcastlejon]

I was going to rant about how PDAs have had this problem for years but then I realised how having Bluetooth on Apple mobile devices is lip service at best.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Michael Kristopeit]

this is obviously a solution for inept users... i already pointed that out. HP is obviously happy to cater to these users rather than educating them, and in the end providing them with a higher quality product.

where is HP going to stand after the these users have all their paper and ink burned up with spam?

i don't see this killing fax... fax is for people that have a physical copy and a fax machine and want you to have a physical copy... so now you expect this inept user on the other side of the line to buy a scanner that can send email, or figure out how to connect the scanner and import the scans and email them? fax is not kept alive by users that need to receive faxes... it is kept alive by more inept users that need to transmit physical documents that might never live on a computer.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[mcgrew]

I can mail from my phone, but I can't print. I can, however, forward it the the computer and print from THAT.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Michael Kristopeit]

what kind of phone do you have? there are apps for iphone and android that allow printing.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Michael Kristopeit]

who can't already print from their existing email client?

ipad users.

wrong

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I don't even own a printer. I haven't needed one for 4(ish) years now and I've missed one maybe twice.

HP's solution, on the other hand, is just what you've described...

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

plugging in inherently insecure email to fill the gap is a lazy solution, seemingly employed to get around explaining router port forwarding to stupid users, which would enable outside access to a print server running on the printer (the correct solution that my canon printer uses)

By your criteria, less than 0.01% of the entire world is intelligent?

Even my linear algebra professor would have found this too hard. Not because he wasn't capable of following instructions, but because this is such an uninteresting and needlessly complex task. Similar to painting a house, without hiring someone to do it for you.

On the other hand, many 'geeks' are so out of touch with reality that they think it's better that no one is capable of printing, than it is for everyone to print insecurely.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Michael Kristopeit]

so you're saying that someone that pays to be connected to the internet shouldn't understand what they are paying for, or how to correctly utilize the service they are paying for?

do you have any other numbers to pull out of your ass and shove in my mouth? by my criteria, you are NOTHING.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Michael Kristopeit]

at one point in time less than .01% of the world was "intelligent" enough to use email...

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

this is obviously a solution for inept users... i already pointed that out. HP is obviously happy to cater to these users rather than educating them, and in the end providing them with a higher quality product.
where is HP going to stand after the these users have all their paper and ink burned up with spam?

Inept users are the only statistically relevant users. And these users don't learn, so go with the flow.

Security is obviously an important issue, and having not read the article, I don't know how this is going to be solved. Perhaps these printers will have an interface that downloads the e-mails on-demand.

i don't see this killing fax... fax is for people that have a physical copy and a fax machine and want you to have a physical copy... so now you expect this inept user on the other side of the line to buy a scanner that can send email, or figure out how to connect the scanner and import the scans and email them?

Printers can already send fax to e-mail addresses. In fact, they have done this now for over five years. No one buys a scanner anymore; they are built-in. This person would theoretically never even have to check his e-mail.

fax is not kept alive by users that need to receive faxes... it is kept alive by more inept users that need to transmit physical documents that might never live on a computer.

Fax is kept alive by people who have no idea how the fuck to send a file, or to print an e-mail, or to download and open an e-mail attachment. In other words, almost everyone but you.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Michael Kristopeit]

plugging in inherently insecure email to fill the gap is a lazy solution, seemingly employed to get around explaining router port forwarding to stupid users, which would enable outside access to a print server running on the printer (the correct solution that my canon printer uses)

By your criteria, less than 0.01% of the entire world is intelligent?

Even my linear algebra professor would have found this too hard. Not because he wasn't capable of following instructions, but because this is such an uninteresting and needlessly complex task. Similar to painting a house, without hiring someone to do it for you.

On the other hand, many 'geeks' are so out of touch with reality that they think it's better that no one is capable of printing, than it is for everyone to print insecurely.

so your linear algebra professor can set up a printer to connect to his network and utilize his router, but he can't set up his router to utilize his printer? how is that at all like the physical task of painting a house?

it sounds like you're school is failing you from every angle. my linear algebra professor set up the university network for the math and compsci departments.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Michael Kristopeit]

he also got me a grant from the national science foundation to develop network expert systems... my linear algebra professor wasn't ignorant or lazy. here is his bio... would you mind admitting which school you are paying to make you as intelligent as you currently are?

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

I see you have never worked a day in your life alongside common folk. I have no need to prove myself to you, because every person who has can personally attest to what I have claimed.

And no, no user should be required to learn the definition of an IP address or port number, and certainly not the technicalities of NAT. It would be similar of me to claim people should understand programming, because I write software every single day that they use. It's just a tool, made to make their lives a little easier.

BTW, I love your OCPD-like respondences to my posts. Keep it up.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Michael Kristopeit]

Fax is kept alive by people who have no idea how the fuck to send a file, or to print an e-mail, or to download and open an e-mail attachment. In other words, almost everyone but you.

what world are you living in?

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[xonar]

What a Hoar!

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[mcgrew]

Motorola i776. There's probably an app for it, but it's easy enough to just forward the email to the computer; that's how I get photos I take with it out. I don't have any minute or data charges, just a flat $50 monthy fee that covers voice, internet, email, text, etc so it doesn't cost me anything to do it that way.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Michael Kristopeit]

I see you have never worked a day in your life alongside common folk. I have no need to prove myself to you, because every person who has can personally attest to what I have claimed.

And no, no user should be required to learn the definition of an IP address or port number, and certainly not the technicalities of NAT. It would be similar of me to claim people should understand programming, because I write software every single day that they use. It's just a tool, made to make their lives a little easier.

BTW, I love your OCPD-like respondences to my posts. Keep it up.

did i ever say i've never worked alongside common folk? i see you're presumptuous.

so how did these people get their home networks set up? they paid someone to do it? so THAT SOMEONE should set up their router to enable printing from the internet if the user needs to.

if the user can follow instructions to enable the printer to connect to the internet through the home network, then they can follow instructions to set up the router... they don't need to know what an ip address is... they just need to know they need to put a string of characters in a field... just like they would need to put a string of characters in a field to connect to the home network.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

Might I suggest examining the common US workforce before presuming college and Slashdot are an average representation? Go ask that over-25 grocery store clerk out on a date. Then see if she can do anything except talk and fuck.

In the meantime, I leave you with this classic example (which is still not a substitute for actual experience): 2,000 people confuse dissimilar website with Facebook login page.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

it sounds like you're school is failing you from every angle.

Really now?

Dumbass.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Michael Kristopeit]

how about this example: all of my grandparents and nieces and nephews can send files, receive files, and print files.

what city do you live in?

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Michael Kristopeit]

if i knew any of my professors unwilling or unable to complete such a trivial task, i would have switched schools.

either the printer has to be setup or the router has to be setup... so either way, there is work to be done. "email to print" solves nothing.

i didn't bring up college or drop "my linear equations professor" like it was different than "my plumber"... but pointing out the inabilities of those you've entrusted to educate you is FAIL.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

You questioned my accuracy of 0.01%, which I then said should become evident if you worked with such people. Apologies if I struck the wrong chord.

People don't and have never set up routers. It used to be that they would try plugging them in, if they could figure out how to plug an Ethernet cable in (most couldn't). But this obviously only worked for ISPs supporting DHCP (DSL providers usually didn't). Now -- for about the last 10-12 years -- every ISP configures the modem/router for you. The router usually even comes bundled automatically with all plans.

"Enable the printer" -- they don't, they plug it in and it automatically receives a local IP address.
"Connect to the home network" -- they don't, Windows did this automatically when under the same workgroup, and ISP techs would reset it when necessary. IIRC Vista/7 even removes this technicality.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Michael Kristopeit]

how would it automatically receive a local IP address if the network was protected with a password? are you suggesting that 99.99% of people don't use a network password? i have 30 wireless networks within range and they all use a password. i'm living on the edge of farmland in the midwest. did i somehow end up living around the mythical .01% of people that are "intelligent"?

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[natehoy]

Granted, but most HP printers with an Ethernet port already run a small HTTP server that you can use to submit documents to. I have my printer driver installed on my main Linux box, but for the other machines in the house I simply point my web browser to the printer and use the "upload document to print" feature. It supports all image formats I've thrown at it, most office-type document formats, PDF, etc.

Sending an email has its advantages, but telling the printer to print the document using a web browser is also very nice.

And since it's on my LAN, only, I can secure it pretty well.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[jedidiah]

There is nothing "complex" about painting a house. Although it is time consumer. Whether or not
you choose to engage a "consultant" is entirely a matter of laziness. Now some of us are at least
willing to admit that we are lazy (when that is infact the case) rather than trying to make lame
excuses.

Crack open a book. Get yourself a clue. Educate yourself. At least learn enough so that you won't
be raped by whatever "consultant" you do finally hire.

Or you could just be willfully ignorant and choose to take risks you aren't even aware of. That's
not a terribly bright idea regardless of how many letters you can put after your name.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

I was just pointing out your horrible grammar and spelling.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Michael Kristopeit]

here is how my printer works (and i suspect how most people WANT their printer to work):

1 cable: plug into the wall.
setup screen asks for network password, there is only 1 other option: DHCP or fixed IP.
router port forwarding setup page: add new, type in the port and the same IP you chose on the printer setup... done.

no usb to the computer sucking resources, no ethernet cables running around the house... just a printer in the closet out the way for the rare times i need to print to it, and securely available from anywhere on the internet. ANYONE could be instructed on how to set this up in under 10 minutes.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Michael Kristopeit]

or you could forward the port the HTTP server listens on to the printer IP and add a password field and use it from anywhere just as securely.

my printer offers HTTPS, so that's what i use to do the same thing.

from there it's trivial to hack a driver to "print" to the HTTPS form using saved password parameters, so to the user it's just like any other printer.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Michael Kristopeit]

wow. and i just blasted someone else for the same mistake. bah. "you're an idiot, you're an idiot, you're an idiot" was playing over and over in my head i suppose...

i don't see any other grammatical mistakes... so what part of my grammar do you have a problem with?

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you trolling? Consumer routers don't support the concept of LAN authentication. The password you mention is for wireless negotiation (wireless printers do exist). LAN and WLAN are bridged, and outgoing packets to the WAN interface are remapped by NAT and are not subject to firewall rules. Incoming packets are automatically rejected unless a portforward rule exists, in which case, the packet is transparently passed to the LAN. Passwords involved: 0.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Michael Kristopeit]

the "password" i'm talking about would be a part of the device driver unless you want to enable anyone to print.

i'm assuming the "email to print" also uses the same idea such as a custom "subject" field... if it doesn't, it's worse than i'm suggesting.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[LoverOfJoy]

So everyone has to buy the app? Or buy it multiple times if they want it for their ipad, iphone, etc.?

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

You said, "if the [physical] network was protected with a password." This is an impossibility, as any device or computer connected to a router that used such nonstandard auth. scheme would be unable to communicate.

A printer using a secured protocol would be pointless for use on the physical LAN, as this is always assumed safe. WLAN clients are still subject to the router's WPA(2) authenticator. And anyone serving a wireless hotspot or similar can configure their routers to place LAN and WLAN on separate (firewalled) VLANs. A public-facing printer would probably be put under DMZ, as otherwise if it's hacked it has access to entire LAN.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Michael Kristopeit]

there is a difference between "can't" and "can't without paying for it".

learn the difference, then ask a valid question.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

a printer not using a secured protocol would be pointless for access over the internet, as it is always assumed unsafe.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but this is a separate service that not all printers provide. Mostly due to the inconvenience of IPv4. A printer can use two ports, one on port 8080 (WAN), and another unsecured for the LAN. Many may even do this, but I wouldn't know.

Technically, a print server isn't even required, as Windows can map the passworded printer share from another PC over the Internet. But setting this up properly is even harder to do than enabling a printer's proprietary server.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[natehoy]

True, but personally I've really never feed the burning need to print from anywhere outside my local network. To me, having it as part of the LAN only is a nice security feature. :)

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

i agree completely... i was just trying to point out that even if HP thinks people do have that burning need, their implementation is bad.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Tau_Xi]

You can TOTALLY print from an iPad! http://www.theformgroup.com/about/blog/2010/04/how-to-print-from-an-ipad

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

another step i failed to consider for most users is a dynamic external IP... i have a static IP/domain which makes it easier for me, but most consumer routers have features to enable and update a dyndns or similar account, making it just as easy for everyone else with 1 extra step.

it's not that this won't work, it's an ugly hack not worth the potential consequences that can be easily avoided by anyone.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

Capital letters. And you just started a sentence with 'and' out of the blue.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

it is perfectly acceptable to start a sentence with "and"... i do not agree that capitalization is or should be a part of structural grammar rules. in any case, structural written grammar rules do not apply to this site... the filter complains when you use too many capitals and claims it is "LIKE YELLING"... as such, comments are not to be read literally, they are to be interpreted as speech. IN ADDITION, you are NOTHING.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[clone53421]

2,000 people confuse dissimilar website with Facebook login page

You really need to tell the story for that one to make any sense. Wasn’t it something like, that blog entry somehow gained the #1 Google rank for “facebook” for a short while, which led thousands of clueless people to it who were then confusedly trying to log in and wondering why facebook looked so “weird”.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

but no smart phone stupport IPP

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[icebraining]

Actually, there's an app for that:

Wellala has released a remote printing app for the iPhone and iPod touch, Print Magic. The app allows users to print content from the mobile device via Wi-Fi, without the need to first sync to a computer. It can print directly to network printers that support the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP), along with any printer capable of sharing from a Mac via Printer Sharing. In order to print content, users simply copy the data into the application or, when printing web pages, copy the URL.

All the phone of the Nokia E Series also support networked printing through Wifi, but not IPP, though. They used an non-authenticated protocol (LPR, if I'm not mistaken), which means it can't be open to the 'net.

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Grishnakh]

There's several issues to painting a house: 1) it consumes a lot of time, 2) it's hard work, especially if it's hot outside, and 3) it's physically dangerous, as it usually involves working on ladders.

If your time is valuable, it may make more sense to hire someone than to do the work yourself.

If you're not in great physical shape (or are just lazy, and have extra money), it may make more sense to hire someone.

If you're worried about falling off a ladder, it may make sense to hire someone.

Additionally, professional house painters have spray equipment that lets them paint much faster than regular people (and with better quality as it doesn't leave brush marks). This equipment usually costs at least $1000 (no, I'm not talking about those crappy Wagner sprayers that never work), which is a big investment and doesn't make sense for a one-time job.

But the idea that house painting is complex is just plain idiocy. If you're smart enough to drive a car, you're smart enough to paint a house. There isn't much to it. It's a little distressing how dumbed-down society is getting, where no one wants to do anything they haven't been specifically trained (like a monkey) to do. I've even heard of people taking their cars to dealerships and spending $50 to have (get this) a burned-out light bulb replaced! (The person in this anecdote was in school to be an HVAC technician.)

Re:horrible horrible horrible idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

IN ADDITION, you are NOTHING.

I see you ran out of arguments. Oh well.

Just what I need...

[mcgrew]

A printer that spammers can print to directly.

No, thanks, HP, I don't want one.

Re:Just what I need...

[JSBiff]

Exactly my first thought. Then I thought, HP *must* be doing something to add some security so that only the owner, and friends/relatives specifically authorized by the owner, can send emails to the printer. Maybe I'm giving them too much credit, but nobody wants to waste $500+/mo on inkjet ink (which we all know is one of the most expensive substances in the world) and paper to print spam.

I doubt they'd require users to use public-key cryptography to verify their identity, but at the very least, they could setup some filters so it will only print emails from certain 'from' addresses. *Unfortunately*, half the spam I get appears to have come from my own email address (because, as we all know, anyone can forge the 'from' address, which I've always thought is a seriously *bad* deficiency of the current email standards - you don't even need every end-user to implement public-key cryptography to get stronger identity authentication - all you really need is for the mail servers to use cryptographic authentication between themselves to prove that an email claiming to be from domain example.com is actually *from* the example.com email server; the example.com server can take care of authenticating end-users with password or other means).

Re:Just what I need...

[clone53421]

Whitelisting your own e-mail address is an utterly pointless tactic in the war against spam. Unless, perhaps, you regularly send e-mail to yourself.

If you regularly send e-mail to yourself, that sounds like another problem entirely...

not cool

[aal]

now you can kill trees everywhere with a button press on your phone
how wonderful

Re:not cool

[$RANDOMLUSER]

now you can kill trees everywhere with a button press on your phone

Now you'll be able to show your grandkids pictures of trees.

Re:not cool

[Anonymous Coward]

A lumberjack grade laser on a smart phone? Sign me up.

available for all devices?

[Anonymous Coward]

So how come this can not be added in a firmware upgrade for practically every printer they have ever made.

Re:available for all devices?

[Anarki2004]

Because a firmware upgrade wouldn't add an ethernet port. The idea here I think is that the printer does not need to be connected to a computer, only the internet. You could perhaps argue that USB/parallel would work, but you would still need some sort of interface to connect the printer to the web. A firmware upgrade by itself would not to the trick.

fantastic!

[Thud457]

great, another 50MB of bloat on top of the 95MB they currently cram down your throat and insist on updating daily. With their own proprietary update scheduler. For something that requires maybe 20K of actual code, if any.

Re:fantastic!

[hedwards]

You can blame MS for that. They were after all the ones that popularized the neutered overpriced "designed for Windows" hardware, which was a real piece of hardware with a couple chips removed so that they required Windows only software to work.

Re:fantastic!

[m1ss1ontomars2k4]

Uh, I'm pretty sure this is a printer-side thing. And if it weren't, then that's even dumber than either of us ever conceived.

Re:fantastic!

[value_added]

You're talking about Windows, yes?

Dunno about the HP printers used in large firms, but for the networked ones I've used, I can typically just telnet in to change the config, and jobs are magickally printed, without or without CUPS, but certainly without installing a boatload of management software. The one I use at home (an old 4090N) is easier to use and far less trouble than those ubiqitous plastic blue boxes with a Linksys logo that everyone uses. And certainly more reliable.

Re:fantastic!

[DragonWriter]

You can blame MS for that. They were after all the ones that popularized the neutered overpriced "designed for Windows" hardware, which was a real piece of hardware with a couple chips removed so that they required Windows only software to work.

While obviously Microsoft popularized it in the specific "designed for Windows" form in, as I recall, the Win95/NT4-era, I think that the concept of offloading functions from peripherals to software running on the workstation the peripheral was serving as a measure which both saves costs and ties the peripheral to a specific operating system predates its use by Microsoft -- NeXT, for instance, did the same thing with its Canon-manufactured laser printers, as I recall.

Re:fantastic!

[Arthur Grumbine]

... jobs are magickally printed, without or without CUPS...

Not a fan of CUPS, eh?

Re:fantastic!

[value_added]

Not a fan of CUPS, eh?

CUPS is fine. Just unneeded. Isn't that was Mac OS X uses?

Re:fantastic!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because Canon was a direct investor in NeXT. So Job's had minders from Japan breathing down his neck to to bundle specific hardware, which he is amenable to, to create a closed ecosystem.

Re:fantastic!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun did this back in 1990 or earlier with the SPARCprinter and NeWSprint.

Re:fantastic!

[Grishnakh]

Sorry, no. I hate MS as much as the next Linux fan/slashdotter, but they aren't really to blame for that. That's the hardware makers' fault: they wanted to save $1 per device by taking out some chips, and moving functionality to software, and that's what created the "winprinter" and "winmodem". They were only tied to Windows because it was the dominant OS; if there was enough money in it, they'd make drivers for Mac too, but obviously they wouldn't waste time with any other OS.

Saving $1 in parts on something that you'll make 10 million units of means you've saved $10 million, so the CEO can be given a $1 million bonus, while cursing users with a slower computer and a lot of hassle when their overly-complex drivers don't work right or crash the OS.

somewhere in the world...

[Coraon]

A spammers mouth just started salivating uncontrollably.

Somebody at HP deserves congratulations for this

[RollingThunder]

...and by "congratulations", I mean a nice, hard punch in the crotch.

What in the hell were they thinking? EMAIL IS NOT A FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL, DAMMIT.

Back to the Future 2

[Jeng]

Now when you are fired your boss can let your kids and wife know by printing out You're Fired from all the printers in the house.

Re:Back to the Future 2

[tracerbb]

Now when you are fired your boss can let your kids and wife know by printing out You're Fired from all the printers in the house.

Only if you can use invisible ink... that way it can disappear when you go back to the future... or was it the past...

Re:Back to the Future 2

[EEBaum]

Hey, at least they're trying! Five years to 2015 and we have no flying cars, no hoverboards, no 3D billboards where the shark attacks passersby. HP is doing their part in making 2015 less of a disappointment.

Re:Back to the Future 2

[Grishnakh]

We're missing a lot of other stuff too: bionic implants (like Biff's son had), self-sizing jackets, and Mr. Fusion.

It's funny how ridiculously optimistic some sci-fi predictions are. 2001: A Space Odyssey was the same way, except that all the technology portrayed there (except maybe HAL) was perfectly plausible; the only problem was that stupid humans stopped advancing as quickly as they were in the 60s.

Spam

[gilesjuk]

Now we really can complain how spammers cost us money!

Open Standard

[hey]

Yes, there are many possible problems with spam, etc. But at least they are using an open standard: email. Perhaps IPP might be better. This means any email user (including any smart phone user) can print which is kinda cool.

Re:Open Standard

[TooMuchToDo]

Then build an email to IPP gateway, so you can still use the authentication and access control built-in. Why reinvent the wheel?

Finally I can toss out my fax machine!

[jep77]

For years I've been looking for a viable replacement for my aging fax machine. Fax... that's short for facsimile for you youngsters.

I know the rest of you have all been looking for an better way than plain e-mail to exchange physical copies of documents. There's just nothing like holding the document in your hand. Am I right?

So I'll let *you* decide what I need to have printed. Send me your stuff: tonerlow@anothersillymarketingideanobodyneeds.com

Great

[JustNiz]

Now we keep buying very overpriced ink cartridges just so some spammer can send Viagra ads directly to our printers, or worse, a facebook friend emails their entire set of holiday photos.

No thanks HP. Terrible idea.

Not new, and furthermore, why?

[LoudMusic]

For starters this isn't exactly new. It might be new to consumer grade crapware printers, but I believe I setup a Canon office copier that had the ability to receive emails and print them approximately 8 years ago.

Furthermore, why are we printing photos at home? If they're worth printing they're worth printing really well, which isn't cheap and should be done at a print shop, framed, and hung on the wall. Otherwise, gaze upon it on the screen, add it to your screen saver's image loop, and move on.

Re:Not new, and furthermore, why?

[jeffmeden]

Furthermore, why are we printing photos at home? If they're worth printing they're worth printing really well, which isn't cheap and should be done at a print shop, framed, and hung on the wall. Otherwise, gaze upon it on the screen, add it to your screen saver's image loop, and move on.

Because low quality prints are fine for old people who can't tell the difference. This is the sort of thing that will probably keep some guy's inlaws from pestering him on a weekly basis if they can just get their hands on recent pics of the grandkids without having to work that dang mouse.

Re:Not new, and furthermore, why?

[Amouth]

I find this odd to as we have an HP 4600 - and it supports e-mail mailbox support..

Re:Not new, and furthermore, why?

[jgrahn]

For starters this isn't exactly new. It might be new to consumer grade crapware printers, but I believe I setup a Canon office copier that had the ability to receive emails and print them approximately 8 years ago.

I bet people did this in the 1980s. A simple mail-to-printer gateway takes thirty seconds or so to set up in Unix. (But why do it? The line printer spooler protocol was in use already in the early 1980s).

Re:Not new, and furthermore, why?

[justleavealonemmmkay]

Furthermore, why are we printing photos at home? If they're worth printing they're worth printing really well, which isn't cheap and should be done at a print shop, framed, and hung on the wall. Otherwise, gaze upon it on the screen, add it to your screen saver's image loop, and move on.

Because you can't print kiddie porn at the print shop

Re:Not new, and furthermore, why?

[petermgreen]

It really depends on what functionality you want. If you just want to print plain text emails it probablly would be that easy.

If you want to print attatchments it gets a bit harder since you need to identify and convert them.

Re:Not new, and furthermore, why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, I don't know - shorter-duration prints work well as temporary decoration. Take a good-but-not-exceptional picture, print on e.g. matte A4, and hang it as decoration for a year.

Re:Not new, and furthermore, why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention that these are designed with the mobile phone picture takers.. The resolution on most mobile phones are definitely not print quality. Hell, most are not even viewing quality.

Paper manufacturers worldwide say..

[Sanhedran]

..thank you, HP, and don't forget to leave us a backdoor so we can empty people's trays when things get bad for us.

Re:Paper manufacturers worldwide say..

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you need a back door when the front door is wide open?

And

[bytesex]

And scanners must be webservers. I mean, it fits the paradigm completely - small, parametrizable requests, big gobs of response, and done. Why haven't they been built ?

Re:And

[Brianwa]

Many HP scanners can save scans to a SD card and will automatically let you grab the images over a samba share. I used that a lot considering that no other method of scanning seemed to work on my old machine.

Re:I really hope this has some form of verificatio

[BobMcD]

1. Spambots sending your printer garbage...
2. DDOS somebody's printer with a combo of tubgirl / lemonparty / goat.se
3. Invest in companies that sell ink
4. Profit?

Re:Somebody at HP deserves congratulations for thi

[BobMcD]

And TCP/IP wasn't designed with Carrier Pigeons in mind, but it can and does work that way...

Can you say...

[roc97007]

SECURITY HOLE? This is going to be the greatest corporate espionage tool since the camera phone!

What could possibly go wrong?

[Attila Dimedici]

I came here to post this question: What could possibly go wrong?
And discovered that just about everybody else had exactly the same reaction. There were two or three responses that at first glance seemed to think this was a good idea, then I read them closer and realized they were being sarcastic.

wow, this is brilliant

[TravTrav]

although I think they're not seeing the paper for the print.... if they really want to capitalize on cartridge replacement, they should make printers that print both the text, and the page; kind of like 3d printers. They could market it as 'earth-friendly' while driving the cost (and profit margin) of each page up exponentially. Of course, if I had a printer like this, I'd be printing 20's and 100's...

Great...

[roc97007]

Another reason to buy HP's overpriced printer ink.

PC Load Letter? What does that mean?

[Minwee]

You have to watch those guys. One day they're innocently printing email so that managers will be able to read it, the next they're urgently requesting your assistance in confidential financial matters.

What's next? Printers downloading copyrighted material through p2p networks? Those things are a menace!

HP: Innovating spam

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks HP for bringing in the second renaissance of fax machine style spam.

Hrm.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I'll start anonymously emailing CP to a few of these new printers and then notify the FBI. Lulz are to be had.

Re:Hrm.

[clone53421]

I think I'll start anonymously emailing CP to a few of these new printers and then notify the FBI.

You’re kidding, but FYI e-mail doesn’t work that way.

However there is a significant catch that could result in something similar. Most multipurpose printer/copier/scanner/fax machines keep everything ever printed, scanned, copied, or faxed on the machine stored on their hard drives. Depending on whether or not you have to authenticate yourself (entering a code), someone might be able to anonymously walk up to it and scan something bad. Anything done over the network would make them identifiable, most likely, but if someone could get physical access to the machine and scan something anonymously then bad things could result...

HP: Hard at work for a better tomorrow

[ArbitraryDescriptor]

By ensuring your ink cartridges are changed regularly, we can help make sure your ink will always be fresh. At HP we're making it easier for empty out those old, crusty ink cartridges by printing all your attachments for you. At the same time we're keeping your ink fresh, we're also helping you uphold your document retention policy by automatically generating hard copies of all your email!

Amazed? Well that's just what we do.

Love,
Hewlett-Packard

Re:I really hope this has some form of verificatio

[vlm]

two girls one cup ... of printer ink?

Well lets see

[NotSoHeavyD3]

I've had a HP printer that instead of giving me a useful error when things didn't work just failed with a "Nope, that didn't work" error.(Oops, I turned off the guest account when printing over the network.) My brother had an HP printer with scanning functionality but the scanning software had a bug where it would always crash on a scan of the last page. (This was apparently a common issue and last I heard it still hasn't been fixed.) So now they're going to have a printer that uses software so you can e-mail it? So they can't get the basic shit to work, why would anybody trust them with anything even slightly advanced?

Re:Somebody at HP deserves congratulations for thi

[tepples]

What in the hell were they thinking? EMAIL IS NOT A FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL, DAMMIT.

Then what store-and-forward file transfer protocol should ISPs make available to their users to replace e-mail attachments?

Hell. No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nuff said.

Awesome!

[Last_Available_Usern]

This is great until someone registers your printer's email address with NAMBLA.

SMTPS or a new avenue for identity theft?

[Dark Fire]

SMTPS or a new avenue for identity theft? Tonight at 11.

What?

[edrobinson]

Typical HP garbage.

Re:Somebody at HP deserves congratulations for thi

[camperdave]

There's barely any need for store and forward anymore. These days people are interconnected with always on links, for the most part.

Black email

[bluefoxlucid]

So back to black faxing....

Just a New Way to Sell More Ink Cartridges

[Phrogman]

From the company with the most expensive and most annoying cartridges on the market. Its a shyster move to try to sell more HP ink products to the stupider members of the business community, not a well needed and clever feature.

Aside from the obvious...

[billsayswow]

Aside from the obvious problem of people sending lame pictures to your printer all the time, or spamlists getting a hold of your email address, the thing that bothers me the most is:

"rather than merely emailing links around, users can email a photo to a friend's printer."

Am I the only one who sees this as an almost-desperate bid to get people to print more out in an increasingly printless world? Think about all the people you know, and all the random images that you link back and forth. And now imagine if you spent the ink of a full-colour 5x7" on every LOLcats that came to you. And now imagine how much ink you'll be burning through.

Re:I really hope this has some form of verificatio

[morphotomy]

More like tubgirl.

Re:Somebody at HP deserves congratulations for thi

[DragonWriter]

What in the hell were they thinking? EMAIL IS NOT A FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL, DAMMIT.

SMTP is a store-and-forward protocol which handles arbitrary file content reasonably well, is mature, and is ubiquitous. There may be technically superior store-and-forward protocols for arbitrary content in internet-scale systems (AMQP is shaping up to be one, for instance, though even the current work on v1.0 focuses on internal institutional systems and doesn't, IIRC, get into the weeds of addressing and interoperation necessary for internet-scale deployment, leaving that for a future revision), but none with the maturity and ubiquity of e-mail.

Re: Printers doing X....

[TaoPhoenix]

I wanna see a printer join slashdot!

With digital signatures, not so bad!

[morgan_greywolf]

There's nothing inherently insecure about email, at least for the purposes of this discussion; it's plaintext e-mail that's inherently secure. You could hack together a secure solution on a Linux box over the weekend using postfix, GPG and a Python[*] script and a user account. All you need to do is make sure that every e-mail printed is digitally signed, with the script checking each e-mail against the user account's public keyring. If the mail isn't signed, or is signed by a public key not in the user account's public keyring, then the Python script just ignores/deletes the e-mail. Otherwise, it prints what it gets -- a PDF attachment might be best, but there are other ways you could go.

 

Re:With digital signatures, not so bad!

[Michael Kristopeit]

that would make the document secure, but the address would still be open to spam.

Re:With digital signatures, not so bad!

[morgan_greywolf]

Yes but it wouldn't print the spam, so who cares?

Re:With digital signatures, not so bad!

[Michael Kristopeit]

so now, this user that wasn't expected to figure out how to use the print server included with any network printer is supposed to set up digital signatures on all of the devices they would like to print from?

"email to print" introduces attack vectors that consume real world goods, and doesn't solve any problems don't already have more secure solutions that are just as easy to implement... HORRIBLE idea.

Wait until

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait until your printer replies: "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't print your document."

Great idea, HP!

[VincenzoRomano]

(Which is not Harry Potter, though!)
More (useless) printouts, more money for HP with printers and consumables!
Why sending a printout when you can send a link to a photo or even the photo itself?
Why sending a paper document when you can send the document itself?
Simple, because otherwise you will peruse it without printing it in a large number of cases!

Re:I really hope this has some form of verificatio

[Anonymous Coward]

two girls one cup ... of printer ink?

That's how ink is made?? Fucking pervs!

IM networks, clients, firewalls, and time zones

[tepples]

These days people are interconnected with always on links, for the most part.

As I understand your comment, you want people to send files back and forth with instant messaging programs. But then they both have to have accounts on the same IM network; they both have to be using an IM client that supports file transfers, which a lot of the Free ones don't over the major IM networks if I remember correctly; one of them has to forward a port on the firewall; and (here's the big one) they both have to be in front of a PC at the same time, which is difficult if they live in different time zones or if they have only one hour of computer time per day, after which it is another family member's turn to use the computer.

Cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

One more facebook friend! Can't wait to post party pictures of me and my printer!

Re:Somebody at HP deserves congratulations for thi

[morgan_greywolf]

EMSI, FTS-0001, or BinkP.

But can they build a LEGO printer?

[moonbender]

It should only be Slashdot frontpage news if the printer in question is made from a felt tip pen and LEGO.

Fax Machine Redux

[Snarkalicious]

That is all.

Re:Somebody at HP deserves congratulations for thi

[BobNET]

What in the hell were they thinking? EMAIL IS NOT A FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL, DAMMIT.

This guy disagrees.

And??

[mweather]

I have a 10 year old Xerox printer that has an email address. This isn't new by a long shot.

Printing?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's this printing thing you speak of?

Re:I really hope this has some form of verificatio

[Zerth]

two girls one cup ... of printer ink?

No, that'd be too expensive. Two girls, one thimble.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Somebody at HP deserves congratulations for thi

[clone53421]

EMAIL IS NOT A FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL, DAMMIT.

What makes you say that?

Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Yeah, but he started it.

Um, Outlook Rule, anyone?

[mtutty]

I can do this with an Inbox rule in Outlook today. Why would I want my printer doing it autonomously?

Re: Printers doing X....

[Cicada7]

I can see it now..

"Somebody help me! I'm out of paper and I've got a SPOOLER ERROR!! Why does it hurt?!"

What am I missing here?

[JacksBrokenCode]

Would SPAM be a problem if the machine requires that the sender's email address be on the whitelist and a passcode must be in the subject line?

Have 2 different passcodes - printer code for printing, admin code to remotely execute certain commands (like adding/removing other email addresses from the whitelist). Throw in a little logic to take itself offline temporarily (or some other response) if it's getting DOS'd. Should be fairly ok, no?

Re:What am I missing here?

[Coraon]

your assuming morals on the part of HP, the same company who are the only ones allowed to sell ink for their printers, the same ones who made the price of ink the single most expensive liquid on the planet...

I'm out of the office

[Cicada7]

Autoresponder loop wars! Now they might even catch fire!

Re:Somebody at HP deserves congratulations for thi

[Anonymous Coward]

duh, why not? MIME seems to work, and documents aren't actually all that big

Speaking of abuse....

[syousef]

Dear HP Printer,

PC Load Letter???? What the @#$!# does that mean?!?!?

Sincerely,

Frustrated User.

4Chan?

[mcrbids]

Did you think of 4chan? For some reason, I did...

There was the run a while back where somebody discovered the admin page for large industrial printers could be easily searched to find unprotected panels, and that print jobs could be remotely administered... how many million pages of unsavory imagery were printed for the next day or two is anybody's guess...

Mod Parent Up!

[LoverOfJoy]

Excellent points made that I had not considered.

The Return of The

[jprupp]

Fax?

Good News for the RIAA/MPAA!

[II Xion II]

At least they know where to send their DMCA takedowns to now.

Re:Good News for the RIAA/MPAA!

[davegravy]

Hah! Mod parent up!

Printers downloading music

[Anonymous Coward]

This is so the RIAA can send out pre-settlements to printers that download music.

Guess I'm Odd

[DavidD_CA]

It appears I'm the only one that is kinda excited by this idea.

This is not something for your average business that has a BizHub Mega 5000X or whatever.

If my home laser printer has an email address, then when the random friend/relative visits and wants to print something I don't have to go through hoops to make it happen. I don't have to give them permissions, install drivers, remember IPs, or have them email it to me just for me to open it and print.

Does this have the potential for abuse? If they do an average job with security settings, I don't see this being a huge issue. I'm sure it's something that can be turned off completely, whitelisted, or maybe even password protected (by a word in the subject line).

There might even be some neat programming applications for this, too.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

> a combo of tubgirl / lemonparty / goat.se

I'm guessing that the magenta ink would run out first.

Re:I really hope this has some form of verificatio

[Anonymous Coward]

You have the order wrong...

1. Spambots sending your printer garbage...
2. Invest in companies that sell ink
3. DDOS somebody's printer with a combo of tubgirl / lemonparty / goat.se
4. Profit!

re: ipad users can't print?

[King_TJ]

http://www.activeprint.net/

That's just one solution ....

Support?

[Bassman59]

Ya know, hey, HP, how about instead of adding this feature, why not just continue to support your older (but not all that old) printers in newer operating systems?

Re:Somebody at HP deserves congratulations for thi

[Khyber]

"There's barely any need for store and forward anymore."

You don't do any global business, do you?

Can it respond to emails?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Hey man, it's your printer here...i'm kinda lonely...you wanna chat? write back"

I would trade problems...

[hAckz0r]

A previous car of mine stopped running the day after its warranty expired. Coincidence? While taking that loooong walk home I stopped by the post office, and would you believe I had an advertisement to buy a brand new car from the same dealership and a "really great deal on ANY trade in, just drive or push it in" for $$$ off the new car price. I replaced the 'computer module' with an after market unit and drove it for 7 more years. You can guess how much future business they got from me.

Re:I would trade problems...

[tibit]

Post hoc ergo propter hoc, lol. Yes, it was a coincidence. Look at the probabilities, it's not that unlikely.

Re:I would trade problems...

[barzok]

Complete coincidence. Your car doesn't know what day it entered service or what day it is right now, unless you've got OnStar or similar.

If you were truly a single day past warranty, a decent dealer would have covered you.

Oh yeah!

[Anonymous Coward]

If anyone at HP is reading this, you would have a much larger market if you provided "slim drivers" along with your full driver package for those who just want the basic functionality (and the use of their computer for other tasks).

Re:Oh yeah!

[dotgain]

My ideal world: Printers (and scanners, fax et al.) work with no drivers. It can be done.

The "printers" I deal with may need plates, regular washups, gallons of chemicals and natural gas, to name but a few, but all we ask our client for is essentially vector art, we take care of the nitty gritty. You can think of us as the "built in" drivers. Even without Postscript / PDF support in the printer, it's gotta be possible to standardize on some protocol for spewing patterns of ink onto the various media available.

Hell, I can dump a JPEG in a $20 photo frame and view it, so why can't I throw one directly at my printer?

Re:Oh yeah!

[mlts]

We had this in the past. It was called PostScript. PostScript sent would work regardless of printer, be it inkjet, laser, dye sublimation, or high velocity platypus sweat sprayed onto paper.

I wish Adobe would relicense PostScript making the cost on a sliding scale so a low end printer (the usual $50 inkjet that takes cartridges more than what the printer costs) could use it.

Now, drivers are more of for using printer-specific features, not just getting it to print at all.

Re:Oh yeah!

[dotgain]

/inch {72 mul} def newpath 1 inch dup moveto
/Times-Roman findfont 72 scalefont setfont
(You'll see I referred to PostScript in my comment, and that this should be possible with our without it. It's really overkill for most people's needs, especially the printing of bitmap photos) show
showpage

Re:Oh yeah!

[ryanov]

For a bunch of printers, they do. Maybe not all, but many in my experience. That's the driver I normally use.

Re:Oh yeah!

[clone53421]

If anyone at HP is reading this, make the drivers fucking work. That’s all I’m asking for.

From the HP color laserjet with its shitty colour that more often than not looked washed out or oversaturated with some odd hue, its 5-minute-long warm up cycle, the inexplicable your-print-job-got-borked please-cycle-the-power error code that the HP site itself could only throw out wild guesses for eliminating (copy and paste entire document into new blank document, re-print... try moving one of the images ever so slightly up, down, left or right... if you are printing from one application try printing from a different application... yeah, those were real suggestions; they’re fucking clueless)...

Or the HP laserjet with faulty firmware which requires the driver to sends it a firmware update every time the computer is booted, which it stupidly does by adding a job to the print queue with the result that if there was already a print job in the print queue when the computer was booted (say, because you rebooted because the fucking thing was frozen when you tried to print, but didn’t delete the job you’d just printed), the printer will freeze up completely (again)... and half the time it seemed like going to hibernation froze the printer up as well, or was it sleep mode that screwed it up... and apparently getting it to work on Ubuntu is even more fun...

HP drivers suck.

Re:Oh yeah!

[Grishnakh]

Yes, and you can buy it right now. Get a printer like mine: the HP LaserJet 2300 (circa ~2003). It costs less than $100 on Ebay, has built-in duplexing, accepts JetDirect network cards, and supports PostScript level 3. Best of all, you can buy remanufactured print cartridges on Ebay for it for about $20-25 each, which last 5-6000 pages.

If your printer is available at Best Buy, Target, or any other consumer store, it's a piece of crap. No decent printer is sold in places like that. God printers are sold only to businesses.

Easily prevent abuse [spam] in a very simple way

[JoeKeegan123]

This could very easily be used securely without wasting ink, I think ... the simplest prevention may be the best. If this were implemented, even in a public environment, it could be very easily controlled to prevent SPAM. Let's say a hotel has a courtesy printer in the business center, with a public email address, to be used in the method intended in this announcement. From some of the comments, nothing could be asking for abuse more clearly ... BUT, if the printer received an email to be printed, rather than just PRINTING IT, a simple LCD message of: "Print job received via email, press CONFIRM to print now." and if CONFIRM isn't pressed within [timeout threshold], the message is purged from printer storage and NOT printed. Seems pretty simple, I might create a printer line myself doing just this if HP gets it wrong ... you saw it first on Slashdot. Seems like a great idea....

Re:I really hope this has some form of verificatio

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it works as:

1. Spambots sending your printer garbage...

2. DDOS somebody's printer with a combo of tubgirl / lemonparty / goat.se

3. ???

4. Print!

Spamfilter

[helix2301]

I really hope they build in a spam filter of some kind or this will turn into the next generation of fax machine where you are always being offered cheap health care and vacations. If put together right this would be a really cool feature.

There is a better way

[techie7]

This is nice feature but in fact users of Windows Mobile smartphones can print documents on any printer connected to a wireless network, not necesserily on that has an e-mail address. The can be done using a freeware application PocketWhere, see Mobile Tips and Tircks for details.

HP's Presto?

[Anonymous Coward]

HP has been offering this service for years as its Presto home email printer.

I can see it now...

[crimperman]

Just imagine what happens when the printer gets an e-mail which has a standard "Think of the planet before printing this e-mail" footer attached. Oh the irony.

Re:Somebody at HP deserves congratulations for thi

[Grishnakh]

Actually, it is. We have a very expensive Lanier printer at my office which lets you scan documents, and then email them as PDFs to your (or any) email address. As the printer is in a separate room (and takes up much of it), and sits on the network, it doesn't have any other convenient way of transferring files.

I don't know if it accepts documents for printing that way, however. I kinda doubt it. It doesn't need to anyway; that's what IPP is for.

Scanners....

[master0ne]

Now when will we get scanners that can email scanned documents automatically?

Bad idea

[jbatista]

I don't want it printing every single frame of stupid lolcat videos my friends send me. What a waste of paper and toner!