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HP and Yahoo To Spam Your Printer
An anonymous reader writes "As many suspected when HP announced its web-connected printer, it didn't take long for the company to announce it will send 'targeted' advertisements to your new printer. So you'll get spammed, and you'll pay for the ink to print it. On the bright side, the FCC forbids unsolicited fax ads, so this will probably get HP on a collision course with the Feds."
... or Bill and Dave would certainly have some, er, input on this matter.
...is a coupon for ink.
I'm sure HP will do their best job to protect the access to these web-based printers. It will take an entire week for the spammers to get HP's database and start sending ads to your printers.
Also: The article is unclear, but it doesn't sound like HP will just send random print jobs with ads to your printer. It sounds more like *if* you setup the feature to print your newspaper every morning, the ads in the paper will change to be targeted. That is why they can claim "What we discovered is that people were not bothered by it [an advertisement]..." If they truly are sending advertising jobs to the printer unsolicited, then I think that quote is going to turn out to be the dumbest thing said on planet earth for at least the last few years. People would just love to find their already exorbitantly priced ink wasted on an ad.
Lastly: Who would want to print their newspaper in the morning? Physical newspapers are convenient because of their wide format. Electronic news is nice because it is targeted and doesn't waste paper. Printing out your newspaper in the morning seems like the worst of both. You don't get the nice wide format, and you still waste the paper. Ugh.
Does sending a page to a printer count as a "fax" as far as the law is concerned?
The scheduled delivery sounds kind of cool...course, if I have to walk over to my printer to get it, why wouldn't I just turn on the computer sitting right next to it?
But if you're going to put ads on my paper, you dang well better be paying me for it.
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
When I am printing my very important sales proposal - and HP/Yahoo inject spam into it - and this costs me my sale .... I can sue their balls off yes?
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
But really this is Quid pro quo, HP give you access to "free" services - in this case the web elements and in return you have to put up with a few adverts. It is in no way different from how GMail or HotMail operate. Will it cost you ink and make HP money, yes, but will you get the ability to e-mail printed documents to your printer and to automate printing web-content, also - yes.
If you want an honest printer than invest in a Kodak already -- or better yet a laser printer for B&W documents.
Assuming you can't disable the feature I'll be firewalling it's IP address completly
Normal people worry me!
My HP photo printer has a touchscreen LCD. I think most have an LCD of some sort. I can imagine HP thinking they could reserve some of the space for ads...
bp
Me: "Hello, Kodak? Yes, I'd like to buy one of your printers as long as you don't spam me with ads."
Kodak: "Sure, not a problem. We aren't like HP."
Me: "Awesome, I'll take ten."
Of course that wasn't a real conversation, but if I had the money for ten printers, you better believe I'm giving my money to Kodak (or Canon, Canon makes good printers).
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
I am dumbfounded by HP's decision-making here. "What we discovered is that people were not bothered by it [an advertisement]," Nigro said. "Part of it I think our belief is you're used to it. You're used to seeing things with ads."
That sounds like a ringing endorsement for the printer. "Buy our printer! It will make you feel all warm and cozy because it has ads, like everything else in your life!" Ugh. It's appalling.
From the article it seems that the ads are part of on demand publications that you choose to have sent to you. So this is definitely an opt-in sort of thing. It is conceivable that printers with preview displays could be perverted to show ads as well but that doesn't seem to be in the works yet.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
That's how long it's going to take the community to figure out how it works and create a proxy for it that allows you to use all the cool services without the advertising. It'll probably even be built right into the next version of CUPS. BTW: Fuck you HP, It is my printer, not yours. That's why I don't print much (and if I do, I use my Epson printer with alternative ink and continuous system)
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
They'd be wasting the effort sending that garbage to me. I'd refuse to buy into whatever it was just out of principle. Send me an ink allowance and i don't really care as long as it doesn't start printing ads on my school papers. Lol The cost of an ink cartridge is more expensive than half of the printers themselves. Firewall it. :/
By purchase agreement of the free or subsidized printer? By perhaps getting a request to print on the lcd screen? Or maybe a popup on the computer that offers free coupons?
Not to say it won't be sleazy. Not to say people won't be surprised by the ads.
First let me say, I, like most of slashdot readers absolutely hate this crap. But to play Devil's advocate, suppose some consumers are not opposed to this kind of business relationship. Suppose they actually find value in it (ignoring the fact the you and I may consider it some kind of wrong). Should it be allowed to continue? I see insane ad practices happening time and time again. Sometimes they catch on and become normal. Other times they disappear (often quickly) as consumers revolt against them. Often, the ones that stick don't bother "normal" people. Whether it should or shouldn't is another topic, I guess. Where do you draw the line?
My view is that our outcries against this stuff have their place. Hopefully it makes "normal" consumers more aware. Hopefully. Sometimes these practices stick. Sometimes they don't. Maybe the ones that do are a fair tradeoff. My concern is that the absurdity and intrusion escalates.
There is a problem. Ads want to be targeted. We want to hate ads. Maybe it will always be that way. The best we can don is to keep people conscious so at least they're aware of what they could possibly be giving up when allowing them into their lives.
This printer thing. I don't see how it will stick. But HP and Yahoo! are sure as Hell going to see. Let's just hope it doesn't set a precedent, or at least some kind of civil middle ground can be found.
I absolutely hated Yahoo's new login screen. There was a Chevy Ad that took up the whole page. What I did like was the fact that there was a forum at the top of the screen to provide feedback on the ad. This is a new trend in my opinion. Let's hope our outcries continue to bring about changes like this.
This is such an obviously, outrageously bad idea that it boggles the mind. If HP goes ahead with such a plan it will richly deserve the universal drubbing it will receive. HP would have difficulty escaping the wrath of the marketplace and the brand would be severely tarnished for years to come.
So what's to stop me from pulling out the power or leaving it paper/inkless when I'm not using it?
Who the hell would put a printer online anyway without a firewall or some kind of IP whitelist?
I mean it's not going to be the first time that hackers will jump into your network from a "bit too intelligent for it's own good" printer.
Also, as a busy system administrator, do we really want another device to add to our security patch weeklies?
We've got a color samsung printer at work. I think we got it on sale for $150. That's even affordable for most home users. I think my dad's spent that much in HP ink this year.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
While the article is a little confusing, if you read it a couple of times, it becomes clear that the advertisements are only supplied with their "scheduled delivery" service. Basically, HP is signing up with content providers and Yahoo to provide content in your printer every morning.
The subscriber selects the content (newspaper sections), HP is responsible for fetching + formatting + advertisement insertion. Yahoo provides the localised (through IP address lookup) advertisements.
Basically, this is the Sci-Fi print-on-demand newspaper where the paper includes content from multiple sources.
So, no, advertisements aren't inserted into the middle of your print job.
I would say that the demand for the service is probably dwindling, but who knows. It will probably be a good little money maker for HP and Yahoo.
My Lexmark printer driver is around 3 bytes long. I dumped HP when their driver crossed the 200MB level and installed a bunch of background processes.
I didn't buy a computer to run HP software I bought it for many things a very small thing being to occasionally print. But HP seems to want to pretty well turn my desktop into an HP dedicated print server.
I have only "Office Spaced" one electronic device in my life and it was my HP all-in-one. It was very satisfying to smash the crap out of it. All that thing was built for was to get me to buy ink. Every time I turned it on to scan the thing would go through this 2 minute cleaning cycle and use up some more ink. I would literally go through more than half an ink cartridge without printing a thing. A printer that uses ink when I am only scanning is just stupid. Then when it ran out of ink the whole menu system basically wouldn't let me get past the no-ink-complaining so that I could do hardly anything else with the printer. It wasn't an all-in-one is was a single purpose ink selling machine.
So no surprise that HP is figuring out a way to screw their customers even harder. "Yes I bought your printer so that you could make money selling advertising." Or maybe people buy printers to print stuff; their own stuff.
HP's ePrint printers, some of which will become available next month, are connected to the user's home router, which means they will have an IP address.
Good luck getting your users to correctly configure their routers to make this work.
Just turn the power off when you aren't using the printer. That is what I do with my printer now.
GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
You think if they started advertising for penis enlargement that they'd start going for my 11x17 tray just to prove a point/overcompensate?
Who is this "Yahoo!" that you speak of? Sounds like a real jerk to me.
I'm sitting next to a Brother ink jet printer right now. I really prefer lasers, but in this case I wanted a large format multi-function machine. My Brother will both print and scan up to 11x17" (equivalent to A3) and it cost me less than $200, shipped to my front door. It shipped with full, high-capacity ink cartridges, not HP's half cartridges. And while it does include some software it's pretty lightweight, and is basically used to handle features like networked scanning and a monitor program to let you know when the ink is low. Both are optional. And yes, Brother explicitly offers drivers for Linux.The print quality is what it is -- could be better, could be a lot worse -- and the build quality seems fairly plasticky, but that seems par for the course with today's printers. Overall my only complaint was that the price was so low it wasn't even a significant tax write-off.
Breakfast served all day!
Why would anyone want to print using e-mail? If I print something, it is because I want it on paper, and to get it I have to be near the printer. If I am near the printer, I don't need to use e-mail. I can't imagine any reason for using e-mail o print that would compensate for getting spam.
If you consider the slippery slope theory, it may undermine the whole CAN SPAM Act. It looks like spamming where you cannot really opt out. If you really need internet printing you might be able to just hook the printer up to a computer and configure the computer to be a print server bypassing HP's software.
You mean these printers will ALSO leak out possibly sensitive information to the world (Yahoo) in order to target the advertisements that will be printed using the owner's ink and the owner's paper?
Talk about the mother of all bad ideas. Even if this printer was FREE with these ad subsidies, you still have to pay for ink cartridges that are excessively expensive and the paper as well, so this will also add to waste and user costs.
I guess this is just another in my long (and ever growing) list of reasons why I will never, EVER purchase a HP inkjet printer. I suggest everyone else vote with their wallets and abandon support for HP in favor of another company that doesn't steal information about what their users print in order to make users PAY with the ink they purchased to print advertisements based on information swiped from those very same users!
This signature is lame.
Just when you thought HP printers couldn't get any worse...
What fucking bright spark in marketing thought this would be something ANY customer would want their printer to do, and what idiot manager approved it on the basis that people would put up with it? Someone should bill them for the paper, ink and recycling costs. $1000/picoliter isn't it? Fuckers!!!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I've been able to print from off-site for years. I just have to tunnel in through a firewall to get at my printer so that I don't act as the building charity copy center, but how is any of this new?
the way to deliver the printed ads is ONLY done by
+ overwriting your default HP test page image, which you won't care to waste ink for anyway
+ overwriting the annoying cartridge alignment page, which these days doesn't even need user feedback to align each new ink, so I have little idea why it's printed.
BTW: I won't be surprised when home routers start to be used to spew ads per wireless session, seeing how they already have an open connection and control over what your browser sees. Perhaps they'll use timed redirects, popups or frames. Ads are making their way into every form of media we use, including our self-produced stuff.
Sadly, ink itself dries up when stored, and we won't be able to stock it if HP just says "we no longer sell the non-ad printer ink, and our chip tech won't let you refill your old cartridges generically." Other than that, it's time to start a stockpile of "dumb" devices that will just leave us alone.
and Google out by calling ''targeted' advertisements" a mistake.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
From TFA, it seems that these advertisements would come out only on pages such as scheduled newspaper print jobs, etc. in place of the publisher's non-/less-targeted advertising... No net gain or loss for ink usage as compared to printing whatever ads were on the page in the first place.
If you want news without ads, use an Adblocker, and schedule a cron job for printing.
It's not like the thing is just going to turn on and print ads.
I got rid of a Lexmark because their inkjet printers had ink that was too expensive, though, so pay attention to the model as well as the brand.
I was also unhappy with Lexmark for trying to abuse the DMCA to lock people out from making compatible ink cartridges.
But I had a printer from HP once. At one point when I tried to print the action failed and it gave me an error. Did the error give any hint of why the print failed? Of course not, it just told me "Print failed" which was obvious and useless. So now I'm supposed to believe a company that could even manage to generate a proper error message can handle something like preventing spam? Yeah, I'm not buying it. (Oh for what it's worth it was a network permission issue. I had to set up a guest account so printing over the network was "ok". Of course having an error indicating network security problem would have made that so much simpler.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
V'ger was looking for its creator, but it didn't think primitive carbon based life could have built it so it thought that the Humans where preventing the creator from responding.
The probe looking for the whales was from a species that was, to the best of my knowledge, never identified but it was not intentionally trying to kill all the humans, it just didn't care that its comm beam was ionizing the ocean and flooding the land.
But you do have a good point, how will these printers (mis)behave if they can't contact a designated server. Even if you don't opt-in to the adds HP will try and use the Internet to upgrade the printer's firmware, and how many of us have tried to print a plain text document but the printer won't work because it is out of cyan?
I can hear it now;
Me:"Print the document"
Printer:"I can't reach the server to update my firmware and confirm that I have not been stolen from my rightful owner"
Me:"I am your rightful owner, you will do what I tell you to!"
Printer:"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."
Me:"I'm not dave!"
Your sig goes to an empty page.
Everyone knows that wires are just tubes with a bit of metal inside to give them strength. You got big tubes beneath the road and small tubes called wires inside the house.
Here I will proof it by removing the useless metal from my network tube[CARRIER LOST]
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
So basically what this new service is that you get a free "newsletter" that is automatically printed for you at a scheduled time. Bit like getting your own newspaper printed before you wake up like a coffee machine and bread maker on a timer but instead of just printing the same page for everyone, they make the ads in the newspaper dynamic, targetted specifically at you.
Pretty harmless... sure, the inkt and paper cost you money but a regular newspaper also costs money.
But then, there used to be unwritten rules about where the ads were placed. None on the front page. Only small ones on the front page. Now they just wrap the entire newspaper in an ad.
Same with tv. You used to get station ID's and "upcoming features" between programs, then during the credits. then a small text bar at the bottom. Now 50% of the screen covers the action for half a minute or more. Often to tell you to watch the program beneath the ad.
How long before these "free" newsletters will be advertorials with 1 sentence of content on a full color print that uses so much ink the paper feels wet?
The idea itself isn't wrong, I just know advertisers have never learned to limit themselves. No advertiser given access to a new medium will ever say "Okay, that is enough, lets not go any further". Bigger, louder, more annoying. Until finally the poor user gives up in disgust and then the advertiser will ask: "What happened? Why are my ads no longer watched. Maybe they weren't loud enough and annoying enough!"
First they came with the banners, and I did not object because I was not a banner.... well you know were I am going with this.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Doesn't anyone bother to actually read the article before posting on here?
"HP also launched a program called "scheduled delivery," where a user can regularly schedule printing, for example, portions of a daily newspaper every day at 7 a.m.
The company also sees a potential for localized, targeted advertising to go along *WITH* the content."
It's not "your" printer. You don't own the software in the printer, or the driver, or the service that handles spamming you. You're just licensing that. You're renting a printing service, and the landlord controls what you can do with the printer. Read your EULA.
using the ads as a replacement for a weekly "keep your print heads clean" test page?
there is not a single thing that REQUIRES paper in todays age.
A paper aeroplane? Try that with your laptop you'll have to get a new one.
You can't say the same of any other printer out there.
Yes you can. Any networked printer with a ppd driver will work fine under Mac, Linux or Windows.
I am not worried about the official opt-in ads. Nor is the OP. I am worried that somone hacks the system and sends inofficial SPAM.
This is not what worries me. What worries me is that some hacker finds a way to exploit the system to send SPAM.
... is an ad for a printer that doesn't print spam.
Here's how I would make it stick if I were HP (assuming the costs worked out in HP's favor):
-Print one ad per day
-Targeted as much as possible (user can select interests upon signing up)
-Only accept humorous ads (this may be tricky as people's humor vary...but it's usually pretty obvious when something is at least meant to be funny
-At least once a week, one of the ads is a coupon (targeted if possible)
-Every X amount of time, those who've signed up receive a free ink cartridge in the mail
-Have it be opt-in only
A decent number of people are only interested in the Superbowl because of the ads. A decent number of people sign up for joke of the day mailing lists. A decent number of people will put up with ads for coupons. A decent number of people will put up with ads for free stuff.
Depending of frequency of the free ink cartridges, I might sign up for that.
With all the crap HP are doing lately, you would have to be stupid to buy a HP printer.
Get a printer from a decent company such as Canon or Epson or Brother.
It's bad enough that HP printers INSIST on printing a test page seemingly every time you cycle the power, or remove and reinsert a cartridge after shaking it to see how much ink is left.
It's bad enough that they insist on bundling over 100 fucking meg of software when all you really want is the bloody printer driver.
It's bad enough (environmentally) that it's probably more economical to buy a new printer that comes with "free" starter cartridges than to buy replacement cartridges for your existing printer ... at least here in Philippines prices about 1500 pesos ($33 USD) for a printer, and 1700 pesos ($37 USD) for a b/w and color cartridge.
Now they're being allowed to spam your printer with internet ads (full colour of course) ?
Fuck HP, tired of their bullshit.
When I clicked this I got a popup ad with a big spinning wheel and a sign saying loading. It had a close box too. So I click the close box and it collapses to a small box on the side of the page that says "Stop waiting for the network. Get a better network. Juniper systems".
Genius!
Even more interestingly, if I refresh the page I don't see the same ad. In fact most of the time I don't see any ad at all. If I follow the link from slashdot however, I do get ads. So it's like they know they should only hit you the first time you visit the site, not on a refresh.
If I clone the tab in Opera I can get the ad again, and it's as I thought - the spinner is actually the ad, nothing is loading. The text says "Still waiting for automation, still waiting for simplicity..." and then it collapses whether or not you click the close box.
The ad goes here
http://www.thenewnetworkishere.com/us/en/?WT.mc_id=WT_US_GE_028&CAMPAIGN_NAME=WT_US_GE_AdvAllRichMedia
And you can see they have a bunch of spinning wheels and progress bars as adverts.
HP could learn a lot from this sort of advertising. Now on to the article. What they are doing would actually be sort of OK if they got the advertisers to pay for the ink rather than the people that get spammed. Only sort of though, it's a seriously flawed idea.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I wouldn't care about the ads, as long as those new HP printers can also print USD or EUR bills to pay for the ink cartidges (and for other things that each BOFH needs).
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Since I quit buying anything from HP after that laptop fiasco - I guess I'll just have to miss out on having my printer spam me. They keep on Inventing so many interesting products that show how much they care about their customers that it's hard to sit back and just watch it go by without me.
But it's OK; this is just the price I'm going to have to pay for making the choice to say NO to any HP products.
I'll write an angry letter and sue! Shame the ads will be all over my letters too.
Everyone keeps saying "Firewall it!", but that defeats the purpose of the printer, which is to allow email-printing from HP's servers. If it can't get sent stuff from HP's servers, you can't email to it, but if it can be sent stuff from HP's servers, HP can send SPAM. Unless you've got a computer in between that does image recognition of any postscript attachments coming across the pipe, and edits out HP SPAM, you might as well just buy a model without the email feature.
Thias seems to harken back to the days of "Toner phoners" and ads being sent to random fax machines.
I want to shoot the messenger!
If this is how HP is going to help revenue then I am very disappointed in this. I have to say the idea of the printer is great but this whole idea of targeted advertisement to the printer is just bad business. I hope they build in some type of spam filter because a lot of other companies will starting doing this and you can just burn threw ink, paper and all the ware and tare on the printer.
http://www.thetechnologygeek.org
I have no problem with this, but wait until they see what I charge for the paper and the ink...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
As you install the 10 GB drivers and software set, you will be given page after page of checkboxes, all of them checked. You'll click past them and it will turn out those were all the ads. The drivers will take 5 hours to install, and once installed the printer will refuse to print until you replace all of the ink cartridges and reinstall the drivers again. There is also a 2 hour configuration time, that uses 100 pages, each time the printer is powered off and then on.
Check it out. Since HP already has a relationship with you as the vendor of your printer, it will be difficult to block them, especially with the combination fax/copier/printer devices.
It's been a good law, and withstood constitutional challenges. Attempts to expand it to include email spam have failed because of lobbying by the Direct Marketing Association, which fears blocking ads from their members.
I'm happy with my HP printer with one exception: The web interface won't allow me to lock the printer keypad and the cat won't stop printing test pages.
Well, I'll just add this to my list of why I hate HP...
-300 MB printer drivers
-$30 for a ketchup packet of ink
-hardware\software designed to actually lie about ink levels
-scanner and other bundled software that simply does not work
-software takes over your computer as bad as QuickTime and AOL
-And now, advertisements directly sent to your printer!
At what point do we just start referring to HP as malware vendor?
I think of HP as one of the companies that people go to solve a simple problem, printing, and these people have learned to accept the terrible deal as a necessary evil, because they need to print, and HP = printing. It is like all the poor folks paying for the $100 Adobe Acrobat + 1 GB install process when there are other PDF creation tools that are free and better.
HP is making tons of money off of by being a synonym for printing. Everybody that knows better has already left, and the people still around buying will just accept this new thing, ads on their printer, as just another necessary evil. I think it will hurt them though. Even my less tech-savvy friends are pleased with how their new Brother printer or other brands are treating them. Brands not normally found at Wal-Mart because the all-in-ones cost a more reasonable $150 instead of the ludicrous $40.
Which part of "opt in" is so fucking hard for you to understand? Don't want ads, wasted paper, wasted ink etc? Well, just don't... Yes, you got it! See, that wasn't so hard was it now?
Wait, people still print?
Honestly, I only print stuff when someone insists these days. I haven't owned a printer at home in years; everything I need to reference is sent to a PDF which is then sync'ed to my iPhone. Signatures... digital. I think the last thing I printed was a gift affidavit that I had to get notarized in order to give a car to my ex wife in my divorce :)
On topic though; when are we going to see the printer now with the optional automatic shredder attachment (spam filter)? :)
I can see it now. Your new LCD monitor is sold to you as a 22 inch, but 1/4 of the screen is actually an ad server, so your actual display area is smaller than 22 inches.
This is the new way.
I see it happening on TV. Between the logos, the market ticker, the oil gusher cam, and the pop-up ads promoting upcoming shows, all we're left with on TV is a talking head and all you can see of him/her is an eye or nose jiggling about the screen.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
While all the flaming going on is really fun... if we actually RTFA you'd see it's not what you think.
HP is trying to develop a system of content delivery, which will support ads. Imagine your grandfather waking up in the morning and the sports and local news sections of the local paper are already lying on his printer tray. Sure there's an associated, targeted, local ad.. but he's got the news paper delivered to his desk for very little cost.
It's not a terrible idea. It's a pretty good idea. It's just communicated poorly.
Why you couldn't give me an HP printer.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
For a recipe's what?
What would the environmental protection agency say about these fuckers at HP wasting your ink and paper on these unsolicited ads?? Hopefully they'll put a dome over Hewlett Packard like they did Springfield!
Do we get a refund at the end of the month from HP for ink useage to print the spam ads?
Jack of all trades,master of none
That last name is spectacular. I wonder if he's black.
Better send it on WHITE font (with deep black background of course)
They wanted to be able to fax you a summary of the morning paper (for an extra fee, of course). Nobody bit.
Why would I want to print it out anyway? How many people are going to buy a printer who don't already have a computer?
Let's open up the printer more, wwweeeeeee! Maybe we don't change the default admin password. Time to phish someone, load up nmap and scan the network for printers. Is it possible to forward the print jobs to a remote IP address?
Let's hope that payroll get a printer. They should print out really big f@#*ing spreadsheets with all the companies’ staff names, addresses, and social security numbers.
Why bother with the routing, is ftp installed? Can I access the internal hard drive of the printer across the network?
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/04/19/eveningnews/main6412439.shtml
I dont want "targeted ads" or any ads at all. So I will not by any HP crap.
I know many (most?) people hate this advertising on principle, but I'm willing to go along with it if it reduces the cost to me. -- On the flipside, I wouldn't allow one into my office if it didn't come at a steep total discount over normal printing (that more than offsets the printed ads). I don't see any reason to put up with creepy targeted ads--or to do more paper- and cartridge-replacing than I already do--when I could just buy one that doesn't give me junkmail.
If they'd provide the ink/paper and reduce the pricetag on the printer, I'd probably be willing to buy one. I could put up with some creepy targeted ads if it meant the printing I actually want would be cheaper.
As far as this "printing newspapers daily" thing goes, that doesn't remotely count as a feature. Given that I'm already at my computer anyway, I may as well just go to a news website manually, and I can print from there if I want to.
It'd probably be pretty easy to circumvent the ads also. We'd have to see how it handles being turned off when not printing, or left out of paper except when I want something (though I assume it'll just queue up ads and not allow me to cancel them). At the least I can feed already-printed spam pages into its paper supply whenever I am not printing, and pocket the money/paper from the ink and paper allowance (which would be necessary to get me to buy one in the first place).
It also seems easy enough to mount the printer on its side over a recycle bin, and perhaps make a paper tray I can put over the trash can when I am printing something on purpose.
... of visiting the link and the very FIRST thing on the page (very top) is a banner ad, followed by a scrolling Motorola ad, a giant LREC on the right and a popup in the corner.
Holy crap too many ads.
>> there is not a single thing that REQUIRES paper in todays age.
> A paper aeroplane? Try that with your laptop you'll have to get a new one.
Actually, when I got it I did :) I ran the 1996 64k intro Paper which features LOTS of digital paper aeroplanes! I can confirm that due to Statix's excellent programming skills that my laptop is still working fine but thanks for your concern! :) Note: Paper works best now days under DOSBox or you can watch it online here.
I am surprised that the fucking genius types of the advertising world have not yet released underwear that prints flashing banner adds on your dick...
So every time you pull it out, Whoaaaa Dude!!! "Work the tension out of your body with Henrietta's Hand Relief"..
Next time you see an executive from HP or Yahoo - beat them up.
Why? because they deserve it.
.
Voting up, Voting down - If I really gave a fuck about your approval or not, I'd come and ask you.
Can HP turn the printer into a robot so it can 'deliver' me the stuff it prints...
Heck, I'd rather just do away with all the printing anyway.
I see it happening on TV. Between the logos, the market ticker, the oil gusher cam, and the pop-up ads promoting upcoming shows, all we're left with on TV is a talking head and all you can see of him/her is an eye or nose jiggling about the screen.
This is why I have Pay-TV these days. At least in Germany Pay-TV does not interrupt the feature program with advertising. I think the "new world" you are talking about is again a world divided: Those who have the funds to purchase advertising free products and those who don't.
You know what? I'd actually like some variation on this... I mean, I don't want to be spammed with random ads, but I already get those savings flyers that are 90% garbage, and keep thinking I SHOULD save the few good coupons, but don't. If a list of coupons just arrived, and the ones I okay'd printed, cool. That might actually get me to browse the list.
I do screen scraping and I was wondering what the fuck this hp and yahoo javascript code was I was seeing
on a couple sites.