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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."
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.
You can easily disable this feature. It's opt-in. Disable it by not opting in. See? Wasn't that easy?
Seriously, is the article that complicated? you have to log into Yahoo's page, ask for content, and the content will be delivered as you ask for it, and Yahoo! will add an advert so they can justify setting up the system that automatically delivers the articles to you.
Personally, I think the idea is asinine - I prefer my articles on-screen and I hate the idea of printing out everything I want to read on paper.
But no one will be sneaking into your house and making your printer print anything you don't ask for.
Yet.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
"Whooosh" is a good summary of the whole article... does anyone actual read the articles that get submitted?
HP is NOT going to spam printers.
HP is planning to partner with Yahoo so that you can subscribe to content that would automatically be printed out for you. In other words, the idea is that you can wake up, grab your morning paper off the printer, and sit down to read it with your cup of coffee. The ads IN THE PAPER would be targeted using geolocation from the IP address of your printer so that you would get locally appropriate ads. No ads for department stores that don't exist within a hundred miles of you. Those are the ads they're talking about. Not spam!
On the other hand... the idea of printing off your morning paper may have made sense in the science fiction of the 1950's, but HP is crazy if they think people actually want to print out content that they are going to read once and recycle.
Life is short: void the warranty.