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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."
...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.
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.
No, faxes come through a series of wires. These ads come through a series of tubes. Completely different!
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.
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.
You think if they started advertising for penis enlargement that they'd start going for my 11x17 tray just to prove a point/overcompensate?
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."
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!
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.
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.