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Google Launches Cloud Printer Service For Windows
An anonymous reader writes "Google today announced it is bringing its Cloud Print project to Windows. The company has launched both a driver and a service, both of which are available for download now from Google Tools. For those who don't know, Google Cloud Print connects Cloud Print-aware applications (across the Web, desktop, and mobile) to any printer. It integrates with the mobile versions of Gmail and Google Docs, and is also listed as a printer option in the Print Preview page of Chrome."
One of the things that annoys me about Android: having to print through the Cloud (tm) when I have an Internet Printing Protocol CUPS server on the same network as my phone connected to a printer ten feet from me. It wouldn't be so bad if the Google Cloud Print libraries weren't proprietary and did something like IPP proxying instead of using a similarly proprietary API.
Will the advertisements be in the middle of your print jobs or printed to the side?
Google supported existing open APIs instead of pulling a Microsoft and inventing their own for everything and dropping support for open APIs?
Whats next to be replaced by some Google specific protocol for Google users? SMTP?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
You're 1 of 2 people who can get CUPS a) setup and b) working well enough to not just spew ink with a real printer.
Would it be possible for alternative Android rom makers like CyanogenMod to replace or augment Google's cloud-printing service with printing directly to your IPP-capable printer or CUPS print server when connected to your home network?
It seems like it should be possible for someone to make a custom rom set that eliminates a lot of the Google spyware stuff and makes Android closer to just plain Linux-on-your-phone, while still being compatible with all the Android apps.
Now I can share everything I print with the NSA too!
Thanks google!
... if Google announced the date this service will be discontinued so my business partners won't be crying like they have about Chrome Frame and Google Reader.
One of the things that annoys me about Android: having to print through the Cloud ... to a printer ten feet from me
Sure it would be lovely to have easy printing built into Android, but honestly I've found that PrinterShare works just fine.
Three Squirrels
I guess Google wants to have access now to the traditional hardcopy documents that you provide to your tax accountant and your banker.
The world is quickly separating into two stable groups: Google fans and Google haters. The latter started as the former, but got better.
Sorry for fucking you over, you should've used Tor!
Your pal,
Needles
Trayvon Martin, the black youth who was killed is Barak Hussein Obama!
From Wikipedia:
The fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman took place on the night of February 26, 2012, in Sanford, Florida, United States. Martin was a 17-year-old African American high school student. George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old mixed-race Hispanic, was the neighborhood watch coordinator for the gated community where Martin was temporarily staying and where the shooting took place.[2][3][4] Following an earlier call from Zimmerman, police arrived within two minutes of a gunshot during a scuffle, in which Zimmerman had fatally shot Martin. Zimmerman was taken into custody, treated for head injuries, then questioned for five hours. The police chief said that Zimmerman was released for lack of evidence and lack of legal grounds for arrest, and that Zimmerman had a right to defend himself with lethal force.[5] However, six weeks later, amidst what some have described as a "media circus"[6][7][8] atmosphere with some misleading reporting,[9][10] Zimmerman was charged with murder by a special prosecutor appointed by Governor Rick Scott.[11][12]
Trayvon wanted something from George!
What did Trayvon want from George so much that Trayvon risked his life to get?
Barak Hussein Obama wants information for all legal citizens of the U.S.A.
Barak Hussein Obama will do anything to get the information he wants, i.e. the information he THINKS he wants, at any cost ... to the Department of Treasury knowing that the Department of Justice, meaning Mr. Eric Holder, is in his pocket, i.e. Barak has impunity from ANY law.
So Barak has set into motion efforts by NSA, with blessings from FISA which he owns, DNI which he owns and the Supreme Court which he owns.
Barak is now on top of the U.S.A. (citizen) and punching the living daylights out of him to get what he wants.
The U.S.A. then pulls a pistol and fires into Barak's tee-shirt covered chest. Imagine the smell of marijuana on Barak's breath!
Barak Hussein Obama IS Trayvon Martin.
If you want it to print to CUPS, make it do so.
"One of the things that annoys me about Android: having to print through the Cloud"
A networked Samsung printer can print on your local network from an Android device via Samsung's print app.
As much as the privacy concerns, I'd be worried that they'll shrug and suddenly decide to 'pull the plug' a year after I incorporate it into my routine. This is too low-level of a function to hand over to a bunch of easily distracted next-big-thing buccaneers.
Wow, they reinvented spam and printer sharing?! What an innovative company!
Everywhere I go, I find that a damn OfficeJet has the strongest 802.11x signal anywhere in the vicinity. I am beginning to suspect that, in reality, The Ministry of State Security of the People's Republic of China has just one, in Beijing, that their people in the field use to Phone Home.
When I worked at Apple, I discovered that it took me not long at all to find both John Sculley's personal LaserWriter - when I was doing QA for MacTCP - then later Gil Amelio's LaserWriter, on the corporate AppleTalk. I don't recall the "Zone", but it was pretty obvious whose Zone it was.
I'm pretty sure those printers had no security, so I was sorely tempted to print a scan of my fat hairy ass on each of their printers. There were all kinds of ways I could have done so, on a regular basis, without ever getting caught. But I was a little shy back in the day, so I never did. That, today, is one of my deepest regrets.
But today?
So, if I select one of those damn WiFi OfficeJets in my Mountain Lion Printer Setup Utility, can I print without a password?
PERHAPS YOU CAN SEE WHERE I AM GOING HERE.
Extra credit if you can tell me how I can display a different video on AirPlay (OS X to Apple TV video sharing), than what actually appears on my display. "hello.jpg" you see, I love to show it to other people, but have grown to find it rather passe when others show it to me.
Get A Load Of This Shit:
More or less, what happened is that six - Count 'Em: SIX - of Portland's Finest guarded The Portland Startup Weekend event hall at the Portland State University Business Accellerator last Spring, after I was not thrown out of the PSU Campus Police, but politely requested by the Campus Cops to step outside so I could explain to them why the Startup Weekend staff totally surrounded me, then simultaneously screamed at me for twenty solid minutes, something to the effect that they were happy to refund my seventy-dollar ticket were I to leave the event, rather than going around explaining to all their naive, young victims that it's a really bad idea to blast all of your trade secrets, business plans, marketing plans, the names of your businesses and products whose domains they had not thought to register before the event, all over Creation on Twitter, YouTube and quite likely Facebook.
Now, it's not like I don't know how cell triangulation works. Had I really threatened anyone with anything, don't you suppose I would have been dragged off the TriMet Light Rail in cuffs, rather than my cell being rang up for my take, by some delightful, young lady Portland Police Bureau Officer who, while doing her damnedest to sound professional, was totally pissing herself laughing during our entire twenty-minute call?
Just now I dropped by the Police Bureau customer service lobby to inquire about all of the written and recorded audio records involved, for use in my upcoming Civil Defamation Lawsuit. I'm not going to represent myself Pro Se - with the assistance and advice but NOT the representation of a bar-admitted attorney - but Pro Per - without any legal advice at all, as I have come to regard the vast majority of Bar Association members as a complete was of my valuable time.
That's what bookstores and law libraries are for. If you think Law School is hard, and that legal texts are hard to read, just try graduate school in Elementary Particle Physics. Now those are some books!
Legal books are cheap as dirt too. I was quite surprised, I bought about a dozen, mostly used but some new, at Powell's City of Books on Burnside in Portland for about $130.00.
I discuss this matter with Law Enforcement officers on a regular basis. I mean, I come right out and tell them that the Startup Weekend staff rang up 9-1-1 in an attemp
The reason it Just Works to print on just about any printer, without having to install any manner of driver, is that OS X has all the CUPS drivers bundled. They are regularly updated as well through Software Update. I've never had a problem with printing on OS X.
Not the first time but the second time I printed something on a laser printer, I asked a friend to print out some manner of UNIX manual for me, a lengthy book.
He said, "We better go look at the printer. Sometimes it prints out the Postscript verbatim, rather than rendering it."
That was on a BSD VAX.
Good Times.
And print it whenever you like. Woz was right - nobody owns anything anymore, you're just using a device (terminal?) to access content that another has agreed to let you access. Soon printing your own content will be seen as some kind of subversive act.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
For those who don't know, Google Cloud Print connects Cloud Print-aware applications (across the Web, desktop, and mobile) to any printer
So if I want to print my document to a printer in Bulgaria, no problem! That's just flat out daft. Cloud storage, processing and applications provide ubiquitous accessibility. Cloud printing provides ubiquitous inaccessibility.
Google 2.0 is a collection of some of the dumbest ideas I've ever seen in my life. Surely there's still somebody with common sense working for Google?!?
"It's illegal to threaten the President, even if you're joking."
-- The Mayor of Carmel, portraying a Secret Service agent in Line of Fire.
For committing an offense against a "Covered Person" - there are more than just the President - at Kuro5hin back in the day, a couple of Secret Service agent turned up at his place of work not long after. I'm not certain it was the very next day, but it might have been.
I promise to keep it (reasonably) clean.
OK, I broke that promise.
http://www.niftiestsoftware.com/cups-cloud-print/
Linux drivers todo the same thing landed in 2011.
Unknown Lamer
"It wouldn't be so bad if the Google Cloud Print libraries weren't proprietary and did something like IPP proxying instead of using a similarly proprietary API."
No proprietary libraries are used by the Linux cups cloud print. Yet it prints to Google Cloud Print Perfectly. https://developers.google.com/cloud-print/docs/pythonCode Yes the inferface instructions are written for python programmers. Yes you can write a print driver in python on Linux, OS X..... Almost all OS's bar Microsoft made OS's. The C/C++ versions are inside the chromuim source code.
Yes it is possible to create a cloud print circle of never ending print. Yes have chrome/chromuin proxy provide printer to google cloud print that just happens to be google cloud print itself. Anyone who makes this mistake is going to love the missing bandwidth.
What is lacking is a man in middle solution to intercept and redirect google cloud print and the option to set up your own private cloud print equal servers.
It's not like I don't understand cryptography, but my client Wiebetech got flamed by the "Pros" at the MacWorld Expo back in the day.
They were very excited that I'd implemented FireWire Encrypt hard drive AES encryption in ARM assembly code in the Oxford 911 storage bridge firmware. That enabled us to secure your external drives without the need of a driver, just a simple OS X GUI to enter your password, then transmit it over a proprietary FireWire protocol to the drive.
After confirming the password, the drive performed a bus reset, then appeared on the bus as an SBP-2/RBC storage device, as if unencrypted.
However, because I had a bit of a hard time getting that assembly code right - I called it "The Data Motel" until my encryptor and decryptor were BOTH fully debugged - James Wiebe appeared at the show, with my GUI transmitting the passphrase to the firmware in cleartext.
Now see if you can figure out why I'm calling you a damn fool.
As my father once said of his work at Mare Island Naval Shipyard:
"Every time we install a new computer, we have to wait for three months for someone to fly out from Washington, then another month while he spends a solid month before he is willing to "bless" it."
It was plainly apparent to me what he meant by "blessing" a computer at a Nuclear Submarine maintenance shipyard, but the proper term for "bless" was classified way, way about Top Secret, with the actual name of that classification being itself classified.
Perhaps you can take High School Physics at your local adult school, you knew where you'd go to study for your G.E.D. If not, I'm sure your local community college could fix you right up.
I've had Google print service for months now on a standard off the shelf Epson printer.
I've always wondered with Cloud Print, it is routed through Google servers?? So Google and NSA sees everything you print?
i.e. it's not just some sort of exchange of IP addresses and port numbers, it's an actual man-in-the-middle attack on printing? You print to the printer in Epson in your house and it actually routes the thing through Google/NSA data center?
Really??
What kind of encryption is there between the device that's doing the printing and the printer, and is the source code available for inspection?
that's what is is. Greetings to 66MI in Erbenheim - whom have you peeped on today ?
Novell (yeah that old company that made NetWare back in the day) just released their mobile iPrint app last week. It would let you print via IPP from your android or iOS device without the need to set up a google cloud printer. Granted, it's targeted at enterprises, not end-users... http://www.novell.com/products/iprint/
That's why, back during the Communist era, all typewriters, mimeograph machines, photocopiers, and personal or office printers were registered with the K.G.B.
Funny, though, the Samizdat had a way of getting published, printed then distributed anyway.
Back in the day "Pamphleteering" was of quite some significance in bringing about what, at one time, was Democracy, Freedom of Speech and the like. Those rights are largely gone now, present in name only but not really in effect.
However, to the extent that we can continue to published openly online, for the most part on the Web, but also via eMail and other IP protocols, we now have a far more effective form of pamphleteering.
Get a Load of This Shit:
the man who "threatens explosions, guns" was yours truly, Michael David Crawford.
What the Portland taxpayer got out of my, uh, "threat", was six of Portland's Finest guarding the Portland Startup Weekend FROM ME for about thirty, maybe thirty-three hours, with everyone attending having to pass through a metal detector upon entering the premises.
Now, it's not like I don't know how Cell Tower Triangulation works.
But what *I* got out of it, was a rather fascinating twenty-minute cell chat with a delightful young female Portland Police Bureau Officer, who did her best to pretend she had not already read every last one of my "Tweets" - oh do I hate that word - in which I tore a new one into Seattle's Startup Weekend Corporation for duping perhaps one hundred innocent, naive young fraud victims into spilling all of their trade secrets, business plans, what should have been their domain names but no longer can be, as a result of better-funded competitors, for the most part in foreign lands, subscribing to their Twitter, FaceBook and quite likely YouTube feeds as well.
Here's what the Portland Police Bureau had to say to me just this evening, when I dropped by their customer service lobby, to ask for all their written and recorded audio records, for use as evidence in my Civil Defamation Complaint against Startup Weekend, Inc., Twitter - for deleting my account, thereby removing exculpatory evidence that would have rescued my reputation - and The Oregonian, for failing to ask for my take on the incident, as well as having failed, for example, to ask the Portland Police Bureau why they didn't even try to arrest me, but did nothing other than piss themselves laughing when they rang me up on my cell.
And I Blockquote:
I was quite hungry, you see, and being Summer and all, it's been a tad warm around here.
Those are the EXACT WORDS of a uniformed, on-duty Portland Police Bureau Officer, that I asked for directions to their Customer Service Lobby, so that I could request their police report, any other written records, the names and badge numbers of all of their officers that were involved - at least seven, maybe more - and a WHOLE BUNCH of audio recordings, not just of 9-1-1 calls, but my chat with that amused young lady cop, recordings of calls between each other, audio recordings of their patrol car conversations and the like.
There are a whole bunch of really good reasons that Law Enforcement takes at least audio recordings of everything they possibly can. If you have at least three independent recordings of a gunshot, or if you're lucky, maybe just
all your bases r belong to us
Nice try, Google, but you've burned me enough times that I'm not getting suckered into another one of your services that'll go away if it doesn't make you enough money.
I don't think that an company would be so stupid to send their documents through Google.
BSD style.' In the for 4ll practical World. GNNA members
As someone who's been trying to use Cloud Print since it launched, I had assumed that the project was abandoned long ago. It has always been extremely flakey, it never "just works", etc. When it works, it's great. When it doesn't, you are left staring at a screen identical to when it does, with no diagnostics, and no sign of potential progress.
There are also some rather insane missing features, like the inability to rename printers (eg: if two of your friends have an HP DeskJet 1050a, and they both left it with the default name, have fun trying to decide which one to print on. Or if they both renamed their printers, but gave them sensible names like "HP (Upstairs)")
CloudPrint was a nice idea which Google has given zero attention. I do not expect things to suddenly work now that Windows is in the mix.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Is Google trying to get out of their way just to acquire every last bit of information for NSA masters?
I cant deny information to an app - its an app that decides if it will run on my phone depending on what Im willing to give it. Dont want to share my contact list? wont play half the games.
Then Google disables WiFi button because 'gotta have this location data no mater what!'
"Let Google's location service and other apps scan for networks, even when Wi-Fi is off"
And now they want copy of everything I print? They already have copy of every email ffs.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
It's just so nasty that it's an embarrassment. Android really, really needs a set of rendering APIs that apps can use to render content to a canvas and some dialogs for previewing, printing, page setup and spooling documents to a printer via a CUPS-like API. I'm sure it doesn't even need a new API level - the printer server could be a an app, the APIs for rendering could be drawing primitives with some convenient methods for snapshotting screens for lazy apps. It could be backported like other things have been like fragments to encourage wide adoption. But it does need them.
I just dont think cloud as a medium will be solid enough.
Funny, that was about the first thing I thought too.
Wrt your other complaints I could, of course, observe that other platforms offer a much finer granulation of access control, even AFTER installation, but we still have to acknowledge that being asked is better than not being asked at all, as was the case before..
Insert
The Android software works like a charm (except for the occasional forgetting that pages that require logging in won't be logged in -- your receipts, for instance, aren't so simple to print).
On the other hand, HP's software, which only operated while I am on the WiFi, never worked to print a web page (I could print photos). I'd get a blank page, or worse, a black page.
Design for Use, not Construction!
I set this up the other week for the mother in law, and me, I'd stick with cloud printing through Chrome the way I set it up for her.
Why? Because I can sign out of Chrome until I need it again.
Installing this as a driver into Windows means I've now put Google into the operating system -- and increasingly I believe they will take advantage of that and record and send data when I'm not directly using it.
So, I will pass on installing a Google cloud-print driver, because I prefer the option of being able to turn them off. I prefer my trust relationship with Google to be something I can meter a little more closely, and disable when I'm not using it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I have used cloud print for my wireless printer for quite a while for home or mobile use. Though always through Chrome browser.
Perhaps I've missed an obvious step but after loading the Cloud Print for Windows I cannot seem to find a way to connect my work PC to my homes Cloud Print printer. As with many that work from home, I log into the company network via VPN. While on Chrome I can easily print to it but have not found a way to print to it using any Office app as it doesn't load drivers for a "Cloud Print Printer". Cloud Print for Windows just wants to add my works networked printers to the cloud which is worthless to me.
From their help section it says to go to the cloud printer management page and select print, upload the file to print. That seems far less than ideal. If I can't set it as my default printer in windows, then it's near worthless to me.
...this project?
http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/build-instructions-windows
Yea, we have this up already, but nice to see an actually-released installer.
Are you saying they have done this or projecting they will?
I have two Android devices running pretty current versions, and I have a button to disable wifi.
In fact, I routinely turn off wifi on both devices to prevent ads and other network traffic when I don't want it. Neither has access to cellular data.
My test for a new application is airplane mode ... if it can't operate in airplane mode, it gets immediately deleted. As wifi is a subset of airplane mode, I don't think they could ever remove the ability to turn this off. Games and stuff which is local only are much better if I deny them access to their ads.
And, yes, I agree that we should be able to come in later and revoke certain permissions on apps. Because I don't think the app itself needs to read my phone calls, I believe that should be taken care of by the OS. And things which are essentially local post-it notes, those apps don't need network access at all.
For me, Google is increasingly becoming a "kinda trust, but not always", and many of the apps don't get much trust at all.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Are you saying they have done this or projecting they will?
I have two Android devices running pretty current versions, and I have a button to disable wifi.
this button will stop working in 4.3, it will still be there, but it wont turn off wifi :) it will be there to make you feel good
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
When collaborating with a team at a remote office, it makes sense to:1)save scan stuff to the remote office server and 2)queue stuff to print to the remote office server. These two tasks are possible through the cloud, but not necessary to have. A lot of this has already been dealt with in existing desktop operating systems. It's surprising to see they didn't integrate this kind of stuff from the beginning.
Events like these prove people consider smartphones/tablets should be mobile desktops crippled with no keyboard and mouse. Yes there are phones with a qwerty keyboard, but they are tiny and if you have stubby fingers like me they are inefficient. Manufacturers are doing their best to try to wean us off desktops/laptops because it gives them the opportunity to sell us all those things we take for granted as phone app$$$. I bought 3 slow and shitty expensive tablets and I won't be fooled again. I don't want Android. I think Android is slow and it sucks. I don't want to code for it either because the programming toolkit and api are not the same as regular Linux.
These so-called inexpensive devices are expensive when you calculate all the time you waste with them trying to make things work like on your Desktop Linux.
More people will be screaming for more Linux Desktop experience on phones/tablets. Android in its present form is definitely not where I see myself tomorrow or ten years from now. Desktop Linux is where I am. Desktop Linux is where I will be with X-Window(x.org wayland)/GTK/GNOME/KDE/QT on a traditional DIY Desktop PC and hopefully a DIY Mobile Phone. UBUNTU touch is coming, but I hope it will cut the mustard, but I won't pay for something in advance when I haven't even touched it or had a ride around the block with it yet. I made that mistake with those 3 android tablets. Never again. That was just smoke and mirrors advertisements on TV thinking it was up to snuff like a Desktop. Android tablets are not up-to-snuff or at least not to my opinion of a useful work device; high-end laptops and dedicated rudimentary Motorola cellphones that last 4-5 days without recharging are useful work devices. I did try LilDebi(Debian Linux on ARM) on my Android tablets and LilDebi is more like what I want, but LilDebi runs simultaneously with Android so it's very very slow. I would prefer a NATIVE touch & usb keyboard/mouse capable (your favorite flavor Linux) DEBIAN with (your favorite flavor GUI) GNOME and without any Android GUI.
In the meantime, I continue to use my Linux desktop for doing real work.
I've had this setup on my Windows machine for a long time now. It's been a feature in Chrome for a very long time.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?