Canon Printer Hacked To Run Doom Video Game

So it runs Doom ? by MondoGordo · 2014-09-15 06:15 · Score: 5, Funny

How much paper does that use ?

Re:So it runs Doom ? by cp5i6 · 2014-09-15 06:19 · Score: 4, Insightful

You're missing the point.

It's connected to the net. check. It's got enough cpu power to run a proper app. check. It's got no security. check. It's got enough storage for a decently sized program. check.

You know what the next logical step is?

installing DDoS zombies on these printers.
Re:So it runs Doom ? by damn_registrars · 2014-09-15 06:23 · Score: 1

I'm pretty sure he was making a joke, there.

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Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Re:So it runs Doom ? by amiga3D · 2014-09-15 06:24 · Score: 1

Use it as a torrent client?
Re:So it runs Doom ? by OhSoLaMeow · 2014-09-15 06:30 · Score: 4, Funny

You know what the next logical step is?

Beowulf clusters of Canon printers?

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They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
Re:So it runs Doom ? by gstoddart · 2014-09-15 06:33 · Score: 4, Funny

You know what the next logical step is?
It involves the internet ... so I'll assume some form of pornography.

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Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Re:So it runs Doom ? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-09-15 06:37 · Score: 0

No, it's the shit comment system of slashdot. You have to the first decently rated comment to have any chance of being read, since those two comments balloon to hundreds of children long.
Re:So it runs Doom ? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-09-15 06:39 · Score: 0

From the article:

Writing code and getting it running sucked up months of

...effort.
Man, I'd like to get paid months for doing that. Since it took him so long, it seems he was risking that someone else might beat him to the punch.
The result of his efforts is that the game shows up on the printer's color screen, because that is just part of the user interface on this printer.
The colors look okay on the title screen, but the palette is all messed up in-game, as can be seen by a screenshot in the referenced article. (If he had gone with Tetris, the botched colors wouldn't have been an issue.)
I didn't see any reference as to how he controlled the game. It might just be an LMP player (meaning that it plays back the in-game recordings). Although, since this was done by uploading custom firmware, presumably he could use some of those buttons for rudimentary controls, if desired. The game was described as "unoptimized", probably meaning that it is slow. My guess is that full multiplayer/netplay support isn't real high on the priority list. The researcher who did this doesn't plan to enhance the port (even to try to get the color palette working right).
Re:So it runs Doom ? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-09-15 06:45 · Score: 0

How much paper does that use ?
For Doom 3 a single sheet of black paper should suffice.
Re:So it runs Doom ? by lucm · 2014-09-15 06:46 · Score: 4, Funny

The guy will upload 3D printer firmware, and demons from Doom will come out of the printer.
RUN

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lucm, indeed.
Re:So it runs Doom ? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-09-15 06:50 · Score: 5, Funny

Ooh. Printer porn.
Ms. Canon: I love the way you jam the paper inside me.
Mr. Epson: Ooh, baby, my fuser's so hot for you.
Ms. Canon: Yeah. That's the way. Fill me full of black ink.
Eww.
Re:So it runs Doom ? by tippe · 2014-09-15 07:08 · Score: 3, Interesting

Well duh, the next logical step is obviously to add sound by modulating the movement of the print head somehow (sort of like how you could on old HP ScanJet scanners in order to play music). Who'd want to play doom on their printer unless it also had sound?
Re:So it runs Doom ? by tepples · 2014-09-15 07:17 · Score: 1

You know what the next logical step is?
Lawsuit from Zenimax perhaps?
Re:So it runs Doom ? by ziggystarsky · 2014-09-15 07:22 · Score: 1

You know what the next logical step is?
Not quite yet.

A "security researcher" has four months of over spare time. check.

Yes, I think I got it now!
Re:So it runs Doom ? by nblender · 2014-09-15 08:12 · Score: 2

8 pages per minute, 500 sheets in the tray ...
Sounds like hours of fun.
Re:So it runs Doom ? by The+Grim+Reefer · 2014-09-15 09:14 · Score: 1

But can it play Crysis?
Re:So it runs Doom ? by TWX · 2014-09-15 10:28 · Score: 1

I'd be much more impressed if they wrote a Pong client that ran on the multicolor LCD screen, so that two players could use some of the control panel buttons to move their paddles!

(see what I did there?!)

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Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Re:So it runs Doom ? by TWX · 2014-09-15 10:29 · Score: 2

It involves the internet ... so I'll assume some form of pornography.
That takes me back...

I was one of the first kids in my neighborhood to regularly BBS and to have a color inkjet printer, I used to sell individual printed pages for $0.50 each...

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Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Re:So it runs Doom ? by dissy · 2014-09-15 11:49 · Score: 1

While I'm sure it was intended as a joke, we do (sadly) have that answer...
Just about 200 pages: http://oi61.tinypic.com/11tbbr...
Re:So it runs Doom ? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-09-15 18:38 · Score: 0

Thanks for keeping this meme alive
Re:So it runs Doom ? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-09-16 00:29 · Score: 0

Ooh. Printer porn.
Ms. Canon: I love the way you jam the paper inside me.
Mr. Epson: Ooh, baby, my fuser's so hot for you.
Ms. Canon: Yeah. That's the way. Fill me full of black ink.
Eww.
I know you meant the comment to be sarcastic humour but I couldn't help myself. I am figuratively ROFLMAO.
Mr. Epson: Come a little closer to my print head baby.
Ms. Epson: Oh! Oh! Oh!
Mr. Epson: (sleep mode)
Ms. Epson: (handles 500 print requests)
Re:So it runs Doom ? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-09-16 05:17 · Score: 0

Same for me, except it was a CD burner. Already had a massive porn collection, so one day I put them together and started selling CDs loaded with porn for $5 a pop. Porn kept my bowl packed for months.
Re:So it runs Doom ? by Waccoon · 2014-09-16 16:46 · Score: 2

So that's why the damn cartridges run out so fast.

Another... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-09-15 06:16 · Score: 2, Interesting

Another headline I never expected to read.

Re:Another... by cusco · 2014-09-15 06:28 · Score: 1

There is no evidence that anyone is attacking printers via the route Mr Jordon found.
Yet. They left "yet" off the end of that sentence.

--
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin

If I type in "IDKFA" by Anonymous Coward · 2014-09-15 06:18 · Score: 0

Do I get unlimited ink?

Re:If I type in "IDKFA" by Anonymous Coward · 2014-09-15 07:01 · Score: 0

No, but if you type in "IDKFC", you get free chicken.
Re:If I type in "IDKFA" by GameboyRMH · 2014-09-15 07:06 · Score: 1

I guess IDCLIP toggles the wireless capability...

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"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Re:If I type in "IDKFA" by Anonymous Coward · 2014-09-15 08:35 · Score: 0

It tastes like paper, just like real KFC!

I'm not surprised by Quantum+Apostrophe · 2014-09-15 06:19 · Score: 1

Canon has the worst, abysmal software to run their devices. I don't know how they manage to make it so complex and large.

Re:I'm not surprised by Anonymous Coward · 2014-09-15 06:26 · Score: 0

What are you talking about? The Windows drivers for printing and scanning on most recent pixmas are under 30MB on Canon's website. You're not forced to install all that crap on the CD. Compare that with the many hundreds of megabytes that HP (and others) drivers take, even in their most reduced form.
Re:I'm not surprised by Narcocide · 2014-09-15 06:34 · Score: 2

Before you just sign off and assume that 30MB is a completely acceptable install size for a single printer driver or a single group of drivers from a single printer manufacturer simply because HP somehow manages to waste a whole order of magnitude more space, compare that to the installed size of the Linux CUPS printing subsystem and its ENTIRE DRIVER SET FOR ALL SUPPORTED DEVICES.
Re:I'm not surprised by fulldecent · 2014-09-15 06:55 · Score: 1

> ENTIRE DRIVER SET FOR ALL SUPPORTED DEVICES
Cliff hanger! How big is it?
(Mac users are used to the bloated CUPS version that includes all the graphics)

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-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
Re:I'm not surprised by Anne+Thwacks · 2014-09-15 07:17 · Score: 2

The Linux drivers require a version of Libtiff from 1993, and have never been updated - ever.
Please, when can we have a hack that makes these printers print in Linux?
Or *BSD support?
Or Android support?

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Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Re:I'm not surprised by Narcocide · 2014-09-15 07:17 · Score: 2

Well I too have a bunch of optional stuff that objectively speaking, I REALLY don't need, like bluetooth support (not to mention all the extra drivers and the development headers for compiling stuff, and a bunch of filters packages that I don't even know what they're for, in both 64-bit and 32-bit format due to compiling multi-arch stuff on this system) but I'm still sitting on a total install base of a bit less than 17MB. If Canon actually needs 30MB just for their own drivers and presumably the printing system itself is part of the Windows kernel, I think something is REALLY REALLY wrong.
Re:I'm not surprised by Anonymous Coward · 2014-09-15 07:22 · Score: 2, Interesting

I'm not assuming 30MB is acceptable. Windows drivers for some printers don't even reach 1MB, so I understand what you're saying.
However, saying that the software for Canon printers is horrid is just untrue, because I work with quite a few such printers and it rarely gives me trouble, even in networked environments. And less than 30MB is certainly better than what most other manufacturers are doing.
I can also give you one good explanation for why the package is ~30MB rather than much less: there are dozens of localized DLLs that have precisely the same code, but different strings inside. Yeah, that's sloppy, but the end result is still much better than what other manufacturers are doing. And then there's an x86 and an x64 version of each. All in all, for a single driver that is actually loaded in a particular system, you end up with far less than 30MB.
See this for an example: http://www.usa.canon.com/cusa/support/consumer/printers_multifunction/pixma_mp_series/pixma_mp560#DriversAndSoftware
Re:I'm not surprised by sexconker · 2014-09-15 07:28 · Score: 1

> ENTIRE DRIVER SET FOR ALL SUPPORTED DEVICES
Cliff hanger! How big is it?
(Mac users are used to the bloated CUPS version that includes all the graphics)
Double cliffhanger: How many devices does it actually support? How old are they? How many of those devices's features does it actually support?
Re:I'm not surprised by Narcocide · 2014-09-15 07:47 · Score: 2

To be fair, you do partially have a point there; the official Canon printer drivers certainly support more of their own printers than CUPS does. I can tell you that without even looking at Canon's official driver install. However, the total amount of printers supported by CUPS, since it includes a sampling of most major manufacturer's printers (and all of the features of most of said printers) utterly dwarves what any one manufacturer supports currently in their own drivers in Windows. Yes, the average age of the list doesn't necessarily include as many printers released THIS YEAR (another partial point to your statement) but it also doesn't exclude printers that used to work simply because they're old enough that Canon wants you to buy a new one so they simply merged out support. What you're getting in that 17MB (probably less than 10MB really, for normal users - my installation case is an exception because I use multi-arch and compile a lot of packages on my own) is basic or complete support for a broad cross section of printers going back for more than a decade, not just the most recent offerings of one manufacturer's last 2 years of flagship products. Note this figure also includes the documentation.
But that doesn't really mean Canon's software is in and of itself bloated and horrible necessarily. If I had to bet on it, my guess would be that 28MB of the 30MB used by the Canon driver install is a hidden video of the developers eating birthday cake.
Re:I'm not surprised by Anonymous Coward · 2014-09-15 08:33 · Score: 0

# equery size cups
* net-print/cups-1.7.3
Total files : 599
Total size : 14.55 MiB
Re:I'm not surprised by Quantum+Apostrophe · 2014-09-15 08:36 · Score: 1

" all that crap on the CD"
So you're agreeing that Canon can write crap? So what makes you think that somehow just the driver part is magically not crap? Every piece of software from a Japanese hardware company is universally garbage.
Their user interfaces are also ridiculous. Just fucking awful.
Re:I'm not surprised by Anonymous Coward · 2014-09-15 09:50 · Score: 0

Does libtiff have bugs in it? If not, why updated it? I'm running LMDE and can print, so it must be working... Are you one of those people who wants change for the sake of change?
Re:I'm not surprised by hairyfeet · 2014-09-15 18:48 · Score: 2

THANK YOU, as it doesn't matter if you can squeeze a driver set down to 1Kb if the damned things don't work or work half assed which is what I found trying random printers on Linux at the shop last year. Some would print but NOT scan, some would scan but came out lousy, and frankly NONE of them worked OOTB without seriously fiddling. Compare this to a Windows printer install...1.- Put CD in driver, 2.- Follow instructions....there is no step three! And the driver is 30 Mb, oh noes...who fricking cares? What kind of garbage are you dumpster diving where 30Mb or even 300Mb makes a damned bit of difference? Hell the cheapest shittiest used towers I keep around just to have something under $99 have 160Gb drives so who cares about drivers in the Mb range?
As for TFA...is anybody REALLY surprised, I mean really? These corps never think about security until it bites them square on the ass so while I'm glad its a white hat and not a black pulling this I really wouldn't be surprised if all consumer printers with net features is equally shitty, its just not something they even bothered considering. It reminds me how there was zero security on faxes until assholes started spamming black faxes, most of these companies just don't think "What would a giant douchebag do?" which sadly today is EXACTLY what you have to consider right off the bat.

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ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Re:I'm not surprised by Reziac · 2014-09-16 05:20 · Score: 1

Or with the average laser printer, plug in printer, don't bother with the install disk, select whatever is the nearest version of the HPLJ that Windows happens to have handy. (This also works for older inkjets and some pin-impact printers.)
As to TFA, didn't you know that no device is complete until it can play DOOM? :D
But yeah, methinks if software started from the perspective of the douchebag, 90% of the hacks would go away and the rest wouldn't be worth the trouble.

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~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Re:I'm not surprised by hairyfeet · 2014-09-16 08:29 · Score: 1

THIS, this right here, is what royally pisses me off with the "Linux is ready for the desktop" crowd, because its fucking trivial to show that even the most basic consumer hardware just DOES NOT WORK while basic common sense features, like having a way to roll back drivers when an update hoses them or roll back the system when something goes wrong, that Windows has had for a decade and a fricking half just do not exist. I mean how bad would the FOSSies be laughing if you had to wipe and reinstall Windows every year to year and a half just to get the latest security updates? Well I get that trotted out as a viable "solution" to the fact that no Linux distro can pass the Hairyfeet challenge, which boils down to "get 5 years worth of updates without shitting yourself". Last time I saw that level of shitty in Windows was WinME!
And its sad but I realized years ago that most security problems, both on and offline, could be solved by merely applying the "douchebag rule". Act like the world is filled with vicious trolling POSes that will do something nasty even when they don't gain from it? Watch your issues disappear. Its sad that we have come to that point but we have so many worthless excuses for human beings with nothing better to do than cause grief and misery because they can that this is the world we live in. Hell did you see that article in yahoo about SWAT kicking down the door of a COD player and coming within a hair of killing the kid? Turned out somebody he beat online got butthurt and deciding to call SWAT on him just to be a giant fucking prick, THAT is the world we live in now.

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ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Re:I'm not surprised by Reziac · 2014-09-16 14:07 · Score: 1

I hadn't heard about the CoD incident, but ... [goes off, looks it up] holy shit, that's douchery of a high order. Tho I'm not sure the cops had much less douchery... I mean, 60 officers, WTF? I guess he can count himself fortunate they didn't overhear game gunfire and react by opening fire themselves.
If I had to wipe and reinstall Windows with any regularity, yeah, I'd be looking for a different OS. I don't spend all that time and effort getting it all just how I want it, only to have to replace it and start over. Reinstalling is against my religion. I use the damn machine, I don't just play with it. My OS setup is not disposable.
WinME was actually very good about drivers -- the install routine was smart enough to look for one that works even if it wasn't a WinME driver. I'd not seen that before and was suitably impressed. And while WinME sucked donkey balls out of the box, it could be made 100% stable -- turn off System Restore, apply 98Lite in default mode, and it goes from unable to even crash properly, to never crashes again. (Didn't help the sucky resource management, tho.)
But when we stoop to comparing FOSS to WinME... yeah, that shows just how ...unrealistic... their expectations and performance really are. The driver structure is insane. You do NOT build ephemeral software (ie. liable to be updated, possibly often) into the kernel, and not expect to have the whole house of cards fall down too often for comfort.

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~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Re:I'm not surprised by hairyfeet · 2014-09-19 02:24 · Score: 1

Well to be fair to the SWAT they were told they had a hostage situation and having friends that are ex-cops I can tell you those calls are the ones they always feared because one wrong move and you have to explain to somebody why their wife or kid is in a body bag, so they naturally are gonna go heavy when you have hostages. the fact that there are so many absolute douchebags on this earth that "SWATting" could actually become a word? Just shows why you have to assume asshattery anymore when it comes to anything and everything, too many wastes of space on this planet.
And the simple fact that long term Linux professionals, the kind that write articles for major sites and are called on for expert Linux advice actually suggest that having a separate home partition and blowing away the whole OS, including programs and settings, every year and a half is a "viable solution" just shows why I call 'em FOSSies, because like Moonies and Scientologists there is a serious fucking disconnect between what they consider normal and reality! I mean can you imagine me selling customers a PC and telling them they are gonna have to blow away their OS every year and a half and that they only have X number of months before they have to wipe and start over? I'd be out of business before the year was out! But that just shows how cult like their thinking has become, because Torvalds has made it clear as long as he has a pulse the whole "stick it all in the kernel" bullshit is NEVER gonna go away so instead of going "Welp that's fucked up, lets go somewhere else" they cook up these elaborate workarounds just to give them a bare semblance of what Windows and OSX have had for the better part of a decade!
Finally as for WinME...wanna know what killed WinME? The douchebag at MSFT who said that WinME could run VXD drivers. If you had a WinME system with ONLY WDM drivers? It was solid as a rock, in fact I had a customer who didn't retire his WinME system until it died in 2009 because it worked perfectly all that time. But Lord have mercy if you mixed WDM and VXD as loading both made WinME an unstable mess of an OS, but I'd rather be trapped on a system that had only WinME and Win 8 in a dual boot than deal with Linux as like you I have better things to do than spend my time trying to fix Torvalds' fuckups.

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ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Re:I'm not surprised by Reziac · 2014-09-19 03:15 · Score: 1

Any idea what the problem was, or maybe just trying to juggle two styles of driver access?
Now that you mention it, I'll have to check driver types when I have my old WinME setup handy again -- once I'd beaten it into submission, it ran 24/7 as the media-watching and image-editing box for two solid years without once needing a reboot (tho got restarted a couple times for twiddling hardware). Only got retired cuz I added an XP dual boot that took over the same jobs.
If mine had any VxD drivers, it woulda been the Matrox vidcard... but I became a Matrox bigot largely because their drivers never caused me any grief. Couldn't say that about various others.
Linux frustrates the hell out of me. I keep trying distros with hopes held high, only to find some showstopper issue (I am not willing to chase all over hell looking for fixes, it either works out of the box or it goes away), or that the performance is unbearably bad. Contrary to popular claims, I've found Linux with fullfledged desktops needs about 3x as much hardware to perform the same as concurrent Windows. :(

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~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Re:I'm not surprised by hairyfeet · 2014-09-23 22:32 · Score: 1

VXDs were .INI based, a hell of a lot like DOS "bare metal" drivers while WDM had a much more sane isolation driver model, in fact last I checked you could run XP WDM drivers on Win 7...try THAT with Linux and see how far you get! But trying to have bare metal drivers AND isolated drivers while dealing with the 16bit GDI memory state just overloaded the OS which eventually would cause a crash thanks to lack of memory for the desktop subsystem. Most folks don't know that all Win9X had a fatal GDI flaw where the GDI would run out of memory, no matter how much you had, because crucial parts of its subsystem were 16bit leftovers and THAT is what killed WinME, trying to fit two completely different driver models into a 16bit limited memory manager was...it was just too much.
As far as Linux? Give it up, because as Linus has a pulse it will NEVER get any better. I mean we'd laugh if Windows still ran with VXD drivers, right? Well Linus' driver model is sooooo old that VXD would be a step up! The simple fact is the "let the kernel devs handle it" worked back when ALL of Linux AND the drivers could fit on a floppy but when you have over 100,000 drivers AND new drivers in the thousands released every quarter AND major parts from the kernel on up in flux? Its easy enough to do basic math and see it doesn't stand a chance of being stable. This is why the "Hairyfeet Challenge" has stood for 8 years now, because Linux just can't update itself without the house of cards that is the drivers falls apart.
And the hilarious part? They claim you are an "anti FOSS shill" for daring to ask for functional drivers, and the best part is its NOT FOSS, as BSD? Has functional drivers, they simply are focused on servers so they don't have drivers for consumer hardware! But NO OTHER OS uses Linus's shit model, not BSD, not OSX, hell even OS fucking 2 has a more functional driver model than Linux!
Mark my words Windows 9 is gonna make Linux look like the POS that it is and gonna slaughter Linux on the desktop...I mean a Windows that is nearly 40% FASTER than Win 7 AND its gonna be less than $40 a pop, possibly even free? And you are right about hardware, I can slap Win 7 on a late model P4 with an IGP and GB of RAM and its fine, that exact same system on the supposedly "lightweight" Linux just crawls unless you use a Win98 looking DE like Blackbox. But you spend any time with Linux and you find out a good 90%+ of their claims? Total bullshit, classic circle of loon. As I go to sleep I'll be having my hexacore process a half a dozen videos AND convert a video to DVD and meanwhile just basic things that Windows has had since 2006 like hardware acceleration? Doesn't work, in fact just basic multitasking is a crapshoot so yeah, don't bother its not worth it.

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ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Re:I'm not surprised by Reziac · 2014-09-24 02:03 · Score: 1

Oh, then my WinME definitely had some VxD drivers, cuz I recall it fishing a Win95 driver out of several options via pawing thru INI files (I can't recall if this was for the SCSI card or the sound card), and the Matrox vidcard definitely had the old type. Whether it had any of the WdM type, then ... dunno. Mainboard was a Tyan server board which was rock solid (and did not have the rollover bug -- didja know that's actually in the hardware, and in only about half the hardware -- Windows just triggered it), and that helps under any circumstances. I'd seen others that were dead-stable too, even on seriously junk hardware like Packard Smell... which woulda had all older drivers and OS never touched since it left the factory.
Main reason I keep looking at linux (other than masochism) is that it's good to have alternatives, but as you say it's never really going to be viable for the masses unless and until they restructure the driver mess, and stop "removing" drivers for older hardware (while saying how good it is for old hardware, WTF? Few versions back Ubuntu pulled support for all vidcards over 5 years old!) ... dandy for a headless server that does one job. Not so dandy for people with random hardware that does many tasks. It needs a wrapper so it can run any damn drivers including Windows drivers, instead of trying to force everyone to come to them with a linux driver.... and keep it updated. If it's supposed to be the OS for everyone, then stop locking out anyone who won't bow to your system, and to the GPL (which in its current incarnation is coersion, not 'freedom'. The BSD license is truly free.)
I've often said that developers should have to work on the slowest hardware that will even run their programs, so they know how the rest of us feel. The fullblown linux desktops are a prime example.
Yeah, I've heard all the excuses... they all boil down to "works for me, sucks to be you". That's not going to draw everyday users, tho it may draw ivory-tower bigots. It's been what, 20 years now? and it still has only about 1% of desktop users. You'd think that alone would cue 'em they're goin' at it wrong if they truly want to attract ordinary users. Most of us don't run server OSs. If you're only going for the server market (and there'd be nothing wrong with that, BSD as an example), admit it and stop bullshitting the rest of us.
All I've seen about Win9 so far is that it kinda reverts to Win7 in the interface dept (at least MS eventually learns from their mistakes, and does something about it!). What's this about $40 or even free?

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~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Re:I'm not surprised by hairyfeet · 2014-09-26 13:58 · Score: 1

Well if you had ALL VXD or ALL WDM? then you didn't run into the GDI bug so most likely you had all VXD drivers. you see what really doomed WinME was that Win2K had come out and it was using WDM and the OEMs already had XP beta and it too was WDM and if MSFT says it can use both why not just use these WDM drivers for the new stuff and use the old VXD for the older hardware we are still selling? Most folks don't realize most boards, especially back then, were this mishmash of hardware that could be as much as 5 years old, see the whole "Vista capable" debacle that came about because Intel still had a warehouse full of shitty 9xx chipsets they were trying to move. The 9xx were IRL a DX8 GPU that Intel used software to run parts of DX9 on the CPU, which just didn't work worth a piss in the first place and which tied a boat anchor to Vista, hence "Vista capable" that only ran Vista Basic non accelerated desktops.
On your Win9X the biggest offenders for having old drivers were the "winmodems" and the sound chips, the old Sounddesign and Realtek chips were used for ages, hell I have seen boards as late as 3 years ago with AC97 sound chips on them! So this is what bit WinME in the ass, the OEMs would mix and match VXD and WDM drivers and with a 16bit GDI already being severely memory constrained? Yeah it really didn't take much, just one even slightly leaky driver could cause the house of cards to come crashing down.
As far as Linux goes like you I wanted options but after 5 years of dealing with their bullshit? there is a REASON I call 'em FOSSies, like Moonies and Scientology the amount of logic disconnect and the sheer amount of fuckery they are willing to tolerate and hoops they are willing to jump JUST to support their belief system? Its fucking nuts. I mean we'd laugh our asses off if MSFT told us we had to blow away our OS every year and a half, or that you would have to change to a different OS and reload ALL your programs AND reset and reinstall ALL your software because some jackass changed a critical subsystem and now your hardware doesn't work, right? Yet both of these are considered completely "normal" behavior, I have even read articles by Linux "experts" advising new users to have their Home on a seperate partition so that when ubuntu or Mint or whomever shits on their drivers they can "easily swap" distros until they find one that works...of course then they get to spend hours reinstalling all their software and getting everything back the way they had it, but that is part of the "fun" of Linux, right?
As for Win 9? The rumor is Nadella is sick and tired of so many refusing to upgrade from WinXP and Win 7 so the rumor is he is gonna give it either free for everybody or free for those that bought win 8 and $20-$40 a pop for WinHome for everybody else, just to get XP off the radar. Now this is just a rumor but its coming from reliable sources like Mary Jo Foley whom have been on the money in the past and it also lines up with what Nadella has been saying about making Windows less about "one big purchase a decade" and more about selling add on services like SkyDrive and Office 365. Again this is rumor but makes sense, especially if Cortana (their version of Siri) and Bing are gonna be integrated the way Google integrates their search into Android. as someone who uses Bing this is fine with me and if integrates as smoothly as Google search does with Android I really don't have a problem with it.
Finally as for Linux numbers get ready to bust a gut, as it seems that the users are growing wise to their bullshit. From a high of 1.7% after ubuntu 9 and their big ad push their current figures worldwide? Drumroll...0.97%. that is right, they aren't even 1% anymore and are just 0.01% higher than "other" which is commonly accepted to be Win2K and Win98 put together LOL! How much did they gain when Win 8 pissed everybody off? 0.00%, that is right any change was so low as not to register. Now I don't know about you but if I were to give my product away for 20 years against a competitor that sold the

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ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.

It's on the network... by damn_registrars · 2014-09-15 06:21 · Score: 4, Funny

... can you run multiplayer doom if you have several of these printers? Maybe make the printer print out red when you're hit?

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Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.

So it runs Doom ? by pesho · 2014-09-15 06:22 · Score: 2

I guess this depends on the frame rate.

Mochol Jordon by kruach+aum · 2014-09-15 06:25 · Score: 0

So hackfrustrated, very hype, much wow

Surprising by DaMattster · 2014-09-15 06:26 · Score: 1

I'm surprised that the Pixma has that kind of power that it can run Doom. It's a pretty funny hack actually.

Re: Surprising by Anonymous Coward · 2014-09-15 06:40 · Score: 0

Makes you wonder how much processing power is out there that is being unutilized. All these devices could easily be hooked into distributed protein folding systems or some such.. A million idle printers could do the world some good...
Re: Surprising by Njorthbiatr · 2014-09-15 07:00 · Score: 1

And now to hack into the other printers to do just that...
Re: Surprising by denis-The-menace · 2014-09-15 07:10 · Score: 1

I'm sure it being used to detect if you are scanning currency.

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Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Re:Surprising by Megane · 2014-09-15 07:12 · Score: 2

Wasn't Doom released in the era of the 25MHz 486 with 1-4 megs of RAM and 640x480 VGA with no acceleration? It probably helps if the screen is only 320x240 QVGA. It depends on which CPU is in use, but something designed to print a full page at 150-ish DPI should have more than enough RAM and CPU. The front panel alone has 2 megabytes of RAM, and a 45MHz LVDS interface for display data, as per its recent hackaday appearance:
http://hackaday.com/2014/09/11...

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#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Re:Surprising by UnknownSoldier · 2014-09-15 08:26 · Score: 3, Informative

> 25MHz 486 and 640x480 VGA with no acceleration?
Before you get flamed ...
Dos Doom used @ 320x200 in ModeY, Quake supported Michael Abrash's ModeX @ 320x240.
Doom95 which ran on Windows 95 supported different resolutions.
I played it on my 386SX 16 MHz with the screen shrunk down a few levels. It was silky smooth on the Pentium 90 MHz, and the Pentium Pro 200 MHz (obviously) as was Quake.
Reference: http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Asp...
Re: Surprising by skids · 2014-09-15 15:47 · Score: 1

Unless you have a use for the waste heat, you're better off with systems with better performance-per-watt. These are usually low wattage chips, but they can't do much math-wise.

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Someone had to do it.
Re:Surprising by Anonymous Coward · 2014-09-16 05:46 · Score: 0

I should hope it was okay on your Pentium 90.
I had a 486DX33 and it ran perfectly smooth... most of the time. Sometimes I might lose some frames when I was spinning, but that would happen rarely, maybe like once every couple of hours. So I would hope a Pentium 90 would have no problems either.
Just like my 486DX33 had no issues with Wolfenstein 3D.
Similarly, the 486DX33 also ran WarCraft 2 really well, without some of the issues that faster computers had in that game.
Re:Surprising by Megane · 2014-09-17 02:37 · Score: 1

Dos Doom used @ 320x200 in ModeY, Quake supported Michael Abrash's ModeX [wikipedia.org] @ 320x240.
Well it's only been a few decades, and I was mostly a Mac user back in the day. I did remember enough about VGA that as I posted, I was wondering where the hell all the color came from, because I was sure that 640x480 was only 16 colors. Oh the joys of cramming a frame buffer through a tiny chunk of a mere 1 megabyte addressing space. But at least I got the approximate CPU range right.
And FWIW, shrinking the screen down (and a coprocessor in the cartridge) was how they got it to run on SNES.

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#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }

Sigh. by ledow · 2014-09-15 06:26 · Score: 4, Funny

I really shouldn't be getting my tech news from sites that are basically a day behind BBC News.

Re:Sigh. by JackieBrown · 2014-09-15 08:32 · Score: 2

I come here more for the comments than expecting breaking news.

"PC load jibs?!! WTF DOES THAT MEAN?!!" by Thud457 · 2014-09-15 06:26 · Score: 1

No, John. You are the DDoS zombies.

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the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

Nice one... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-09-15 06:27 · Score: 0

Now since they can be hacker apparently, im more interested what else you could do with them then just play doom ;) Small proxy server? Bittorrent client? ssh pipe endpoint? small www server to serve something else then official printer management...

Re:Nice one... by Richy_T · 2014-09-15 09:23 · Score: 1

For real fun, rogue DHCP server.
Re:Nice one... by skids · 2014-09-15 15:51 · Score: 1

Prefabricated boards with attached motors, sensors, and often WiFi? Rip that out for robot guts. Screw the Raspberry Pis, arduinos, and whatnot.

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Someone had to do it.
Re:Nice one... by Reziac · 2014-09-16 05:35 · Score: 1

Your sig is amazingly appropriate. Now you know how to upgrade your project. ;)

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~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?

Right fix by Anonymous Coward · 2014-09-15 06:29 · Score: 0

From the researcher's blog, quoting Canon:

We intend to provide a fix as quickly as is feasible.

They...

will have a username/password added

Aw, heck. They're "fixing" it the wrong way.
The right way to deal with DOOM running on a printer's LCD is not to remove this feature. They should simply turn DOOM into official menu option.

Re:Right fix by tepples · 2014-09-15 07:21 · Score: 1

They should simply turn DOOM into official menu option.
Doom is free software with non-free assets. How much would Zenimax charge per copy to license the assets?
Re:Right fix by ArcadeMan · 2014-09-15 08:24 · Score: 1

After all this time, why hasn't someone or a group came up with alternate assets and make them available for free?

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Re:Right fix by Richy_T · 2014-09-15 09:24 · Score: 1

Combine it with the Doom mod for killing processes and you could make killing print jobs a fun option.
Re:Right fix by towermac · 2014-09-15 10:53 · Score: 1

The problem is, the DOOM thing happens to my office printers far less often than me needing to quickly get into the thing and fix it or figure out what the user's issue is.
The account/password thing not helping me out there. It wasn't broken before, Canon. It will make no difference to office security, but will eventually cost you sales. (Well, you sucked already at printers, so maybe not a lot of sales.)
Re:Right fix by xvan · 2014-09-15 13:37 · Score: 1

Aw, heck. They're "fixing" it the wrong way. The right way to deal with DOOM running on a printer's LCD is not to remove this feature. They should simply turn DOOM into official menu option.
It's not like it hasn't been proposed before.

Aah Shodan by Anonymous Coward · 2014-09-15 06:33 · Score: 0

One of the NSA and GCHQ's favorite tools.

Re:Aah Shodan by Anonymous Coward · 2014-09-15 08:40 · Score: 0

One of the NSA and GCHQ's favorite tools.
They have their own tool: Treasure Map.

So it runs Doom ? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-09-15 06:34 · Score: 0

If you have VSYNC enabled, around 60 PPS (pages per second). I didn't know Canon printers were that fast.

no, that is the point by swschrad · 2014-09-15 06:40 · Score: 1

one page per screen, the bad guys are gonna get you early. but it sells a lot of ink, so Canon doesn't mind.

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if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?

Cannon Releasing a Fix by FrankieBaby1986 · 2014-09-15 06:49 · Score: 4, Funny

From the article:

"The colour palette is still not quite right," he said. "But it proves the point and it runs quite quickly, though it's not optimised."

Mr Jordon has no plans to fine tune the demonstration and do that optimisation or take on more work to get the game beyond its loading screen, given how much trouble it took to get it working at all.

"I'm so sick of it," he said. "I'm done."

On a blog entry about Mr Jordon's work, Canon said it intended "to provide a fix as quickly as is feasible".

This will involve adding a user name and password field to the web interface for future Pixma printers and issuing an update for existing owners to add the same feature.

It looks like Cannon is planning to release a fix to correct the color palette and get the game optimized! Even better they are going to add accounts to the game for scores and going to release this for all previous purchasers of the printer! Sweet!

:p

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ERROR: SIG NOT FOUND (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?:

Re:Cannon Releasing a Fix by TuxWithoutPants · 2014-09-15 16:09 · Score: 1

"to provide a fix as quickly as is feasible" Sounds duke nukem-ish, so we'll see correct color palette in 12 years?

Framerate by Anonymous Coward · 2014-09-15 07:14 · Score: 0

Wow... at 10ipm, that means it will have a framerate of 1fpm for a letter-sized printouts. The guy playing on it will not know what hit him...

Screw Torrent. by Anonymous Coward · 2014-09-15 07:34 · Score: 3, Interesting

Use it as Tor Relays.

It doesn't even have to be an exit node, but thousands of added Tor nodes running no logging and providing hop services for in-network traffic would be a huge boon for the privacy of all users. Best part, if you kept the cpu usage down, you could keep a print daemon running on them so the end users of the printer weren't affected, and allow anyone sympathetic to run it with valid deniability.

The Difference by Jonathan+A · 2014-09-15 09:07 · Score: 2

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id...

we are doomed I tell you by Anonymous Coward · 2014-09-15 09:21 · Score: 1

Doomed - printers mean any one can use that subversive technology called print.

Freedoom by tepples · 2014-09-15 09:31 · Score: 1

There is Freedoom . But I imagine that people want to play authentic Doom with the levels that they used to speedrun back in the day, not a knock-off.

Logical consequence ... by PPH · 2014-09-15 15:02 · Score: 1

... of this technology

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Have gnu, will travel.

Don't fix it! by cyn1c77 · 2014-09-15 16:39 · Score: 1

From TFA:

Canon said it planned to fix the loopholes on future printers to make them harder to subvert.

Why would you want to subvert someone from installing Doom on your printer?

People are stupid by gweihir · 2014-09-15 19:28 · Score: 1

Really. A printer belongs behind a firewall and has no business having a public IP in the first place. This is neither a new risk not in any way surprising. Asking the manufacturer to secure the printer is not going to work.

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Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.

Publicly accessible printers??? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-09-16 02:59 · Score: 0

So not one mention in the article or comments as to how on earth, and WHY printers are accessible outside the LAN? If you've got "hackers" inside your company LAN already, a printer getting accessed is probably the least of your worries...

Yay! Tradition rules! by Anonymous Coward · 2014-09-16 08:48 · Score: 0

Wow.. a classic /. post! Groovy, dude! Outa sight! Dope! Rad, man.. OK, so /. ain't THAT old!

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Canon Printer Hacked To Run Doom Video Game

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