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Canon Printer Hacked To Run Doom Video Game
wiredog writes Security researcher Michael Jordon has hacked a Canon's Pixma printer to run Doom. He did so by reverse engineering the firmware encryption and uploading via the update interface. From the BBC: "Like many modern printers, Canon's Pixma range can be accessed via the net, so owners can check the device's status. However, Mr Jordon, who works for Context Information Security, found Canon had done a poor job of securing this method of interrogating the device. 'The web interface has no user name or password on it,' he said. That meant anyone could look at the status of any device once they found it, he said. A check via the Shodan search engine suggests there are thousands of potentially vulnerable Pixma printers already discoverable online. There is no evidence that anyone is attacking printers via the route Mr Jordon found."
Another headline I never expected to read.
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?
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
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.