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HP To Issue 'Optional Firmware Update' Allowing 3rd-Party Ink (arstechnica.com)
Soon after the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) issued a letter to HP, calling for them to apologize to customers for releasing firmware that prevents the use of non-HP ink cartridges and refilled HP cartridges, the company has responded with a temporary solution. HP "will issue an optional firmware update that will remove the dynamic security feature" for certain OfficeJet printers. Ars Technica reports: HP made its announcement in a blog post titled "Dedicated to the best printing experience." "We updated a cartridge authentication procedure in select models of HP office inkjet printers to ensure the best consumer experience and protect them from counterfeit and third-party ink cartridges that do not contain an original HP security chip and that infringe on our IP," the company said. The recent firmware update for HP OfficeJet Pro, and OfficeJet Pro X printers "included a dynamic security feature that prevented some untested third-party cartridges that use cloned security chips from working, even if they had previously functioned," HP said. For customers who don't wish to be protected from the ability to buy less expensive ink cartridges, HP said it "will issue an optional firmware update that will remove the dynamic security feature. We expect the update to be ready within two weeks and will provide details here." This customer-friendly move may just be a one-time thing. HP said it will continue to use security features that "protect our IP including authentication methods that may prevent some third-party supplies from working." Without the optional firmware update, printers will only be able to use third-party ink cartridges that have an "original HP security chip," the company said.
It's 5:36PM as I write this, and this posted at 5:30PM. And yet I see no comments.
Interesting. I like the hurt tone of the press release. "We're just trying to protect you from your cheap piratatical impulses. You could catch something horrible from those illegal immoral filthy aftermarket cartridges, and when you buy one of those things your money goes straight to ISIS' Fund for Killing Adorable Puppies. But whatever, you cretinous monkeys, if you want to hate Freedom and break all the laws of Nature and This Great Country, go ahead and download this new firmware. Download and be damned!"
But I think we can brave the perils of untested ink, we will chart for you the untested waters of that dangerous substance that mortal men (and HP engineers, obviously) don't dare to touch, we shall make it our mission to ensure that these nefarious cartridges and ink tanks shall not remain on the shelves, for we will drain them, use and abuse them, test them to the limit, so no longer you have to endure the dangers of untested ink in your printers.
No, there is no need to thank us. That's our gift to you, our beloved maker of printer hardware. This is brand loyalty!
(tl;dr: HP, don't try to out-bullshit internet users, we are better at this than even your marketing department)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That's quite some spin they put on it. If only the invested as much money in their products as their PR.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
If you didnt spend so much $ on putting security chips in your ink cartridges then maybe you could sell them for less $. Ink is a commodity, if someone wants to put generic ink in their machine, it should not be an intellectual property crime to do so, but since you sell the printers at a loss and make all of your $ on ink sales, maybe you need to rethink your business model. What's next people? Coffee machines that prevent you from using your own coffee that didn't come from the manufacturer of the coffee machine?
To be fair, Samsung also makes ink cartridges. It's possible that HP just cast the safety net a little too wide.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
HP engineers the best and most-secure printing systems in the world. We strive to always provide the highest-quality experiences for our customers and partners. As a new company, we are committed to transparency in all of our communications and when we fall short, we call ourselves out.
WT actual F?
HP was "new" in 1939 when they sold audio oscillators to Walt Disney to help develop the sound systems needed for Fantasia. Learn your history, dweeb. If Fred Terman could see your company now, he'd kick Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard out of EE school and then shoot himself.
There's a reason why the very first verb in the very first sentence of the Wikipedia article on Hewlett-Packard is "Was."
An optional temporary solution for certain OfficeJet printers?
Wow thats big of them.
I'm VERY glad I already broke a long-time habit and chose other than HP for my last printer purchase. With this kind of response from HP I will actively avoid ever buying another HP product.
Sorry, we didn't realize any of you were smart enough to notice! LOL!
So from what I get from this is that some third party cartridges actually use HP chips (presumably from reels of chips sold to a re-manufacturer of cartridges so HP can track down the re-manufacturer/batch if Joe has a printing quality problem, or whatever) and some just clone whatever chip they found first (I'm picturing thousands of printers all reporting that they have cartridge with SN#2477751135432 installed and it amuses me).
I've seen some pretty convincing fake cartridges in my time that hold themselves out to be genuine, brand new in box units. That said, the firmware had previously said "This cartridge has been previously used or is non-genuine" upon insertion and you could click okay to continue.
I haven't read specifically whether self-refilled, store-refilled or store-bought third-party cartridges were affected, or whether this was just for cartridges bought from the usual suspects (some ebay sellers, amazon vendors, ali*, etc). Working in a big box store, though, I haven't yet had customers complain about it, though, so with my tiny sample size, I'm going to theorize that is the case.
See "The Dirty Little Secret Of Inkjet Printers":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycD4XkUtbIw
Laser ones are cheap enough. Jus follow this page recommendations.
Top 5 laser printers for refilling:
http://www.urefilltoner.co.uk/test-lab-printer-reviews.html
I've been a loyal seller, fan, user of HP printers since the first HP Laserjet. This has made me pause to think perhaps my next printer won't be an HP. To HP: I don't need or require your protection. If I purchase a non-HP ink cartridge and it doesn't work properly, I'll get burned and will then purchase your cartridges. If I find that other (lower cost) cartridges work just fine, I'll use them and you will learn to be more competitive.
To get the update you'll need to submit a form. To get the form you'll have to walk down to HP headquarters. Go to the "display department" in the cellar and look for a disused lavatory with a sign that says, "beware of the leopard"
Inside you'll find locked file cabinet with the form to fill out.
Bring a ladder, flashlight and a towel, just in case.
It's that easy!
What do you want to bet that the optional firmware gets reset whenever the printer checks for updates. Users who manage to wade through the steps to get the optional firmware (probably have to register to even get it), might find themselves needing to repeat the process many times.
Y'know, I thought Apple had shown me true courage when they pushed headphones into the future for no good reason. HP showed me I didn't know what true courage was. I'm so impressed that they allowed customers to save some dough on third party ink cartridges like they were already doing on the printers they'd already purchased. They are so brave.
but we're going to continue to piss on every other fire hydrant we sell you, repeatedly; and we will do our level best to make sure you can never wash our territory-marking stench off the product which you paid for, but which we continue to own. Because IP, because we're pissy little mutts with delusions of grandeur, because we'll do everything in our power to screw you if it fattens our bottom line, because we can, and because you let us get away with it.
You know, consumers still have tremendous power to stop such abuses by simply buying other companies' products, and/or by LOUDLY and REPEATEDLY pressing our legislators to put an end to this shit. It's really too bad that, collectively speaking, we don't care enough to do so.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Before I get into it, I must admit it's not clear if refilled cartridges work or not. I think we have just some anecdotes that they don't but it could be isolated cases. So HP's claims there might have merit.
Now that that's over with, I want to draw your attention to this gem that caught my eye from HP's statements:
This is amazing when you break it down. First of all you have this reasonable part:
So far so good. Without any context it seems a reasonable enough statement.
The use of "that" here, though, indicates they are talking about a specific subset of counterfeit or third party ink cartridges (or that they believe all of them fit the following criteria). This is where they shoot themselves in the foot I think.
So, in other words, they are requiring you to only buy cartridges with their DRM in order to ensure you only buy cartridges with their DRM. Great circular logic there. But the best part is next:
Why do they infringe? Because big companies have lobbied for laws to give themselves more power when it comes to their IP, and its these laws that give HP the authority to do what they do (as opposed to laws that might protect creators of competitive products). So HP's reasoning here is because it's legal, they're gonna do it. So if you strip away will the corporate speak, their OFFICIAL statement is not too far from that they're doing it because they thought they could get away with it.
Rape me once shame on you, rape me twice shame on me.
Holy-Poo is fresh out of steam.
It's a fuck you chip to use any other cartridge or ink in 'your' printer.
The chip is largely a joke to the consumers and is purely for anti-competetive practices.
Fuck you HP
The press release on the HP website has to be the most contrived, insincere piece of corporate BS that I've ever read.
I think the fact that they would put out a release worded in that way just highlights the utter malfeasance of the decision that they made, and the excuses used - 'Security' (your printer cartridge is reading your documents!?) and 'Protection from using counterfeit cartridges' just stink of lawyers lining up their defense for a class-action suit.
And that line "Although only a small number of customers have been affected, one customer who has a poor experience is one too many." is just complete crap.
I'm not ditching HP, because I like my 8610. But I'm not buying from them in the future and I feel like I've been treated really badly.
From the link: "HP said it will continue to use security features that "protect our IP..."
What IP is being protected exactly, by preventing consumers from using cheaper, third party ink?
They (again) got caught with their hand in the cookie jar and are dropping buzzwords to draw attention away from their anti-competitive practices.
I'll never buy another inkjet printer again, and after hearing about how HP tried to be like Microsoft by screwing you with bullshit like this I won't be buying anything from either of them. My Canon laser printer is fine for documents. If I need something printed out in color I'll take a flashdrive to a nearby drugstore or Costco.
Having grown weary of consumer-grade inkjet printers that fail in their 13th month, I purchased an HP OfficeJet Pro 8740 AIO that is fast and does about anything I would want from it. I'm looking forward to alternate sources for cartridges that do not now exist.
HP has an optional "Instant Ink" program that lets a printer tell HP when a cartridge is low and a replacement is automatically sent to me. It has monthly fee levels based on pages printed per month, but allegedly the prices are good. We'll see whether that saves me any money, and having some competition in that market is good.
"Optional" as in "We got caught and now we're going to try and pretend we're good guys by unfucking what we deliberately fucked up."
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Serious question - why does your printer have access to the Internet? This is poor security protocol. Proper security is to drop traffic by default, white list what you need. You never truly know what your devices will try to do. As an example, I installed security cameras outside my home and linked them to a linux based PVR for the interface/recording. I noticed that my firewall was dropping tons of data from the IPs assigned to the cameras. A quick dump of the traffic uncovered all cameras trying to connect out to a pair of IPs hosted on amazonaws. I never asked or gave consent for this to happen. The same thing would go with a printer, I don't want it to have access to the Internet. The only thing I want it to do is to print pages I send to it. It doesn't need to update firmware unless I manually push it, in which case I'd have a pretty damn good reason - which wouldn't include limiting my ink cartridge choices. For reference, here is a data dump from one of those cameras.
master@EdgeRouter:~$ sudo tcpdump -i eth0 host 192.168.1.248
tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode
listening on eth0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 65535 bytes
22:13:46.947684 IP 192.168.1.248.58611 > 192.168.1.1.domain: 895+ A? www.nwsvr1.com. (32)
22:13:46.948215 IP 192.168.1.1.domain > 192.168.1.248.58611: 895 1/0/0 A 54.247.103.91 (48)
22:13:46.996373 IP 192.168.1.248.33102 > 239.255.255.250.1900: UDP, length 421
22:13:48.191871 IP 192.168.1.248.14620 > ec2-54-245-98-57.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com.32100: UDP, length 4
22:13:48.192026 IP 192.168.1.248.14620 > 123.56.159.92.32100: UDP, length 4
22:13:48.192104 IP 192.168.1.248.14620 > ec2-54-217-201-148.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com.32100: UDP, length 4
Do you want your devices to serve you, or do you want your devices to serve the device maker and their will? It might seem extreme to some but as far as I'm concerned the only sane thing to do is treat *every* device as hostile until you know otherwise, drop all packets with a hardware firewall by default, and only approve the traffic you want to go out.
So, I have to buy and install a copy of Windows 10 just to fix my f'ing printer? talk about product tie-in!
It costs me a hundred dollars to get ink replacement for my HP printer. A hundred fucking dollars!
I can buy a whole new printer in jjust 3 replacements.
Ink prices are jacked up 300% percent! It's highway robbery I tell you.
I will never buy a HP printer again.
"By installing this firmware, the user waives all rights to make warranty claims on the machine in perpetuity."
screw them and the horse they rode in on. Buy Epson, Kodak, etc
A few years back, I bought a laptop PC for my wife. after using it for a few months, I decided to upgrade the internal WiFi card. To my surprise, HP had decided to add a firmware check that only allowed THEIR WiFi cards to be used! Since that time, I have NEVER purchased another HP product and have actively discouraged my family from them as well.