HP CEO Makes Up A Whole Lot Of Bullshit To Defend Crippling Printers That Use Cheaper Ink
from the smart-consumers-are-bad-for-us dept
When last we checked in with Hewlett Packard (HP), the company had just been sued (for the second time) for crippling customer printers if owners attempt to use cheaper, third-party printer cartridges. It was just the latest in a long saga where printer manufacturers use DRM or dodgy software updates to wage all out war on consumer choice.
The company could have taken the opportunity for self reflection, acknowledge their error, and attempt to shore up a fraying relationship with customers. Instead, HP CEO Enrique Lores went on CNBC to not only double down, but to make up a whole bunch of new nonsense to justify their unpopular actions.
On the segment, Lores claims that HP is crippling the use of cheaper ink and toner cartridges because they’re simply worried they will infect consumers with viruses:
“Last Thursday, HP CEO Enrique Lores addressed the company’s controversial practice of bricking printers when users load them with third-party ink. Speaking to CNBC Television, he said, “We have seen that you can embed viruses in the cartridges. Through the cartridge, [the virus can] go to the printer, [and then] from the printer, go to the network.”
Ars Technica talked to numerous security researchers who laughed at the claim, noting that it’s never been meaningfully documented in the wild, and isn’t something consumers should be worried about.
Printer manufacturers have a long and proud history of hiding their anti-competitive price gouging under the pretense of user safety and security. In this case, HP cripples printer functionality using its “Dynamic Security System,” which stops HP printers from functioning if an ink cartridge without an HP chip or HP electronic circuitry is installed.
It’s clear to everybody that HP is simply being obnoxious and anti-competitive to goose quarterly revenues. But you really get a good sense of Lores’ distorted thinking later on in the CNBC article, where he calls savvy, cost-conscious consumers a “bad investment”:
“This is something we announced a few years ago that our goal was to reduce the number of what we call unprofitable customers. Because every time a customer buys a printer, it’s an investment for us. We’re investing [in] that customer, and if this customer doesn’t print enough or doesn’t use our supplies, it’s a bad investment.”
That kind of thinking teeters toward the psychotic. HP is being obnoxiously anti-competitive, hiding it behind claims of user security, then declaring consumers the enemy if they’re smart enough to see through the company’s bullshit and shop for cartridges intelligently.
Of course for publicly traded companies, it’s simply not enough to sell a quality product that people like. Wall Street’s unrelenting need for improved quarterly returns at any cost routinely turns big companies and their execs into self-sabotaging, anti-competitive jackasses sooner or later. Companies start to nickel-and-dime users, skimp on customer service, or cannibalize product quality to hit quarterly revenue goals.
It’s not clear if a handful of class action lawsuits will be enough to shift the company’s thinking back to reality, but being so obnoxious that you permanently pollute the HP brand reputation in the mind of an entire generation of future shoppers might just do the trick.
Filed Under: drm, Enrique Lores, ink cartridges, printers, security, third party, virus
Companies: hp
Comments on “HP CEO Makes Up A Whole Lot Of Bullshit To Defend Crippling Printers That Use Cheaper Ink”
You know, it’s well documented that CEOs can infect others with viruses, which can then spread out. Potently to the rest of humanity. Is he arguing we should brick CEOs. Just in case?
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I mean, I’ve got a brick we can use… 🙃
Re: Ever used their software?
USED to be.
Any printers could be plugged in and USED with Just a basic driver that handled All printers.
YOU CANT do that now.
You have to have the manufactures Driver, AND it wont work if you dont have the PROGRAM from them Also. the driver Just connects you to the printer, and the program on top, does everything the Driver SHOULD HAVE BUILT IN. Nope.
Then we get a program change and certain option Disappear. AND the Current programs CALL HOME ON THE NET.
Waiting to use the CEO blood for the red ink.
'We're just protecting you from our terrible design!'
Speaking to CNBC Television, he said, “We have seen that you can embed viruses in the cartridges. Through the cartridge, [the virus can] go to the printer, [and then] from the printer, go to the network.”
That sure seems like a great reason to make the ink cartridges as ‘dumb’ as possible, either removing the ability for any data transfer between cartridge and printer or limiting it to such an extent that it is only able to send and receive the most absolute basic information like ‘this is how much ink is available/print this’.
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Most of “smart” functionalities in cartridge are needed to ensure the final quality is as good as possible, depending of the quality of printing wanted, the glossy/mat or the density of the paper, the color adjustments, etc.
For most of personal use (even for photography amateurs), printers are basic and cheap (but ink may not), but printing something professionally is often pretty expensive and the results need to coherent from screen to print. Most designers expect the printer to produce to best result at anytime and for any number of copies.
So reliance and quality are what professional are paying for, like always. Of course, most of cheap printers nowadays would be enough to print a dozen of black and white text pages a day like most small offices are doing, that why HP needs to “Keep Reinventing” new excuses to force companies to pay more.
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“Most of “smart” functionalities in cartridge are needed to ensure the final quality is as good as possible,”
The location of said ‘smart’ capacity is completely arbitrary, their choice of in the cartridge is theirs.
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Totally the wrong place for smarts, as that is code that has to run on the printer, which at most needs to know type, color and quantity of ink in the cartridge.
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…but obviously not getting, if the CEO is so worried about the printer’s software quality to expect a cartridge to exploit it.
As a sibling comment said, it’s just a tiny bit of information that needs to be transferred to the printer. If we can’t expect simple reports of maybe 20 bytes to be handled correctly, we should probably be concerned that they’ve got parsers for IPv4, IPv6, TCP, Internet Printing Protocol (including HTTP and TLS), Wi-Fi, JPEG, and PDF.
(I was concerned enough about my old laser printer—no firmware updates, for like 20 years now—that I taped over its network port and switched to a USB connection long ago.)
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Then professionals can keep buying the mfr ink and pass the costs along to their customers.
As a non-professional that only prints a handful of pages a month, I don’t need consistent quality. Add in the fact that I use more ink cleaning print heads than I do actually printing, why would I want to buy expensive mfr inks?
USB sticks are MUCH better at transmitting viruses. For printers with usb ports, not only does it not require opening the printer, but it can appear like innocuous behavior. Further more, not only can malicious files be on the USB stick, but the microprocessor on the USB stick can send malicious USB packets, potentially exploiting an unexpected attack surface (and worse looking just like a normal USB drive when plugged into an ordinary computer)
If your printer and software infrastructure are so broken that ink cartridges are now, by your own admission, a potential security threat, wouldn’t that be a reason not to buy them? It’s dumb on every conceivable level.
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Well when your printer needs to phone home, or just expose itself on the internet, yeah.
Landfill fodder
There is essentially no second-hand market for HP inkjet printers. I’ve personally seen hundreds of these things go to e-waste in the last few years.
What a proud legacy.
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HP didn’t really start sucking till about the year 2000, and it took a while for their laser printers to be affected. Pre-2000 and probably pre-2005 models are likely still worth considering. Apparently even the LaserJet 4 from 1992 goes for hundreds of dollars online and still has toner available. If you’re really lucky, you might find one for $10 in a thrift store (at some, employees have no idea how much this stuff is worth, and repair instructions are easy to find online).
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That was around the time they were claiming they wanted to ditch consumer products entirely. Probably should have done. They certainly aren’t the HP of yore. If i didn’t know better, i’d have thought they had already been dismantled entirely and the trademarks rented out to some guy in a basement by a huge “brands” conglomerate.
Infected?
I don’t think that viruses in printer ink will cause any trouble, they are small enough to pass through the holes in the print-head easily. Bacteria and fungi on the other hand are likely to clog up the system.
But I don’t thing viruses in printer ink will be a serious issue for printer users. Nobody will think of drinking it and if the stuff ends op on your hands, you’ll certainly notice and try to wash your hands ASAP.
whisper Ooh, software viruses entering via a broken DRM system: I’ll sue HP for all they are worth when my printer gets infected!
You were smart enough to buy another brand.
OK, I’ll rest my case!
I have to ask, why are they loading code from the cartridge? Who made the printer so stupid? Oh wait.
The first mistake was trying for a subscription model: using the printer as a loss-leader and vehicle to sell vastly marked up ink.
… they didn’t need to make a second mistake.
Shortens my printer purchase list
All this does is narrow my choices for which printer I might buy. HP doesn’t even get a look.
Re: Is the competition any better?
I had a mid-range Epson that I ditched because I got fed up with it insisting I replace “out of date” colour cartridges when all I wanted was to print black & white.
Our local library offers a marvellous print service at 10c/sheet.
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HP = Hewlett Packed in.
I'd be embarrassed, personally...
I find it hard to fathom why the CEO of the corporation would basically imply that his company has spent untold amounts of time and money to transform innocuous printer cartridges into delivery systems for network security threats.
Because that’s what he’s doing. On television.
It won’t. HP is in a long, slow, and permanent decline. They will not be able to make the kind of decisions necessary to bring them back. I can’t predict when they will shut down but it will not surprise me when it happens.
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That’s not in conflict with HP “shift[ing its] thinking back to reality”. At some point, the brand could be eroded so much that they’ll never recover even if they start to do everything right. But I suspect they won’t, and, like RCA, will instead license the brand to foreign manufacturers to wring out what little value is left.
Getting a virus into a print cartridge that’s in its original package would require that it’s inserted by the manufacturer or that a supply chain attack insert it. In either case it’s incredibly far fetched, and that’s not to mention that the printer would need very shitty design to be hacked by a cartridge.
HP has suffered a string of shitty CEOs over a couple decades that have turned the company into a trusted manufacturer of computers and accessories to a shell of its former self trying to squeeze subscription revenue out of its customers/victims.
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Third Party ink in the era of chipped ink cartridges, reuse either the chip or the entire cartridge from Genuine HP Ink. They fill it, and resell it. By reusing the chip they can bypass DRM lockouts, but This requires modifying the data on the chip so the printer doesn’t know it has already been used.
The premise of the virus is that the company refilling the cartridge, or someone in the secondary supply chain, makes the change. The virus would not be inserted in the OEM supply chain as you imply by talking about original packaging, but in the reuse market, where original packaging is long gone.
And yes, of course the printers are shitty. With printer deals, People used to suggest buying a new printer than buy ink with a level of seriousness. HP printers are designed to be cheap and disposable. I’d be more surprised if HP took the time to secure the ink dat channel, or the USB ports, or the scanner.
HP Printers
My first “modern printer” (e.g. not a dot matrix) was an HP LaserJet III. I used that printer for 20+ years. It always just worked. When I became a manager, I always ordered HP printers for employees and as departmental printers. Good quality that just works is how you build lasting relationships with customers.
I’m getting ready to order a new printer to replace an aging departmental HP 3800dn printer. You can bet it will not be an HP printer.
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I have an HP laser printer from around 2007. It’s printed tens of thousands of pages and still works fine. The only thing that’s annoying is I need to install hplip on Linux boxes because it doesn’t work with generic drivers. If HP hadn’t enshittified its printers, I would gladly buy another when this one finally breaks. But now that’s out of the question.
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Why not buy another HP printer of the same vintage? Or another laser model, of any decent brand, from then or earlier. When Google discontined Cloud Print in 2020, they created a massive amount of e-waste that’s still making its way from basements and garages to thrift stores. People like you, who know how to install things like hplip and CUPS, can make out like bandits.
The stuff we’re printing now is basically the same as what people were printing 30 years ago. One just need to make sure toner and drivers are still available.
I am the principal investor in several smallish companies, all of whom have been banned from purchasing ANY HP product. The ink extortion was bad enough, but they have been just as stupid with other products. For years, some of my companies have used devices made by a company once called “Obi” to use Google Voice to support home office workers. Obi was acquired by a company that was acquired that was later acquired by HP. All of those devices simply quit working in December. Obi has the email addresses of all of their customers and could, easily, have notified them, but no one bothered. It’s sad to see a company that was respected for its innovation being destroyed by a relentless attempt to squeeze one more penny out of their customers.
Subscription model
Eventually, being able to breathe clean air will be a subscription model.
Re: New hire at HP HQ by day's end: 'I'm surrounded by Assholes!'
HP CEO: Hey that’s a great idea, someone get on that!
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Oh, fuck. We’re creating Spaceballs.
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I think this is the video you wanted, Stephen.
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I believe there are, in fact, residential air purifiers that already have this type of DRM. And for a while last year, a purifier was absolutely necessary to breathe clean air; my local air quality index was off-scale-polluted for about a week.
(The non-proprietary solution, by the way, is a 20-inch box fan, a 20×20 smoke-rated furnace filter, and some duct tape. Underwriters Laboratories officially declared it “not a fire hazard”. Or look up the Corsi–Rosenthal Box if you want something for longer-term use.)
Selling subscriptions crowds out product support
Just replaced my last HP printer.
The product support is dramatically weaker than it was 10 years ago. In a very specific sense. Tell the chatbot “X is wrong.” Chatbot first suggests fixing something else, then, when that doesn’t work, says you can fix X with an Instant Ink subscription. I tried a few different X, not just my actual issue.
Inverse buyer's remorse?!?!
I had given up on HP and bought an Epson EcoTank last year thinking that I could avoid this HP-induced print-cartridge drama … little did I know that I was also avoiding HP-mediated computer viruses!
Thanks HP!! I feel much better about my decision to buy from your competitor!!
Re: If you don't use an HP printer it can't infect your computer, brilliant!
HP: Protecting people from potential virus infections one less customer at a time.
Next printer will be a Brother.
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Brother does the same thing. Last Brother laser printer I got, I used non-brother cartridges and after an update, they refused to work because they were non-genuine.
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That’s apparently fairly recent. It seems that old printers are the way to go, at least till someone makes replacement firmware à la OpenWRT or CHDK.
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My next printer was a Brother — and I’d been using HP printers since Win95 days.
I simply don’t care to do business with a business that thinks I’m a peon, instead of a customer.
They have been known as, “HP makers of expensive printer ink” for a long time.
I ran into this issue when I used to have an Epson printer.
There are two independent companies whose reputation can be ruined with this.
Back in 2015, HP split itself into two separate companies. One is HP Enterprises doing the highly profitable server and corporate networking. The other is HP Inc. that got stuck with the lower profit consumer desktop and printer business.
This is HP Inc.acting as the scumbags here, but I can imagine this poisoning the reputation of HPE. I’d imagine a CEO getting burned by a bricked HP printer and deciding maybe to cancel their contract with that other HP that has the contest for their new data center.
Re: 'If one HP company ripped us off it's only a matter of time for the other...'
I could absolutely see a worker or manager in a company complaining about getting ripped off by an HP product and deciding that any company with HP in the name isn’t to be trusted as a result.
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Don’t you mean “HP Ink”?
HP's debasement is as extreme as it is sad
HP used to be a name to respect. In school, I lusted after the HP-41CV calculators that I couldn’t afford. They were built like a tank! The gas chromatograph that my school bought in the 1980s is still running. For the past few decades, they’ve redirected to a focus on consumer-grade crap. The HP-49 that I got in the ’90s was an insult to the quality of the decade before, and HP has continued to sink.
HP has become this decade’s version of Packard Bell. If you’re too young to remember the Packard Bell crap PCs, be grateful.
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That HP disappeared long ago. They tossed out their electric engineers when they split off Agilent Technologies back in the 1999. Those were the people who built those cool calculators and designed those first HP workstations. They’re the ones who also designed the first HP laser printers.
Then, they bought Compaq over Bill Hewett’s objection. That set up a decade of decline. Leading to failed leadership and constant mergers and splits.
Basically, the company that is now HP Inc is pretty much the old Compaq that became a PC commodity maker that outsources its manufacturing to the same people their competitors use and then can’t figure out a way to distinguish themselves from their competitors.
HP Enterprise is the old EDS along with a few other companies tossed in for good measure. They are chasing after the corporate dollars.
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So, Hewlett Packard Bell?
HP Printers
After using HP exclusively for decades, I now own an Epson “ink tank” printer. So much cheaper.
Try Canon instead
I first started in IT back in the mid-90s when HP LaserJets where the best printers around. I did a lot of printer repairs back then and the LaserJet III and 4 were amazing. Even into the early 2000’s, the LaserJet 400, 4050, and 4100 printers were great workhorses that were easy to fix.
When I finally bought a laser printer for home, I bought a Color LaserJet 2600n. It was a nice printer, until the dust from the toner cartridges started causing problems with the mirror for magenta. No official fix from HP but found a way to fix it.
I switched to Canon printers instead. I don’t know if they still do, but they used to make the print engine for the HP printers. I got a better printer for less money.
I don’t know about 3rd party cartridges since I only buy official ones (my experience has been that remanufactured toner cartridges are not worth the cost savings), but I just replaced my first Canon printer after 10 years because it needs some maintenance done on it. It still works, but is loud.
I will never go back to HP at this point.
Funny the cartridge wouldn’t have a chip that could have a virus problem if it wasn’t for HP adding a chip just for the purpose of price gauging and anti-competitive reasons
Ink Jets have a wonderful feature where they clean the print head by spraying ink into a hidden sponge. Thus just wasting the fluid that costs more than it’s weight in gold.
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And to add insult to injury, some ink-printers stop functioning when that sponge is saturated and it is a non-replaceable item.
I have a Canon MF8580CDW laser printer/scanner/copier/yadda yadda blah, I got this thing in 2014, and it’s still fantastic 🙂 the previous printer i had was an HP i had it for 2 years, and there is no way i will ever buy another HP anything again.
got an update one day and it wouldn’t accept any ink from 3rd party sellers, which was a problem cause the HP ink was like 40 bucks a cartridge, while the 3rd party stuff was like 15 😛
“Fiduciary duty to shareholders” is the biggest blight on humanity. Not only is it killing the planet, it’s making our lives that little bit shittier each and every day.
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“Fiduciary duty to shareholders”
Elon has entered the chat.
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Gotta wonder if a good argument that the kind of DRM HP is using actually violates “Fiduciary duty to shareholders”.
It begins with the statement that such DRM drives potential customers away from the products because of that DRM.
EPSON Bricks Their Printers Too
EPSON pulls similar crap. After a certain number of ink cart cycles, the printer BRICKS itself insisting that the ink pad (the sponge that soaks up excess ink) be replaced. It’s a simple procedure with several online videos showing how, but EPSON BRICKS the printer with a message that you have to take it to an authorized repair shop to replace the ink pad. Power cycling, and other tricks don’t work. If I had been in the middle of a print job with a deadline, I would have been screwed.
EPSON requires their proprietary “repair” software to unbrick the printer. There are 3rd parties selling their software that will supposedly unbrick the EPSON printers. FTS. I trashed the EPSON and got a Brother instead. Time will tell of they pull a similar trick.
Dot matrix printers are still available, lol.
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Sure, I’d love to see the quality of the photos you print on those.
Just so I understand...
Just so I understand… You mean by using the DRM chip that HP added to lock customers in to ‘genuine’ ink cartridges? So if you remove the DRM, you would remove the ability of the cartridge to infect printers and the user’s network?
Wait, how is that the user’s problem? If you continue to produce cartridges with a known security flaw, without trying to remove that vector, isn’t that on you?
-FTC study weighing manufacturers’ bullshit anti-repair claims like “safety” and “security” against the facts. [bold added]
https://www.techdirt.com/2021/05/13/bipartisan-ftc-study-confirms-everything-right-to-repair-advocates-have-been-saying-years/
HP loads software/firmware onto your equipment that locks you out of using it. Offers to make it work again if you pay them money. Isn’t that how ransomware works? Actually it’s worse because they demand money each month.
Hp was already frowned upon by knowledgeable users
Back when they used ESN boards… so stripped down that you couldn’t use off the shelf parts in the systems.