The CEO and the board must serve prison time for things like this. No measure less than prison for the CEO and all board members is enough to curtail this because it just becomes the cost of doing business.
No, you can’t say it wasn’t your decision. If you want to not be held accountable for the work your employees, contractors, and agents do on your behalf, you should have to prove they acted against your express written orders.
I don't think prison time is even what's needed here, I think these issues would resolve themselves if corporate fines were continually issued, rather than one-off lawsuits. For instance, a standing ruling that if your printer stops being able to print for no reason other than a contract breach, then the hardware is eligible for a refund.
We don't need to put CEOs in prison for making consumer-hostile decisions, we just need to also make those decisions bad business.
Corporate fines just end up being passed on to workers who had nothing to do with the decision. "We had to (lay off 10% of our workforce|cut worker pay by 10%|etc.) because of these unfair fines."
Corporations aren't people--they can't make the decision to do unethical things. Yes, I understand the law, I'm saying the law is incorrect. People do unethical things, and people should be held responsible for their actions.
Fining decision-makers might be an acceptable alternative to jail time, as long as the minimum fine is some sort of multiple of profits gained, to prevent criminals from just figuring a slap on the wrist fine into their decision-making math.
The issue is the fine is paid by the company and not the people who actually did the crime. As a result, the CEO, the board and the other players will all get big fat bonuses and the company will take a hit. When the company takes a hit one thing happens the people at the bottom of the chain get fired, not the decision makers, not the people who pushed this policy but some fucking engineer that just had his first kid and thought being and engineer at HP was a great job. The system is setup so that people who screw up never pay but the people who have nothing to do with the problem always pay the bill. If the idiots at the top actually had some accountability I think we'd see a lot different choices being made, but that is just a pipe dream in the world we live in.
I used to think this as well but then I learned of something called a principal-agent problem. I am talking in general, so while fines might work in this exact case, they won’t work in general. The CEO and board supervising the crimes might be long gone and no longer a part of the corporation by the time the law catches up with them and the owners / shareholders are left holding the bag.
I understand what I am advocating might seem against existing case law about LLC and as I’ve said before I am not a lawyer so it might not be something straightforward to codify but I know it is possible if we have the will and we make it a priority.
I would hope we should have the owners of our economy, the 0.0001% of the population on our side on this matter because upper management is robbing them or they will if we institute reasonably high enough fines instead of prison time.
The fine would have to be akin to a corporate death penalty, so that the CEO would never work again. Ideally, it would also pierce the veil of limited liability, so they’d be stuck in court for the next few decades.
For this case, computing back:
94M printers are sold per year.
HP’s market cap is $29 billion.
So, fine them $1000 per printer they sold that has any sort of anti-third-party ink mechanism, payable direct to consumer. (This seems about right to me. It’s less than 10x the retail price of a printer.)
Production of a receipt or a picture of an HP branded printer serial number should be all that is required to obtain the $1000. If they fail to pay in 30 days, individuals can use the mechanism where the sherrif walks into an HP office and takes $1000 worth of stuff on behalf of the claimant.
After 12 months, any unclaimed money gets sent to charity.
As appropriate as that would be, I’d rather see the CEO and execs that approved this stuff go to federal maximum security prison for life than for all the unrelated HP employees to lose their jobs. (Though, arguably, their services would be better used elsewhere.)
Workers, yes, but mainly consumers. A million dollar fine, if you sell 500,000,000 cartridges (just a guess, but in 2012 I searched and saw they sold 315 million worldwide) means they would have to charge .2 cents per cartridge to pay for the fine. ''
I hardly think that issuing any fine would make them care. Why would the CEO give one little tiny shit about a million dollar fine, or a ten million dollar fine for that matter. They just pass it on to the consumer. And that is only passing on the cost of the fine only to the ink division. They could easily pass on the costs to all departments.
Fines are silly and useless. I guess if they were to have a $500 million fine, that would get the company's attention, but I don't see that ever happening, honestly.
But I think if they put the C-suite and board of directors into jail for 8 years, that would have a major effect on all boards and executives.
And right now, corporations are claiming supply chains and inflation for raising their prices, yet they have the largest profits ever. This can only mean that they are raising their prices but their costs are staying the same or rising very little. All of them should be put in prison - robbing the poor and middle class to put that wealth in the hands of the rich. More siphoning money from the poor and middle class. Put them in prison, I say. Make some example. This is not about price controls, but against holding the US population hostage. Is there collusion? Because that is against the law. That is not controlling prices. Collusion is collusion.
I think you're fundamentally incorrect that a more consistent fine structure could fix the problems we have now.
The basic reason is that the US (and the Western World) has gone through deregulation to re-monopolization, so consumers face monopolies or oligopolies in most major markets and these entities basically make their money by selling their products as "services" in the chunk-size that makes a consume most desperate - IE, Hp will fight forever to sell 100 prints for $30 rather than 10000 prints for $120 and only hard threats can stop them (and we know the shit MS does - if MS could charge an ambulance a fee to keep their heart monitor software from killing them, they would, etc).
I'm not sure that will work. The intention here is to move the needle on what's acceptable.
If fines grow/shrink, then people will think "what are ways to get around these fines?" or more commonly "Are these fines larger than the profit I would earn?". Even if fines are increased for now, that's a temporary thing, and not everyone would care.
A CEO doesn't personally care about extra fines costing the company; that can be a "calculated risk". CEOs are very well paid and fines are generally an inconvenience. But these people cannot buy time; threaten to take away years of their life, and see how the underlying value structures change.
This is a surprisingly naive thing to say in the era of a CEO having a fiduciary duty to maximise shareholder-value over the short-term / their tenure (whichever is shorter)
How the heck would you create such a law with no unintended consequences? “If you want to not be held accountable for the work your employees, contractors, and agents do on your behalf, you should have to prove they acted against your express written orders.” So if a low-wage worker goes mad and kills his coworker the CEO should be charged with murder? What if his salary got cut and it was a customer? Where do you draw the line?
What’s needed is regulation and fines, so that it’s not the “cost of doing business” and they lose money (the one thing that dictates their decisions) from this stunt. If there was actually a decent competitor, they could simply be forced to fully refund impacted customers who decide to switch, but HP has basically a monopoly on printers. This is a sign they need to be broken up or put under strict regulation like utilities.
That would a) fully repay affected customers, b) stop the practice for future customers, and c) discourage other companies from this practice. IMO 3 goals, and the only 3 reasons, we have a justice system and punishments in the first place. This isn’t an action which caused permanent, life-altering harm. This is an action which can be 110% undone (via extra fines), so no further punishment is necessary.
And yes, I know petty thieves and druggies serve jail time for causing much lesser problems. That’s wrong too. “2 wrongs don’t make a right”
Step one would probably be making this practice illegal in the first place, which, as far as I can tell, it isn't. Putting the cart before the horse to worry about who's liable for doing something legal.
Make them pay the fines personally. They take credit and make big money when employees do the right thing, so let's make it a two way street. Once their net worth gets wiped, maybe they will get the message.
If you bought and it is still under warranty, ask for a full refund. You likely won't get it, but make sure HP waste as much time as possible dealing with this
In the UK it is even worth considering to take this to the small claims court. Of course seek legal advice first.
The only way HP gets away with this, because people just accept this kind of behaviour.
Knowing HP's shitty policies some years ago I bought an HP color laser printer off eBay that was already then several years old. It was a model I understood to be able to work with cheap 3rd party ink cartridges.
I feel like these older, pre-dynamic security printers are going to be gold. Hang on to your babies, keep them safe, keep them running.
> The only way HP gets away with this, because people just accept this kind of behaviour
please name a situation in the past 50 years where a conpany went under or lost at least 10% of their revenue from'peiple not accepting' this behaviour
While I generally agree, there's something more immediate. All of us having this view can refuse to ever buy or even use HP products, and explain to anyone and everyone at every opportunity exactly why this is.
Boycotts can be immensely powerful, and strike fear into the hearts of those who would exploit us.
Personally, I will never buy an HP product again. Absolute, permanent blacklist.
It's simply way too disgusting to me that they would even consider doing this, let alone actually carry it out.
What must they think of their customers? It's unforgivable.
How about switching to laser printers from brands that do not play these shenanigans? As far as I know, the only one that does not do it is Canon, which has the same security chips, but lets you opt into disabling third party cartridge support.
Also, of interest, is that HP and Canon printers can use the same toner cartridges:
For the most part, HP does not make its own printers anymore and just sells rebadged printers running their own firmware. It would not surprise me if the ink for HP Smart Tank printers is identical to the ink for Canon Mega Tank printers.
They reportedly are selling some models using technology that they obtained from Samsung, but aside from that, very little of what they sell they actually make. They are basically a middle man.
Let's apply the same logic to people then. "John scammed his neighbour of his life savings, we don't need to lock him up because lots of people will refuse to associate with him or supply him with goods and services."
Making loss of business or minor fines the only mechanism for correcting behaviour, means that the leaders can view antisocial and unethical behaviour as a cost benefit tradeoff. And the lack of personal accountability means the company leadership has very limited downside, even if they completely screw up.
This seems to be the top vote comment here, demanding jail time for CEOs for printers not working.
Meanwhile, the top comment on an article painstakingly detailing how a company is using every dirty trick in the book to get mentally incapable or distressed, etc people to sell homes to them at far below market value has a top comment basically saying “well, they signed a contract”.
Or maybe it’s as simple as this affects most HNers, so it’s the worst thing in the world, whereas that doesn’t, so people it does affect are just suckers.
The argument isn't. "This is illegal so the CEO should be jailed". Instead the argument is "This should be made illegal so the threat of jail ensures CEOs keep this from happening."
Worth noting that we make things illegal when we feel they should be illegal, and for no other reason. In a democracy the feeling turns to a vote which turns to legislation. In this case, we would pass a law making executives personally criminally liable for anti-competative, anti-consumer behavior like this. I do not think it would run afoul of the Constitution, either.
I think we should pass the law and try it out, see how it feels.
Maybe none. Everything was done above board, capitalism (growing capital as a core value) worked as intended.
It was immoral and unethical but those are lesser concerns than maximising return on capital invested. Possibly, no law was clearly broken.
We need to outsource some of our lawmaking to ethics boards/commissions if we want to keep capitalism. Otherwise, every other company is now looking to defraud its customers and that’s the only way an endless desire for capital growth (exponential growth expectations from investors) goes.
But how about some sort of environmental levy on any device prematurely 'bricked', or disposed of before reaching a certain lifespan.
Including those bricked by server shutdowns, or by the inevitable failure of non-replaceable batteries. Perhaps even those designed to be somewhat fragile but not economically repairable - thinking of all the phones and tablets discarded due to cracked screens.
Isn’t an environmental levy just a fine? Maybe prison is excessive but there needs to be a way to punish bad actors personally on an individual level. It’s clear that current corporate level fines aren’t effective.
As someone here came up with, as punishment instead of fines the government should be granted X percentage non-dilutable ownership of the company. Mess up once, you now have to deal with the government owning 5% or more. This punishes the shareholders/owners in a real way that fines don't. If the business continues to mess up the government would acquires more ownership until it becomes majority owner and can completely clean house. The Government can sell their ownership after X years or if once in majority control replaces X people in management. Funds from sales could not be used for general budget purposes (to prevent the government from instituting taking as policy) but instead social goods projects (provide waterworks improvement grants, provide scholarships, etc).
The government takes money for public education from me and doesn't let me swap cartridges (i.e., spend that money on a less crappy school that it doesn't run). So not looking forward to your plan.
I like the sentiment a lot but curious what law this is against that has prison time as a consequence? I can’t think of any, but if there are none, we should pass laws that allow this to put these people on notice and then aggressively prosecute.
It’s frustrating to see people argue this. Not because it’s wrong, but besides basically anything that makes it not worth doing will work. The debate to be had is over what is to be done to put policies that discourage this activity in place. Bikeshedding what to do basically just passifies the urge to debate the actually important thing.
It's at times like this that I'm reminded of what Howard Scott said: "A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who hasn't sufficient capital to form a corporation."
Funny how access to enough money to form a corporation, does in certain circumstances tend to clothe your subsequent actions in virtue...
Punishment should fit the crime. We don't over-punish people to force them to think differently, that has always led to dark periods in history.
There are plenty of low-friction ways consumers could be reimbursed plus the cost of lost time or energy spent on a now 'broken' printer if we wanted to solve this in a fair way.
But in America people are overpunished. I often read titles like "he faces up to 100 years in a prison" when in reality it is just a poor Russian guy who didn't murder or hurt anyone, just collected credit card numbers and sold it to other guys. 100 years just for stealing a bit of money? That's draconian laws.
Why not send top stockholders to prison while you're at it? And regional managers as well? And the stores that sell the printers too?
No, prison makes zero sense. When people agree to a business contract and one side fails to uphold their end of the bargain, the remedy should remain financial. And punitive remedies exist precisely to make sure the "cost of doing business" makes it no longer profitable.
And if that's not happening, then that's the fault of the legislators and voters. This is why we need to vote people into office who ensure that consumer protection laws remain strong.
It's not as if corporate actors are passive non-participants in the political process, abstaining from lobbying or campaign financing. It's much more economical for corporation to influence legislation/regulation than for voters to build a coalition and then try to leverage it to significantly alter the status quo. Ignoring this reality makes idealistic arguments like yours seem naive at best.
> Why not send top stockholders to prison while you're at it?
Or just curtail every holder's shares by a fixed percentage, if/when a publicly-owned company is found to have engaged in anti-competitive behavior. If the incentive of maximizing shareholder value is no longer aligned with the interests of society, maybe that's how to fix it.
> CEO and the board must serve prison time for things like this. No measure less than prison for the CEO and all board members is enough to curtail this
This is the sort of overreaction that kills reasonable responses, like making HP reimburse everyone whose printer they disabled, trebled, plus pay a big fine to a regulator and also enter into a consent decree. Hit them with a market cap decimating fine. Then let the Board eat its own.
> like making HP reimburse everyone whose printer they disabled
won't happen, because most of the customers live in different countries with different law systems
> hit them with a market cap decimating fine
won't happen, because most of the costs is beared by people in foreign countries who don't matter to US courts, and most of the profits are gathered by people in US (company, owners, shareholders, employees, budget)
It's not an accident that most of the time google and apple are fined by EU and VW is fined by USA.
While I support the notion of a lengthy spell of contemplation inside the walls of a prison for all CEOs of printer companies — even prior to this cartridge issue — I cannot help but feel that anything short of summary execution is excusable for the engineer or engineers who were responsible for the logic and error messages pertaining to “PC Load Letter”.
Say what you will about Carly fiorinas leadership strategy but she certainly set a record for how fast you can pedal an american institution into the ground.
If it weren't for government contracts and Gartner quadrant payola I don't think HP would even exist.
You deliberately misrepresent this as one $80 printer; in reality it is the sum total of all printers bricked by this, plus price gouging the printer owners who don’t want their printer bricked.
If even a few dozen printers were bricked by this it would represent more lost value than the threshold for grand larceny in many jurisdictions; do you propose we let people who steal, say, $1600 of goods walk away scot free? And don’t waste your breath on fines —- those will only be passed on to the captive consumers as the “cost of business.”
I can't believe such a response. Is not the $80 dollar printer, is that HP is crossing a line, boarding the realm of illegality, misappropriating an electronic device that should be yours. And is also not money that you lose. Is frustration, time and feeling miserably deceit by a corporation that gives a shit about you. Also that you probably end up buying another printer and/or wasting time doing some research on printers online to not fall again into a dirty and dodgy maneuver like this.
Poor people sometimes go to prison for far smaller crimes than this. The problem is that far too often, rich and powerful people are only held accountable if they hurt other rich and powerful people.
And if it's a million $80 printers affected by this, it's an $80 million crime.
It's not a 80$ printer but damage to society, or if you find that exaggerated hurting and lying to customers.
Prison is hard, on the other hand let the scale of damage and intention decide.. more human would be just stick to penalties. They just must be high enough to hurt really, not ridiculous amounts you can price in. Like do it once and maybe get away with it, but do it twice or thrice and you will quite certainly bankrupt the company.
The last time printer shenanigans came up on HN, it was related specifically to apparent Brother shenanigans [0]. I was planning on buying a Brother at the time due to similar comments like yours, and still did so. I've been a happy customer since day 1 with the thing, it just works, even on mobile, and it's fast and quiet. I hope Brother can remain sane.
Or buy a laser printer. They cost a bit more upfront, but a single toner cartridge lasts ages (and won't dry out or get used up in cleaning cycles), the printers are generally much more robust and longer lasting, and because laser printing isn't as patent-encumbered there's more actual competition and less outright user-hostile behavior.
I would like to vouch for Xerox laser printers. Not only they don't identify your printouts with tiny yellow markings/serial number, but also they gladly accept off-market toners, and places like Amazon have many different brands that race to the bottom of price making it easy to try out what works for you. I am on my third Xerox laser printer and couldn't be happier.
Even they're not exempt from being messed with. I had an HP color laser printer which, when purchased, would print on any paper size that would fit in the printer. (Specifically used it to print to US Legal Size.) A firmware update some years back disabled printing to anything larger than US Letter Sized.
I now own a Brother printer that is perfectly happy to print to larger paper.
Lasers also have issues. I had a laser my last printer but had issues with the imgaging drum and other parts. Eventually tonor ended up on some of the rollers and the printer was basically useless at this point.
I bought an epson workforce back some years ago. When it had printing issues i was able to do some cleaning runs and reslove. I have used ink quite a bit over time. But probably not nearly as much as the imaging drum, rollers and other parts i ended up swapping trying to stop the darkened prints on my main machine. The original laser was about 400 bucks, inkjet like 89.99. I dont think i spent more on the inkjet, even after the swaps.
> This is one of those really good "vote with your wallets" situations.
This is a really good situation for actual voting, like actual political action to have regulation, instead of pretend voting.
HP probably doesn't give a damn about the HN crowd, it won't affect their business line in the little, so there's no signaling here.
And assuming Brother gets enough of a loyal following, they can now (probably already are) jack the prices and push the envelope of what's acceptable as business practices, until you'll have to start looking around again at who's left to let you escape predatory practices.
Hard disagree. This is how Chrome won the browser wars - people ask their nerdy cousin which browser to use.
The market of HN is small, but the market power is large. Also, I guarantee you people here make large corporate purchases for things like printers, networking equipment - stuff HP cares about.
I've had my Brother laser printer for 10 years, only changed the toner cartridge once, and it immediately starts printing when you need it to. One of the best purchases I ever made!
During previous discussions about this there have been some comments indicating Brother is headed down this road as well. No idea how accurate that is.
They offer a closed-source Linux and you need to download an installer from them (an i386 binary, which also works on i686 and x86_64); so, not great. The driver is mostly-reliable, although every once in a while it does kind of give out on you and printing fails, possibly until a restart. I suppose on Windows it's better.
> really good printers that are inexpensive and live a long life?
I bought mine about 4.5 years ago; hardware seems fine so far.
> happy life
yeah, so... not so much when it comes to toners. Either the toner capacity is really low, or the MFP becomes disenchanted with toners quickly. I get "Toner Low" extremely quickly - even with only a few hundred pages printed. Granted, I don't print much these days, but still. And I've already experienced a case in which I put in a new toner and was already told it was low.
When I got my recently-acquired MFC-L3550CDW home, I went to set it up over the network and it just worked. Trying to install the drivers stopped it working :P.
I've not tried printing to it over USB, but over Ethernet it supports IPP and mDNS so all you need to do to print is connect the printer to the network and CUPS will find it automatically.
At some point in the last ten years, network printing has gone from dark magic to just working, and in my experience working better on Linux than Mac or Windows. Printing from Android took a smidge of manual set up but now also just works when called upon. It's almost disappointing, until I remember that while I quite enjoy tinkering I also bought the printer to actually print stuff.
The scanner? Also just works over the network. Mind blown.
It amazes that in 2023, other operating systems still need separate drivers for printers. I just look for AirPrint compatible printers and they work seamless from my Mac, iPhone and iPad. I pulled an old 2010 iPad out a couple of years ago and it could print to a brand new printer.
>They offer a closed-source Linux and you need to download an installer from them
Similar experience with their label printers, except they only had a i386 binary, which rather killed my idea of a raspberry pi print server. Also it was generally just terrible and froze after a few labels.
I bought a Brother laser printer like the internet told me to, and I even paid extra money to get the one that is easy to connect on wifi, but we can't seem to connect the printer to any macs wirelessly. It only connects to the iphones and the ubuntu machine. It just doesn't show up in macs. Anyone know anything about that?
Have you tried manually adding it? When adding a printer you can change the type to 'airprint' which makes it discoverable in the same way that iphones discover printers. You could also use the IP address directly if you must.
Brother is great unless you need to configure it to fax over VoIP. I recall horror stories from my technical support days. Had to walk users, over the phone, through navigating to the settings and then changing a binary (literally) value.
> Ok now it says 01101101 and I need you to change it to 10001111.
Yes, I was going to mention Brother. They're excellent; I've bought their products for years.
But, given advertising is legal, and HP advertises much more aggressively than Brother, we can't rely on "vote with your wallet" to solve this problem. "Vote with your wallet" doesn't work when one competitor is spending money on making quality products and the other is spending money on advertising.
The entire premise that capitalism brings the best products at the lowest cost is falsified by advertising.
I just want to be clear, because this headline is borderline clickbait.
HP is not bricking the printers. The printers will continue to work if you put the HP cartridges back in.
I'm not condoning HP at all, not in a million years.
But the verb "disable" carries connotations of permanence, so it seems like a disingenuous word choice at best, if it's not outright clickbait. Just so people aren't confused here.
in a free market shouldn't hp be forced to lower it's prices to compete with 3rd party to a little more than their price since it technically is OEM? I mean like car parts
They are at a minimum destroying value of the ink, as the ink already put into the printer is useless now. At least the running combination is permanently disabled as long as you do not buy something from HP. With printer prices often as low as the ink prices that is a big deal.
At least they should be required to compensate the users.
Thanks for clarifying because that’s the impression i got from the headline too - while the practice is pretty bad, from the comments in here I suspect many others also had the same interpretation.
It is clickbait. Nothing borderline about it. Still terrible behaviour from HP, but very unsurprising as opposed to the idea of actually bricking printers.
Before the firmware update, the printers were able to print with third-party cartridges. HP disabled that ability. Their customers' printers are now disabled.
By that definition of "disable", HP is disabling their customers' printers regardless of whether they use ink cartridges from another manufacturer. It's clear that that is not the intended sense, however, because the headline says "if they use...".
If that meaning was intended, the headline should read "HP disables the use of third-party ink cartridges on their customers' printers with a firmware update", or something like that.
I agree with OP that as written the headline is misleading.
Before reading the article, I interpreted the headline to mean a permanent disabling. Like disabling a tank. Or a disabled person. Merriam-Webster may agree with you, but I felt the wording was misleading
I suppose you could say that, but it would mean something quite different from what bricking normally does. And I wouldn't advise it because it sounds like a soft brick rather than "beep boop replace cartridge".
It's this mentality that makes internet discussions so polarized. If you allow the slightest nuance or point out that something is factually incorrect, and it happens to go against the prevailing narrative, you're accused of being a shill.
Has there ever been another company that declined as much from its glory days as HP? During the second half of the 20th century HP was a fabled brand. They made beautiful equipment for which there was often no comparable quality alternative in the world. The pocket calculators they built in the 1980s are still sought-after, not just as collectables but also as daily drivers. They built computers during that era, but they we never a "player" in that industry.
Then they shifted their focus to computers and began their long decent into the crappy husk of a company that they are today. The engineers who work there should be ashamed when they implement malware like this printer ink scam.
Yes, but I would claim that was when they started going to pot. LONG before the PC era, HP made its own line of computers, which were seldom seen outside of labs, and even labs were much more apt to have a PDP-8 or PDP-11. Their move into commodity computers and peripherals moved them from a situation where they were building the highest quality products available, into one where they had no "moat". After all, who would buy a spectacularly well built PC early in the PC era? After two years you would have wanted to throw it out regardless of how solidly it was built, because back then PCs doubled in performance nearly every year.
Plenty of other companies have declined, or just changed as the people composing them changed. But for HP, yeah, I miss their heyday too. I consider their spinoff Agilent to be the "real" HP now.
I would blame it a bit on standardisation… not too much, but when you drop the development of your own cpu, your own operating systems, your own hardware… you’re an oem like the others.
What business does an ink cartridge have containing any significant code that could act as malware? What sort of imbecilic or evil (or both) personage designs a system that makes this even remotely possible and then sells it to the general public?
Of course there is no answer to that because it isn't a real reason, it is crap regurgitated by a PR drone who knows next to nothing about tech details and has been told to drop the phrase in to make it look like the company is defending their customers from something rather than being a something their customers need defending from…
(or worse, the PR person knows a bit about tech, so knows the malware angle is complete bunkum, and was actively lying.)
I hadn’t heard of this before either. A quick search (miraculously, Google still sometimes works for me) indicates two separate phenomena: one is that HP did intend to insert printed ads when you use some of their automated print options (https://www.computerworld.com/article/2519039/hp-partners-wi...), and the other is that some HP printers are “web-enabled” in the sense that emails to a certain printer email address will automatically be printed, and the default access settings allow spam ads which then get automatically printed (https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Mobile-Printing-Cloud-Printing...)
This issue is discussed for over 20 years now, it baffles me that there is apparently still no established solution.
By the way, Apple forcing users to install apps only via its 30% fee AppStore has provoked far less outrage. Probably because people are not directly aware of the Apple premium, in contrast to the HP premium.
Apple would get the outrage if other app stores existed but you risked bricking your phone if you installed apps from them.
Part of the difference here is likely due to Apple primarily penalising the developers (second order effects hit the consumer). If Apple were directly hitting consumers it would be a louder series of protests.
HP are targeting the consumers, not the 3rd party suppliers, which Apple hits.
Apple (reversibly) bricks parts of the phone, even when you buy genuine parts, because they want you to pay them for the new components to be allowed to talk to each other.
>Probably because people are not directly aware of the Apple premium,
It's because it's developers who piss and moan about the 30%, while most consumers get value from having to go through the AppStore, such as 1.) being able to cancel subscriptions quickly and easily and 2.) ensuring that developers aren't abusing permissions to siphon data from the device.
Maybe because most non game apps never pay the 30% fee (Netflix, Spotify, apps that see physical services like Uber, apps that require a subscription outside of the App Store) and according to the Epic lawsuit, most of the revenue (80%+) comes from slimy pay to win games.
People are less upset because Apple does not brick the phone when the user downloads an app they don't like. (they might in the future, but not today).
Readit News
No, you can’t say it wasn’t your decision. If you want to not be held accountable for the work your employees, contractors, and agents do on your behalf, you should have to prove they acted against your express written orders.
We don't need to put CEOs in prison for making consumer-hostile decisions, we just need to also make those decisions bad business.
Corporations aren't people--they can't make the decision to do unethical things. Yes, I understand the law, I'm saying the law is incorrect. People do unethical things, and people should be held responsible for their actions.
Fining decision-makers might be an acceptable alternative to jail time, as long as the minimum fine is some sort of multiple of profits gained, to prevent criminals from just figuring a slap on the wrist fine into their decision-making math.
I understand what I am advocating might seem against existing case law about LLC and as I’ve said before I am not a lawyer so it might not be something straightforward to codify but I know it is possible if we have the will and we make it a priority.
I would hope we should have the owners of our economy, the 0.0001% of the population on our side on this matter because upper management is robbing them or they will if we institute reasonably high enough fines instead of prison time.
For this case, computing back:
94M printers are sold per year.
HP’s market cap is $29 billion.
So, fine them $1000 per printer they sold that has any sort of anti-third-party ink mechanism, payable direct to consumer. (This seems about right to me. It’s less than 10x the retail price of a printer.)
Production of a receipt or a picture of an HP branded printer serial number should be all that is required to obtain the $1000. If they fail to pay in 30 days, individuals can use the mechanism where the sherrif walks into an HP office and takes $1000 worth of stuff on behalf of the claimant.
After 12 months, any unclaimed money gets sent to charity.
As appropriate as that would be, I’d rather see the CEO and execs that approved this stuff go to federal maximum security prison for life than for all the unrelated HP employees to lose their jobs. (Though, arguably, their services would be better used elsewhere.)
I hardly think that issuing any fine would make them care. Why would the CEO give one little tiny shit about a million dollar fine, or a ten million dollar fine for that matter. They just pass it on to the consumer. And that is only passing on the cost of the fine only to the ink division. They could easily pass on the costs to all departments.
Fines are silly and useless. I guess if they were to have a $500 million fine, that would get the company's attention, but I don't see that ever happening, honestly.
But I think if they put the C-suite and board of directors into jail for 8 years, that would have a major effect on all boards and executives.
And right now, corporations are claiming supply chains and inflation for raising their prices, yet they have the largest profits ever. This can only mean that they are raising their prices but their costs are staying the same or rising very little. All of them should be put in prison - robbing the poor and middle class to put that wealth in the hands of the rich. More siphoning money from the poor and middle class. Put them in prison, I say. Make some example. This is not about price controls, but against holding the US population hostage. Is there collusion? Because that is against the law. That is not controlling prices. Collusion is collusion.
The basic reason is that the US (and the Western World) has gone through deregulation to re-monopolization, so consumers face monopolies or oligopolies in most major markets and these entities basically make their money by selling their products as "services" in the chunk-size that makes a consume most desperate - IE, Hp will fight forever to sell 100 prints for $30 rather than 10000 prints for $120 and only hard threats can stop them (and we know the shit MS does - if MS could charge an ambulance a fee to keep their heart monitor software from killing them, they would, etc).
If fines grow/shrink, then people will think "what are ways to get around these fines?" or more commonly "Are these fines larger than the profit I would earn?". Even if fines are increased for now, that's a temporary thing, and not everyone would care.
A CEO doesn't personally care about extra fines costing the company; that can be a "calculated risk". CEOs are very well paid and fines are generally an inconvenience. But these people cannot buy time; threaten to take away years of their life, and see how the underlying value structures change.
Maybe we don't need to, but we should.
Maybe we don't need to, but let's.
What’s needed is regulation and fines, so that it’s not the “cost of doing business” and they lose money (the one thing that dictates their decisions) from this stunt. If there was actually a decent competitor, they could simply be forced to fully refund impacted customers who decide to switch, but HP has basically a monopoly on printers. This is a sign they need to be broken up or put under strict regulation like utilities.
That would a) fully repay affected customers, b) stop the practice for future customers, and c) discourage other companies from this practice. IMO 3 goals, and the only 3 reasons, we have a justice system and punishments in the first place. This isn’t an action which caused permanent, life-altering harm. This is an action which can be 110% undone (via extra fines), so no further punishment is necessary.
And yes, I know petty thieves and druggies serve jail time for causing much lesser problems. That’s wrong too. “2 wrongs don’t make a right”
If you bought and it is still under warranty, ask for a full refund. You likely won't get it, but make sure HP waste as much time as possible dealing with this
In the UK it is even worth considering to take this to the small claims court. Of course seek legal advice first.
The only way HP gets away with this, because people just accept this kind of behaviour.
No, the way they get away with it is to collude, and make sure customers have no other choices.
I feel like these older, pre-dynamic security printers are going to be gold. Hang on to your babies, keep them safe, keep them running.
please name a situation in the past 50 years where a conpany went under or lost at least 10% of their revenue from'peiple not accepting' this behaviour
Boycotts can be immensely powerful, and strike fear into the hearts of those who would exploit us.
Personally, I will never buy an HP product again. Absolute, permanent blacklist.
It's simply way too disgusting to me that they would even consider doing this, let alone actually carry it out.
What must they think of their customers? It's unforgivable.
Also, of interest, is that HP and Canon printers can use the same toner cartridges:
https://www.shop.xerox.com/supplies-accessories?brand=6346
For the most part, HP does not make its own printers anymore and just sells rebadged printers running their own firmware. It would not surprise me if the ink for HP Smart Tank printers is identical to the ink for Canon Mega Tank printers.
They reportedly are selling some models using technology that they obtained from Samsung, but aside from that, very little of what they sell they actually make. They are basically a middle man.
I cannot find a single example of a successful boycott in my lifetime. Can you?
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Making loss of business or minor fines the only mechanism for correcting behaviour, means that the leaders can view antisocial and unethical behaviour as a cost benefit tradeoff. And the lack of personal accountability means the company leadership has very limited downside, even if they completely screw up.
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This seems to be the top vote comment here, demanding jail time for CEOs for printers not working.
Meanwhile, the top comment on an article painstakingly detailing how a company is using every dirty trick in the book to get mentally incapable or distressed, etc people to sell homes to them at far below market value has a top comment basically saying “well, they signed a contract”.
Or maybe it’s as simple as this affects most HNers, so it’s the worst thing in the world, whereas that doesn’t, so people it does affect are just suckers.
I'm not sure if it's hyperbole or not. If it's not, what law was broken?
(Honest question. I'm not a fan of this, but I was curious if it's actually illegal.)
I think we should pass the law and try it out, see how it feels.
It was immoral and unethical but those are lesser concerns than maximising return on capital invested. Possibly, no law was clearly broken.
We need to outsource some of our lawmaking to ethics boards/commissions if we want to keep capitalism. Otherwise, every other company is now looking to defraud its customers and that’s the only way an endless desire for capital growth (exponential growth expectations from investors) goes.
But how about some sort of environmental levy on any device prematurely 'bricked', or disposed of before reaching a certain lifespan.
Including those bricked by server shutdowns, or by the inevitable failure of non-replaceable batteries. Perhaps even those designed to be somewhat fragile but not economically repairable - thinking of all the phones and tablets discarded due to cracked screens.
The solution is really simple. Buy a printer that doesn’t do this. Many exist. They cost more, because HP sells these as loss leaders.
Funny how access to enough money to form a corporation, does in certain circumstances tend to clothe your subsequent actions in virtue...
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There are plenty of low-friction ways consumers could be reimbursed plus the cost of lost time or energy spent on a now 'broken' printer if we wanted to solve this in a fair way.
No, prison makes zero sense. When people agree to a business contract and one side fails to uphold their end of the bargain, the remedy should remain financial. And punitive remedies exist precisely to make sure the "cost of doing business" makes it no longer profitable.
And if that's not happening, then that's the fault of the legislators and voters. This is why we need to vote people into office who ensure that consumer protection laws remain strong.
Not at all - when one party intends to cheat another, we call that fraud and we do send people to jail for this regularly.
Or just curtail every holder's shares by a fixed percentage, if/when a publicly-owned company is found to have engaged in anti-competitive behavior. If the incentive of maximizing shareholder value is no longer aligned with the interests of society, maybe that's how to fix it.
This is the sort of overreaction that kills reasonable responses, like making HP reimburse everyone whose printer they disabled, trebled, plus pay a big fine to a regulator and also enter into a consent decree. Hit them with a market cap decimating fine. Then let the Board eat its own.
won't happen, because most of the customers live in different countries with different law systems
> hit them with a market cap decimating fine
won't happen, because most of the costs is beared by people in foreign countries who don't matter to US courts, and most of the profits are gathered by people in US (company, owners, shareholders, employees, budget)
It's not an accident that most of the time google and apple are fined by EU and VW is fined by USA.
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If it weren't for government contracts and Gartner quadrant payola I don't think HP would even exist.
If even a few dozen printers were bricked by this it would represent more lost value than the threshold for grand larceny in many jurisdictions; do you propose we let people who steal, say, $1600 of goods walk away scot free? And don’t waste your breath on fines —- those will only be passed on to the captive consumers as the “cost of business.”
And if it's a million $80 printers affected by this, it's an $80 million crime.
Prison is hard, on the other hand let the scale of damage and intention decide.. more human would be just stick to penalties. They just must be high enough to hurt really, not ridiculous amounts you can price in. Like do it once and maybe get away with it, but do it twice or thrice and you will quite certainly bankrupt the company.
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This is one of those really good "vote with your wallets" situations.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
and won't dry out or get used up in cleaning cycles
On the other hand, if you live in a humid climate, toner can clump. This may explain the popularity of inkjets in Southeast Asia.
The printer just stopped working from most of my computers. I tried everything.
I was going to replace it, then decided to try a 1st party cartridge again. And it’s been basically flawless again.
Such a scam.
I now own a Brother printer that is perfectly happy to print to larger paper.
I bought an epson workforce back some years ago. When it had printing issues i was able to do some cleaning runs and reslove. I have used ink quite a bit over time. But probably not nearly as much as the imaging drum, rollers and other parts i ended up swapping trying to stop the darkened prints on my main machine. The original laser was about 400 bucks, inkjet like 89.99. I dont think i spent more on the inkjet, even after the swaps.
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This is a really good situation for actual voting, like actual political action to have regulation, instead of pretend voting.
HP probably doesn't give a damn about the HN crowd, it won't affect their business line in the little, so there's no signaling here.
And assuming Brother gets enough of a loyal following, they can now (probably already are) jack the prices and push the envelope of what's acceptable as business practices, until you'll have to start looking around again at who's left to let you escape predatory practices.
The market of HN is small, but the market power is large. Also, I guarantee you people here make large corporate purchases for things like printers, networking equipment - stuff HP cares about.
Ethernet, IPP and Postscript support are requirements.
So that they can work with generic drivers, on a range of platforms, without much setup complexity.
> And their drivers aren't user hostile?
They offer a closed-source Linux and you need to download an installer from them (an i386 binary, which also works on i686 and x86_64); so, not great. The driver is mostly-reliable, although every once in a while it does kind of give out on you and printing fails, possibly until a restart. I suppose on Windows it's better.
> really good printers that are inexpensive and live a long life?
I bought mine about 4.5 years ago; hardware seems fine so far.
> happy life
yeah, so... not so much when it comes to toners. Either the toner capacity is really low, or the MFP becomes disenchanted with toners quickly. I get "Toner Low" extremely quickly - even with only a few hundred pages printed. Granted, I don't print much these days, but still. And I've already experienced a case in which I put in a new toner and was already told it was low.
Other than that no complaints.
I've not tried printing to it over USB, but over Ethernet it supports IPP and mDNS so all you need to do to print is connect the printer to the network and CUPS will find it automatically.
At some point in the last ten years, network printing has gone from dark magic to just working, and in my experience working better on Linux than Mac or Windows. Printing from Android took a smidge of manual set up but now also just works when called upon. It's almost disappointing, until I remember that while I quite enjoy tinkering I also bought the printer to actually print stuff.
The scanner? Also just works over the network. Mind blown.
I recently found that there is a setting in printer admin page called "Replace Toner".
By default the printer is set to STOP printing as soon as "Toner Low" status is reached.
But we can set it to "Continue" so that it continues printing with low toner instead of immediately replacing it.
Mine has been printing fine since last 1 year after this. FYI ... I print like 10 pages in a busy month.
It just gives me "Low Toner" / "Replace Toner" warning each time and still prints just fine.
And this cartridge is a cheap $15 toner refill i had bought off Amazon 2-3 years ago.
printer : Brother DCP L2540-DW bought 8 years ago for $100.
other than occassional connectivity issues like once a year that required reinstalling printer drivers on Win 10 ... I have been super happy.
Similar experience with their label printers, except they only had a i386 binary, which rather killed my idea of a raspberry pi print server. Also it was generally just terrible and froze after a few labels.
Don't get me wrong, it's still a decent printer, but short of what I would consider "really good".
Also, I read here in another thread that a recent firmware update also blocked third party cartridges.
> Ok now it says 01101101 and I need you to change it to 10001111.
Something to that effect. Ew.
The value proposition is especially relevant if the printers & refills themselves are simple business expenses.
Not saying the company is perfect, but there's a lot of room between the headlines and day-to-day use.
But, given advertising is legal, and HP advertises much more aggressively than Brother, we can't rely on "vote with your wallet" to solve this problem. "Vote with your wallet" doesn't work when one competitor is spending money on making quality products and the other is spending money on advertising.
The entire premise that capitalism brings the best products at the lowest cost is falsified by advertising.
HP is not bricking the printers. The printers will continue to work if you put the HP cartridges back in.
I'm not condoning HP at all, not in a million years.
But the verb "disable" carries connotations of permanence, so it seems like a disingenuous word choice at best, if it's not outright clickbait. Just so people aren't confused here.
There's no HP cartridge to put back in, unless I go and buy one.
The printer is disabled until I give HP money. I call that extortion.
At least they should be required to compensate the users.
If that meaning was intended, the headline should read "HP disables the use of third-party ink cartridges on their customers' printers with a firmware update", or something like that.
I agree with OP that as written the headline is misleading.
No it doesn't. I can disable the safety catch or disable the alarm just fine without breaking them.
That's semi-bricking the printers.
> I'm not condoning HP at all, not in a million years.
You're semi-condoning them.
I suppose you could say that, but it would mean something quite different from what bricking normally does. And I wouldn't advise it because it sounds like a soft brick rather than "beep boop replace cartridge".
> You're semi-condoning them.
No they're not.
It's this mentality that makes internet discussions so polarized. If you allow the slightest nuance or point out that something is factually incorrect, and it happens to go against the prevailing narrative, you're accused of being a shill.
Then they shifted their focus to computers and began their long decent into the crappy husk of a company that they are today. The engineers who work there should be ashamed when they implement malware like this printer ink scam.
HP was definitely a player in the PC industry and has been the number one manufacturer at different times..
https://statisticsanddata.org/data/best-selling-computer-bra...
What business does an ink cartridge have containing any significant code that could act as malware? What sort of imbecilic or evil (or both) personage designs a system that makes this even remotely possible and then sells it to the general public?
Of course there is no answer to that because it isn't a real reason, it is crap regurgitated by a PR drone who knows next to nothing about tech details and has been told to drop the phrase in to make it look like the company is defending their customers from something rather than being a something their customers need defending from…
(or worse, the PR person knows a bit about tech, so knows the malware angle is complete bunkum, and was actively lying.)
Revising/restricting the features of a product after it is sold can have legal consequences.
https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/sony-settles-linux-batt...
https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/3/20984028/playstation-supe...
Turns out, it was an official practice by HP.
I'll never use any of their products again.
By the way, Apple forcing users to install apps only via its 30% fee AppStore has provoked far less outrage. Probably because people are not directly aware of the Apple premium, in contrast to the HP premium.
Part of the difference here is likely due to Apple primarily penalising the developers (second order effects hit the consumer). If Apple were directly hitting consumers it would be a louder series of protests.
HP are targeting the consumers, not the 3rd party suppliers, which Apple hits.
It's because it's developers who piss and moan about the 30%, while most consumers get value from having to go through the AppStore, such as 1.) being able to cancel subscriptions quickly and easily and 2.) ensuring that developers aren't abusing permissions to siphon data from the device.
You get nothing extra from buying HP first party ink otherwise they wouldn’t do this.
iPhones and iPads, you still can do other things, it’s not a paper weight cause you rooted your device or sideloaded an emulator…