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this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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Either this is complete bullshit or HP is over-engineering completely unnecessary vulnerabilities into their hardware. There’s no reason why a dumb ink cartridge (no DRM) would need any ability to send data to the printer other than very short messages (like a few bytes at most), so it should not be possible for an ink cartridge to give the printer a virus unless this vulnerability is the direct result of the new DRM-tracking additions.
So HP is either malicious or incompetent, and regardless of which it is, I can’t see myself trusting another of their products ever again.
Why not both!?
I'd rather have them be both. I think the incompetence would ameliorate the maliciousness.
i didn’t mean to exclude that option but rather thought it to be redundant since the result is the same.
So... Comically evil?
It's not bullshit. Wether or not it's "over-engineered" is debatable... a lot of seemingly simple technology is crazy complicated these days.
For example some USB-C cables are a simple cable with four pins soldered to four wires and a bit of plastic so they don't touch. Others have over 20 wires, most of them individually shielded (which means a lot more wire and a lot more plastic separating them) with incredibly complex circuit boards to detect and counteract electromagnetic interference to eliminate cross talk between those 20 wires (because even with shielding, some of the signal on one wire still leaks out onto the ones next to them).
Is USB-C over engineered? That depends if you're using it to charge your phone or to connect your laptop to an external screen/wired internet connection/power/etc. In the latter case, not over engineered at all.
The circuitry on printer cartridges don't just do DRM, they're also part of the calibration process to output accurate colours. Total overkill to print a hard copy of a payment receipt for your printer warranty... but printing a photo? I can get behind the over-engineering for that.
But I don't see why the calibration would need to be on the cartridge. Like I could understand some sensors or similar but at the end the logic and all that the logical thing would be to be on printer.