If I buy a product, and the manufacturer remotely disables that product in order to coerce me into buying their goods and services, the people responsible should be charged with fraud, destruction of property, criminal conspiracy, racketeering, and anything else that can stick. It should be treated no less severely than if they hired thugs to smash it with a crowbar.

"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."

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.

But HP thinks that when you buy a printer, the company is investing in you

That sounds gross, but I'm pretty sure what's meant is simply that their printers are a loss leader, and the margins are supposed to be made up in the ink cartridges. Like here's another way of putting it: when Keurig sells the coffee machine at a loss, they are investing in you hoping you will buy a lot of kcups to recoup the investment.

shady is as shady does. on the street or in a corner office.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Last Thursday, HP CEO Enrique Lores addressed the company's controversial practice of bricking printers when users load them with third-party ink.

That frightening scenario could help explain why HP, which was hit this month with another lawsuit over its Dynamic Security system, insists on deploying it to printers.

HP has issued firmware updates that block printers with such ink cartridges from printing, leading to the above lawsuit (PDF), which is seeking class-action certification.

Still, because chips used in third-party ink cartridges are reprogrammable (their “code can be modified via a resetting tool right in the field,” according to Actionable Intelligence), they’re less secure, the company says.

Further, there's a sense from cybersecurity professionals that Ars spoke with that even if such a threat exists, it would take a high level of resources and skills, which are usually reserved for targeting high-profile victims.

Realistically, the vast majority of individual consumers and businesses shouldn't have serious concerns about ink cartridges being used to hack their machines.

The original article contains 766 words, the summary contains 164 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Its about time to ditch printers completely inside the office. The only people who should be worried about printers are graphics shops like AlphaGraphics. What the fuck are we doing? Just beholden to these companies because paper feels nice in the CEOs hands? We deserve what we fucken get.