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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday April 30 2020, @11:18AM   Printer-friendly

Florida man might just stick it to HP for injecting sneaky DRM update into his printers that rejected non-HP ink

One man's effort to sue HP Inc for preventing his printers from working and forcing him to use its own branded, and more expensive, ink cartridges can move forward in California.

Florida man John Parziale was furious when he discovered in April last year that HP had automatically updated his two printers so they would no longer accept ink cartridges from third-party vendors – cartridges he had already bought and installed.

That month, HP emitted a remote firmware update, without alerting users, that changed the communication protocol between a printer's chipset and the electronics in its inkjet cartridges so that only HP-branded kit was accepted. The result was that Parziale's printer would no longer work with his third-party ink. He saw a series of error messages that said he needed to replace empty cartridges and that there was a "cartridge problem."

Parziale sued the IT titan in its home state of California, arguing he would never have bought the HP printers if he knew they would only work with HP-branded ink cartridges. At the time, the cartridges he bought to go with the machine did in fact work and were printing merrily right up to the point the DRM-style update was sent.

[...] But feeling ripped off and beating a tech giant in court are two different things, as Parziale found out this month [PDF] when federal district judge Edward Davila threw out most of his claims against HP. Four of five allegations he had made were under America's Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), accusing HP of abusing its "authorized access" to his devices. These were rejected because, the judge noted, he had granted HP remote access to his printer.


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2020, @12:46PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2020, @12:46PM (#988522)

    Whatever gets the job done!

    I mean, fuck it, if I can't find anything which works without blobs, I may as well just buy an ancient dot matrix printer.

    To add to the insult, every fucking printer has to be WIRELESS. What if I don't want wireless?

    Dot matrix, how I've missed you.

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  • (Score: 2) by epitaxial on Thursday April 30 2020, @03:05PM

    by epitaxial (3165) on Thursday April 30 2020, @03:05PM (#988581)

    You going back to a 60mA current loop for an interface?

  • (Score: 2) by TheReaperD on Thursday April 30 2020, @03:25PM (1 child)

    by TheReaperD (5556) on Thursday April 30 2020, @03:25PM (#988597)

    There used to be a company that refurbished HP LaserJet 4050Ns and would replace all the wheels and cogs with brass replacements. The resulting refurbished unit was far better than when it was sold new and would only need a set of belts every 10-20 years (depending un usage). They'd even repair the PCBs if something happened (rare). But, I went to look them up for this post and I could no longer find them. It looks like they are no longer around. Sad.

    --
    Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit
    • (Score: 2) by vux984 on Friday May 01 2020, @02:18AM

      by vux984 (5045) on Friday May 01 2020, @02:18AM (#988802)

      We recently finally let our workhorse 4050N go this year because it broke down and the replacement parts simply weren't available anymore.