SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday April 30 2020, @04:59PM
My Brother colour laser printer works fine, and understands a variety of well-known printer protocols,a s well as understanding Postscript.
I do have the ppd from Brother installed on my old laptop. It was quite a effort to get it to work *without* installing that massive inscrutable blob of printer handling stuff everybody uses called CUPS, but instead using the simple lpr commands that have been around for ages. It turns out there are several different Debian packages that install different lpr commands, and it matters which one you have! But browsers and word processors can't figure out how to use lpr, so I ask them to print to pdf and do the lpr myself.
But on my new laptop the default Devuan install did install CUPS, and I didn't have the energy to go and figure out the whole mess all over again. Now the browsers and word-processors know about my printer. But they think the printer doesn't have two-sided printing. The official straightforward old-fashioned method I used on my old laptop does do two-sided flawlessly.
And yes, on occasion I've hand-written my own Postscript files.
The one problem I have with the drivers provided by Brother is that instead of providing a driver, they provide a binary installer for the driver. I would have been happy with just the ppd file and instructions where to put it. That would have been enough.
-- hendrik