Dymo causes a stir by adding DRM to printer paper:
[...] But some people do need a printer, and it seems that label printer maker Dymo is giving us yet another reason to hate printers.
It's building DRM directly into the printer paper. Or in this case, rolls of labels.
Yes, that's right, according to author, journalistc, and activist Cory Doctorow writing for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Dymo is putting RFID readers into its latest label printers, and using those to prevent owners from putting third-party labels through their printers.
"The new label rolls come with a booby-trap," writes Doctorow, "a RFID-equipped microcontroller that authenticates with your label-maker to attest that you bought Dymo's premium-priced labels and not a competitor's. The chip counts down the labels as you print them (so you can't transplant it to a generic label roll)."
This goes back to the original question that gets asked a lot around here, who owns the products that you buy?
Also, as the video points out, it's possible that the anti-circumvention law of the DMCA may possibly make it illegal for you to circumvent these restrictions(?). As the video points out, these corporations are huge on free market capitalism but only when it suits them. When it doesn't they're suddenly in favor of more government restrictions.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @12:08PM (24 children)
Are all printer companies bad? And if they are... how hard would it be to roll out your own... with open hardware, drivers, specs and liberty to use whatever paper/ink you want to use. Why does such company need to control the whole supply chain. Is this the same with 3D printers (I have no experience with that, but what I know it seems much more friendly towards customers)?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 25 2022, @01:08PM (2 children)
Not hard at all, as long as you have more money than the competition.
It's not about the engineering, or the intellectual property, or the supply chain and manufacturing, those are maybe $10m to roll out, but... You need a certain volume of sales say, at 100% markup, $20m gross sales at $100/unit, or 200,000 units. How are you going to move 200,000 units? Marketing.
Marketing is an unlimited ceiling arms race. Give away the razor, sell the blades psychology, plus advertising and exclusive rights in high profile sales channels. IDK what the marketing spend in printers is these days, but it is not uncommon for a $150 sales price piece of electronics to spend $100 per unit on advertising/marketing/sales activities. Now you get into price competition where brutal cost reductions in the design and manufacturing come into play.
Even if you have $10m to make your run of 200,000 printers, it may well cost you another $20m to sell them for $150 average sales price, and if you succeed at that, expect the $100m+ annual revenue printer companies to come gunning for you, likely selling a model at a loss to drive you into unprofitable territory long enough to sink your endeavors.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @01:11PM
Yes, but once you've sold those 200,000 printers you can activate the DRM and then make back your investment on marked-up supplies!
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday February 25 2022, @09:29PM
Teamsters!
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @01:21PM (3 children)
> with open hardware, drivers, specs and liberty to use whatever paper/ink you want to use.
How soon they forget?
Iirc, the whole free-as-in-freedom software movement started when Xerox wouldn't let RMS see the internal workings of their early laser printer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @08:00PM (2 children)
"the whole free-as-in-freedom software movement started when Xerox wouldn't let RMS see the internal workings of their early laser printer."
put down the crack pipe
it started when RMS got his panties in a bunch because Gosling sold EMACS
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @11:13PM (1 child)
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt [gnu.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 26 2022, @07:36PM
20-20 hindsight on the RMS printer story. I wonder if that early Xerox printer had a light on the front panel, "Paper Jam"? Anyone know??
If so, a little hardware mod to put the signal for that light onto the local network was well within the capabilities of the MIT AI lab hackers. For example, they broke into the elevator room in their building and built an EMACS command that would call the elevator to their floor... The elevator was slow--if you called it from your office, then walked over, the elevator might just be arriving.
(Score: 2, Funny) by bzipitidoo on Friday February 25 2022, @02:05PM (14 children)
Quit using paper! Quit printing! We can do it all digitally. Paper is a great invention, but for most use cases, it's inferior and obsolete. All those people who claim they like paper better than ebooks have failed to appreciate what an ebook can do that paper cannot, things such as easily enlarging the font and other visual enhancements, text searches, and far more compact storage that can hold thousands of print books worth of material.
Businesses are still stuck too much on paper, still doing things the old fashioned way. One of the most exasperating things about the situation, are those who complain about the costs of printing, even as they push customers to use paper. They're all in love with PDF, and won't provide the source from which the PDF was created. When it comes down to it, most businesses regard a form as their form. From top to bottom, they like it that using the PDF format makes it more difficult to copy and edit. The office flunky whose job is to take the content dictated to them and create the documents does not want that process to be more streamlined, for fear of losing said job.
Centuries ago, signatures were made ridiculously weak proof that some contract has been accepted. Now, all that demanding a signature does is push people towards the printer. Then, once some document has had to be printed so that it can be signed in ink, to get it back into electronic format, have to apply OCR, which is still not very good. Usually, they don't bother with the OCR part, and leave the scan as a bunch of JPEGs bundled up as a PDF. Ugly.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 25 2022, @03:00PM (5 children)
These labels are going on physical things - envelopes mostly, also nametags, etc. 99% of that can be done digitally - e-mailed .pdfs, Zoom calls, etc. But... newspapers lasted until about 2001 before they were crushed entirely, buggy whip makers were still around when the first Model Ts rolled off the lines, and it's going to be hard to get people to give up their paper communications.
I just received a paper envelope mailed notice yesterday at 2pm, informing me of an appointment that my friendly bureaucratic administration office made unilaterally with me for 12:30pm that same day. I received three phone calls between 12:15 and 12:33 leaving brief barely intelligible messages amounting to: "having tried to contact you three times for our scheduled meeting, I am now closing out this meeting which you failed to attend." Such shenanigans are so much easier and well established with paper, management hasn't figured out how to pull them with e-mail yet.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Friday February 25 2022, @07:40PM (4 children)
In my experience, Dymo label printers are less likely to be used on envelopes, and more likely to be used in labelling circuit breakers on a distribution board, for example.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 25 2022, @07:51PM (2 children)
Oh, these are the little plasticky things... yeah, O.K. - go ahead and get bent, Cory, but those label cartridges always have been pretty proprietary since the first unit sold.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Saturday February 26 2022, @04:14PM (1 child)
In fairness, the linked article states that it's a desk-top address label printer that's gotten the DRM first, but I doubt that the handheld (narrow) labellers will be far behind.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 26 2022, @05:00PM
We do have one of those little narrow label guns both at home and at work. Home labels things like little storage drawers, obscure light switch connections, etc. Work labels things like USB sticks - though I find it more convenient to tie tags onto USB sticks instead - easier to re-label as they change. All in all, my world would certainly keep on spinning if I never printed another one of those labels again, I certainly won't be supplying the industry with a lot of income from my personal decisions - and this one "ding" from Mr. Doctrow is probably enough to drive that future number to zero, from something less than $20 over the next 20 years as it was.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Saturday February 26 2022, @07:31PM
Labels are used a lot in healthcare. Labels on test samples. Patient ID's on innumerable forms. A label in a plastic wrist-strap so people know who you are when you are unconscious or demented. Inventory labels on equipment. The market is huge. Healthcare will pay, whatever it costs, for the convenience and the minimisation of mistakes - so if Dymo can get their DRM labels 'approved' in some way, such that not using them means you are out of compliance...
DRM-style used to assure quality control can be useful. However, it should be in control of the customer, not the supplier. The supplier should meet the customer's requirements, not the other way round (which it is at present, both with DRM on inks, and on 'trusted computing' CPUs).
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday February 25 2022, @03:01PM (5 children)
ebooks are much more difficulter to burn than paper.
The server will be down for replacement of vacuum tubes, belts, worn parts and lubrication of gears and bearings.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @04:26PM
But they're much easier to erase. They're also much easier to modify without leaving a trace.
I'll trust information in an old book much more than anything in electronic form.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @04:28PM (2 children)
All it takes is for Amazon or Google to decide they don't wany you to be able to read it, and voilà, it's gone!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Friday February 25 2022, @04:49PM
That works the other way too.
Someone wants to erase all traces of an ebook (eg, burn it), but they can't because of the wac-a-mole nature of how it can be re-re-re-uploaded all over the internet.
The server will be down for replacement of vacuum tubes, belts, worn parts and lubrication of gears and bearings.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 26 2022, @03:56AM
It was rather on the nose when Amazon deleted all the copies of 1984 that they had sold without acquiring the appropriate rights.
(Score: 3, Touché) by kazzie on Friday February 25 2022, @07:37PM
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/750/ [xkcd.com]
(Score: 2) by drussell on Friday February 25 2022, @03:22PM
The publisher, or the distributor, or a competitor, or the government, or whomever decides it has a much more difficult time of discontinuing, expiring, remotely erasing or otherwise blocking your access to your documents and information when they are in a physical, printed-on-paper form than in fragile little 1s and 0s, even when you try to keep a local copy.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Friday February 25 2022, @08:46PM
Such as allowing the vendor to remotely remove a book that you “bought”? Yeah, that's definitely a feature I want in my books. </sarcasm>
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday February 25 2022, @10:33PM
Just desperate. They are selling a solved problem which has little room for improvement to a saturated market and yet they still have to provide a return on shareholder investment.
I don't print much nowadays. Do you? I bought a colour laser printer in 2009 which still works perfectly well with 3rd party toner. Since then the total cost of the printer and all the toner I have ever put in it is probably still under $400 US.
It's not a great business to be in.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday February 26 2022, @03:22PM
MOST hobbyist 3D printers that can be afforded by mere mortals are completely open. They run open source firmware, the parts are all available. Many manufacturers actually make schematics and cad (or at least drawings) available. They are designed to be easy to work on.
It's telling that those are mostly Chinese companies with the notable exception of Prusa from the Czech Republic. The ones made by U.S. companies (in China) are mostly orders of magnitude more expensive, heavily DRMed, or both. There are a few U.S. companies that make nice parts for open 3D printers or who make filament.
A significant part of that is because circa 2010, there was a significant maker community building 3D printers from arduinos and parts they could order from McMaster-Carr while Stratasys wasn't interested in anyone whose budget was less than five figures. There is still a significant maker community building their own and many more who start with inexpensive Chinese printers and customize them. It is actually possible to go from design to printed part without ever touching anything non-open.
(Score: 2) by garfiejas on Friday February 25 2022, @01:31PM (6 children)
I don't have an expectation that I can "add" games to a PS4 without Sony digitally signing off on the purchase; happy with that choice - but I'm under no delusions that I don't actually "buy" the games or fully own the PS4 - though I have taken it apart a few times.
My friend uses a Dymo constantly on a project were doing - and the last time I looked the machines weren't badly priced - the tape was expensive - and openly sold "compatible" tapes were vastly cheaper. Like my laser toner cartridges there are alternatives to the printer manufacturers - but I don't personally use them even if it costs a bit more - but my "buying the printer in the first place" - those alternatives "just in case" are factored in - as long as they advertise the fact "in yer face" that only their toners/labels can be printed... DRM in household gadgets - its right there at the top of "DO NOT BUY" alongside "May Cause House Fires and Kill your Pet Robots"...
(Score: 4, Touché) by MIRV888 on Friday February 25 2022, @01:40PM
I do have that expectation. If I can take your software, printer, or proprietary equipment and make it work for me. Then I will.
HP's ink gouging pushed me over the edge a long time ago.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 25 2022, @01:40PM
Which is a big part of why the PS3 was the last gaming console we ever bought. We _do_ expect that a game, once purchased, is ours to play as long as the console is functional.
Waiting 30+ minutes after turning on the console for "mandatory updates" to download and install just so we can play a round of single-player Hamster Ball? I don't think I can stomach any further "advancements in the state of the art." My baseline is the Atari 400/800 cartridge system, plug it in, switch it on, and the game is ready to play before your hand can move from the power switch to the joystick. There are zero technical reasons why that model can't also work with high resolution games downloaded from the internet.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @03:05PM (1 child)
Yes, just give up.
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Saturday February 26 2022, @10:07AM
If you don't own the games... don't buy them.
PIRATE them.
Seriously... This is why piracy exists and is as popular as it is. When companies can take away your first sale rights, it is no wonder why people get fed up with them.
If there was no DRM, piracy would still exist... but it would be a fraction of what it is now.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PinkyGigglebrain on Friday February 25 2022, @05:57PM
Funny thing that.
when it works Sony owns it.
When it breaks out of warranty , you own it.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday February 25 2022, @08:38PM
Maybe I'll just ask a friend if I can give them a quarter for each game I want to play on their PS4. Then it'll be just like old times, and good enough for people who don't want to spend a lot of time playing a lot of video games. If I do it often enough, maybe I'll buy them a proper controller [androidcentral.com], ask them to repay me for it in quarters, and slowly give the quarters back to them over time. "Ownership" doesn't really enter into the picture in that event.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @01:31PM (2 children)
Anything less will not fix the problem.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Friday February 25 2022, @03:12PM (1 child)
There is a law. That is the problem. The Draconian Monstrous Copyright Atrocity or DMCA.
The server will be down for replacement of vacuum tubes, belts, worn parts and lubrication of gears and bearings.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @03:46PM
There is another law, against tying, which is what this is, but good luck getting the courts to enforce it.
(Score: 5, Informative) by theluggage on Friday February 25 2022, @01:36PM (13 children)
So, great, looks like there's a choice between a DRM'd Dymo or 101 non-name "bluetooth label printers" that will be landfill as soon as the dedicated (and probably ad-laden) smartphone app vanishes from the App store.
If only there were some other way to put text onto sticky labels, maybe using some sort of pointy object with the tip soaked in ink...
(Score: 5, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 25 2022, @01:42PM (6 children)
They're a little pricier, but I believe these are DRM free and should be wizard at thermal sensitive paper:
https://www.michaels.com/glowforge-plus/10685321.html?r=g [michaels.com]
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday February 25 2022, @03:25PM (1 child)
https://www.michaels.com/glowforge-plus/10685321.html [michaels.com]
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 26 2022, @09:56PM
Glowforge the requires internet company.
https://support.glowforge.com/hc/en-us/articles/360033633634-Wi-Fi [glowforge.com]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday February 25 2022, @04:31PM (3 children)
Those are much, much pricier. The DYMO Label Printers I use cost around $100 to purchase. That's nearly 40x more expensive, a little pricier indeed. May as well go back to using sheets of labels and my laser jet printer at that point.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 25 2022, @06:38PM (2 children)
'Twas merely a jest, but also to the point: if you pay enough, you don't have to fool with DRM.
I have actually been living this in practice since smart TVs came out - I pay nearly twice as much for the same screen without the "smarts". I suppose I could just get a smart screen and deny it network connectivity, but I suspect I would suffer for that at the hand of the Smart TV marketing design wonks.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 26 2022, @12:33AM (1 child)
All it takes is one person in your neighbourhood with open wifi and the TV will automatically connect, and that's assuming that you can use the TV at all without registering it online.
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Saturday February 26 2022, @04:29AM
Not positive if this will work... probably depends on the TV... Have it connect to your wifi and either give it the wrong password or let it connect and use the firewall to block it from the internet.
The latter suggestion should work but will require a little tech knowledge (usually easy for people on this site; maybe not for their friends/relatives.)
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @01:48PM
So how is anyone going to read the labels i write?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Freeman on Friday February 25 2022, @04:27PM (3 children)
I work at a Library. We use DYMO Label Printers to print labels to put on our books and various other things. Using a sharpie to or other type of pen to hand write labels isn't an option. I mean sure, at a certain level, "that's an option", but it really, really isn't. For one, my handwriting is atrocious.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by LabRat on Friday February 25 2022, @08:06PM
We use a Dymo for labeling samples in a lab. Agreed; I could write everything out, but it would take a long time. I'd rather scan a bar code and have the Dymo print labels based on it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @08:08PM (1 child)
-nomsg
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday February 28 2022, @05:00PM
There is that, which could theoretically be possible, but that would be nuts.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @10:24PM
Better than your alluded to pen is a portable printer that can handle just about any surface. Better software so you can transfer images, text, etc.
You can print directly onto objects if you wish, or get cheap blank labels. Apply blank label, print on label.
Dymo will become the buggy whip at labeling things here quite soon. I've seen these portable printers starting to get down to the size of a pen.
If I had to label a bunch of stuff today I would look at one of those. More flexibility and supported surface areas.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @02:06PM
In the past I've even printed QR code stickers that link to the relevant reviews with a "Things you should know before you buy!" caption and stuck them onto retail shelves next to the item.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Rich on Friday February 25 2022, @02:06PM (1 child)
...and even thought it might be worth a submission, so thanks to AC for doing the job.
Such label printers aren't made from witchcraft, so they might trigger a "CueCat" like debacle, where the world and dog suddenly had to have a universal personal barcode reader - below cost of the vendor. For the driver side, there is https://pypi.org/project/brother-ql/ [pypi.org] . (Note: This is for the cheaper Brother QL series, and even Brother has some sort of "physical DRM" by including the roll holders with the rolls but low price second sources are available for that.)
The hardware/firmware (about one sensor, one line of heating dots, and one feed motor) itself should fall to the hackaday crowd within a week.
Now, what's more interesting than such trivial machinery is the Epson piezo print heads. Enough is known about them to individually drive them, but no one has gone all the way so far. That would be a glorious Raspi-family showoff with a Pi 4 for the PostScript server and rasterizer, and a Pi Nano for generating the waves the head needs from its PIO.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday February 25 2022, @08:48PM
And why not have a personal barcode scanner? They're not that expensive [amazon.com], and now they do bluetooth, dongle-RF, and wired-USB, even straight into your cell phone's Google spreadsheet if you like. Now that you mention it, I wonder why the CueCat didn't offer those options at the time ;-)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday February 25 2022, @02:12PM (5 children)
I suppose this problem is easily solvable at the hardware hacking level. RFID readers, usually standalone chips with (internal) or without (external) antenna and serial stuff are quite clear to understand and communicate with.
Once the relevant I2C link is identified in a specific scheme of a printer, it can be injected with any data necessary. Arduino platform is your friend. Or, you can try to cut a transponder chip from some original cartridge and glue it to the receiver internally forever. Depends on how antenna is engineered in the device itself.
Long ago I used to say, "A hacker without oscilloscope is not a real hacker."
Dear fellow programmers, do not be afraid of wires!
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday February 25 2022, @02:41PM (1 child)
Lots of lines of attack besides the h/w one. It might not even need protocol analysis, sometimes these manufacturers really cut corners in order to cut costs - there might even be a hack of just pulling a line up or down and have that be an "always yes" response. Eventually there has to be something that's just a signal of "yes/no".
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @03:56PM
Just like the chips in ink cartridges the RFID tag likely includes its own counter, and reverse engineering it is illegal under the DMCA.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @05:05PM (1 child)
I can't imagine that they're putting it in the paper itself, I imagine that if every sheet of paper had its own chip then it would be too expensive plus wouldn't all the RFID chips be interfering with each other(?).
I imagine it's in the role overall (but people are saying it's in the paper because they don't know any better), one chip per role is much cheaper.
Just steal the chip from the role and place it in a knock off role.
Or, if it really is in the paper, steal one chip from a piece of paper and place it right next to the reader so that it thinks it's a legitimate sheet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @05:10PM
(and, yes, there could be a counter, as others pointed out, but most companies tend to cut corners and all of that is unlikely since it adds cost and many people won't put in all that much effort to circumvent it(?). Just try it assuming there is no counter first and if you find there is then move to the next step up the chain of ways to circumvent it I suppose?).
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday February 25 2022, @08:51PM
Since so much is software-based nowadays, would you accept "A hacker without a network protocol analyzer is not a real hacker?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @02:49PM (1 child)
I still have one, no refills around anymore...
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_XChCcLljTKM/TRF8Oc7OenI/AAAAAAAABCs/EXrbnJHzWIk/s1600/Dymo%2527s+Embosser.jpg [blogspot.com]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday February 25 2022, @04:33PM
Look for Dymo Embossing refill on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Aken-Compatible-Replacement-Embossing-Organizer/dp/B07FK7LM3Y [amazon.com]
The internet is a lovely thing, when it works.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @05:10PM
The 1970s clicky-clack label maker that we had as kids and used to put our names on lunch-boxes is, by definition, off-patent since it's a very old device. Gentlemen, start your 3D printers. It's the height of arrogance to think they can pull this kind of crap with such a simple device.
If you over-pay for Dymo products, you have only yourself to blame. There are so many work-arounds for this it isn't even funny. Just use ordinary tape and a sharpie if you don't care about the font. Get a nice wide piece of that tape, put it across the forehead of whoever came up with this, and write DOUCHE on it.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday February 25 2022, @07:29PM
More like another reason to hate THIS COMPANY. I, for one, don't hate printers. My printer is one of the easiest to use and most reliable pieces of equipment I own.
Death to Dymo, may they go out of business quickly.
Impeach Donald Palpatine and his sidekick Elon Vader
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Friday February 25 2022, @07:37PM (1 child)
All of these comments, and I don't see any mention of competitors. No time to research right now, unfortunately. But people should make their voices heard that they disagree with this shit - let any potential competitors know that people are interested in an alternative.
Pfff, a couple of years ago, I bought a cheap Dymo labeler from our favorite Mart of Wal. If I had known they might do shit like this I would have looked elsewhere. I was actually pleasantly surprised to find something with an actual keypad rather than some consumertard shit that requires a smart phone because... because smart phones.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 26 2022, @03:35AM
An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. If one company does it others will follow and the few that remain will be bought out. Or, given how utterly broken our patent system is, someone will somehow acquire the needed intellectual property to keep competitors out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @09:14PM
I had a machine room label printer that did that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 26 2022, @06:56PM