[Plura-list] HP ends its customers' lives

[Cory Doctorow]

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Baycon 2020 - where I was scheduled to be guest of honor - has
reconstituted as a series of online panels; mine's tomorrow:

How do we survive Social Engineering?
https://baycon.org/baycon-2021-zoom-mini-con-3-november-7th/

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Today's links

* HP ends its customers' lives: "Free ink for life" vs "Pray I don't
alter it further."

* This day in history: 2019

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing
projects, current reading

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😤 HP ends its customers' lives

HP never stopped innovating. From its origins in the 1930s as a leading
electronics manufacturer to its role in the birth of PCs and performance
servers, it has always demonstrated incredible ingenuity.

Today, that ingenuity is deployed in service of evil ink-based fuckery.

The printer-ink business model has always been a form of commercial
sadism in which you are expected to put giant manufacturers' interests
ahead of your own with no expectation of any sort of reciprocity.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

After all, when your profits depend on charging more for ink than
vintage Veuve-Clicquot, you need to get up to some serious shenanigans
to get your customers to drain their bank accounts to fill their printers.

By contemporary standards, the opening hostilities in the ink-wars look
positively quaint:

* Manufacturing special half-full cartridges to ship with new printers
so their owners have to buy a new set just days after the open the box

* Requiring frequent "calibration" printouts that use vast amounts of ink

* Gimmicking cartridges' sensors to declare them "empty" even when
there's still ink in them

Thing is, all of this just makes official printer ink less desirable and
fuels demand for third party ink.

For this to work, you need to win a two-front war: one on your customers
and the other on your competitors. HP is fighting both.

First they pioneered the use of DRM to detect and prevent third-party ink.

Then when ink makers started making their own chips, or harvesting chips
out of discarded cartridges to use in new ones, HP got US customs to
seize the product, calling it a patent infringement.

But the real ugliness started in March 2016, when HP pushed out a fake
"security update" for inkjet printers. Owners who ran the update saw
nothing, just a software version number that went up by one.

What they didn't know was that they've been given an asymptomatic
infection - a malicious update that only kicked in five months later,
after everyone had had a good long time to update. That update's real
purpose was to detect and reject third party ink.

It went off right after school started, stranding cash-strapped parents
with a year's worth of ink for their kids' school projects. People were
outraged. HP issued a nonpology.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/what-hp-must-do-make-amends-its-self-destructing-printers

(One year later, they did it again)

https://gizmodo.com/one-year-after-bricking-third-party-ink-with-update-hp-1809073739

Every time HP got caught doing something evil, they had the same excuse:
"that's the deal we offered and you accepted it."

For example, if the box says "Works best with HP ink," then you are
"agreeing" that it might not work with other ink. Nevermind that the
only reason your printer doesn't work with other ink is that HP tricked
you into downgrading it so that the ink stopped working.

This is the grifter's all-purpose excuse: "If you didn't want me to rip
you off, then why did you click 'I agree'?"

HP was just getting started, though. In the ideal world, you wouldn't
even own your printer ink, you'd just *rent* it.

Enter HP Instant Ink.

https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c03760650

This  is "ink as a service." You pre-commit to printing a certain number
of pages/month and they mail you ink, which they own. You're not buying
the ink, you're buying the right to use it.

If you don't print your quota in a month, some of the pages roll over,
but they don't let you bank more than a few months' worth - and to keep
those pages, you have to keep paying for your sub. Meanwhile, if you
blow through your limit, you get charged for every page.

This is a weird and unpalatable idea, so to sell it, HP rolled out a
pay-on-price "Free Ink for Life" plan that gave you 15 pages every month
for as long as you owned your printer.

But this is HP we're talking about, so words have no meaning. Last
month, HP notified its "free ink for life" customers that their life had
ended, and they were being moved to a new afterlife where they had to
pay $0.99/month, forever, or else.

This Darth Vader "Pray I don't alter it further" shit is the most
on-brand HP thing ever

Worse still are the many imitators HP inspires - all those companies
that have decided that it's your solemn duty to arrange your affairs to
suit their shareholders' needs.

The right-to-repair criminals like Apple, John Deere and Medtronic.
Tesla and GM, Juicero and Keurig - companies that are not merely content
with waging war on customers, but also on competitors who offer those
customers shelter.

Since the turn of this century, HP has been shedding its productive
business units that make useful products, and focusing its legal and
engineering departments on innovations in shitty dystopian hack-futurism.

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😤 This day in history

#1yrago How to reengineer our systems to address climate change’s
refugee crisis and create new, high-density cities on demand
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJWPv3Cl5Go

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😤 Colophon

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel
about truth and reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 516 words (81455
total).

Currently reading: The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson

Latest podcast: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 21)
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/11/01/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-21/

Upcoming appearances:

* How do we survive Social Engineering? Nov 7, Baycon,
https://baycon.org/baycon-2021-zoom-mini-con-3-november-7th/

* How to Fix the Internet/Reboot 2020, Nov 9,
https://www.rebootconference.org/day-two

* Cyberterrorists, Post-Apocalyptic Landscapes, and
Were-Pomeranians/Texas Book Festival, Nov 12,
https://www.texasbookfestival.org/events/cyberterrorists-post-apocalyptic-landscapes-and-were-pomeranians-new-in-speculative-fiction/

* Let's Talk About Influence/Designthinkers, Nov 16,
https://www.designthinkers.com/week-2/strategy-lets-talk-about-influence

* Shaping the Digital Future Summit/Kaspersky, Nov 17, details TBD

* Misinformation and Disinformation in Science Fiction and Fantasy/LITA,
Nov 17, details TBD

* Keynote, Data Natives, Nov 18, https://datanatives.io/tickets/

* Keynote, Cologne Futures, Nov 20, details TBD

* Keynote, Cybersummit 2020, Nov 26 https://www.cybera.ca/cyber-summit-2020/

* Beaverbrook Lecture: How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, Nov 30,
https://www.mcgill.ca/maxbellschool/channels/event/2020-beaverbrook-annual-lecture-part-ii-cory-doctorow-325538

* Keynote, NISO Plus, Feb 22-25,
https://niso.plus/cory-doctorow-to-keynote-at-niso-plus-2021/

Recent appearances:

* Author Stories Podcast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxSPZn8EGTE

* The Gould Standard:
https://www.glenngould.ca/thegouldstandard/#cory-doctorow

* Attack Surface: A Reckoning
https://draxfiles.com/2020/10/26/show-278-attack-surface-a-reckoning/

Latest book:

* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone
technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political
cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution
and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies
* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet
analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a
solution.
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies
here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime,
gender, and kicking ass. Order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed
copy here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.

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When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla -Joey "Accordion Guy"
DeVilla

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