Pluralistic: A sexy, skinny defeat device for your HP ink cartridge (30 Sep 2024)

doctorow · 30 September 2024 18:05

Originally published at: Pluralistic: A sexy, skinny defeat device for your HP ink cartridge (30 Sep 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

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A sexy, skinny defeat device for your HP ink cartridge: A machine in the middle that's too cheap to meter.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023
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Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Colophon: All the rest.

The flexible, adhesive-backed 'sticker' circuit board that man-in-the-middles an HP printer cartridge.

A sexy, skinny defeat device for your HP ink cartridge (permalink)

Animals keep evolving into crabs; it's a process called "carcinisation" and it's pretty weird. Crabs just turn out to be extremely evolutionarily fit for our current environment:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-animals-keep-evolving-into-crabs/

By the same token, all kinds of business keep evolving into something like a printer company. It turns out that in this enshittified, poorly regulated, rentier-friendly world, the parasitic, inkjet business model is extremely adaptive. Printerinisation is everywhere.

All that stuff you hate about your car? Trapping you into using their mechanics, spying on you, planned obsolescence? All lifted from the inkjet printer business model:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

That GE fridge that won't make ice or dispense water unless you spend $50 for a proprietary charcoal filter instead of using a $10 generic? Pure printerism:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/12/digital-feudalism/#filtergate

The software update to your Sonos speakers that makes them half as useful and takes away your right to play your stored music, forcing you to buy streaming music subscriptions? Straight out of the HP playbook:

https://www.wired.com/story/sonos-admits-its-recent-app-update-was-a-colossal-mistake/

But as printerinized as all these gadgets are, none can quite attain the level of high enshittification that the OG inkjet bastards attain on a daily basis. In the world championships of effortlessly authentic fuckery, no one can lay a glove on the sociopathic monsters of HP.

For example: when HP wanted to soften us all up for a new world of "subscription ink" (where you have to pre-pay every month for a certain number of pages' worth of printing, which your printer enforces by spying on you and ratting you out to HP over the internet), they offered a "lifetime subscription" plan. With this "lifetime" plan, you paid just once and your HP printer would print out 15 pages a month for so long as you owned your printer, with HP shipping you new ink every time you ran low.

Well, eventually, HP got bored of not making you pay rent on your own fucking printer, so they just turned that plan off. Yeah, it was a lifetime plan, but the "lifetime" in question was the lifetime of HP's patience for not fucking you over, and that patience has the longevity of a mayfly:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/06/horrible-products/#inkwars

It would take many pages to list all of HP's sins here. This is a company that ships printers with half-full ink cartridges and charges more than the printer cost to buy a replacement set. The company that won't let you print a black-and-white page if you're out of yellow ink. The company that won't let you scan or send a fax if you're out of any of your ink.

They make you "recalibrate" your printer or "clean your heads" by forcing you to print sheets of ink-dense paper. They also refuse to let you use your ink cartridges after they "expire."

HP raised the price of ink to over $10,000 per gallon, then went to war against third-party ink cartridge makers, cartridge remanufacturers, and cartridge refillers. They added "security chips" to their cartridges whose job was to watch the ink levels in your cartridge and, when they dip below a certain level (long before the cartridge is actually empty), declare the cartridge to be dry and permanently out of use.

Even if you refill that cartridge, it will still declare itself to be empty to your printer, which will therefore refuse to print.

Third party ink companies have options here. One thing they could do is reverse-engineer the security chip, and make compatible ones that say, "Actually, I'm full." The problem with this is that laws like Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) potentially makes this into a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine, for a first offense.

DMCA 1201 bans bypassing "an effective means of access control" to a copyrighted work. So if HP writes a copyrighted "I'm empty" program for its security chip and then adds some kind of access restriction to prevent you from dumping and reverse-engineering that program, you can end up a felon, thanks to the DMCA.

Another countermove is to harvest security chips out of dead cartridges that have been sent overseas as e-waste (one consequence of HP's $10,000/gallon ink racket is that it generates mountains of immortal, toxic e-waste that mostly ends up poisoning poor countries in the global south). These can be integrated into new cartridges, or remanufactured ones.

In practice, ink companies do all of this and more, and total normie HP printer owners go to extremely improbable lengths to find third party ink cartridges and figure out how to use them. It turns out that even people who find technology tinkering intimidating or confusing or dull can be motivated to learn and practice a lot of esoteric tech stuff as an alternative to paying $10,000/gallon for colored water.

HP has lots of countermoves for this. One truly unhinged piece of fuckery is to ask Customs and Border Patrol to block third-party ink cartridges with genuine HP security chips that have been pried loose from e-waste shipments. HP claims that these are "counterfeits" (because they were removed and re-used without permission), even though they came out of real HP cartridges, and CBP takes them at their word, seizing shipments.

Even sleazier: HP pushes out fake security updates to its printers. You get a message telling you there's an urgent security update, you click OK, and your printer shows you a downloading/installing progress bar and reboots itself. As far as you can tell, nothing has changed. But these aren't "security" updates, they're updates that block third-party ink, and HP has designed them not to kick in for several months. That way, HP owners who get tricked into installing this downgrade don't raise hell online and warn everyone else until they've installed it too, and it's too late:

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

This is the infectious pathogen business model: one reason covid spread so quickly was that people were infectious before they developed symptoms. That meant that the virus could spread before the spreader knew they had it. By adding a long fuse to its logic bomb, HP greatly increases the spread of its malware.

But life finds a way. $10,000/gallon ink is an irresistible target for tinkerers, security researchers and competitors. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but the true parent of jaw-dropping ingenuity is callous, sadistic greed. That's why America's army of prisoners are the source of so many of the most beautiful and exciting forms of innovation seen today:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/09/king-rat/#mother-of-invention

Despite harsh legal penalties and the vast resources of HP, third-party ink continues to thrive, and every time HP figures out how to block one technique, three even cooler ones pop up.

Last week, Jay Summet published a video tearing down a third-party ink cartridge compatible with an HP 61XL:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0ya184uaTE

The third-party cartridge has what appears to be a genuine HP security chip, but it is overlaid with a paper-thin, flexible, adhesive-backed circuit board that is skinny enough that the cartridge still fits in an HP printer.

This flexible circuit board has its own little microchip. Summet theorizes that it is designed to pass the "are you a real HP cartridge" challenge pass to the security chip, but to block the followup "are you empty or full?" message. When the printer issues that challenge, the "man in the middle" chip answers, "Oh, I'm definitely full."

In their writeup, Hackaday identifies the chip as "a single IC in a QFN package." This is just so clever and delightful:

https://hackaday.com/2024/09/28/man-in-the-middle-pcb-unlocks-hp-ink-cartridges/

Hackaday also notes that HP CEO Enrique J Lores recently threatened to brick any printer discovered to be using third-party ink:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/hp-ceo-blocking-third-party-ink-from-printers-fights-viruses/

As William Gibson famously quipped, "the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." As our enshittification-rich environment drives more and more companies to evolve into rent-seeking enterprises through printerinisation, HP offers us a glimpse of the horrors of the late enshittocene.

It's just as Orwell prophesied: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a HP installing malware on your printer to force you to spend $10,000/gallon on ink – forever."

(Image: Jay Summet)

Hey look at this (permalink)

Guided by Vices https://pxlnv.com/blog/guided-by-vices/ (h/t Waxy)
FOOLISH MORTALS: A Haunted Mansion Burlesque Cabaret https://www.foolishmortalsburlesque.com/about (h/t Dan Howland)
The Internet Archive’s Fight to Save Itself https://www.wired.com/story/internet-archive-memory-wayback-machine-lawsuits/

A Wayback Machine banner.

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Asimov’s magazine on ebooks https://web.archive.org/web/20041010190341/https://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0408/onthenet2.shtml

#20yrsago Can suing customers save the record companies? https://web.archive.org/web/20041012170814/http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1095434496352

#20yrsago ACLU and EFF strike down part of PATRIOT Act https://web.archive.org/web/20040927082258/https://www.eff.org/news/archives/2004_09.php#001945

#20yrsago Industrial nations to WIPO: less IP, more global well-being https://web.archive.org/web/20041011201242/http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/ip-health/2004-September/006974.html

#20yrsago Court trashes fair use https://web.archive.org/web/20041009211351/https://www.eff.org/news/archives/2004_09.php#001962

#20yrsago EFF kicks Diebold’s ass https://web.archive.org/web/20041009211351/https://www.eff.org/news/archives/2004_09.php#001961

#20yrsago MSFT’s FAT shakedown suspended by Patent Office https://web.archive.org/web/20041009202717/http://www.pubpat.org/Microsoft_517_Rejected.htm

#20yrsago Sony ditches DRM CDs https://web.archive.org/web/20041010063144/http://www.engadget.com/entry/3586262161659249/

#20yrsago Canadian Creative Commons licenses launched https://web.archive.org/web/20041011105249/http://www.cippic.ca/en/projects-cases/icommons-canada/

#15yrsago Bank of America demands thumbprint from man with no arms https://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE58247Y20090903/

#15yrsago Britain seeks ban on glass pint-glasses to prevent bar-brawl injuries https://www.loweringthebar.net/2009/09/british-government-considers-mandating-plastic-pints.html

#15yrsago Trotsky: the graphic biography https://memex.craphound.com/2009/09/30/trotsky-the-graphic-biography/

#15yrsago BBC wants to encrypt “free” TV — talking points debunked https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/sep/29/bbc-hd-encryption

#15yrsago UK Border Agency’s pseudoscientific “race-detection” DNA/isotope tests has scientific experts “horrified” https://web.archive.org/web/20091004013349/http://blogs.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2009/09/nationality-tes-1.html

#15yrsago Zork rock anthem https://web.archive.org/web/20131110083129/http://www.elumir.com/music/Walkthrough.mp3

#15yrsago Apple 1984 ad, updated for 2009 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdVzboF2E2Q

#15yrsago Android developers pledge to make open equivalents to Google’s proprietary apps https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/09/android-community-aims-to-replace-googles-proprietary-bits/

#15yrsago Boneshaker: Cherie Priest’s swashbuckling steampunk Seattle story https://memex.craphound.com/2009/09/29/boneshaker-cherie-priests-swashbuckling-steampunk-seattle-story/

#15yrsago Faced with network surveillance, Hong Kong student demonstrators go P2P https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-29411159

#10yrsago Eric Holder’s terrible tech-liberties record https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/holders-disappointing-tech-legacy

#10yrsago Localizing an operating system for a language with no high-tech vocabulary https://web.archive.org/web/20191025222806/https://www.economist.com/international/2014/09/27/cookies-caches-and-cows

#5yrsago Stealing Ur Feelings: interactive documentary on the snakeoil “science” of facial emotion detection https://stealingurfeelin.gs

#5yrsago Jonathan Lethem on Edward Snowden’s “Permanent Record” https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/10/24/edward-snowden-labyrinth/

#1yrago The surveillance advertising to financial fraud pipeline https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/29/ban-surveillance-ads/#sucker-funnel

#1yrago The internet is not a (link)dump truck https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/30/mesclada/#melange

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, holding a mic.

Was There Ever an Old, Good Internet? David Graeber Institute (Remote), Oct 3
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUsduuprjgpG9C4SAenCK4jOsawnkxDrY_-#/registration
“Come distruggere il capitalismo della sorveglianza” (Pisa/Remote), Oct 12
https://www.internetfestival.it/programma/come-distruggere-il-capitalismo-della-sorveglianza/
SOSS Fusion (Atlanta), Oct 22
https://sossfusion2024.sched.com/speaker/cory_doctorow.1qm5qfgn
TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10
https://tusconscificon.com/
International Cooperative Alliance (New Delhi), Nov 24
https://icanewdelhi2024.coop/welcome/pages/Programme

A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)

Rethink: Is the internet getting worse?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0022z9r
Annie's Book Stop Of Worcester
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYM3WOPOMC0
DEF CON 32 – Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EmstuO0Em8

A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)

The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"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 https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
"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?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
"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/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025
Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Today's progress: words ( words total).
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025

Latest podcast: Vigilant (a Little Brother story) https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/09/29/vigilant-a-little-brother-story/

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