Well, in some bit of good news in this current cyberpunk dystopia we find ourselves in, it looks like the consumers have spoken and forced a big company to walk back their stupid money grab surveillance capitalism plans. Score one for the good guys!
HP stops producing their “always-online” line of printers and their forced ink subscriptions.
Hopefully some enterprising hackers will homebrew a few workarounds when HP finally bricks these things remotely.
Yeah, that last bit in the chunk posted on Slashdot was kinda like a little “screw you” middle finger to some of those folks. “Oh, we made a bad decision that nobody likes, but we’re still not going to give you access to all the functionality that you could have and that you paid for because we’re asshats.”
Still not a good look for HP. I kinda hope that this activity kind of blackballs them forever in the minds of consumers when it comes to printers. Just some shady shit and some very anti-user dark patterns there, which I’m sure they’ll try again.
I wonder how difficult it would be to hack their software and enable those features? Maybe some chip swapping would be necessary?
I’ve sworn off anything they make at this point. The printer division is probably pretty typical of where they’re heads are at.
At the risk of sounding pessimistic (though on this topic I’ll concede such is the truth):
HP has been showing their true colors for years now with respect to all sorts of consumer-devices, but especially printers. If people haven’t gotten it by now, I’ve not much faith that they’ll have a sudden moment of clarity.