Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK Profile picture
Nov 5, 2020 20 tweets 5 min read Read on X
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.

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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.

eff.org/deeplinks/2020…

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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.

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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

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* 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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

eff.org/deeplinks/2016…

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(One year later, they did it again)

gizmodo.com/one-year-after…

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

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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.

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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.

13/
Enter HP Instant Ink.

support.hp.com/us-en/document…

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.

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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.

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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.

16/ Image
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.

17/ Image
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.

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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.

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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.

eof/

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More from @doctorow

Jan 25
The core regulatory proposition of the tech industry is "it's not a crime if we do it with an app." It's not an unlicensed taxi if we do it with an app. It's not an illegal hotel room if we do it with an app.

1/  Two caricatures of top-hatted millionaires whose bodies are bulging money-sacks. Their heads have been replaced with potatoes. The potatoes' eyes have been replaced with the hostile red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' They stand in a potato field filled with stoop laborers. The sky is a 'code waterfall' as seen in the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies.   Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg  CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/pot…

2/
It's not an unregistered security if we do it with an app. It's not wage theft if we do it with an app.

3/
Read 34 tweets
Jan 24
"Boss politics" are a feature of corrupt societies. When a society is dominated by self-dealing, corrupt institutions, strongman leaders can seize control by appealing to the public's fury and desperation.

1/ An altered version of a Gilded Age editorial cartoon titled 'Who controls the Senate?' which depicts the Senate as populated by tiny, ineffectual politicians ringed by massive, bloated, brooding monopolists. A door labeled 'people's entrance.' is firmly locked. A sign reads, 'This is a senate of the monopolists, by the monopolists and for the monopolists.' The image has been altered: an editorial cartoon of Boss Tweed, portrayed as a portly man in a business suit with a money-bag for a head, stands in the foreground. He is wearing a MAGA hat. On his shoulder perches a tiny, 'big stick' swin...
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2025/01/24/enf…

2/
Then, the boss can selectively punish corrupt entities that oppose him, and since *everyone* is corrupt, these will be valid prosecutions.

3/
Read 49 tweets
Jan 22
Turns out Donald Trump isn't the only world leader with a tech billionaire "first buddy" who gets to serve as an unaccountable, self-interested de facto business regulator. UK PM Kier Starmer has just handed the keys to the British economy over to Jeff Bezos.

1/ A vintage Puck cover illustration depicting a tophatted millionaire as a puppeteer, operating two marionettes, one dressed as a general, the other as a businessman. It has been altered: the puppeteer's face has been replaced with Jeff Bezos's. The general marionette's face has been replaced with Keir Starmer's. The other marionette's face has been replaced with a vintage oil pastel drawing of an outraged bricklayer in a folded paper hat. The puppet theater is surmounted by the UK royal crest.   Image: UK Parliament/Maria Unger (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Keir_Starmer_...
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/aut…

2/
Oh, not literally. But here's what's happened: the UK's Competitions and Markets Authority, an organisation charged with investigating and punishing tech monopolists (like Amazon) has just been turned over to Doug Gurr, the guy who used to run Amazon UK.

3/
Read 50 tweets
Jan 20
Many of us have left the big social media platforms; far more of us *wish* we could leave them; and even those of us who've escaped from Facebook/Insta and Twitter still spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get the people we care about off of them, too.

1/ A page out of a medieval hand-illuminated grimoire; it is an illustration of a tree, with each branch terminating in a demon; these branches are annotated in an unknown script. The demons have been replaced with 19th century caricatures of shouting millionaire industrialists.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/cap…

2/
It's lazy and easy to think that our friends who are stuck on legacy platforms run by Zuckerberg and Musk lack the self-discipline to wean themselves off of these services.

3/
Read 93 tweets
Jan 18
We're less than a month into 2025 and I'm already overwhelmed by my backlog of links! Herewith, then, is my 25th linkdump post, a grab-bag of artful transitions between miscellaneous subjects. Here's the previous 24:



1/ pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/A pile of miscellaneous junk.  Image: Jen (cropped) https://www.flickr.com/photos/jenrab/4877784036  CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2025/01/18/rag…

2/
Last week's big tech event was the Supreme Court giving the go-ahead for Congress to ban Tiktok, because somehow the First Amendment allows the US government to shut down a speech forum if they don't like the content of its messages.

3/
Read 101 tweets
Jan 15
Five years ago, Trump touted his "big, beautiful" replacement for NAFTA, the "free trade agreement" between the US, Mexico and Canada. Trump's NAFTA-2 was called the USMCA (US-Mexico-Canada Agreement) and it was pretty similar to NAFTA, to be honest.

1/ A 19th century painting depicting the burning of the White House during the War of 1812. The white Xes on the soldiers' uniforms have been replaced with white Canadian maple leaves.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/bea…

2/
That tells you a couple things: first, NAFTA was, broadly speaking a good thing for Trump and the ultra-wealthy donors who backed him (and got far richer as a result). That's why he kept it intact.

3/
Read 57 tweets

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