Whether there is an all-powerful God or not, he or she definitely exists and hates printers. Like Bluetooth, printers go against God’s will, violating universal laws in such a way that they must be forced to malfunction in increasingly unimaginable ways. Therefore, the people who make them are cursed to do so pure evil in every action. HP is being sued again.
Printers have never worked. Well, never, if anyone ever needed it. They work when you first set them up and they print out this page of text to get your hopes up, but when you need to print your boarding pass and the flight leaves in 43 minutes it doesn’t even light up. This is because, as already explained, they represent blasphemy against our Creator.
The problem is that printer technology has improved so much in recent years that paper jams are far less likely, and complicated digital screens can give us more coherent feedback about why only the left side of the image is printing, which you absolutely need to be done already . In response, printer manufacturers had to step up their game and resort to new means of rendering the machines unusable at any moment. HP is really stepping up in this regard and trying to stop people from using affordable third-party ink cartridges in their powerful devices.
This is all done via a wonderful piece of hardware DRM called Dynamic Security, where HP printers look for a chip on ink cartridges and, if it isn’t its own, the printer throws a hissy fit and refuses to work. It’s totally fucked up and everything Ars Technica Reports, has cost the company millions of dollars in settled cases in recent years. Yet despite all the many times the company has paid out cash to avoid lawsuits, it’s still up to the same old trick. Because of this, another lawsuit was filed, this time in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, seeking $5 million and a jury trial.
This new case claims that HP released a firmware update for printers in late 2022 that instructed everyone to fold their arms and refuse to work, right after a price increase for their own ink. The ink that costs more than just buying another printer.
Don’t forget, this is the same company that offers the Instant Ink “subscription service,” which encourages customers to sign a contract where they’ll be charged for the ink whether they use it or not. You pay a monthly fee to HP for the right to get more ink when your current cartridge runs out, even if it doesn’t run out for months, as I discovered to my great embarrassment.
In fact, I only discovered this after I purchased a new, official HP ink cartridge for my printer, because a replacement cartridge had been shipped months before and printing was so infrequent that I had completely forgotten about it. And guess what?! The companys own cartridge refused to work because it was not an Instant Ink machine. That was…spectacular. The other one was lost, but because he hadn’t reported back that it was used up, I couldn’t get a new one…
Why should HP be allowed to force its printers to only work with proprietary cartridges? Well, there’s no reason why she keeps spending millions of dollars to settle all these cases. Did I cover this tech story on a gaming site just to complain about how much I hate HP? I definitely did!
We contacted HP and asked why the company continues to pay out so much money but doesn’t stop the practice.
