EFF to Texas AG: Epson Tricked Its Customers with a Dangerous Fake Update
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The August security update (only delivered last week) disabled NFC support unless you used a sim card from a specific network provider (who had presumably paid for exclusive NFC ability).
'Once installed, this update cannot be removed' say the release notes, with no details about lost functionality.
My phone just lost a feature, and I'm not happy about it.
As my friends updated, their coverage went from usable to not working indoors, with no warning that an update was disabling part of their LTE radio. Very scummy business practice, it is not good to let Motorola continue to abuse customers like this with no consequences.
I think some consoles used to charge a lot of money to vet an update for a game. I wonder if that pushed devs to update less often and test/prepare more.
If you're on Android, you can disable update notifications from the app store settings.
If you get gratuitous notifications from an app to remind you of its existence, you'll blame the app for being annoying.
The same stigma doesn't get attached to app updates.
That said, I have seen mobile game devs show daily user charts that rise (relative to installs) after updates. It wouldn't shock me if people had decided to capitalize on that.
*I think malicious is the right word - it is done in the knowledge that it will result in higher costs and inconvenience for customers without consent.
"These updates secure the user against using dangerous counterfeit cartridges that might damage the printer"
If you really wanna push it, they might add something like
"Moreover, these counterfeit cartridges could come with malicious hardware meant to infect the printer"
Because sure, if you wanna get really inventive you probably could get some kind of hack going by getting hardware in the printer.
Brother, enough said. No bullshit preventing you from using refilled cartridges if you want, their hardware doesn't randomly die as much as competing brands, etc. Heck, even if you go with OEM cartridges they aren't too bad either.
My current recommendation is the Canon MG2500 series: They can scan, copy, and print, you can often get them for about $20-25, and they come with ink. And if they stop working, you can just toss them and get new ones. It may or may not be more economical to just buy a new printer every time you run out of ink.
I think that might have been an issue ten+ years ago.
The EFF's position here is the kind of misguided idealistic thinking that has destroyed housing affordability by shutting down the less-than-ideal housing and boarding options that used to be available to day laborers, etc. There is no free lunch--if you make it illegal to sell cheap, restricted printers, manufacturers won't just sell unrestricted printers for the same price. They'll sell better printers for more money, and price out the bottom of the market.
Printers are a low-margin, highly competitive business, which means that you get what you pay for. If you want a reliable printer with low cartridge costs, get a business-grade laser printer.
The EFF isn't just complaining about selling "cheap, restricted printers" though. Epson chose to sell a cheap unrestricted printers, people bought them knowing they were unrestricted, and then Epson restricted them after sale.
It'd be like if Tesla had a lower cost car and thought they could make up some costs by charging you a large premium at their Superchargers on road trips. You bought the car knowing that topping it up in your garage overnight was enough for your usual commute.
Then a year later they decide they aren't making enough money at the chargers because people haven't been using them. Now they push out a "Security Update" that makes your car refuse to charge anywhere but the Supercharger, which happens to cost 500x the going rate of electricity.
Somehow I don't think people would be OK with that.
> the letter also notes the practice of disallowing third party cartridges in general is nefarious.
Maybe printer boxes should be required to list the MSRP and page capacity of compatible ink cartridges on the box so you have some idea of what you're getting into. As is, any printer company that tries to avoid this race to the bottom on up-front cost ends up pricing themselves out of the market because it isn't apparent that the running costs are lower.
This is far from the case. The majority of people who buy 'cheap' printers do not know how expensive they are to run. Even if the manufacturer displays the # pages a cartridge can print, these numbers usually assume 5% page coverage, which is very low compared to the eye-catching sample prints shown on the printer's box.
All of this is intended to mislead consumers.
I like how in supermarkets (in the UK at least), shelf labels clearly show the price per kg, or per ml. So it's easy to compare items. And I like how there are regulations for how efficiency (and hence running costs) is measured for cars and washing machines.
Maybe we need similar regulation for printers: you can sell anything you want, but the ongoing cost must be calculated in a specific way, consistent across all manufacturers and models, and must be displayed prominently.
I have a different theory--power users want to have their cake and eat it too. People who print a lot lose under this model, because it shifts costs from light users to heavy users. From their perspective, it would be better to have expensive printers and cheap ink. (The same is true for price discrimination generally. Apple's pricing practices are good for people who can get away with a 32GB iPhone, bad for people who need a 256GB one.) Or, they're simply ignorant of the economics, and think that printer companies could offer unrestricted printers for the same price by cutting into their fat, fat profit margins.
No they're not. The cartridges aren't usually on a shelf at all.
Epson's ink cartridge retail packaging is designed to be hung on a hook.
"Yes, that's not the coverage for eye-catching sample prints on the box, but you also won't achieve the EPA-estimated gas mileage driving the way they show in car commercials."
Right, but the way EPA-estimated gas mileage is close to the way real people drive. The 4%-5% coverage listed in the PDF you linked is not, especially given that most home injket users are printing photos, web pages, and their kids' school stuff.
Not only is this true morally--you agreed to the deal, you should be bound by it--but it's economically efficient. It allows mutually beneficial transactions to happen that otherwise would not.
That way they wouldn't be caught.
But given how expensive these are anyway I'm surprised they don't use PK cryptography (micros are really cheap these days) to authenticate themselves to the printer. Extracting private key could quite difficult with appropriate chip used (still cheap). And the keys could be put in batches that correlate with the cartridge expiration date.
When people can perform bad acts like this (see: VW) and not fear any personal consequences this behavior becomes common and acceptable.
If you hit them in the bottom line every time, they'll learn to police themselves. (Or perish. Either is fine.)
Our economy is less like a cabal of fat cats twirling mustaches and puffing cigars at the thought of how they can further disenfranchise the poor, and more like an ecosystem.
It's not like CEOs will even suffer, they'll probably get a fat comp bonus to try and keep them from jumping ship in the middle of bankruptcy proceeding.
An ecosystem with a cabal of fat cats twirling mustaches and puffing cigars at the thought of how they can further disenfranchise the poor sitting at the top of the food chain, sure.
One of the ways they do that is to assure that workers have a trivial stake in the same things that the rich depend primarily on, so as to provide a basis for propaganda misleading the masses about a shared interest.
As of this week, the lowest paid Amazon employee is less that 2,000$ away from being part of the global 1%
We all consume like the world is going to leave us tomorrow but complain about the system that lets us?
I’m from a 3rd world country, and even there, with all the exploitation and government mismanagement I wouldn’t buy that argument easily.
But in the West? Even the poorest gain too much to wash their hands and say “this system doesn’t do anything for me”
Maybe it doesn’t do as much for you as you’d like, but if it collapsed tomorrow morning and we “ate the rich”, their quality of living would be strictly worse than it is today.
That’s not propaganda, that’s simple logic.
Ironically I think if the entire world “ate the rich”, most Americans saying “eat the rich” would be eaten.
PS, I hate when things are written off as propaganda. It’s too tautological: “Why is that false” “Because it’s propaganda”; “Why is it propaganda” “Because it’s false”. At least show the fault in the “propaganda”.
It's always funny to see people thinking their personal profits should come first over preventing widespread harm.
The loans people take out on their homes, the insurance on their cars and homes, and more tangibly, the companies involved in getting them the food they put on their tables for pennies on the dollar in raw value.
We’re all in on this. Just because you don’t get a yacht out of it doesn’t mean the system doesn’t benefit you.
When does that happen to execs in USA? This suggests that it has been a long time:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/05/americ...