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Comment by danans | Hacker News Reader

> Silo it off and just leave it be.

Not really possible. It's an internet service that talks to large number of different printers from different manufacturers.

Besides the code management issues others have mentioned, services like this require a great deal of product and partner coordination and testing effort to ensure that even small security patches don't break the heterogeneous ecosystem of devices.

More importantly, CUPS and driverless printing standards have solved the problem (os-specific print drivers) that cloud print was designed to work around.

Disclosure: Google employee but not on cloud print, though I use it on my personal printer.

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> Not really possible. It's an internet service that talks to large number of different printers from different manufacturers.

Of course it's possible. Those printers are not getting updates, either. Nobody is changing the printer side of this. And if they were it'd be a change in the protocol. It's easy to just freeze the protocol (which already happened years ago), and if any printer manufacturer wants something new then can go fork off and do their own thing. That's very different from breaking something old which is what's happening here.

> More importantly, CUPS and driverless printing standards have solved the problem (os-specific print drivers) that cloud print was designed to work around.

CUPS still needs printer-specific drivers to do the actual printing part. And how widespread are driverless printing standards? Do such printers actually exist in consumer households? My Dell printer from just a few years ago certainly isn't.

> Those printers are not getting updates, either. Nobody is changing the printer side of this

Of course things change. Security protocols get upgraded. New attack vectors are discovered in protocols and need to be fixed. New devices with new capabilities are created and need API integration. That all requires human effort to make happen. All of that has to be worth the cost of maintaining the project.

> CUPS still needs printer-specific drivers to do the actual printing part.

Even if it needs them, the point is that it has them now, probably due in no small part ot the fact that CUPS is used on the Mac.

> Of course things change.

Except they don't. The clients are frozen in time forever. There's no change happening here. It doesn't matter if they should be changed, they aren't being changed. Printer firmware does not get updates.

> New attack vectors are discovered in protocols and need to be fixed.

IF that ever happens, which is super duper unlikely, then kill it since the clients are unfixable. But this is not an ongoing cost. There's no continuous change aspect to that at all.

> New devices with new capabilities are created and need API integration.

That's not change, that's new features. As I said, simply tell those things to go do their own thing. That's unrelated to leaving Cloud Print on life support.

> Printer firmware does not get updates.

Sounds like you've never owned a printer before...

> IF that ever happens, which is super duper unlikely, then kill it since the clients are unfixable.

So have a possible security hole with no active developers until a third party finds a vulnerability, then shut it down?

> But this is not an ongoing cost.

You would still require SRE support for keeping this thing up running. You would also open yourself up to a lot of risk, losing user trust and potential lawsuits if it ever was hacked.

Everything you wrote sounds like an elaborate troll but I'm assuming that you've just never worked on a large system before.

https://www.google.com/cloudprint/learn/printers/

Yep, to highlight some problems on the printer firmware side:

- outdated RootCA list, forcing Googles endpoint to stay on old CAs

- devices not supporting newer TLS versions like TLS1.2, TLS1.3 etc

- ossification of auth mechanism

> So have a possible security hole with no active developers until a third party finds a vulnerability, then shut it down?

This is true of every internet protocol. Being staffed at all does not mean the protocol or server has active security research being done on it. It usually doesn't. Taking people off of the work of constant churn from refractors and internal tail chasing doesn't actually change much.

> Sounds like you've never owned a printer before...

Sounds like you're just trolling but I'm going to assume you've just never seen a printer or worked on a stable system before.

And how widespread are driverless printing standards?

Very widespread. Most consumers printers support AirPrint for iOS and MacOS.

What are you going to use after this? A internet available print server? VPN?

The problem I had that cloudprint solved was printing from a Linux machine to a local non-Linux-compatible printer. With CUPS and driverless printers, this is no longer a problem. I don't generally need to print remotely to my printer.

Well... I do and I choose my printers based on availability for remote printing.

You forget that there are a lot of cases where elderly people can't print shit and need actual paperwork.

> You forget that there are a lot of cases where elderly people can't print shit and need actual paperwork

I'm guessing you are referring to a scenario where you have configured an elderly person's printer to allow you to print directly to it, sort of like a one way fax machine? I can see how that could be useful for some people, but it's a very rare use case, and hard to argue for maintaining the cloud print service based on that.

There appear to be alternatives for this specific use case, like HP ePrint, or you could set up a VPN to use in these situations. You could also just use printer that hooks up directly to eFax: https://www.faxcompare.com/blog/signing-up-for-efax-with-you...

More importantly, CUPS and driverless printing standards have solved the problem (os-specific print drivers) that cloud print was designed to work around.

Guess who owns CUPS?

No one? It is an open standard originally created by Apple.

Apple owns the copyright to the CUPS software that runs on Linux and Macs.

But the point being that unlike Google, Apple has supported CUPS and actively developed the software for well over a decade even though it doesn’t profit directly from it.

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