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Comment by dividedbyzero | Hacker News Reader

During the pandemic I had a Canon all-in-one printer with ADF and bells and whistles that refused to let me use the scanner if one of the ink cartridges was empty, which happened all the time because the self-cleaning used a ton of ink and ran every time I wanted to use the ADF scanner, and while it did support pushing PDFs to a NAS via Samba, only a hopelessly insecure stone age version of Samba was actually implemented. The thing was an utter pos, it's crazy that it could be sold like that.

I've since replaced it with a standalone Brother b&w laser printer and an HP ADF scanner and lo and behold both devices just work, I can scan and process my mail using scanline and python and print the occasional document and both devices take up less space than the Canon pos.

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So how does HP make money from that scanner? Is it limited to a number of pages per month or pay per scan? Oh I know, 1200dpi scanning is enabled with your subscription? I mean surely they don't just sell it to you as a physical product and then let you use it?!?!

I know, right!

How can they still sell you a product that doesn't use a little digital green man on a circuit board to cross his arms and demand you pay rent to use the hardware you legally bought and now (in theory only) own?

Those fools. Don't they see that there's rent to be extracted here? If you teach a man to fish, he might fish without paying you.

If you build a fishing pole that refuses to cast unless he inserts a quarter... fishing and paying you become inseparable! Genius!

Do you realize where you are? Poe's law, man.

You're on a board frequented not just by technical types, but MBA's as well (VC).

Sometimes, as tempting as it is to post a sarcastic remark, it's better to just remain silent rather than sowing the seeds of misery by making $exceedingly_bad_idea tangible to the PHB who'll eventually try to get people to implement it for them.

If you don't want to see it, don't bring it up in any way. Lord knows, the fool is out there that'll think "that's a revolutionary idea!"

If you think this behavior isn't already standard practice... you're living under a rock.

This has become the bread and butter of digital age capitalism: Sell a fancy device. Include digital green bouncer on board. Make the device stop working (or cut off features) using the digital green bouncer if payment stops.

Why do work when you can just keep charging for the work you already did?

Personally - it's WAY too fucking late for mere obscurity to stop this. It's time for "Fucking nuke it from orbit with regulation" type approaches. Or, more likely and also much sadder - feudalism.

My bet is that feudalism is going to come back in a major, major way. But your lord is going to hand out keys to digital devices instead of titles to land.

My hope is that we manage to enforce legislation requiring manufacturers to provide all keys to a device. In the same way that it's not legal to sell a home and refuse to provide the keys.

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