HP and Yahoo To Spam Your Printer 397
An anonymous reader writes "As many suspected when HP announced its web-connected printer, it didn't take long for the company to announce it will send 'targeted' advertisements to your new printer. So you'll get spammed, and you'll pay for the ink to print it. On the bright side, the FCC forbids unsolicited fax ads, so this will probably get HP on a collision course with the Feds."
So let me get this straight .... (Score:3, Interesting)
When I am printing my very important sales proposal - and HP/Yahoo inject spam into it - and this costs me my sale .... I can sue their balls off yes?
Reason #9839 not to buy HP printers... (Score:4, Interesting)
But really this is Quid pro quo, HP give you access to "free" services - in this case the web elements and in return you have to put up with a few adverts. It is in no way different from how GMail or HotMail operate. Will it cost you ink and make HP money, yes, but will you get the ability to e-mail printed documents to your printer and to automate printing web-content, also - yes.
If you want an honest printer than invest in a Kodak already -- or better yet a laser printer for B&W documents.
Firewall it (Score:4, Interesting)
No HP For Me (Score:4, Interesting)
Me: "Hello, Kodak? Yes, I'd like to buy one of your printers as long as you don't spam me with ads."
Kodak: "Sure, not a problem. We aren't like HP."
Me: "Awesome, I'll take ten."
Of course that wasn't a real conversation, but if I had the money for ten printers, you better believe I'm giving my money to Kodak (or Canon, Canon makes good printers).
donotwant! (Score:5, Interesting)
I am dumbfounded by HP's decision-making here. "What we discovered is that people were not bothered by it [an advertisement]," Nigro said. "Part of it I think our belief is you're used to it. You're used to seeing things with ads."
That sounds like a ringing endorsement for the printer. "Buy our printer! It will make you feel all warm and cozy because it has ads, like everything else in your life!" Ugh. It's appalling.
Re:The first planned spam... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Reason #9839 not to buy HP printers... (Score:0, Interesting)
HP is pretty much the only company that fully supports Linux. I support them because of that. You can go out right now and buy the latest HP all-in-one printer/scanner/fax and every damn feature will work on Linux just like Windows. You can't say the same of any other printer out there.
Test the laws (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The first planned spam... (Score:3, Interesting)
Another Samsung fan here.
Only problem -- had to dig and search to find an ML-1710 driver for a new MacBook.
Re:The first planned spam... (Score:5, Interesting)
I bought an HP Color LaserJet 1600 a couple of years ago. It's built like a tank, works flawlessly, has yet to exhaust its initial toner cartridges, and cost me $133. They still make good stuff, if you buy the right model.
Re:Spammers will LOVE this (Score:3, Interesting)
at around 7 cents per page for inject prints, how bloody expensive is the newspaper in your area that you'd pay that bloody much to print it out on your extraordinarily expensive per-page desktop printer? Just so you can accomplish what a different fold would accomplish...
go ahead and pretend money is no object, and that you bought the low-cost web printer (printers are cheap, printing is expensive) because it matches your drapes. In a very short period of time, the cost of printing a newspaper daily would catch up to just buying a bloody ipad.
Re:So let me get this straight .... (Score:3, Interesting)
> Now instead of someone in the office screwing up, it will be a corporation
> arbitrarily printing on them.
No. It will be someone in the office screwing up by buying this printer, agreeing to have ads sent to it, and then using it for payroll.
BTW using this printer for payroll could have much worse consequences than the mere waste of some expensive paper.
I'll just add this to my list... (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, I'll just add this to my list of why I hate HP...
-300 MB printer drivers
-$30 for a ketchup packet of ink
-hardware\software designed to actually lie about ink levels
-scanner and other bundled software that simply does not work
-software takes over your computer as bad as QuickTime and AOL
-And now, advertisements directly sent to your printer!
At what point do we just start referring to HP as malware vendor?
I think of HP as one of the companies that people go to solve a simple problem, printing, and these people have learned to accept the terrible deal as a necessary evil, because they need to print, and HP = printing. It is like all the poor folks paying for the $100 Adobe Acrobat + 1 GB install process when there are other PDF creation tools that are free and better.
HP is making tons of money off of by being a synonym for printing. Everybody that knows better has already left, and the people still around buying will just accept this new thing, ads on their printer, as just another necessary evil. I think it will hurt them though. Even my less tech-savvy friends are pleased with how their new Brother printer or other brands are treating them. Brands not normally found at Wal-Mart because the all-in-ones cost a more reasonable $150 instead of the ludicrous $40.
Re:The first planned spam... (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow. I'm amazing they finally brought this idea to market. HP has been kicking around this idea since the mid 90's. There used to be this big push inside the company called "grow usage." The idea was to find ways to get customers to print more so they would use more ink and hence have to buy more ink cartridges. Automatically printing the newspaper every morning was one idea to get people to print more. The revenue projections were used to justify massive investments in R&D and production line tooling. (I was working in R&D with cartridge development at the time.) At one point they projected people would be printing so much (including those morning newspapers, complete with ink-heavy full-color photos) that HP was going to have to order over 100 cartridge manufacturing lines and use the entire world's supply of silicon wafers to keep up with demand. When someone finally called bullshit on the numbers, they reduced the order to only 4 lines. I think they only built 2. Actual orders were only 4% of the new, lowered forecast. (This was the 2000 series ink jet printers, by the way -- the first ones HP made with the replaceable ink-tanks. The technology was supposed to go into home printers, but didn't make it for almost a decade, because the business ink jets were so unprofitable.)
Anyway, the last time HP tried this, it was an unmitigated disaster -- the biggest setback in the inkjet business in HP history. If they are trying it again, it must mean VG and Nigro are getting desperate for ways to grow revenue. Hurd must be pushing them really hard. Growth in the inkjet business has been slowing into stagnation for several years now. At least it was like that when I left, which was a couple of years ago. I can't image things have improved. Has anyone here printed MORE in the last year than the year before? I haven't.
15 years ago, printing out a customized newspaper *might* have made sense to a few people. These days? Who wants that? Most people don't even print out their digital photos anymore. The home printer market is in decline. There might be opportunities in the commercial printing market, but the amount of printing taking place at home is falling, and will continue to fall. HP isn't going to increase it by getting people to print ads with their daily printed newspaper.