A man sued Hewlett-Packard for preventing his printer from working and forcing him to use its own brand and more expensive ink cartridges could advance in California.

Florida man John Parziale found out in April last year that HP had automatically updated his two printers so that they would no longer accept ink cartridges from third-party suppliers — the ink cartridges he had purchased and installed. He was very angry.

That month, HP issued a remote firmware update without reminding users, which changed the communication protocol between the printer chipset and the electronic devices in the inkjet cartridges, so only HP-branded kits were accepted. The result is that Parziale's printers will no longer use his third-party inks. He saw a series of error messages saying that he needed to replace an empty ink cartridge and there was a "cartridge problem."

Parziale sued the IT giant in his hometown of California, arguing that he would never buy an HP printer if he knew that these printers could only use HP brand ink cartridges. At that time, the ink cartridges he bought for the machine did work normally, and he had been printing happily before sending DRM-style updates.

HP asked customers to "please use original HP ink cartridges for best results", but Parziale decided to abandon "best results" to save money. He bought nine ink cartridges, none of them no longer work.

Millions of people around the world can understand this situation: the price of a full set of inkjet cartridges is usually more than $100, which makes each drop of ink more expensive than old-fashioned champagne, while the price of refilled or third-party cartridges is usually a third of that. One-that's such a significant savings.

But feeling blackmailed and defeating a tech giant in court are two different things, as Parziale discovered this month [PDF] when Federal District Judge Edward Davila dismissed most of his claims against HP. Four of the five allegations he made were based on the United States’ Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), accusing HP of abusing its “authorized access” to his equipment. The judge pointed out that these were rejected because he had granted HP remote access to his printer.

Another allegation that Parziale now needs to prove is that HP "intentionally caused damage by changing the printer's capabilities to reduce the value of the printer." In other words, by forcing his printer to accept only HP ink cartridges through a firmware update, the value of his printer has fallen.

He argued that HP "after the point of sale, by installing permanent firmware updates on the devices, the features and value of these devices are lower than before, which greatly reduces the value of the products."

Parziale is also targeting the entire business model that HP and other printer manufacturers use to make money: cheap printers and expensive ink. Hewlett-Packard allegedly "damaged competition and increased the cost of owning the printer...forcing existing customers who have already invested high upfront costs in the printer to be restricted from continuing to use the printer and HP-branded ink cartridges artificially. Increased variable cost."

In addition, Parziale accused HP of making him believe that non-HP ink cartridges actually work, thereby violating Florida's deceptive and unfair trade practices laws. But the judge argued that he was not misled because when he bought OfficeJet Pro 7740 printers, they could actually be used with other ink cartridges.

HP's support page also includes a statement that non-HP ink cartridges may not be used, and "HP cannot guarantee the quality or reliability of non-HP ink cartridges." The judge said that Parziale should take this into consideration.

Judge Davila then made a somewhat unusual assertion that “in light of this clear warning, irrational customers will understand that HP’s statement means that the printer will remain compatible with non-HP ink cartridges.”

Parziale purchased two of his machines in September 2017 and June 2018, 19 months and 10 months before the update invalidated his equipment. It sounds like it’s not expected that the printer will work as expected. Reasonable time. The judge stated that he could re-examine this claim in the revised complaint-he should see what happened, when exactly the same thing happened to HP in Australia in 2018.

HP has a variety of explanations for why it continues to promote the destruction of competitor cartridge updates, including "protecting the quality of customer experience, maintaining the integrity of our printing system, and protecting our intellectual property rights." The judge carefully pointed out that these were "so-called benefits." ", although Parziale did not "claim that his harm outweighed any offsetting benefits to consumers."

What are these benefits? Well, HP argues that it spends $1 billion a year on "ink research and development" and that the ink "must be formulated to withstand 300 degrees of heating, vaporization, and jetting 36,000 drops per second at 30 miles per hour, through a human A nozzle one-third the size of hair. After all, it must dry out almost instantly on paper."

This is very impressive. Except for this sentence from HP marketing manager Tom Brown in a ten-year-old review article, it was actually 2010 when HP was facing exactly the same consumer anger over prices. Can HP inks withstand 400 degrees now? Or jet at a speed of 60 miles per hour? Is the current rate of 63,000 drops per second?

At some point, HP's bragging about continuous innovation must be compared with reality. Although the judge rejected Parziale's claim, HP is unlikely to review this point in this lawsuit.

As for what the Florida printer man did successfully argue that he could challenge HP: he said he might be injured by another firmware update, which might suddenly and accidentally affect another part of his printer, the judge accepted this argument and agreed. Acknowledge that in this case, he will be allowed to request an injunction.

And as mentioned above, it is crucial that the judge also accepted the fact that his ink cartridge suddenly stopped working may be regarded as "damage" to his printer.

Of course, for people who often buy printers, all this is not news. In particular, HP has been playing this game for years, actively intervening on a regular basis, and then backing down when people complain and sue.

In March 2016 and September 2017, HP did exactly the same thing, rolling out an update that changed the communication protocol between the ink cartridge and the printer to disrupt third-party ink cartridges. The EFF became involved and initiated a class action lawsuit, reaching the same point that Parziale is now at: allowing to move on, but withdrawing some of the claims.

what happened? HP solved it. It agreed to no longer install "dynamic security" in the future, but only on those models in the lawsuit. It continues to push its DRM-like updates to other printers. Newer printers are not included. Printer, such as OfficeJet Pro 7740. ®

Both AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux provide community versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and they have released versions that match RHEL 8.5. Rocky's work is to catch up with Alma by signing secure boot.

Potential CentOS alternatives AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux closely track RHEL. The difference from CentOS Stream is that they are designed to be binary compatible with RHEL, which is the upstream of the Red Hat commercial distribution.

In other words, CentOS 8.x is still the old model, and CentOS 8.5 can also be downloaded, even if CentOS end of life (EOL) is December 31, 2021.

Northrop Grumman has formed a team to design a new lunar rover.

There are three lunar rover left on the moon, all of which are low mileage and only a few cautious drivers. However, half a century has passed since the last wheel.

NASA plans to send astronauts back to the lunar surface in the next few years (in 2025, if you ask the agency, if you ask its supervisory agency, it will be a long time later), and the required part of the infrastructure will be a new one Rover.

GitHub said it has fixed a long-standing issue with the NPM (Node Package Manager) JavaScript registry that allows attackers to update any package without proper authorization.

Chief Security Officer Mike Hanley released news about the issue yesterday. Security researchers Kajetan Grzybowski and Maciej Piechota reported the issue on November 2 and fixed the issue within 6 hours. The impressive speed contrasts sharply with the length of time the vulnerability has existed, and is said to be longer than "the time frame of available telemetry that we can go back to September 2020."

The vulnerability is based on a familiar insecure model in which the system correctly authenticates the user's identity, but then allows access beyond the user's authority. In this case, the NPM service correctly verifies whether the user has the right to update the package, but "the service that performs the underlying update of the registry data determines which package to publish based on the content of the uploaded package file.

Two large real estate investment trusts (REITs) focused on data center construction, management, and financing will all be taken over in acquisitions of more than $10 billion.

In the first transaction, private equity investor KKR and investment institution Global Infrastructure Partners agreed to acquire CyrusOne in a $15 billion privatization transaction.

CyrusOne mainly manages DC headquartered in the United States, but has a large number of shares in Europe. It designs, builds and operates more than 50 high-performance data centers worldwide. The company owns properties in the United States (with over 102 acres of hosting space, 83% of its revenue) and Europe (17% of revenue, 99% of which is leased).

Mozilla hopes to upgrade the monetization machine through the paid premium version of its Firefox Relay service, increasing the current limit of five email aliases to a nearly unlimited number.

Firefox Relay hides the user’s real email address behind the alias to protect the user’s identity and protect their inbox from spam. Firefox Relay is a relatively simple system that can send and forward incoming emails from the user's alias email address to the primary email address, which means that the primary address will not be snooped in favor of the alias.

Relay appeared in beta form last year, and if all this sounds familiar, it should be. Tech giants have been working hard to solve this problem. Apple recently added an option to hide my email to generate a random email address and forward the message to an actual address.

After the Ministry of Digital, Culture, Media and Sports (DCMS) proposed a mandatory implementation of the network assessment framework compliance plan, the government's crackdown on the UK's MSP security practices is getting closer.

Digital Minister Julia Lopez said in a statement: “We are taking the next step in our mission to help companies strengthen cyber security and encourage companies across the UK to follow the recommendations and guidance of the National Cyber ​​Security Centre to Protect their business." Digital footprint and protect their sensitive data. "

In the medium term, some form of NCSC-accredited certification for managed service providers (MSP) and cloud companies seems likely to become mandatory. After the government consultation in the summer, they asked for opinions on the independent supervision of MSP.

After the preliminary investigation found a negative impact on chip design choices, the British government has asked the Competition and Markets Authority to conduct a more in-depth investigation of Nvidia's $40 billion acquisition of Arm.

The competition regulator reported its findings in the first phase of the investigation in July. In the investigation, it received "detailed and reasonable submissions from customers and competitors, which has attracted attention in many markets." The full report [PDF] was released today.

CMA stated that they are concerned that the combined business "has the ability and motivation to impair the competitiveness of Nvidia's competitors by restricting access to Arm’s CPU IP, and weaken the interoperability between related products, thereby benefiting Nvidia’s downstream activities. And increase its profits."

Cloudy data processing program Snowflake has added Python support to its "Snowpark" developer kit.

Clive Astbury, sales engineering area manager, told The Register that customers expressed frustration about the need to export data from Snowflake to use popular programming languages. Adding language support solved this problem. Snowflake worked with Anaconda to access pre-decorated Python libraries, hoping to reduce dependency problems.

Snowpark development kits have also gained the use of Java Functions to enhance their ability to process unstructured data (videos, pictures, and documents), so they can also be fed into Snowflake's analysis and ML engines. Another new feature is a stored procedure, which allows code to run inside Snowflake instead of an external client.

Although it pales in comparison to the bloodthirsty seen in the story of "Mortal Wombat" last year-it is said that this is only a marsupial who is crazy about a family in the outback of Australia-but in New Zealand, an opossum kidnapped a female" "Hostages" are equally absurd.

Please note that this is not a saber-toothed death rat native to the Americas, also known as an opossum, but a cute, Yoda-like, otherwise completely harmless Australasia phalanx.

Users of Google Nest Hub have reported problems with smart screens, and some have compared its features with bricks.

Except for bricks that have their uses, the suddenly frozen Google Nest Hub has almost no other uses other than paperweights.

The Google Home Hub (later called the Nest Hub) debuted in 2018. This device has obvious similarities with Amazon's Echo Show, and its purpose is to provide a visual user interface for supported smart home devices, as well as the functions of Google Home devices. We can imagine that many people end up as smart speakers or digital photo frames. That is assuming they are indeed effective.

Educational software solutions-a school software provider once owned by Capita and now controlled by Montagu Private Equity-were reduced by customers due to the switch to a minimum three-year license contract.

ESS was sold for 400 million pounds in December and has become part of the same group as ParentPay, which is run by CEO Mark Brandt, who wrote to school customers last week.

"We believe you are starting to enjoy a more stable school year," the letter read by The Reg said. “The pandemic has affected all of us, especially students and those responsible for their learning and development. As we gradually return to normal life, it’s time to share updates within ESS and explain the simple actions you want to continue to take Use SIMS-the UK's leading school MIS [Management Information System]."

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