Y'all Better Reblog This One Cause It Took A While To Make

disagree. while obviously it's true that slavery is slavery and one of the worst things humans can do to each other, and have done for thousands of years, precise clocks have only been used in the workplace for ~200 years. *factory owners had the government issues fines* to their workers for being a single minute late, then /confiscated their pocket watches/ because they were cheating the workers of their breaks and slowing the clock during work. the sheer amount of machine authority involved in worker exploitation is absolutely an unprecedented change that is the calling card of modern Capitalism. medieval peasants the world over had way more time off than any worker nowadays, as did Egyptian slaves. their employers provided food and drink every day, and all work ever since the stone age has a universal pattern of "hard work day, relaxing work day, repeat"

Historia Civilis explains it better in his best video, titled simply /Work./ and Engels' "/The Authority of the Machine/" is like 2 pages long.

yes suffering and exploitation predates it, but there are undeniable and important differences that only came about around the turn of the 19th century, and they're bad enough to be worth singling out.

being an archaeologist in tumblr is so funny because I see so many text posts and go. Imperialism pre-dates capitalism. Rebellion against empires pre-dates capitalism. Money pre-dates capitalism. Social inequality pre-dates capitalism. Misogyny pre-dates capitalism. Wealth inequality pre-dates capitalism. Unilateral rule by oppressive rulers pre-dates capitalism. People’s dependence on their job for their survival pre-dates capitalism. Capitalism as an economic system is about 200-250 years old max but these problems are much, much older, and capitalism supports, entrenches, or exacerbates many of these problems… doesn’t mean it invented them and doesn’t mean they will simply cease to be problems After Capitalism.

who needs they Crete Conked

i feel like we don't appreciate these days how much the twin towers sucked, like, design-wise

they were contemporarily hated for just being these giant grey monoliths

like there probably could've been an easier way to get rid of them, but they probably needed to go either way

Nuremberg 2! Nuremberg 2!

just a good little time capsule for a bunch of history happening at once

a friend of mine and i were having a kiki about the state of the world as one would, and we literally could NOT stop laughing (because at this point, what else can you do?) but i mean PLEASE you cannOT MAKE THIS SHIT UP:

the whole bit with the healthcare insurance CEO.

shooter man is not just immediately beloved by the masses.

he's also insultingly good looking and he's so the drama that he CARVED. WORDS. on the bullets.

he gave everyone a motto to rally behind. i have never seen the U.S. this united over anything ever.

he's literally just a girl. a girl in a 2010s dystopia.

it's giving katniss everdeen with a gun.

theN THE WHOLe thING WITH FRANCE HAPPENS??!?

like their government collapsing????

like the extreme right AND the extreme left banded together somehow to give the parliament the middle finger????? because macron wanted to dissolve the parliment and call for snap elections?? i honestly don't even know what's going on over there and at this point i'm too afraid to ask.

AND THEN KOREA SPEEDRUNNING THROUGH A COUP, A DICTATORSHIP, AND OVERTHROWING SAID DICTATORSHIP IN THE SPAN OF THREE HOURS???

and my friend and i were like 'a big week for the international relations girlies' 'and didn't sabrina carpenter get cheated on? why are men. 💀' 'wait, aren't there like, BTS members IN the Korean army right now???

we lost it.

...bittern....

Von Schrenck’s Bittern (Botaurus eurhythmus), female, family Ardeidae, order Pelicaniformes, Singapore

photograph by Alex Low

ffs

tumblr removed my header which was literally just this image

What's Tony got you cooking up in there Nubby?

Today Nubby is in the Test Chamber

I'll never forgive those vampires at Hewlett Packard. Their little arms race of "how ludicrously hard can we gouge these peasants" has brought me the closest I've been to going full chaotic tinkerer and just tearing out that proprietary Ink Cop crap and coding a humane replacement, then daring a court to convict me once HPs pillaging is laid bare. until then, When my current printer dies, I'll just pick up another one off the side of the road, and it'll last me another 5 years. except oh wait that one I found in hard rubbish is ~20 years old so it's probably better made than most nowadays. isn't society fun and not at all rotten to its core, hidden only by a thin shiny veneer? yay!

A sexy, skinny defeat device for your HP ink cartridge

Animals keep evolving into crabs; it's a process called "carcinisation" and it's pretty weird. Crabs just turn out to be extremely evolutionarily fit for our current environment:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-animals-keep-evolving-into-crabs/

By the same token, all kinds of business keep evolving into something like a printer company. It turns out that in this enshittified, poorly regulated, rentier-friendly world, the parasitic, inkjet business model is extremely adaptive. Printerinisation is everywhere.

All that stuff you hate about your car? Trapping you into using their mechanics, spying on you, planned obsolescence? All lifted from the inkjet printer business model:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

That GE fridge that won't make ice or dispense water unless you spend $50 for a proprietary charcoal filter instead of using a $10 generic? Pure printerism:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/12/digital-feudalism/#filtergate

The software update to your Sonos speakers that makes them half as useful and takes away your right to play your stored music, forcing you to buy streaming music subscriptions? Straight out of the HP playbook:

https://www.wired.com/story/sonos-admits-its-recent-app-update-was-a-colossal-mistake/

But as printerinized as all these gadgets are, none can quite attain the level of high enshittification that the OG inkjet bastards attain on a daily basis. In the world championships of effortlessly authentic fuckery, no one can lay a glove on the sociopathic monsters of HP.

For example: when HP wanted to soften us all up for a new world of "subscription ink" (where you have to pre-pay every month for a certain number of pages' worth of printing, which your printer enforces by spying on you and ratting you out to HP over the internet), they offered a "lifetime subscription" plan. With this "lifetime" plan, you paid just once and your HP printer would print out 15 pages a month for so long as you owned your printer, with HP shipping you new ink every time you ran low.

Well, eventually, HP got bored of not making you pay rent on your own fucking printer, so they just turned that plan off. Yeah, it was a lifetime plan, but the "lifetime" in question was the lifetime of HP's patience for not fucking you over, and that patience has the longevity of a mayfly:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/06/horrible-products/#inkwars

It would take many pages to list all of HP's sins here. This is a company that ships printers with half-full ink cartridges and charges more than the printer cost to buy a replacement set. The company that won't let you print a black-and-white page if you're out of yellow ink. The company that won't let you scan or send a fax if you're out of any of your ink.

They make you "recalibrate" your printer or "clean your heads" by forcing you to print sheets of ink-dense paper. They also refuse to let you use your ink cartridges after they "expire."

HP raised the price of ink to over $10,000 per gallon, then went to war against third-party ink cartridge makers, cartridge remanufacturers, and cartridge refillers. They added "security chips" to their cartridges whose job was to watch the ink levels in your cartridge and, when they dip below a certain level (long before the cartridge is actually empty), declare the cartridge to be dry and permanently out of use.

Even if you refill that cartridge, it will still declare itself to be empty to your printer, which will therefore refuse to print.

Third party ink companies have options here. One thing they could do is reverse-engineer the security chip, and make compatible ones that say, "Actually, I'm full." The problem with this is that laws like Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) potentially makes this into a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine, for a first offense.

DMCA 1201 bans bypassing "an effective means of access control" to a copyrighted work. So if HP writes a copyrighted "I'm empty" program for its security chip and then adds some kind of access restriction to prevent you from dumping and reverse-engineering that program, you can end up a felon, thanks to the DMCA.

Another countermove is to harvest security chips out of dead cartridges that have been sent overseas as e-waste (one consequence of HP's $10,000/gallon ink racket is that it generates mountains of immortal, toxic e-waste that mostly ends up poisoning poor countries in the global south). These can be integrated into new cartridges, or remanufactured ones.

In practice, ink companies do all of this and more, and total normie HP printer owners go to extremely improbable lengths to find third party ink cartridges and figure out how to use them. It turns out that even people who find technology tinkering intimidating or confusing or dull can be motivated to learn and practice a lot of esoteric tech stuff as an alternative to paying $10,000/gallon for colored water.

HP has lots of countermoves for this. One truly unhinged piece of fuckery is to ask Customs and Border Patrol to block third-party ink cartridges with genuine HP security chips that have been pried loose from e-waste shipments. HP claims that these are "counterfeits" (because they were removed and re-used without permission), even though they came out of real HP cartridges, and CBP takes them at their word, seizing shipments.

Even sleazier: HP pushes out fake security updates to its printers. You get a message telling you there's an urgent security update, you click OK, and your printer shows you a downloading/installing progress bar and reboots itself. As far as you can tell, nothing has changed. But these aren't "security" updates, they're updates that block third-party ink, and HP has designed them not to kick in for several months. That way, HP owners who get tricked into installing this downgrade don't raise hell online and warn everyone else until they've installed it too, and it's too late:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

This is the infectious pathogen business model: one reason covid spread so quickly was that people were infectious before they developed symptoms. That meant that the virus could spread before the spreader knew they had it. By adding a long fuse to its logic bomb, HP greatly increases the spread of its malware.

But life finds a way. $10,000/gallon ink is an irresistible target for tinkerers, security researchers and competitors. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but the true parent of jaw-dropping ingenuity is callous, sadistic greed. That's why America's army of prisoners are the source of so many of the most beautiful and exciting forms of innovation seen today:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/09/king-rat/#mother-of-invention

Despite harsh legal penalties and the vast resources of HP, third-party ink continues to thrive, and every time HP figures out how to block one technique, three even cooler ones pop up.

Last week, Jay Summet published a video tearing down a third-party ink cartridge compatible with an HP 61XL:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0ya184uaTE

The third-party cartridge has what appears to be a genuine HP security chip, but it is overlaid with a paper-thin, flexible, adhesive-backed circuit board that is skinny enough that the cartridge still fits in an HP printer.

This flexible circuit board has its own little microchip. Summet theorizes that it is designed to pass the "are you a real HP cartridge" challenge pass to the security chip, but to block the followup "are you empty or full?" message. When the printer issues that challenge, the "man in the middle" chip answers, "Oh, I'm definitely full."

In their writeup, Hackaday identifies the chip as "a single IC in a QFN package." This is just so clever and delightful:

https://hackaday.com/2024/09/28/man-in-the-middle-pcb-unlocks-hp-ink-cartridges/

Hackaday also notes that HP CEO Enrique J Lores recently threatened to brick any printer discovered to be using third-party ink:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/hp-ceo-blocking-third-party-ink-from-printers-fights-viruses/

As William Gibson famously quipped, "the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." As our enshittification-rich environment drives more and more companies to evolve into rent-seeking enterprises through printerinisation, HP offers us a glimpse of the horrors of the late enshittocene.

It's just as Orwell prophesied: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a HP installing malware on your printer to force you to spend $10,000/gallon on ink – forever."

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/30/life-finds-a-way/#ink-stained-wretches

Image: Jay Summet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0ya184uaTE

I love bittern

twisting and bitturning