harrison

It should NOT be this hard to buy a privacy-respecting printer. Seriously. A printer should be one of the simplest devices in the house. You send it a document. It puts ink or toner on paper. That should be the whole relationship. Instead, the mainstream printer market has become a swamp of cloud accounts, mobile apps, subscriptions, cartridge DRM, remote diagnostics, vendor lock-in, and “smart” features nobody asked for. HP is the canonical example of how bad this got. HP+ ties the printer to an HP account, an internet connection, and original HP ink for the life of the device. Dynamic Security can reject cartridges based on vendor-controlled firmware rules. Instant Ink turns printing into a subscription relationship. Why does it need to talk to the vendor just to do the one job it was built for? And from a security perspective, this is a nightmare. A Wi-Fi printer is a computer on your LAN. It has firmware, network services, a web admin panel, default settings, cloud features, and sometimes stored documents or saved credentials. A compromised printer can expose services. It can: - advertise itself to the LAN - store print jobs and scans - keep address books and scan destinations - hold credentials for scan-to-email, scan-to-SMB, scan-to-FTP, LDAP, or remote management And it usually sits on the same network as your laptop, phone, NAS, smart home devices, and sometimes work machine. Used printers are worse. Assume the previous owner left behind Wi-Fi settings, scan destinations, address books, stored credentials, and cached documents. One reason to prefer black-and-white: many color laser printers can embed machine identification codes into printed pages. Yellow dots are the famous version. The broader issue is forensic marking. Good intel on this is weirdly hard to come by.