Well, dear friends, it’s finally game over with the HP printer cartridges with the introduction of the new lines of chips that tell the printer when there is no longer supposed to be any ink in the cartridge. Of course as long as there will be a profit to be made there will be hackers capable of hacking anything but this is the first sign that HP is so desperate of making us buy our ink from them and only from them. The simple fact of the matter is that this time they haven’t even had the decency of inventing an excuse as to why they decided to go in this direction and implementing this chip. It is an open act of aggression and they are simply expecting us to taking lying down. Well, I for one, will not accept that and I will never purchase any HP printer cartridges unless I will be using an particularly efficient HP ink coupon that will allow me to pay the fair price one should pay.
Until then I usually take my used HP printer cartridges to a local shop where the guys there have already found a method of breaking the coding on the chip. So within a month since HP lunched this technology that basically blocks you off from recharging your cartridge they had already found a way to break the HP’s security. But the thing I am still very angry with is the fact that the cartridge counts pages and works on average ink usage to determine exactly how much ink is left. So the logical consequence of that is that it doesn’t really matter if I print 100 full text pages or 100 pages that only have a dot in the upper left corner, the cartridge will signal that it is empty. And while I am sure that most of the time they do get it right and the cartridge estimates correctly when the ink is gone there are certainly a lot of cases where you end up throwing away half of the actual ink that is in the HP printer cartridges.
However the way the modern hacker have managed to bypass the HP printer cartridges ink issue is that they can now program it to think that it has as many pages to print as you choose to. So you can either ask them to program the chip to the correct number of pages you estimate you are going to use, so that you will have a nice warning that the ink is about to run out, or you can ask them to program it to a number of pages that is way beyond what you could print, say 10000 pages and so you can be sure that you will be able to print until the last drop of ink is used but that way you will only be able to know at the last moment as you see white pages coming out of the printer. Ultimately the HP printer cartridges security might get beefy enough so that it will be very difficult to crack but I am sure HP will be bankrupt long before that happens.