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HP fails to derail claims that it bricks scanners on multifunction printers when ink runs low (abcnews.go.com)

submitted 1 year ago by L4s to c/technology

37 comments fedilink hide all child comments

HP fails to derail claims that it bricks scanners on multifunction printers when ink runs low::HP Inc. has failed to shunt aside claims in a lawsuit that it disables scanners and other functions on its multifunction printers whenever the ink runs low

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[–] [email protected] 81 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A more accurate term would be that they ransom the functionality of the product they sold until you pay the ransom.

[–] fubo 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Or maybe they engineered a "multifunction" device with shitty error handling: if any subsystem has an error, all functions fail, even those that don't depend on that subsystem.

A junior engineer filed a bug report about it and submitted a patch that allows subsystem errors to gray-out only certain functions in the UI.

The PM didn't consider the bug launch-critical enough to merit an engineer's time to review the patch. One senior engineer did briefly look at the patch and said "sorry, we can't alter the UI without brand & design review, i18n, and a lot of shit you don't wanna do."

The system shipped with the bug intact. The PM was rewarded for launching the product on time, and got promoted into a different position.

A year later when the users start fussing, the people on the team say "we never heard of that problem."

(This is hypothetical. Tech companies do be like that sometimes though.)

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just because they accidentally made ransomware doesn't make it not ransomware.

[–] fubo 5 points 1 year ago

Exactly, yeah. The incentives within the company generate shitty behavior towards users, even if no individual wrote out a design for that shitty behavior.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

And if this was in the first version, everybody would understand. If it's still in version 5, it's by design.