How to revert HP printer’s ban on 3rd-party ink cartridges

It was caught up in the HP driver security cert error of late last month (which makes me suspicious that it wasn’t an accident, but a reinstall of Apple drivers fixed it).

Economics here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24985405

This is sometimes referred to as the 'five monkeys with a ladder' paradigm [0] (not to be confused with the '5 monkey experiment'). It basically comes down to: we must use paper format, because we have always done it that way, though nobody knows why we still do it.

Having worked on a paperless accounting startup, I though that paper was still used for legal reasons. It turns out that (for most countries) this is mostly a misunderstanding. Digital documents are just as valid (if not higher level of assurance) as its paper counterparts. Many businesses still insist on the 'signature with a blue ink pen' thing, but again that is due to the 5 monkeys with a ladder problem.

[0] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6828/was-the-ex...

What I like:

- Build quality and the low price, the thing is huge and weighs 22kg and I paid only 100 EUR for a new one

- Availability of cheap third party toner cartridges

What I do not like:

- Every toner cartridge must include a circuit board that needs to be replaced together with the cartridge. This increases toner cart replacement price by ~4 EUR

- Third party toner quality varies a lot even from the same seller it's hard to find a cheap supplier with constantly good quality

- After 7 years and about 3k pages printed, a white vertical line / streak started to show up on the printed pages

Based on recommendations here I guess my next printer will be from Brother.

The scanner was expensive, but really nice. And it worked perfectly with MacOS 'capture' application that existed on Snowleapard (10.6).

However, Apple removed TWAIN support in MacOs Lion (10.7), and Brother refused to release updated drivers. The only way to use the scanner was using the horribly bloated third party scanning software, that was basically useless for document scanning (but it did allow you to draw a hat on the photo of your dog!). Up to this day they still market the scanner as 'MacOS compatible'.

Ironically, my scanner is now an expensive paperweight. Which makes it double useless, since I have no paper.

It probably (if not certainly) is .. but with authorities systematically failing their duties on that subject, and for a long time too, don't expect much (if anything) to come from that.

The sad (and in my personal opinion: criminal) reality is that the (official) meaning/interpretation of anti-trust has been systemically eroded over the years. No doubt as a consequence of relentless lobbying (corruption?), to the point it has become pretty much a total farce.

One does not have to look far to find more examples of companies getting away with what should be punished as anti-trust behavior. HP is hardly an exception and don't expect anything to change. If anything, it might just get worse. By now, pretty much the whole system is designed to resist any change that isn't in favor of those who "invest" (lobby) into it.

Pragmatically speaking, the only mitigation here is to avoid printing as much as possible. It won't do much, and certainly won't change a thing .. but at least this criminal enterprise will not get a penny of mine.