Wife is running into a strange problem with a years old, rock-solid printer, suddenly refusing to print unless the computer is rebooted on Windows 11. My fucked up, Windows 10 PC?

printers & scanners > print test page

fuckin' works fine.

The more I see of Win11, the more I'm wanting to vomit.

of course, it was just updated to 24H2, when all this went down.

Try restarting spool service, tried removing files from print spooler. Tried installing newer drivers. I installed the minimal driver bundle. It ends with asking to install HP direct print to "unlock all the printer functionality".

...I've never seen this fuckin' program before.

Alright, next step is uninstall reinstall

edit: It was a print driver issue. Its always a fucking print driver issue. I seriously thing that HP direct print shit not being present on Win11 bricked it until I installed it.

How the fuck is it that the simplest task of transferring ink to paper is so goddamned onerous.

@da_667 I have a whole rant about this but TL;DR the printer industry fucked itself over by ruining consumer price expectations on the hardware during that myopic post-innovation period where they all raced to the bottom on loss-leader printers in the hopes of generating a captive market for consumables, and now they're broadly unprofitable unless they shave every last penny from their product development processes.

@gsuberland only printer brand I've seen recommended with any regularity, if you're required to print at all is Brother, and even then I've heard uncomfortable rumors that they're starting to do unsavory things.

@da_667 the suits at the top will always try to chase the continuous revenue streams over actual printer sales because the theoretical profit margins are colossal. ink is so cheap to produce that it's functionally free (~all the costs are in logistics and staff) so they easily make 10000% margins per cartridge sold.

of course it's a pipe dream because the market is saturated with third party ink sellers who will always offer a superior product at a lower price, and consumers generally know it.

@gsuberland that's generally why in most cases, the manufacturers make it nearly impossible to use third-party cartridges, or ink refill kits, which is one of the unsavory rumors about brother I'm hearing about, is that they're adopting those habits.

@da_667 yup. I worked for an ink cartridge recycling company for a bit. thing is, it doesn't last long. for any of the major printer brands the one-off cost to pay an RE team to find a bypass is roughly a month's profit for a mid-sized ink recycler, so it's always worth the capital investment.

@gsuberland that's actually fascinating.

@da_667 Brother cottoned on to this for a while, and figured out that they could market to customers' eco-friendly sentiments, and started offering new product designs like refillable ink hoppers. but ultimately the structure of these companies will always cause them to revert to chasing unattainable ROI through continuous revenue streams, leading to crashing customer confidence and slumping profits, in a never-ending cycle.

@da_667 it's an interesting market. I don't know the complete ins and outs of the business operations in China doing the RE, but I got the feeling that it's the same folks who are contracting for Eastern-market IC clone manufacturers. it's cheaper than you'd expect because they're really really fast at it.

@da_667
I think many win11 print drivers don't use spoolss any more, fyi.

@FritzAdalis so, each driver is choosing to do its own wonky fucked up thing instead?

@da_667 and honestly, I'm *so* glad that the economics of it works out, because printer manufacturers are genuinely evil.

I won't get into the full details of it because every time I do I spend the rest of the day super pissed off, but they're anti-consumer, they cut corners on worker safety all over the place, they get away with literal murder when it comes to ecological damage around their factories, and all just to extort money from people on a product that is neither costly nor special.

@da_667 ink is just a suspension of super tiny pigment nanoparticles so you can imagine what happens when that shit gets on people or gets dumped into the nearby environment (e.g. groundwater)

@da_667
No, ms is replacing it with something that runs as a user and wasn't written in 1987. Print drivers are still stupid.

@gsuberland yuuup. and corporations being corporations, I'll can bet on incompetence and a complete lack of fucks given for long-term planning.

@da_667 Nothing we have done to replace manual processes with stupid electrified sand has improved matters over the long-term.

@snowcrashmike There was a quote from the metal gear solid franchise by Mitch Ratcliffe - "A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention with the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequila." and it has never held more true than it has now, in this age of so-called AI.

@da_667 you know, i literally had the same bullshit also on windows 11 the other day: https://mastodon.social/@Viss/115096028687089744

@Viss it never ends, this shit.

@Viss
Listen guys Windows 11 is awesome I love it blinks coordinates in morse code
@da_667

@chillybot @Viss @da_667 Too soon.

https://infosec.exchange/@cR0w/115109769437645483

@cR0w
I didn't know... my god... I am so sorry for your loss
@Viss @da_667

@chillybot @Viss @da_667

@chillybot @cR0w @Viss Every so often, Windows 10 drops the "UPGRADE NOW. PEON" message on my desktop. Every day I get closer to the October 14th feels like:

@da_667 @Viss Evergreen: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/printers

@chillybot @cR0w @Viss but also, my wife' s school district stated they'd be updating to Windows 11 "over the summer".

Well, what they meant by that is. "We're upgrading to Win11 right fucking now, during the busiest time of the school year, the end of August into September, and "oh by the way, we're not providing any OTJ training or telling you how the fuck to get the start menu back into the corner where it goddamn belongs.

Fortunately enough, I was volunteering time in my wife's first-grade classroom as well as that of her co-worker's helping to build ikea furniture and whatnot, but also, I was doing patch checks, and reconfiguring monitors to mirror to their smartboards correctly, because of course, all of that was fucked up too.

@0xamit @Viss it blew my mind, reading about the reality winner debacle, and learning why printers won't print without "magenta" "cyan" or whatever the fuck colors it complains about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots

@da_667 @0xamit im surprised nobody had jailbroken printer firmware

@cR0w @chillybot @da_667

@Viss @da_667 at one point I was paid to do that.

@da_667 @chillybot @cR0w @Viss on the one hand I love and respect that you’re doing that. On the other hand that’s literally a $100k salary job that someone should rharhshehrjsherndiwbr. I hate that it was necessary, this goddamn timeline and that there wasnt any actual rawr in my keyboard mashing… despite aiming for it.

succesfully added PATCH, DELETE, and HEAD as valid http methods IoT_hunter can write rules for.

I've also added an option that allows users to not specify a pcre pattern for their rules (in addition to the option for them to specify their own content for the PCRE keyword).

I've also added the option to let users add pre-formatted reference strings directly from other IDS rules without having to strip the reference keyword data out of it.

Delete method rules can specify parameters in the URI or the Body, so they're a bit special.

@da_667 I agree. sadly we'll need to build up our tolerance for it, because win 10 is gonna lose support fairly soon.

Writing up my documentation, I realized I didn't add support for other methods because I was being lazy. I might as well fix that. But fuck the MICROSOFT HTTP methods PROPFIND, PROPPATCH, LOCK and all that shit can go jump up its own ass for now.

this really wasn't bad for me deciding to do a bunch of shit to this script on my day off.

@da_667

1. avoid HP printers like plague
2. if you have a HP printer, use the universal driver if your printer supports PCL6 or PostScript, it'll avoid a ton of problems

@da_667 wife had me move her back to Debian. She still cant print, but she doesn't have to deal with Windows anymore 🙃

@da_667 never heard of them. I usually just do get, post put, get. Mostly to get MVP out the door lol.

@michael yeah, WEBDAV has a bunch of weird ass custom http methods for handling file operations. It gets a little weird.