All of my opinions are italicized and sources are in blue.
The printer industry has to be one of the most anti-consumer industries in the world, competing with John Deere in agriculture and Apple in consumer electronics. While HP is not the only company that participates in this anti-consumer movement (Canon is also doing this), they are one of the worst. The first reason can be seen in the title of this section.
Let’s start with the question, how much ink does an all-in-one printer need in order to scan a document? The obvious answer is “none”. If you wanted to scan a document and then print it, that would require ink. But just converting a physical document to a digital file should require no ink. HP and Canon don’t think so.
Since mid-2022, HP has been fighting a class-action lawsuit alleging that certain all-in-one printer models won’t scan or fax without ink and that HP doesn’t properly disclose this to shoppers. On January 13, 2023, the complaint was dismissed but allowed to be amended, and on August 10, a Northern District of California judge dismissed HP’s motion to dismiss the amended complaint.
Anyone who’s owned an inkjet printer knows how artificially expensive ink can be. Ink-buying subscriptions have also become cash cows. HP in 2021, for example, said its Instant Ink subscription business was worth $500 million, per CRN. In its Q2 2023 financial report, HP named Instant Ink a key growth area.
The HP+ ink subscription is a scam in itself. If you buy a printer with that “feature”, you have 7 days to enable HP+ and receive 6 months of free ink, 1 year extra warranty, and HP will plant a tree for you. It sounds like a great deal, until you read the fine print. Enabling HP+ would install new firmware that permanently blocks non-HP ink cartridges from working. Even if you immediately disable HP+, third party cartridges are still blocked.
Such corporation-first tactics may be why Epson thinks it’s dunking on competitors with its own support page dedicated to this topic. It reads, “Since 2008, all Epson printers will scan even when there is little or no usable ink left in the cartridge.”
But, as is often the case with printers, a sneaky little caveat in the fine print. As the support page also states:
“However, all of the genuine Epson cartridges must be installed in the printer, even if depleted of usable ink and the printer displays the replace cartridge message.”
So you still need an Epson ink cartridge to scan. Thanks Epson, HP, and Canon. You make the world a better place, for your wallets.
In response to recently enacted state legislation in Iowa, administrators are removing banned books from Mason City school libraries, and officials are using ChatGPT to help them pick the books, according to The Gazette and Popular Science.
The new law behind the ban is part of a wave of educational reforms that Republican lawmakers believe are necessary to protect students from exposure to damaging and obscene materials.
But banning books is hard work, according to administrators, so they need to rely on machine intelligence to get it done within the three-month window mandated by the law. “It is simply not feasible to read every book and filter for these new requirements,” said Bridgette Exman, the assistant superintendent of the school district.
To determine which books fit the bill, Exman asks ChatGPT: “Does [book] contain a description or depiction of a sex act?” If the answer is yes, the book will be removed from circulation.
Large language models, such as those that power ChatGPT, are not oracles of infinite wisdom, and they make poor factual references. They are prone to confabulate information when it is not in their training data.
“This is the perfect example of a prompt to ChatGPT which is almost certain to produce convincing but utterly unreliable results,” Simon Willison, an AI researcher who often writes about large language models, told Ars. “The question of whether a book contains a description of depiction of a sex act can only be accurately answered by a model that has seen the full text of the book. But OpenAI won’t tell us what ChatGPT has been trained on, so we have no way of knowing if it’s seen the contents of the book in question or not.”
“There’s something ironic about people in charge of education not knowing enough to critically determine which books are good or bad to include in curriculum, only to outsource the decision to a system that can’t understand books and can’t critically think at all,” Dr. Margaret Mitchell, chief ethicist scientist at Hugging Face.
The digital storefront for purchasing games and other media on the Xbox 360 game console will be shut down next summer, just a bit shy of 20 years after the console’s debut.
A blog post announcement credited to Dave McCarthy, CVP of Xbox Player Services at Microsoft, stated that purchases will no longer be possible starting on July 29, 2024. The change affects both the on-console store and the Xbox 360 Marketplace website. Users will lose the ability to purchase games, movies and TV content, and avatars and other profile customizations.
Users will still be able to download and play games they have already purchased for the foreseeable future after that date, and many other network features will continue to work, like communication with friends, cloud saves, and online play in multiplayer games whose developers still support it.
In a blog post written by Dave McCarthy, CVP Xbox Player Services, Xbox is implementing a new system to keep people safe from harassment. This system uses a series of strikes that accumulate over time. The more strikes that you get, the longer your suspension would be. More offensive actions receive more strikes.
“For example, a player that has received two strikes will be suspended from the platform for one day, whereas a player that receives four strikes will be suspended for seven days. Players have a total of eight strikes and, once reached, will be suspended from Xbox’s social features like messaging, parties and party chat, multiplayer and others for one year from the enforcement date. All strikes received stay on a player’s record for six months.”
Dave McCarthy, CVP Xbox Player Services
McCarthy shared that “fewer than 1% of all players received a temporary suspension, and only 1/3 of those received a second”.
Like before, players will still have the ability to appeal eligible enforcements. Where applicable, if an enforcement is reversed, the corresponding strike will be removed.
The Internet Archive is facing another lawsuit over one of its conservation projects. Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and a handful of other music labels have filed a lawsuit against the nonprofit organization, accusing it of copyright infringement for digitizing, “willfully upload[ing], distribut[ing] and digitally transmitt[ing]” pre-1972 sound recordings. In particular, the labels are suing Internet Archive for the Great 78 Project, which seeks to preserve music recorded on 78rpm discs.
The companies said the the songs preserved on the project website are already available through streaming and other music services, so they “face no danger of being lost, forgotten, or destroyed.” But the organization explained on the project portal that there’s “still research value in the artifacts and usage evidence in the often rare 78rpm discs and recordings.”
The plaintiffs disagree, writing in their complaint that Internet Archive’s activities “far exceed” the limited purposes of preservation and research. “Internet Archive unabashedly seeks to provide free and unlimited access to music for everyone, regardless of copyright,” they added. The labels are asking statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each protected sound recording, and that could add up to $372 million for the listed recordings, according to Bloomberg.
Internet Archive is also embroiled in a legal battle with a group of US publishers led by Hachette Book Group over the National Emergency Library. The organization lent out digitally scanned copies of books through the program during the height of the pandemic, which the publishers described as “willful mass copyright infringement.”
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