Daily Archives: April 14, 2024

We never agreed to only buy HP ink, say printer owners

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HP “sought to take advantage of customers’ sunk costs,” printer owners claimed this week in a class action lawsuit against the hardware giant.

Lawyers representing the aggrieved were responding [PDF] in an Illinois court to an earlier HP Inc motion to dismiss a January lawsuit. Among other things, the plaintiffs’ filing stated that the printer buyers “never entered into any contractual agreement to buy only HP-branded ink prior to receiving the firmware updates.” They allege HP broke several anti-competitive statutes, which they claim:

bar tying schemes, and certain uses of software to accomplish that without permission, that would monopolize an aftermarket for replacement ink cartridges, when these results are achieved in a way that “take[s] advantage of customers’ sunk costs.”

In the case, which began in January, the plaintiffs are arguing that HP issued a firmware update between late 2022 and early 2023 that they allege disabled their printers if they installed a replacement cartridge that was not HP-branded. They are asking for damages that include the cost of now-useless third-party cartridges and an injunction to disable the part of the firmware updates that prevent the use of third-party ink.

In a March filing [PDF], HP claimed it went “to great lengths” to let customers know its printers are intended to work only with cartridges with an HP “security chip.” While the plaintiffs say it uses software updates to block consumers from using cheaper rival cartridges in HP printers, the hardware giant characterizes this as “dynamic security” measures “to prevent the use of third-party printer cartridges that copy HP’s security chips (i.e. cloned or counterfeit cartridges).”

“HP does not block cartridges that reuse HP security chips, and there are many such options available for sale. Nor does HP conceal its use of dynamic security,” the company said.

It added that the printer owners can’t claim damages for being overcharged under federal antitrust laws because consumers who buy products from an intermediary can sue the manufacturer for injunctive relief under those laws, but they can’t sue the manufacturer to recover damages resulting from an alleged overcharge.

Man in tie smashes printer with baseball bat in a field.

HP customers claim firmware update rendered third-party ink verboten

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“None of the named plaintiffs allege that they purchased printer ink directly from HP after receiving a dynamic security firmware update,” HP said.

And why should they?

It also said Robinson and co. hadn’t “plausibly alleged” that HP “acted without authorization” or “exceeded authorized access” when the software tweaks came through.

HP CEO Enrique Lores has made no secret of the fact that it hopes to pull customers into a print subscription business model.

Lores said in an interview earlier this year that if a “customer doesn’t print enough or doesn’t use our supplies, it’s a bad investment.” However, in fairness, when it comes to ink cartridges, HP is far from alone in charging steep prices, with some estimates placing printer ink prices at $439-$2,380 per liter. Some printer makers make a loss on retailing the devices.

We’ve asked HP for comment. The case continues.

Source: We never agreed to only buy HP ink, say printer owners • The Register

Git Good, By Playing A Gamified Version Of Git

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What better way to learn to use Git than a gamified interface that visualizes every change? That’s the idea behind Oh My Git! which aims to teach players all about the popular version control system that underpins so many modern software projects.

Git good, with a gameified git interface.

Sometimes the downside to a tool being so ubiquitous is that it tends to be taken for granted that everyone already knows how to use it, and those starting entirely from scratch can be left unsure where to begin. That’s what creators [bleeptrack] and [blinry] had in mind with Oh My Git! which is freely available for Linux, Windows, and macOS.

The idea is to use a fun playing-card interface to not only teach players the different features, but also to build intuitive familiarity for operations like merging and rebasing by visualizing in real-time the changes a player’s actions make.

The game is made with beginners in mind, with the first two (short) levels establishing that managing multiple versions of a file can quickly become unwieldy without help. Enter git — which the game explains is essentially a time machine — and it’s off to the races.

It might be aimed at beginners, but more advanced users can learn a helpful trick or two. The game isn’t some weird pseudo-git simulator, either. The back end uses real git repositories, with a real shell and git interface behind it all. Prefer to type commands in directly instead of using the playing card interface? Go right ahead!

Oh My Git! uses the free and open-source Godot game engine (not to be confused with the Godot machine, a chaos-based random number generator.)

Source: Git Good, By Playing A Gamified Version Of Git | Hackaday

Ubisoft is deleting The Crew from players’ libraries, reminding us we own nothing

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Ubisoft’s online-only racing game The Crew stopped being operable on April 1. Some users are reporting, however, that things have gone a bit further. They say that the company actually reached into Ubisoft Connect accounts and revoked the license to access the game, according to reports by Game Rant and others.

Some of these users liken this move to theft, as they had purchased the game with their own money and received no warning that Ubisoft would be deleting the license. When attempting to launch the game, these players say they received a message stating that access was no longer possible.

On its face, this sounds pretty bad. People paid for something that was snatched away. However, there’s one major caveat. The Crew is an online-only racing game, so there really isn’t anything to do without the servers. Those servers went down on April 1 and the game was delisted from digital store fronts. Also, this move only impacts the original game. The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorfest are both still going.

When Ubisoft announced that the servers would be taken offline, it offered refunds to those who recently purchased the The Crew. The game’s been around a decade, so this refund likely didn’t apply to the vast majority of players. Some of these people said they had planned to set up private servers to play the game, an option that is now impossible.

[…]

We pay money for these products. We think we own them, but we don’t own a damned thing. Read the terms of service from Ubisoft or any other major games publisher for proof of that. Philippe Tremblay, Ubisoft’s director of subscriptions, recently told Gamesindustry.biz that players will become “comfortable with not owning” their games.

[…]

Source: Ubisoft is deleting The Crew from players’ libraries, reminding us we own nothing

So why exactly can’t you start up a private server for a game you spent a lot of money on, again?

US Hospital Websites Almost All Give your Data to 3rd parties, but Many just don’t tell you about it

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 In this cross-sectional analysis of a nationally representative sample of 100 nonfederal acute care hospitals, 96.0% of hospital websites transmitted user information to third parties, whereas 71.0% of websites included a publicly accessible privacy policy. Of 71 privacy policies, 40 (56.3%) disclosed specific third-party companies receiving user information.

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Of 100 hospital websites, 96 […] transferred user information to third parties. Privacy policies were found on 71 websites […] 70 […] addressed how collected information would be used, 66 […] addressed categories of third-party recipients of user information, and 40 […] named specific third-party companies or services receiving user information.

[…]

In this cross-sectional study of a nationally representative sample of 100 nonfederal acute care hospitals, we found that although 96.0% of hospital websites exposed users to third-party tracking, only 71.0% of websites had an available website privacy policy. Polices averaged more than 2500 words in length and were written at a college reading-level. Given estimates that more than one-half of adults in the US lack literacy proficiency and that the average patient in the US reads at a grade 8 level, the length and complexity of privacy policies likely pose substantial barriers to users’ ability to read and understand them.27,32

[…]

Only 56.3% of policies (and only 40 hospitals overall) identified specific third-party recipients. Named third-parties tended to be companies familiar to users, such as Google. This lack of detail regarding third-party data recipients may lead users to assume that they are being tracked only by a small number of companies that they know well, when, in fact, hospital websites included in this study transferred user data to a median of 9 domains.

[…]

In addition to presenting risks for users, inadequate privacy policies may pose risks for hospitals. Although hospitals are generally not required under federal law to have a website privacy policy that discloses their methods of collecting and transferring data from website visitors, hospitals that do publish website privacy policies may be subject to enforcement by regulatory authorities like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).33 The FTC has taken the position that entities that publish privacy policies must ensure that these policies reflect their actual practices.34 For example, entities that promise they will delete personal information upon request but fail to do so in practice may be in violation of the FTC Act.34

[…]

Source: User Information Sharing and Hospital Website Privacy Policies | Ethics | JAMA Network Open | JAMA Network