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MAYBE IF I PRINT EVERYTHING IN CAPS?On Call With the impending weekend comes another tale of courageous souls dispensing the balm of technical knowhow to those who know not. Welcome to On Call. This week's Regomised reader is "John", who spent long decades at the sharp, pointy end of technical support. His story takes us back a quarter of a century, to the headquarters of a national agency where he was the sole technical support person and tasked with keeping everything ticking over, from Novell servers to those newfangled Windows 95 desktops. "I had one client," he told us, "who...

The University of California, Los Angeles recently published an interview with a professor who claims that mass shootings motivated by racism have only been a problem since Trump’s election. In addition to Trump’s “hate speech,” the professor blames American “gun culture” for the gun violence epidemic. He insists that a solution includes “qualifications” to both the First and Second Amendments, which he says are not “absolute.”

he team moves through a dark, narrow hallway, emerging into a room crammed with an odd sort of contraband: toner and ink cartridges stacked almost to the ceiling. Authorities question a woman who deflects at first before finally admitting that all of them are counterfeits. The video, shot in India and shared with me by Hewlett-Packard (HP Inc), illustrates the raids local authorities have conducted hundreds of times around the world to try and stem the flow of counterfeit ink and toner cartridges. It’s reminiscent of a drug bust, and the economic stakes are nearly as high. According to the...

BRENTWOOD, NH (WMUR/CNN) - A New Hampshire homeowner is under court order to clean up his yard that's littered with thousands of boxes. If he doesn’t, the town will do it for him and stick him with the bill. Meanwhile, his neighbors are hoping their community will finally go back to normal. Michael Bates found himself back in court after failing to clean up his property in Salem, MA. The town estimates that there are some 2,000 boxes containing printers in the yard.

I'm shopping for a new printer for my business; I'm hoping to buy it early next year. Any advice from tech-savvy Freepers who are business owners? Key features I need are: 1. I'm looking for a color laser printer 2. It has to last a long time (my HP 2100 black & white printer lasted more than ten years before I replaced it a few years ago). 3. Despite the long life, I don't use it a lot. I typically print less than 200 sheets in a month. 4. Printing sheets as large as 11"x17" would be a nice feature,...

3D printers have ‘fingerprints,’ a discovery that could help trace 3D-printed guns, counterfeit goods Photo illustration of how the technology works. Credit: Wenyao Xu, University at Buffalo. BUFFALO, N.Y. — Like fingerprints, no 3D printer is exactly the same. Related Assets: Media Contact Information Download Images See Video/Multimedia Download Documents Find a UB Expert That’s the takeaway from a new University at Buffalo-led studyDownload pdf that describes what’s believed to be the first accurate method for tracing a 3D-printed object to the machine it came from.The advancement, which the research team calls “PrinTracker,” could ultimately help law enforcement and...

On Monday night, near the end of his CNN Tonight show, host Don Lemon got into a heated debate with right-leaning CNN political commentator Tara Setmayer after she began criticizing the media for giving the anti-gun Parkland student activists a forum to make incendiary attacks on the NRA and other opponents of gun control. After she complained that, if you criticize the behavior of some of the students, "all of a sudden you're the bad guy," Lemon shot back: "You are the bad guy. Yes, you are, you are. These kids suffered an unimaginable tragedy. You let them vent, and...

Updated Microsoft's latest batch of software updates for Windows has been blamed for a mysterious ailment befalling some poor old Epson dot-matrix printers.Reg readers let us know that, after installing this week's Patch Tuesday payload from Redmond, their Windows boxes no longer work with Epson's dot matrix printers (which are still a thing, apparently, especially among those working with accounting software like Sage)."I had two clients today whose Epson dot matrix printers stopped working after applying this month’s cumulative update on Windows 10 and Windows 7," one tipster told us. "It just seems to eat the print job."In a discussion...

Microsoft has patched today a critical security vulnerability in the Print Spooler service that allows attackers to take over devices via a simple mechanism. The vulnerability affects all Windows versions ever released. Security firm Vectra discovered the vulnerability (CVE-2016-3238), which Microsoft fixed in MS16-087. At its core, the issue resides in how Windows handles printer driver installations and how end users connect to printers. Exploit executes payload under SYSTEM user By default, in corporate networks, network admins allow printers to deliver the necessary drivers to workstations connected to the network. These drivers are silently installed without any user interaction and...

Carly Fiorina's illegal dealings with Iran, during her tenure as CEO of HP, were exposed in the Boston Globe. which broke the story that Hewlett Packard had been selling its printers in Iran through a subsidiary company in Dubai, despite the fact that a trade embargo had been in place against the Iranian regime since 1997. The sales were halted shortly after the business dealings were published by the Globe. Texas GOP: Fiorina claimed no knowledge that the approximately $100 million of sales through the subsidiary were coming from Iran, despite having been HP CEO (since 2000) while it was...

3D printing has been making waves in the manufacturing arena which is touted as the next big thing to revolutionise consumerism and product development. Just as e-commerce has removed the boundaries for marketing and brought the consumers and producers closer, 3D printing is expected to enlarge the market for producers by removing the shackles of production volumes, minimising the time to market and customising the product as per individual customer needs and all of this at affordable costs. In the early days of product creation, nuts, screws and hinges were individually hand-crafted for a very long time until the industrialisation...

"The technological revolution may never end but it does pause from time to time. If investors are expecting the kind of returns that Apple achieved from 2007-2012, they are probably going to have to look elsewhere as smartphones and tablets are nearly commoditized. Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG) should provide more successful products but that does not mean they will have an impact to the degree the iPhone and Android had on the lives of consumers and the economy. As when chips and desktops became commoditized after the tech bubble of the 90s, it may take a quantum leap in...

Warning: this blog post does not tackle the big issues of the week. But it is about one of life's recurring frustrations. Printers. Guardian Money reported yesterday how printing companies are screwing consumers with smaller cartridges. Measure-for-measure, ink is now more expensive than vintage champagne. Hewlett Packard cartridges, for example, are five times worse value than a decade ago. The other manufacturers are just as bad, making cartridges smaller and harder to refill. They've got ink on their hands. Epson say the technology is more efficient now, meaning it's better value. They're efficient all right, when they work. The machines...

The promise of 3D printing has finally taken off with the development of a drone that takes just a week to createUnder darkening skies on a grass airstrip in the UK's Wiltshire Downs, north of Stonehenge, I am watching half a dozen aeronautical engineers rushing to assemble an uncrewed aircraft before the weather takes a turn for the worse. They are hoping to show how 3D printing will revolutionise the economics of aircraft design – by flying the world's first fully "printed" plane. Led by Andy Keane and Jim Scanlan of the University of Southampton, the team believes that 3D...

I take a lot of photos, I've completely worn out 4 cameras in the last 8 years. I've gone through as many printers, all of them really too expensive to feed on my budget. I installed a constant ink supply system recently, and I've tested it enough to predict that it will last. My greatest expense item is now the photo paper. Print quality is excellent, I might get better results from a pro print shop, but not much better if at all. I'm a big fan of HP printers but those little cartridges are just too expensive!This is still...

The Dell V305 printer came with my new Dell computer (Vista Home Premium OS). The printer works okay but there are times when it will not print documents from the computer. I get a pop up that says the computer is not communicating with the printer even though everything is plugged in properly and the settings have not been touched. I have heard that this happens with the V305. It has wireless capabilities but I use the USB option instead. If you had to choose another printer that does not fail you, what would it be? Would need a printer/copier/scanner...

I needed to reload the driver for my HP 5650 due to a recent rebuild of my PC, and I was hesitant to go to HP, because I wanted the driver, not 80MB of ads and crapware/spyware. So I went to Drivers.com, gave them all kinds of personal information to be able to login only to learn this was a printer they didn't have the driver for. Then I went to Print Country, who advertises "free drivers" answered a somewhat less intrusive list of questions, submitted X-rays and a DNA sample, and got my download link -- to the HP...

European Union justice watchdogs are concerned that "Big Brother" computer printer technology that allows security agencies to track printed documents might breach privacy laws. Most consumers are unaware that many popular colour laser printers, including those made by Brother, Cannon, Xerox and HP, embed almost invisible tracking dots onto documents, uniquely identifying the machine that printed them. Franco Frattini, European Commissioner for Justice and Security, has launched an investigation after receiving official complaints from Euro-MPs. "To the extent that individuals may be identified through material printed or copied using certain equipment, such processing may give rise to the violation of...

REFERENCES ARTICLE FROM SOURCE THAT CAN'T BE POSTED HERE. ~~~~~ eweekhickins writes to share an article *snip* highlighting the forgotten risks that a multifunction printer could possibly offer. Brendan O'Connor first called attention to the vulnerabilities of these new devices at a Black Hat talk in '06 and warns that these are no longer "dumb" machine sitting in the corner and should be treated with their own respective security strategy. ~~~~ Forum post on Slashdot: ~~~~ "The biggest issue isn't a lack of (software or physical) security regarding the machine, but a lack of a security policy in these instances....

Home inkjet printers and their ilk have for a while now embodied the best and worst of the technological state of the union, as it were. Simply put, they are mainstream products with incredibly high-end engineering, but also represent a ludicrously false economy in the worst way. And for a decade, printer companies having been laughing all the way to the bank at our expense.