r/singularity • u/FatesWaltz • 13h ago
Ethics & Philosophy What if we get Claude to Rewrite HP PRINTER firmware to let us print with 3rd party ink
Is this not the most moral future of our singularity?
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u/chlebseby ASI 2030s 13h ago
when will people stop buing HP trash, its damn 2026
for 2-3x more you can get Brother that will run years fine on mystery inks 2$ each. I don't even press print only BW for like decade, color is too cheap to care.
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u/Ok-Computer-8726 11h ago
We have an Brother and an Epson that you just squirt ink into the reservoir so it can be from anywhere. The Epson was dirt cheap and is cheap to refill, though the Brother is better option IMO if you don't mind spending a bit more.
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u/mutexsprinkles 12h ago
So much firmware is going to get cracked wide open soon. So. Much.
And so much electronics are shipped with barely functional firmware because Holy Fuck Ship It Now Must Get To Market, so they're riddled with bugs.
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u/FreshBlinkOnReddit 12h ago
Why don't you just do it and then post it?
It's just a few prompts after all.
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u/AshuraBaron 12h ago
"figure out how HP firmware works and what chips are in a HP printer, make no mistakes"
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u/FatesWaltz 11h ago
I don't have a HP printer, I'm using all my tokens on my current game, and also Claude would probably deny it anyways. GLM could do it though
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u/chlebseby ASI 2030s 12h ago
Not everyone can afford to run Claude that long, sorry. I can't either.
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u/deviantbono 6h ago
Too busy swimming in all the money I'm earning from my vibe-coded website (no I do not have a link to that either, sorry).
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u/InTheEndEntropyWins 13h ago
Just buy a brother lazer printer
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u/chlebseby ASI 2030s 13h ago
laser with colors is expensive for home use
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u/InTheEndEntropyWins 11h ago
$200 or so as a one off that will last forever, is way better than having to buy a new printer every few years due to all sorts of issue. Also the OP is talking about buying ink, in which case it won't take long to pay off and end up cheaper in the long run.
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u/SanDiegoDude 9h ago
Theyre really not. I bought a color laser dell over a decade ago when i got tired of inkjets doing inkjet things, was a little more than a "nice" inkjet, but not much more. Still going strong, order replacement ink on Amazon from Chinese knockoffs every couple years with issue.
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u/Super-Award-2244 12h ago
Ah yes, Light Amplification by Ztimulated Emission of Radiation
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u/Smok3dSalmon 3h ago
Is this a conspiracy theory I’m unaware of? Do you avoid using your microwave and turn off your wifi at night?
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u/Present_Lychee_3109 12h ago
HPs are fucking shit. Get an Epson Ecotank. You have ink tanks and refills are cheap.
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u/Economy-Fee5830 12h ago
My biggest mistake - nozzles got clogged all the time - worst printer ever.
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u/Pleasant-Regular6169 12h ago
Which one? I bet both. Brother color laser has saved me from pulling out more hair.
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u/Present_Lychee_3109 11h ago
Thats the downside. You dont print often, nozzles can get clogged. These are meant for regular printing.
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u/Important-Damage-173 10h ago
Its crazy how depressing they managed to get the printing industry. We think of curing cancer, resolving mathematics, achieving superintelligence, and having just normal printers that wont extort us anymore in the same batch.
Literally:
A: "imagine no cancer"
B: "ooooh nice one..... or imagine your printer not extorting you for money"
A: "WOOW OMG THIS, SOOO MUCH THIS......"
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u/Procrasturbating 6h ago
Fuck HP. Just don’t buy their shit. I’ve boycotted them for at least two decades. You can too.
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u/ixfd64 4h ago edited 4h ago
I can think of additional reasons to develop custom printer firmware. A lot of printers leave tracking dots and also prevent currency from being printed. While we obviously do illegal things, this presents a slippery slope because vendors shouldn't be allowed to control what we are allowed to do with hardware we own. What's to prevent a company like Disney from using similar technologies to enforce copyrights?
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u/PhilosophyMammoth748 1h ago
HP uses heating to pop ink which makes the nozzle having a limited lifespan. If you'd like to hack, hack epson's solution.
But epson has already been providing bottled ink printer.
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u/Cyvster 34m ago
i worked at a company that sold ink/laser printers. the ink/toner is like 98% margin. they give the printers away or sell them at a loss hoping people will buy ink/toner from them. i think they shut down their printer division a few years ago. too many people realized it was a scam and bought third party.
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u/AshuraBaron 12h ago
Depends on the circuit and chips. The entire board is going to need to be mapped out. All traces, all components, each layer of the PCB. Most likely HP is using custom chips which means they will need to be scanned with multiple methods and CNC'd a nanometer at a time. Even then it will be a long period of trial and error to replicate basic functions. The circuit could be modded but you would need to remove the boards, desolder components and solder new ones on. Or, you could spend $20 to get a new printer. Their is no incentive to reverse engineer something like this. Especially when it varies model to model.
I think far too many people have no idea how hardware works and assume you can just prompt solutions.
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u/Cryptizard 12h ago
Probably none of that is necessary. It would be much easier to reverse engineer the firmware and then create a new one that just doesn’t check whether the ink is verified.
The hard part would be to jailbreak the printer so you can install unsigned firmwares. But AI has shown an ability to do that as well, and my guess would be that printer bootloaders are not very secure.
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u/trimorphic 12h ago
The hard part would be to jailbreak the printer so you can install unsigned firmwares.
Are the official firmwares signed?
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u/Cryptizard 12h ago
Yes. Otherwise people would have definitely come up with hacked versions already. It’s hard but it’s not that hard, and there is a lot of incentive.
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u/AshuraBaron 12h ago
How do you get the firmware? How do you handle every other custom IC? How do you get that firmware? That's my point.
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u/Cryptizard 12h ago
You get the firmware from their support page. It’s right there.
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u/AshuraBaron 12h ago
That's not the firmware. That's a package that is delivered to the update daemon or loaded via a web portal that gives instructions to make specific changes from the base firmware. This is what I meant by people no knowing how hardware works.
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u/Cryptizard 11h ago
This is obviously not true, since you can upgrade from any version to any other version. If it was some kind of diff that wouldn’t be possible. Also all of their firmware downloads are the same size and very large.
This is what I mean by you are a dick and don’t know what you are talking about.
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u/AshuraBaron 11h ago edited 9h ago
I literally do this for a living. Firmware is incredibly small for a printer. The size is largely made up of everything else needed to implement the firmware in the first place.
Edit: Really sad to see completely ignorant comments get upvoted. Like I said I reverse engineer industrial and office equipment for a living. I've been down this road many times. The "firmware" file is not just firmware. If it was we could have reverse engineered this a decade ago with Ghidra. The file you download from HP has headers only the spooler understands to initiate loading the file, cryptographic hashes for security (which is not something that can be figured out until quantum computers get more available), unique compression techniques and checksum matching, and pieces of firmware for multiple chips. I would challenge anyone who thinks this is simple to take that binary from HP and toss it in Ghidra and go ahead and reverse engineer everything in the blob and make a working payload.
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u/trisul-108 12h ago
Not really. You would take the HP binary firmware and reverse engineer it. It's actually quite good at this. In other words, it would be translated from binary to an appropriate programming language and then work from that.
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u/AshuraBaron 12h ago
You skipped a step. How do you get the HP binary in the first place? If you've ever done reverse engineering you know the binary isn't something you just interpret and get the program.
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u/trisul-108 11h ago
I have reverse engineered binary software, what exactly do you mean? Yes, you do translate binary code into a programming language.
Why would you not get the binary from the non-volatile memory or disk storage, depending on the model?
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u/AshuraBaron 11h ago
I mean the assembly you get is not the exact program. It's an approximation because the binary is not just source code with binary swapped in. Compilers do a lot more than that.
The questions with pulling it from storage or RAM is are these off the shelf IC's or are they more unique? Even if they are off the shelf they undoubtedly have security bits enabled that prevent dumping them. You can monitor them but you'll just see bits going by in pieces.
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u/FatesWaltz 12h ago
You'd get it from an update
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u/AshuraBaron 12h ago
That isn't the firmware. That's a package that is handed off to an update daemon that makes specific changes to the base firmware. HP is not just sending a fully complete firmware image. Not to mention that process would still require the excess storage and memory to hold A/B images. Extra's like that cut into profit.
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u/FatesWaltz 11h ago
They may have vulnerabilities in the update though that exposes how to make your own patch
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u/AshuraBaron 11h ago
It's possible, but it's equally possible there isn't any. Remember these are devices deployed in offices as well. Which means security vulnerabilities are paramount to prevent. Directly talking to the chip would be more effective but like I said the problem there is custom silicon.
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u/FatesWaltz 11h ago
Dell monitors are also mass deployed to offices and their updates are full of exploits that GLM 5.3 can expose in like 15 minutes.
Most of these updates were designed under the assumption that the time and expertise required to RE them is a good enough security in itself.
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u/AshuraBaron 11h ago
Dell monitors are also not connected to the network. Big difference. And having a higher bar doesn't mean they are perfect. It just means that it's less likely for an exploit to be found at any given time. For sure that it's a game of locking out access and making it hard to get at. A storage IC with a security bit enabled isn't impossible to read, but it requires equipment and expertise and luck at a state actor level.
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u/FatesWaltz 10h ago
It doesn't require state level actors anymore is the whole point of this post.
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u/Anen-o-me ▪️It's here! 10h ago
You need access to the actual code somehow to do so. I don't think we even have that.
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u/mr_scoresby13 13h ago
Claude might deny doing this because it's against HP's terms of use, so I think you're better off with something like GLM-5.3 or another model