The Guardian Alex Hern

Hewlett-Packard printers have suddenly started rejecting ink cartridges produced or refilled by third parties, apparently due to a “ticking timebomb” left by the manufacturer in an update released in March 2016.

The printers, in the company’s OfficeJet, OfficeJet Pro and OfficeJet Pro X ranges, accepted refills made by third-parties and sold at a significantly lower price than the official ink made and sold by HP itself. But on 13 September, the printers began to reject those refills, with error messages including “cartridge problem”, “one or more cartridges are missing or damaged” and “older generation cartridge”.

Adding insult to injury, the printers themselves have not received a software update recently, suggesting that the last update, six months ago, had a delayed-action effect. In doing so, it prevented affected users from getting the word out about the lockdown and discouraging others in a similar situation from updating their own printers.  read more…

UPDATE  HP issued a non-apology and made it possible for users to back out the change by applying patched firmware to their printers.  See the HP Blog Post. “As a remedy for the small number of affected customers, we will issue an optional firmware update that will remove the dynamic security feature. We expect the update to be ready within two weeks and will post additional information here as it becomes available”.  Emphasis is mine.