The “Break it Down” Blog

We wrote about the Class Action lawsuit against Hewlett-Packard over printer-ink monopoly pricing and false “empty catridge” warnings that force customers to guy buy more ink long before the cartridge is really empty. What made today important was a story over on Yahoo about a guy named Farhad Manjoo that was not going to take his Brother printer’s false “empty cartridge” messages lying down, and found a way around the bullshit.

Manjoo figured out that if he placed black electrical tape over the sensor on the side of the ink cartridge in his printer, the false warnings would stop and he’s so far gotten another 6 months of life out of the ink and another 100 pages of printing.

Another site that the story links to is the FixYourOwnPrinter resource that will direct you on different ways you can work around the monopolistic shit that companies like Brother, HP and Epson have engineered into their printers because they have been allowed to without penalty.

Does the subversive and scummy etiquette of large companies, when gone unwatched, disturb anyone else? It seems to existing in a perfect 1:1 relationship… Big Company:Shit Behavior=Giant Profits, oh GOOD.

Thanks Yahoo!