Lexmark Spyware

[Bill Campbell]

On Sat, Nov 13, 2004, Ken Moffat wrote:
>Kurt Wall wrote:
>
>>I know there are folksen out there using Lexmark printers. I'm glad  don't
>>use one on a Windows system:
>>
>>http://software.silicon.com/malware/0,3800003100,39125876,00.htm
>>
>>Frankly, that just pisses me off.
...
>I wonder why they would care about printer usage.  Seems like much 
>expense to monitor/track for no good reason.

Lexmark has been a pioneer in the printer industry, doing things in
hardware to insure that the printers don't work with third party
consumables.  It's really too bad as their printers are technically
excellent, and they even provide(d) Linux drivers for several of their
printers.  Unfortunately their actions have insured that I will never buy
or recommend their printers to our customers.

Another company that pisses me off is Symantec with TurboTax.  I have to
remember to dismount the external 120gb hard drive and shut down NFS mounts
on my Apple G4 before doing TurboTax on-line software updates because it
searches all mounted file systems ``gathering information''.  This can take
a while if it tries scanning everything on a network.

Bill
--
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