Lawrence Person writes "According to a story up on Writer's Weekly, Print on Demand publishers are being told to use Amazon's own BookSurge POD printer or else Amazon will disable the 'buy' button for their books. After hemming and hawing, an Amazon/BookSurge rep 'finally admitted that books not converted to BookSurge would have the "buy" button turned off on Amazon.com, just as we'd heard from several other POD publishers who had similar conversations with Amazon/BookSurge representatives... their eventual desire is to have no books from other POD publishers available on Amazon.com.' So much for Amazon's Vision Statement: 'Our vision is to be earth's most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.'"

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "In response to a query from a member of the EU Parliament, an EU commissioner issued an official statement (.DOC) saying that, while they do not violate any laws, secret printer tracking dot codes may violate the human right to privacy guaranteed by the EU's Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. If you don't remember what these are, Slashdot has discussed the issue before. In short, most color printers print small yellow dots on every sheet in a code that identifies the printer and, potentially, its owner. The EFF is running an awareness campaign, and a couple of years back made a start on deciphering the yellow dot code."

eweekhickins writes to share an article in eWeek 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. "During his Black Hat presentation in 2006, O'Connor picked apart the security model of a Xerox WorkCentre MFP, showing how the device operated more like a low-end server or workstation than a copier or printer--complete with an AMD processor, 256MB of SDRAM and an 80GB hard drive and running Linux, Apache and PostGreSQL. He showed how the authentication on the device's Web interface can be easily bypassed to launch commands to completely hijack a new Xerox WorkCentre machine."

Frequent Slashdot Contributor Bennett Haselton writes with his latest which starts "If I were writing laws such that I wanted everybody to agree on how to interpret them, I would use the software development life cycle: First, have lawmakers (analogous to "developers") write drafts of the laws. Then a second group (the "test case writers") would try to come up with situations that would be interpreted ambiguously under the law. Then a third group, the "testers", would read the proposed law, read the test case situations, and try to determine how the law should be applied to those cases, without communicating with the law writers, the test case writers, or each other. If there's too much disagreement in the third group on how the law should be applied, then it's too vague to be a proper law. The only laws which made it through this process would be ones such that when they were finally passed, most citizens (the "users") could agree on how to interpret them, in cases sufficiently similar to the ones the test case writers could come up with."

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton adds his experience to the litany of woes with Microsoft Vista. Unlike most commentators who have a beef with the operating system, Bennett does a bit of surveying to bolster his points. Read his account by clicking on the magic link.

dnormant writes in with a note about QTrax, a 5-year-old startup that just announced deals with all the major labels to provide free, ad-supported music downloads. The new wrinkle is that, though the free tracks come encumbered with Windows Media DRM, QTrax claims that they will be playable soon on iPods. Wired's assumption is that the company is on the verge of a deal with Apple to allow use of its FairPlay DRM in place of Microsoft's. (Apple hasn't licensed FairPlay to anyone so far.) The AP coverage of the story assumes that QTrax has found a way around FairPlay on the iPod, and if so, that its solution will break the next time Apple updates iTunes.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "HP and Staples are facing an anti-trust lawsuit over replacement printer cartridges. According to the lawsuit, HP paid Staples $100 million to refuse to stock competing ink cartridges. HP could make that back in short order when you consider that printer ink can cost $8,000 per gallon and certain printers deceive users to waste as much as 64% of their ink."

WoW Insider had the chance to sit down with Ed Fries, the founder of the new and highly unique business FigurePrints. Fries is best known for his work at Microsoft on the original Xbox, but he hasn't been idle since he left the company in 2004. His newly launched service allows World of Warcraft players to 'print' their characters out as 3D sculptures. He and blogger Mike Schramm discuss the origins of the company, and the process used to make the figs: "At heart, it's basically an inkjet printer, which is pretty cool. It actually uses HP-11 inkjet printheads. But instead of printing on paper, it prints on a thin layer of plaster powder. So you have to imagine that there's a bay with a platform, and a spreader bar comes in and spreads a very thin layer of plaster powder, which has the consistency of flour. So it gets spread onto the platform, like a sheet of paper. And then the printheads come out, and they print right into that plaster. It sets the ink on top of it, and like paper it soaks into it-that plaster hardens."

SoyChemist writes "When she started her job as a new professor at UC Merced, Michelle Khine was stuck without a clean room or semiconductor fabrication equipment, so she went MacGyver and started making Lab-on-a-Chip devices in her kitchen with Shrinky Dinks, a laser printer, and a toaster oven. She would print a negative image of the channels onto the polystyrene sheets and then shrink them with heat. The miniaturized pattern served as a perfect mold for forming rounded, narrow channels in PDMS — a clear, synthetic rubber."

Preedit writes "An InformationWeek story points out a recent deal between Microsoft and Japanese printer maker Kyocera Mita. Under the agreement, Kyocera obtained from Microsoft a license to patents used in 'certain Linux-based embedded technologies.' The question the author asks is why Kyocera needs a patent license from Microsoft to develop its embedded Linux products."

An anonymous reader writes "Picture a 3D inkjet printer that deposits droplets of plastic, layer by layer, gradually building up an object of any shape. Fabbers have been around for two decades, but they've always been the pricey playthings of high-tech labs — and could only use a single material. A Fab at Home kit costs around $2400 and allows users to print anything from Hors d'Oeuvres to flashlights."

Billosaur writes "Darwin Awards, here he comes: Ars Technica has up a story about a would-be identity thief who did himself in by calling tech support about printer drivers. Timothy Short must have thought he'd hit the mother-lode when he stole a PC and a Digimarc printer from the Missouri Department of Revenue, perhaps with dreams of cranking out thousands of fake ids. Problem: he could not unlock the computer he stole and without the necessary drivers, he couldn't use the printer. Ever resourceful, Short called Digimarc tech support a couple of days later (twice), which brought him to the attention of a Secret Service agent, who recognized his voice from a recording of the calls. Short now faces a $250,000 fine and up to 10 years in prison."

StCredZero writes "Wild. Fuji has created a photocopier that automatically translates documents from Japanese to English. That's pretty nuts. Apparently, the copier can figure out what sections are text, OCR the text, send it to a translation engine, and put the english back into place."

Sidepocket_Pro sent us a link to this HP press release which reads, "Based on our own testing, HP knows that many variables can affect the outcome of tests for ultrafine particle emissions. Although HP is not aware of all of the specific methodologies used in the Queensland study, based on what we've seen in the report — as well as our own work in this area — we do not believe there is a link between printer emissions and any public health risk. Specifically, HP does not see an association between printer use by customers and negative health effects for volatile organic compounds, ozone or dust. While we recognize ultrafine, fine, and coarse particles are emitted from printing systems, these levels are consistently below recognized occupational exposure limits."

drewmoney writes "The BBC reports on new findings which may have implications for the way offices are laid out. According to an Australian study, around a third of modern printer models release 'potentially dangerous levels of toner into the air' as they are completing a job. 'Almost one-third were found to emit ultra-tiny particles of toner-like material, so small that they can infiltrate the lungs and cause a range of health problems from respiratory irritation to more chronic illnesses. Conducted in an open-plan office, the test revealed that particle levels increased five-fold during working hours, a rise blamed on printer use. '"

An anonymous reader writes "Today is the 8th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. It is always the last Friday in July and is the one day that SysAdmins are supposed to get the respect they deserve to be getting the other 364 days of the year. Today is the day that we wish everyone would considering the daunting tasks, small budgets, and ridiculous timelines that many SysAdmins face all year. Please thank them for everything they do for you and for your business. If you think you have a great SysAdmin today would be the day to nominate them for SysAdmin of the Year. 'The idea for System Administrator Day was inspired by a print ad for a Hewlett-Packard laser jet printer. The ad showed lines of employees bringing gifts for the IT guy who made the purchase. System Administrator Appreciation Day has, over the years, garnered support from many organizations."

GerbilSoft writes with news of a major security hole in Samsung's proprietary Linux printer drivers. From the Ubuntu Forums: "Just to inform you about a recent post on the French Ubuntu forum about Samsung drivers (sorry, in French). [Google translation here.] It appears that Samsung unified drivers change rights on some parts of the system: After installing the drivers, applications may launch using root rights, without asking any password. What is more, you may be able to kill your system, by deleting system components, generally modifiable only by using sudo." GerbilSoft adds: "Among the programs that it sets as setuid-root are OpenOffice, xsane, and xscanimage."

Rick Richardson writes to note a posting on cups.org that reveals that Apple, which in 2002 first licensed CUPS for printing in OS X, purchased the source code last February and hired its main developer, Michael R. Sweet. Sweet writes: "CUPS will still be released under the existing GPL2/LGPL2 licensing terms, and I will continue to develop and support CUPS at Apple." There are no comments on the post. What exactly did Apple purchase? It was and is an open source project. Trademarks aren't mentioned.

Zack Melich writes with news of a new front about to open in the war printer manufacturers wage with cartridge counterfeiters, refillers, and hardware hackers. A San Francisco company, Cryptography Research Inc., is designing a crypto chip to marry cartridges to printers. There's no word so far that any printer manufacturer has committed to using it. Quoting: "The company's chips use cryptography designed to make it harder for printers to use off-brand and counterfeit cartridges. CRI plans to create a secure chip that will allow only certain ink cartridges to communicate with certain printers. CRI also said that the chip will be designed that so large portions of it will have no decipherable structure, a feature that would thwart someone attempting to reverse-engineer the chip by examining it under a microscope to determine how it works. 'You can see 95 percent of the [chip's] grid and you still don't know how it works,' said Kit Rodgers, CRI's vice president of business development. Its chip generates a separate, random code for each ink cartridge, thus requiring a would-be hacker to break every successive cartridge's code to make use of the cartridge."

Ray asks: "A year or so ago, I got my dad a new computer system that included a Canon PX-160 printer/scanner/copier to replace his aging Lexmark with similar capabilities. On my next visit, I asked him how the new printer was working and he said the ink was killing him. The cartridges are expensive, they don't have much ink in them and there are no third party or refilled carts for it or (apparently) any other Canon. It looks like HP and Lexmark are the most likely to have (relatively) inexpensive supplies but what has your experience been with inkjet All-in-Ones as far as TCO goes?"