
Canon printer hacked to run Doom - dpina
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-29203776
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coldpie
The linked-through blog article describing the decryption process was
interesting:

[http://www.contextis.co.uk/resources/blog/hacking-canon-
pixm...](http://www.contextis.co.uk/resources/blog/hacking-canon-pixma-
printers-doomed-encryption/)

What I especially liked is that this was literally one of the challenges from
the Matasano crypto challenges:

[http://cryptopals.com/sets/1/challenges/6/](http://cryptopals.com/sets/1/challenges/6/)

It's fun when theory meets practice.

~~~
Tomte
Do the solution links work for you? I've never seen a link that doesn't return
"Not Found".

~~~
coldpie
No. Like the homepage says, the site is incomplete. But really you shouldn't
be looking at the solutions, anyway.

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leoedin
The guy has such a classic engineer mentality - spend a while hacking the
printer (the important bit) and then spend the next 3 months trying to get
Doom to run (completely unnecessary, but oh such a great challenge!)

~~~
vanderZwan
> completely unnecessary

I'm not so sure about that - it's sure to help get the point across to the
technically less savvy. Also, it got the BBC to devote an article to the
subject that it otherwise probably wouldn't have.

~~~
Nexxxeh
It didn't need to play Doom. It could have played Pong, it could have played
Space Invaders, Pacman, Mario, Tetris. It could have played some variation of
Flappy Bird.

There are lots of video games that are now more widely known than Doom. People
who have never played an FPS have had Flappy Bird on their phone.

Doom was unnecessarily ambitious. Awesome, but unnecessary.

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wesley
I'd like someone to make custom firmware to stop these new canon pixma's from
cleaning themselves at every start, and generally taking minutes before even
starting to print. It's ludicrous.

~~~
brudgers
My next printer will be a 24 pin, wide carriage dot matrix with a tractor
feed. Though it seems counterproductive to use a high duty cycle device for
the small amount of printing I do, truth is that the racket of an impact
printer is a small tradeoff.

It used to be that inkjet would print black with an empty color cartridge.
Now, printing something may take hours or days until I get to the store to buy
a Yellow...nevermind if I order from Amazon. An impact printer just prints
lighter as ink is depleted.

Printing should just work. It doesn't any more. I miss my Star Micronics NX80.

~~~
bzbarsky
Have you looked into laser printers? I've found that for sporadic printing
they're much better than inkjets, and not too expensive as long as you don't
want color.

~~~
electromagnetic
This is what me and my wife did. She bought the same laser printer she has at
work for home and it works amazing. It was cheap, and not being caught in the
ink racket makes it cheaper.

There's very few instances you actually need to print in colour.

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furyg3
Slightly OT, but what is everyone's favorite minimalist printer? Are there
any?

I avoid printing like the plague, but sometimes you just need to print a
ticket, letter, or a photo of a document you have on your computer. I don't
need a scanner, wifi, 500MB of software, or even color. I need something which
is small and out of the way when I'm not using it (most of the time), cheap,
and ready to go when I have to print something.

I kinda miss dot-matrix printers, to be honest.

~~~
thearn4
I have a Brother HL-2270DW for the rare printing that I do need to do at home.
Has been great so far.

~~~
benyami
I have this printer hidden in a corner. You would never notice it is there
until it receives a job over the wifi. Simple and just works.

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userbinator
Would've been so much more awesome (not that it isn't already) if it could
print screenshots of the game too.

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dbarlett
Reminds me of the sadly-defunct It Plays Doom site
[https://web.archive.org/web/20070320131602/http://www.itplay...](https://web.archive.org/web/20070320131602/http://www.itplaysdoom.com/)

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simi_
Here's the video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INZR9P_SnjY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INZR9P_SnjY)

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thisjepisje
I was hoping for a huge stack of Doom frames rolling out of the printer.

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skizm
SMBC might be starting to overtake XKCD for king of referenceable (is that a
word?) comics.

[http://www.smbc-
comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2158#comic](http://www.smbc-
comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2158#comic)

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hywel
I wonder if you could turn his work into a preprocessor, so you could just
compile a more general source code into a Pixma binary :)

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shr42
Printers do crazy things. Grace Mink hacked one at MHacks IV to print make up.

