8 ms·

Canon printer hacked to run Doom

186 points by dpina 12y ago

coldpie 12y ago
The linked-through blog article describing the decryption process was interesting: http://www.contextis.co.uk/resources/blog/hacking-canon-pixma-printers-doomed-encryption/ http://www.contextis.co.uk/resources/blog/hacking-canon-pixm... 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 12y ago
  Do the solution links work for you? I've never seen a link that doesn't return "Not Found".
  - coldpie 12y ago
    No. Like the homepage says, the site is incomplete. But really you shouldn't be looking at the solutions, anyway.
wesley 12y ago
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.
- dubcanada 12y ago
  I don't even know what they clean? What would a printer need to clean and how would a printer clean itself without actually printing anything.
  - userbinator 12y ago
    Inkjet printers squirt ink through tiny nozzles. When they're left idle in a dry environment for a long time, the ink tends to dry up and clog them, and you get white streaks. The "cleaning" basically involves moving the printhead over a receptacle with a sponge in it (it's called a spittoon, seriously) and firing all the nozzles for a short time while suction from a platen-driven vacuum pump sucks on them (that's why the feed rollers spin when it's doing this.) It uses a ridiculously large amount of ink in the process too - Google "waste ink container" for some further reading.
    - binarymax 12y ago
      Ink is so expensive, that this sounds less like cleaning of printer head than it does a cleaning of the wallet. The conspiracy theorist in me says its designed to purposefully waste ink so you need to buy more. --EDIT-- @DSMan195276 I cannot reply to your message (we're too far down the thread) - but the sensible less wasteful thing to do would be to offer the clean action as an option, not as a default on every startup.
      - DSMan195276 12y ago
        To me it seems like a mixture. It's definitely an important process, but it's pretty easy to abuse as well.
        pizza234 12y ago
        The problem is in the perverse incentive that the printing producers have to "use" as much ink as possible, and consequently pay for it, which prevents significant progress on the consumption. Well, progress would be already an excessively optimistic concept. There's no need to imagine conspiracies - one just need to observe how cartridges stop working before being fully depleted, or how ink is sold at ridiculously inflated prices.
      - coldpie 12y ago
        Honestly, with how little printing most people do these days, and especially quality printing that would require an inkjet, I think I'd rather go to Kinkos than bother owning and maintaining a printer myself.
- brudgers 12y ago
  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.
  - nwh 12y ago
    What's the driver support for dot matrix printers like in linux these days?
    - brudgers 12y ago
      Given the business use case, I doubt it is worse than for consumer oriented models. e.g. http://www.okidata.com/drivers http://www.okidata.com/drivers Also, keeping in mind that dot matrix printers are old hardware, there has been a long time for someone to write a driver: e.g. http://www.openprinting.org/printer/Oki/Oki-ML-520 http://www.openprinting.org/printer/Oki/Oki-ML-520
  - bzbarsky 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      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.
    - phyllostachys 12y ago
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
userbinator 12y ago
Would've been so much more awesome (not that it isn't already) if it could print screenshots of the game too.
leoedin 12y ago
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 12y ago
  > 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 12y ago
    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.
furyg3 12y ago
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 12y ago
  I have a Brother HL-2270DW for the rare printing that I do need to do at home. Has been great so far.
  - cdr 12y ago
    I have a ~ 10-year-old HL-2040 that's somehow still running. I use it for printing throw-away stuff like notes or recipes. It was maybe $30. It predates even the toner cartridge caps being welded on, so refills are relatively painless and $4.
  - benyami 12y ago
    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.
  - beamatronic 12y ago
    I also have this printer and would highly recommend it. It's cheap and it works great.
  - crazygringo 12y ago
    Yup. There's a reason it's been Amazon's best-selling laser printer for... at least a year, I think.
  - angersock 12y ago
    Chinese printnet! XD EDIT: Stupid comment... Brother Industries is actually a Japanese company. Learn something new every day.
hywel 12y ago
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 :)
dbarlett 12y ago
Reminds me of the sadly-defunct It Plays Doom site https://web.archive.org/web/20070320131602/http://www.itplaysdoom.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070320131602/http://www.itplay...
simi_ 12y ago
Here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INZR9P_SnjY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INZR9P_SnjY
skizm 12y ago
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
thisjepisje 12y ago
I was hoping for a huge stack of Doom frames rolling out of the printer.
shr42 12y ago
Printers do crazy things. Grace Mink hacked one at MHacks IV to print make up.

186 points by dpina 12y ago

The linked-through blog article describing the decryption process was interesting: http://www.contextis.co.uk/resources/blog/hacking-canon-pixma-printers-doomed-encryption/ http://www.contextis.co.uk/resources/blog/hacking-canon-pixm... 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 12y ago
Do the solution links work for you? I've never seen a link that doesn't return "Not Found".
- coldpie 12y ago
  No. Like the homepage says, the site is incomplete. But really you shouldn't be looking at the solutions, anyway.

wesley 12y ago

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.

dubcanada 12y ago
I don't even know what they clean? What would a printer need to clean and how would a printer clean itself without actually printing anything.
- userbinator 12y ago
  Inkjet printers squirt ink through tiny nozzles. When they're left idle in a dry environment for a long time, the ink tends to dry up and clog them, and you get white streaks. The "cleaning" basically involves moving the printhead over a receptacle with a sponge in it (it's called a spittoon, seriously) and firing all the nozzles for a short time while suction from a platen-driven vacuum pump sucks on them (that's why the feed rollers spin when it's doing this.) It uses a ridiculously large amount of ink in the process too - Google "waste ink container" for some further reading.
  - binarymax 12y ago
    Ink is so expensive, that this sounds less like cleaning of printer head than it does a cleaning of the wallet. The conspiracy theorist in me says its designed to purposefully waste ink so you need to buy more. --EDIT-- @DSMan195276 I cannot reply to your message (we're too far down the thread) - but the sensible less wasteful thing to do would be to offer the clean action as an option, not as a default on every startup.
    - DSMan195276 12y ago
      To me it seems like a mixture. It's definitely an important process, but it's pretty easy to abuse as well.
      - pizza234 12y ago
        The problem is in the perverse incentive that the printing producers have to "use" as much ink as possible, and consequently pay for it, which prevents significant progress on the consumption. Well, progress would be already an excessively optimistic concept. There's no need to imagine conspiracies - one just need to observe how cartridges stop working before being fully depleted, or how ink is sold at ridiculously inflated prices.
    - coldpie 12y ago
      Honestly, with how little printing most people do these days, and especially quality printing that would require an inkjet, I think I'd rather go to Kinkos than bother owning and maintaining a printer myself.
brudgers 12y ago
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.
- nwh 12y ago
  What's the driver support for dot matrix printers like in linux these days?
  - brudgers 12y ago
    Given the business use case, I doubt it is worse than for consumer oriented models. e.g. http://www.okidata.com/drivers http://www.okidata.com/drivers Also, keeping in mind that dot matrix printers are old hardware, there has been a long time for someone to write a driver: e.g. http://www.openprinting.org/printer/Oki/Oki-ML-520 http://www.openprinting.org/printer/Oki/Oki-ML-520
- bzbarsky 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.
  - phyllostachys 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

userbinator 12y ago

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

leoedin 12y ago

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 12y ago
> 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 12y ago
  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.

furyg3 12y ago

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 12y ago
I have a Brother HL-2270DW for the rare printing that I do need to do at home. Has been great so far.
- cdr 12y ago
  I have a ~ 10-year-old HL-2040 that's somehow still running. I use it for printing throw-away stuff like notes or recipes. It was maybe $30. It predates even the toner cartridge caps being welded on, so refills are relatively painless and $4.
- benyami 12y ago
  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.
- beamatronic 12y ago
  I also have this printer and would highly recommend it. It's cheap and it works great.
- crazygringo 12y ago
  Yup. There's a reason it's been Amazon's best-selling laser printer for... at least a year, I think.
- angersock 12y ago
  Chinese printnet! XD EDIT: Stupid comment... Brother Industries is actually a Japanese company. Learn something new every day.

hywel 12y ago

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 :)

dbarlett 12y ago

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

simi_ 12y ago

Here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INZR9P_SnjY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INZR9P_SnjY

skizm 12y ago

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

thisjepisje 12y ago

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

shr42 12y ago

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