Canon sends instructions to customers on how to bypass their own cartridge protection
Due to the continuing global shortage of chips, Canon is in a rather curious situation and is sending out instructions to customers on how to bypass the protection of their own cartridges.
It is difficult for a company to obtain the necessary components for their ink cartridges that validate their legitimacy for their printers.
Therefore, Canon printers often do not recognize genuine cartridges and consider them to be counterfeit, and the company has to explain to customers how they can bypass its own security system.
Nils Adermann
Also, Canon Germany made a public announcement on its website (it was probably also sent to some customers by email), which clarifies the situation. It is noted that the company is currently facing problems in finding suppliers of certain electronic components, including chips for cartridges used in printers and MFPs.
To ensure an uninterrupted supply of consumables, Canon decided to release cartridges without such chips until the supply situation returned to normal.
Using consumables without electronic components will not adversely affect print quality, but some optional features may not work. As a result, due to the lack of chips, even official Canon inks can be perceived by some of its printers as counterfeit. In total, this problem affects 19 lines of printers and several models in each of them.
Along with this announcement, the company also released a guide that explains how to bypass its own Digital Rights Management (DRM) system. In fact, the instruction can be summed to recommendation that users need to ignore the warnings that are displayed by the printer’s own software. And it might sound ridiculous, given that the company has convinced customers over the years that only official inks should be purchased. Now Canon tells clients that the corresponding notifications can be ignored and the built-in protection can be bypassed.
It is noted that the problem may spread not only to Canon Germany, but also to other divisions of Canon Europe.
You might also be interested to know what Microsoft launches service for reporting malicious drivers, and what Google introduces mandatory 2-Step Verification for Google Accounts.
