Good point AC but

It's been a while since I worked with any large customer where you didn't need to swipe your badge before the printer would print Of course that saves paper but adds to lost time standing around waiting for the print ;-)

The only time this sort of thing works is if you can change the way people think. That is to say you make them want to use less paper or be more secure. If they don't want to they'll find a way round you which'll probably be worse than what they were doing originally!

RE: OK - I'm convinced....

Hehe, had a similar thing at a previous job, swapping out the deskside printers for MFDs at a london local authoritys town hall. Suffice to say the users went mental.

Suffice to say they threatened to buy their own equipment.

Suffice to say it was arranged that this would be a security and health and safety risk through changes of support regs, and thus forbidden.

Suffice to say there have been very few 'leaks' from this area to the local papers since then, now that they all have PIN controlled MFDs and you can't just pick up printouts from peoples DeskJets.

Users - death is too good for 'em...

@nomen

Lisbon will be passed by a convincing margin. Read the treaty rather than xenophobe interpretations.

Printing is primitive stuff, it should be possible to throw a load of "paper" into a washing machine and then dry and press it back into blocks of a4,

Modern printing devices keep digital copies of scanned or printed documents.

Care to elaborate? I doubt the average printer has the storage to retain even the current document if it runs to more than a few pages. If you want to spy on data, you'll need to plonk some malware on the printer. I've not heard of any such thing, though I suppose it's no less likely than a remotely exploitable flaw in SMB on a PC. Hmm, haven't heard of any of those recently either.

RE: OK - I'm convinced....

Yes, too true. Been there, seen it, done it.

At one stage about 10% of the support calls were desktop printers that had been bought/installed by individuals out of their departmental budgets so policy was changed to fully maintained centralised printers with backups and got the same problems of users complaining despite the fact it was a far better situation for everyone (a 50 page report printed in a few minutes, including auto stapling and sorting, rather than 20 on a colour inket).

I even used to walk up two flights of stairs to get my printing when I needed it, but unlike some users I didn't feel the need to print every e-mail I received and put it in my inbox!

Don't get me started on the centralised fax server with routing to individuals user's PCs and faxing from the desktop. Opposite problem this time - sales guys seemed to enjoy standing by the fax machine for 5 minutes waiting for their signed contract to come through. Now they had to carry on working at their PC as normal and not waste time!

Users are never happy and they always think "the old way" was better!

@ac

How about eliminating some of the security risks inherent - .303 between the eyes of the users incapable of using the technology.

Us Yanks prefer .308 or .30-06 for the old timmers

@ac

> "How about eliminating some of the security risks inherent - .303 between the eyes of the users incapable of using the technology."

It sounds good, apart from the problem that if you shoot all of the ones that were a problem you'd make a fair dent in the office population, and then HR would just recruit more ad infinitum. You'd run out of ammo before they ran out of morons.

> "Care to elaborate? I doubt the average printer has the storage to retain even the current document if it runs to more than a few pages."

MFD's do have. Most come with at least an 80GB HDD, which stores at least a couple of documents.

Mistake?

"ENISA describes printing as the "forgotten link" in the security chain."

Shouldn't that read "forgotten ink"?

Mine's the one with the multi-coloured stains.

Interesting descriptions of user stupidity

I heard one from a colleague about the london insurance/finance market where he worked some years before. Apparently some of them were so fuckwitted they couldn't work out how to print selected pages of a document. Therefore they'd print the lot and bin the bulk of it.

Hard to understand stupidity of that intensity.

printing stupidity

[redacted & reposted for our moderator, for whom sweary words are indecorous]

I heard one from a colleague about the london insurance/finance market where he worked some years before. Apparently some of them were so ox-witted they couldn't work out how to print selected pages of a document. Therefore they'd print the lot and bin the bulk of it.

Hard to understand stupidity of that intensity.