What are these called? (Assuming they exist...)

[Bob Eager]

I thought they'd just print out pre-addressed letters and ask him to post them.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Well that might work.... ;-)

[dennis]

Why not? What OS is running on the laser, how much spare storage is there? Its running a TCP stack, sending email wouldn't take much more especially if the printer can email reports to the admin user as mine can.

Maybe you could post what he prints?

[The Natural Philosopher]

it has no writable program memory: nothing van be installed on it.

Neither does it have an interactive shell, nor a mail program

Sheesh why are there so many dorks here who dont know half as much as they think they do?

[Tim Watts]

"Beyond the terrifying burning-paper example, Columbia also showed some hacked firmware that detected when a tax return was being printed, and then extracted the Social Security number and forwarded it to a Twitter feed."

ho hum...

[dennis]

Of course it has program memory, it can't be open and on the net if it doesn't. It has to have RAM in it to function and there is scope to put code in there even if the program memory isn't writeable, which it probably is unless its from the arc.

Do you want to state the model so I can look?

[Tim Watts]

Or it's a Harvard architecture. Though I grant that is unlikely with a laser printer - but may be true of some small IP enabled embedded devices.

[dennis]

8<

Its a laser, running a TCP stack and job control, it ain't going to be running on a microcontroller. Its going to be a micro computer and will be programmed in C or similar and will have a stack and other hackable computer bits. If its really old it may even have a disk in it.

TNP just makes it up and hopes we don't notice.

[Huge]

*laugh*

[John Rumm]

An elegant spam from a bygone age...

(with apologies to Obi Wan)

[John Rumm]

Who are you kidding?

Mine has writeable flash memory if you want permanent storage. All of them have copious amounts of ram.

At the end of the day its a powerful computer with ethernet and a network stack.

If you can install code on it, what it has *now* is of little relevance.

However keep in mind that many printers have PostScript engines. These provide a powerful programming environment and an interactive shell.

Why do some who ought to know better post without actually thinking these things through?

[John Rumm]

In a small way, many are. 68K family processors used to dominate, with their internal harvard style buses.