- Office IT maintenance all hate printers
- I'm sure you've gaped at the control software that came with the little $40 inkjet you bought (or had to use) at some point
- Even the creator of MINIX cited "buggy printer drivers" as his rationale behind prferring nanokernel architecture (all drivers run in userspace) instead of monolithic approach (all drivers run in ring 0; printer driver sits next to crypto keyring).
So. Printers are terrible.
Remember Brinks' fireproof safes that were absolutely rock-solid but were running fully unpatched WinXP and had a USB port on the side of the keypad for "security updates"? Hackable with a keyboard stuffer that looked like a flash drive. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961024
I remember reading (somewhere) a conclusion that went along the lines of, Brinks are awesome at making safes - and this safe was truly amazing - but they weren't a software company, to a profound extent.
It's clear to me that printer companies are similarly really, really bad at software design too.
So, reverse-engineering the firmware to figure out what things printers are doing use probably wouldn't be all too difficult.
The printer companies were told to write the code, not write it perfectly and make it impossible to unravel as well.
Of course, if anyone actually take a crack at this (excuse the pun) that'll make things change a bit, but printer firmware is probably at the "open sesame in a big way" stage right now, and the printer industry is huge and slow to change, which suggests reverse engineering could remain trivial for a little while, even with publishing.