Microsoft: Recent Windows Updates Make USB Printers Print Random Text (bleepingcomputer.com) 65
Microsoft says that some USB printers will start printing random text after installing Windows updates released since late January 2025. From a report: The known issue affects Windows 10 (version 22H2) and Windows 11 (versions 22H2 and 23H2), but according to an update to the Windows release health dashboard, the latest Windows 11 24H2 is not impacted.
"After installing the January 2025 Windows preview update (KB5050092), released January 29, 2025, or later updates, you might observe issues with USB connected dual-mode printers that support both USB Print and IPP Over USB protocols," Redmond explains. "You might observe that the printer unexpectedly prints random text and data, including network commands and unusual characters."
On affected systems, users will often see erroneously printed text that begins with the header "POST /ipp/print HTTP/1.1," followed by other IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) related issues headers. These printing issues are more frequent when the printer is turned on or reconnected after being disconnected. Affected users will observe the printer unexpectedly printing when the print spooler sends IPP protocol messages to the printer and the printer driver is installed on the Windows device.
"After installing the January 2025 Windows preview update (KB5050092), released January 29, 2025, or later updates, you might observe issues with USB connected dual-mode printers that support both USB Print and IPP Over USB protocols," Redmond explains. "You might observe that the printer unexpectedly prints random text and data, including network commands and unusual characters."
On affected systems, users will often see erroneously printed text that begins with the header "POST /ipp/print HTTP/1.1," followed by other IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) related issues headers. These printing issues are more frequent when the printer is turned on or reconnected after being disconnected. Affected users will observe the printer unexpectedly printing when the print spooler sends IPP protocol messages to the printer and the printer driver is installed on the Windows device.
Obviously, expecting ... (Score:5, Funny)
"PC LOAD LETTER"
Re: (Score:2)
PC LOAD A4
Re: Obviously, expecting ... (Score:2)
In case you're curious... (Score:3)
"PC" meant "primary cassette", the main paper tray of HP printers of the time. Other paper trays connected would say other things there when out of paper. "Letter" is the paper size.
Re: (Score:1)
> "PC" meant "primary cassette"
Yet grandpa kept trying to stick paper into the Wintel computer. "The panel told me to!"
Still looking for the "Any" key...
Re: (Score:2)
"PC" meant "primary cassette", the main paper tray of HP printers of the time. Other paper trays connected would say other things there when out of paper. "Letter" is the paper size.
Thanks, though I'm old enough to have actually worked with the original HP LaserJet printers that first displayed that. :-)
Re: (Score:2)
That doesn't make you all that old. The LaserJet 4M was the printer that would say that, and they were used well into the '00s. They were rock solid. The only real issue they had was a tendency to misfeed when using the manual feed. The rollers would eventually wear and cause paper jams if you didn't replace them.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
With PCL control on HP printers you can actually do that. Years ago I had ours display things like "Insert 25c", "Out of cheese", and similar.
More fun with network printers than USB, however. Years ago I saw a guy at CanSecWest demonstrate running a port scanner from a LaserJet printer. Imagine detecting a port scan on your network, only to find it is coming your one of your printers :)
Microsoft continues to... (Score:4, Informative)
...add crap that nobody wants while breaking basic functionality
Re: Microsoft continues to... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, I think I recognize the pattern. We already got the FUD about no security support, and here we are playing the goofy printer games..
Hmm, what's next on the list.. Are we at the point where an update causes boot-loops on some older systems?
Re: (Score:2)
Doesn't seem like MS is adding anything, they are just not handling a 25 year old protocol properly. This implies that their regression testing is crap. Simple problem, and easy to fix with even a modicum of testing.
Re: (Score:2)
they are just not handling a 25 year old protocol properly. This implies that ...
("Greening the workforce")
Re: Microsoft continues to... (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
What did they add? Or are you just on another general rant?
Re:Microsoft continues to... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. The only explanation is that they can still add crap, but that they find themselves unable to fix basic functionality. Likely due to a mountain of technological debt. At some point they have made so many bad technological decisions that trying to fix things only breaks more. That point lies in tghe past for Windows and Office.
Re:Microsoft continues to... (Score:4, Interesting)
MS tried to make MS Paint tablet-friendly a few years ago. It had piles of glitches (for mouse users) for a couple of years.
They eventually cleaned up most, but if you have Paint open and your system is auto-rebooted due to a crash or forced corporate update, then using the arrow keys causes the mouse cursor to move in random apps. They've yet to fix that. It's like tuning* a car radio makes the windshield wipers come on.
* Station hopping, for you younglings.
Re: Microsoft continues to... (Score:2)
If a password is filled in for a field in edge normally it just fills it in. If you have the password manager open in edge and it fills in a password and it's configured to prompt you before it shows you passwords in the wallet tab, when you submit the page it will prompt you for your Windows password even though you are not doing anything with that page. And if you click anywhere but into the password field at that time, edge will stop taking both keyboard and mouse input and you will have to kill it.
Fucki
Re: (Score:2)
Yep. Amateur-level crapware.
You sure this is Microsoft? (Score:5, Funny)
"You might observe that the printer unexpectedly prints random text and data, including network commands and unusual characters."
We're sure this is Microsoft, and not HP trying to sell more ink?
Re: (Score:2)
the printer just prints junk when NON HP ink is installed.
Re: (Score:2)
yeah, we're sure.
Further analysis showed the "random junk" to be the windows source code . . .
Microsoft Has Gone Downhill (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
MS: don't use programs and find the program, just search it!
Me: Nah.
MS: cmon, it's easier! you don't have to remember file locations or program locations.
Me: OK, I'll try it. Hey, this works.
MS: (search bar no longer functions)
Me: where the hell is that program located again?
Re: (Score:2)
My take is MS knows, but nobody at MS knows how to fix it without breaking more things. A classical effect when you heap technological debt on technological debt: At some point you cannot fix problems anymore, you can just throw away the whole mess. Windows and Office seems to have passed that point a few years ago.
Re: Microsoft Has Gone Downhill (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
You forgot to mention what Linus did when some kernel developer tried to push crap past him.
Re: (Score:2)
It could be a combination of enormous technical debt, high complexity caused by many layers of backward compatibility, and something else I have observed in one of their open-source projects: the capable and experienced people moving (or being moved) to a different team/project and the maintenance getting handed to other people that are way less experienced/capable.
Re: (Score:2)
Quite possibly, yes. In any case it is between exceptionally hard and impossible to fix on the tech side and it is essentially a management failure, making it even harder to fix.
Re: (Score:2)
I routinely have to use USB drives on PCs as part of my job. Yet windows still throws the useless message of 'device is in use' or some such worthless verbage that of course does not tell me what program is using my device. Most of the time I do nothing, wait 30 seconds and hey presto it's resolved. Rarely is there something actually using the USB drive.
We've had USB support in Windows for around 30 years now (goi
Re: (Score:2)
I think this is a side-effect of modern development practices. More and more, people depend upon unit tests (and probably at an organization like Microsoft this is measured) and there are generally far fewer testers (the end-users are now the testers). Unit tests suck at validating the user-interface and they aren't so good at validating cross-component behaviors either. You need real testers to find this sort of problem.
Copy/paste is now crap as well (Score:2)
When I do quotes for equipment, I receive an email (in Outlook) with the information.The body of the email, with all the information, is copied then pasted into Word so it can be sent around to the appropriate groups for approval.
As of today, that simple process is borked. Margins are all over the place, words are getting cut off, spacer bars aren't displayed correctly, and so on.
Up until today everything was more or less good. It was never perfect, but as of today it's practically unusable.
At this point
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
At this point Microsoft needs to be shut down. They've so thoroughly mangled the simplest of processes they can't be counted on to do anything useful or securely.
Indeed. They have lost control of Windows and Office and things are now in a slow, long downward spiral. Typical sign of excessive technological debt. There likely is no way to fix things anymore at this stage and it all needs to be thrown away.
Re: (Score:2)
Nah, they're not done until Windows becomes utterly unusable (not far in the future anymore).
Re: (Score:2)
Well, they sure can continue to earn money until it all comes crashing down hard. And it will. I know one Fortune-100 enterprise that is moving to all web-apps to be able to move away from Windows fast if needed.
Re: (Score:2)
At this point Microsoft needs to be shut down. They've so thoroughly mangled the simplest of processes they can't be counted on to do anything useful or securely.
At this point MS needs to stop developing Windows. Fire everyone in Windows team, except some skeleton crew which could be able to patch the most critical bugs. Sell packaged Windows instances in virtual machines under Linux, for these who need to run legacy Windows software. Unisys does the same thing for their legacy mainframe lines (Univac 1100/2200 and Burroughs), emulating them in x86 servers without developing them anymore, and it seems to work well for them.
some put it into teletype mode (Score:2)
some put it into teletype mode
Error More Frequent- (Score:3)
when printer turned on.
How many errors seen when printer is off?
Amazing (Score:5, Insightful)
It's simply amazing to me how many basic OS things MS still struggles with. Printers. Start menu. File search. Updates. They've been doing this for DECADES, yet they still haven't got a handle on these trivially basic tasks.
Re: (Score:3)
I have concluded a long tiome ago that Microsoft is simply incompetent and has been faking it all along. As complexity increses over time, they cbecome less and less able to hide it though as the whole thing starts to crumble.
Re: Amazing (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
So, I'm curious. What other OS handles hardware made by random vendors flawlessly?
Now, I'm with you on file search, it's always been crap, and there's no reason for it to be crap. But printers and USB "plug and play" are *not* easy technologies to get right. I'm frankly amazed that both work as well as they do. No other OS comes close.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
My question wasn't about Microsoft. I want to know what OS does a *better* job than Microsoft, when it comes to supporting random hardware.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The ultimate measure of whether an OS is doing its job, is whether things *work*. If the best architecture imaginable doesn't work for 90% of printers, even if that's because the vendors don't bother to support it, that OS doesn't do a great job of making printers work. For software to be considered to be "working" it has to work from end to end, not just *theoretically* support various devices.
Apple doesn't fare as well as Microsoft in this measure because it only supports its own computer hardware, not ha
Re: (Score:2)
It's worse than that. Printers. Start menu. File search. Updates. used to work fine in the win2k->win7 period. Somehow MS is able to either break the functionality, or replace it with unusable newer version.
MS should just leaves windows UI/basic tools at win2k/win7 level, and add new hardware support/software framework/security update under the hood. That's what most users (both home and office) actually wants.
Re: (Score:2)
Microsoft completely broke the Explorer search feature with the "4.0 search update for XP". Sometimes it matches searches and sometimes it doesn't.
I'm still waiting for them to fix it.
Oh no... wait... I got tired of waiting and got a 3rd-party search application more than a decade ago.
Shades of the 20th century (Score:1)
I saw this a lot if you power-cycled a printer in the middle of a printout back in the day.
The printer would start up ready to accept ASCII/plain-text input OR special instructions to switch modes.
If it powered off and back on in the middle of a print job, the 2nd part of the print job would print as plain text. At best, this usually meant wasting a boatload of paper and a lot of time.
QA issues everywhere (Score:2)
IOS 18 was pretty much a disaster when it rolled out and is half fixed at best. Apple Intelligence (the small pert of it that is actually implemented) really deserves to be renamed Augmented Idiocy. It's bad enough that I wiped the drive and went back to Sonoma. It's AI-free.
And yet Microsoft just has to upstage them by breaking a printer driver plus all the other kvetching I hear about Windows 24H2.
Re: (Score:2)
All closed source software tends to develop this problem eventually for two related reasons. One, only the vendor can fix it. Two, the vendor keeps getting paid even when they don't fix it.
This is why, over enough time, FOSS will always win if not destroyed through a corrupt system of law. Microsoft has made a pretty good attempt at killing Linux. IBM seems to be gearing up for another one with RedHate making a run around the GPL.
Good old Microcrap (Score:2)
The building, long since badly maintained and stupidly constructed from the start, is starting to crumble faster and faster.
Meanwhile MS spreads Fecies-Like AI Over Windows (Score:2)
Oblig 15 years ago (Score:2)
"That's not random text, that's Perl code!"
Hang on a minute... (Score:1)
Dead mouse syndrom (Score:1)
I once had a printer (Score:2)
that loved to print things like "12345X@PJL" without being asked to.
Had this at work (Score:3)