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Patch reliability is unclear. Unless you have an immediate, pressing need to install a specific patch, don't do it. |
ISSUE 18.45 • 2021-11-22 Look for our special issue on November 29! ON SECURITY By Susan Bradley I work in an industry that keeps promising we are goi
[See the full post at: Why is printing so hard to get right?]
Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher
A pedantic point on terminology: “… an industry that keeps promising we are going paperless …” I grew up with this, and the common press articles at the time, used “paperless” as a synonym for “paper-free”, but “paperless” can mean “less paper” (than was used before). We have certainly achieved that goal, especially with the rise in online banking/debit/credit cards and online newspapers.
Paper-free we are not, and are unlikely to reach since contract law and program specifications alike share the maxim “If it ain’t written down, it don’t exist”. I detest telephone conversations about what is expected of a computer program, unless the conversation is followed by an emailed document.
That said I read that, like me, you are probably printing to PDF (“let’s just print everything to PDF because that should be more secure, right?”) and this turns out to be extremely useful as an extra level of proof-reading. I continue to be puzzled as to why I can pick up glaring errors in a PDF of a DOCument I have proofread repeatedly.
I understand too that printing anything to anything is printing, and must conform to whatever rules of interface have been set up, and will suffer from any shared vulnerabilities.
I suspect that printing vulnerabilities will never be resolved, that they can never be resolved, that it is logically impossible for them to be resolved because operating system program code for printers (printer drivers, printer spoolers and so on) has now grown to a level of complexity that outstrips human management processes. I suspect that operating systems passed this threshold sometime between Win3.1 and Win95.
Automobiles show the same pattern; The Ford Model-T could be fixed by the above-average farm hand, but today even diagnostic computer packs (the size of a 1970s portable casette tape player) cannot cope with all-that-can-go-wrong.
In this sense, I believe that we can be “less vulnerable”, but never entirely free of vulnerabilities.
For the record, I got rid of my three printer devices when I retired and now get by with emailing PDF files to the local print shop and then walking down the hill to have a chat with Kim or Peggy; also to collect the hard-copy. I am no longer plagued with laser cartridge supplies, blocked jets and so on. Paradise!
Chris Greaves
Unless you're in a hurry, just wait.
Lots of interesting information in there.
For home users, maybe they could create two scripts:
create a .bat file called “start spooler.bat”, insert the line net start spooler in it and create another called “stop spooler.bat” with the line net stop spooler in it. Add the line “pause” to both file just so you can see the result in case you forget to use admin rights to run them. So it would look like:
net start spooler
pause
You need to run those as an admin, so right-click on them, run as an administrator.
So if you don’t print often at home, leave the spooler disabled and only start it when required, then disable it after. I am doing that now since I’m mostly paperless at home anyway. Print to pdf doesn’t work though when you disable the spooler, so that can be annoying if you do that a lot.
Hi Alex.
For the faint-of-heart (me!) these two commands can be run from the command print as a trial.
As another trial I stopped the spooler, then tried printing (to PDF) the web page with your response. The only difference I noticed is that the PDF printer (PrimoPDF) seems to have switched its command button to “Save”; I am sure the command button used to read “Print”.
Perhaps my first “net stop spooler” diverted attention away from Printing, and towards Saving.
Regardless, I was still able to create a PDF on my hard drive and read it bock with Foxit reader.
Perhaps one could be more secure by abandoning printing with PrimoPDF, but whether the command button reads “Print” or “Save”, I suspect that there is still something there that does the printing.
Stopping the spooler might be an extra level of security for rabbits like me! Especially if it is specifically The Print Spooler that is vulnerable. That means that folks who no longer use physical printers are a little more secure.
Thanks
Chris
Unless you're in a hurry, just wait.
The print spooler on my PC often goes berserk and starts using more and more of the CPU. I’ve “solved” this problem with a little program called ServiceTray (https://www.coretechnologies.com/products/ServiceTray/). It allows you to choose one service to turn on and off with a click to a system tray icon. (I believe they also make a version that can do this for multiple services.)
I suppose Microsoft could answer why it is not doing a complete rewrite of its 20-year old print spooler? Printing is yet another blot on Microsoft’s software design and engineering capabilities. There are others, too. Hardware blind spots and just plain ignorance, all glossed over by a “Nothing to see here” attitude and a PR organization that rivals the Kremlin politburo for competence.
Follow up question – – why isn’t Microsoft putting it’s programmers on this issue, especially for the shiny new Win 11, instead of messing around with the User Interface (and removing capabilities at that.)
Because Microsoft’s programmer don’t know how to fix the bugs as the original programmers left long ago and there is no proper documentation ?
“Print Spooler is more than 20 years old and dates to Windows NT.”
That is technically correct though I was say closer to 30 years old.
Back in 1994, I was working for a Fortune 10 company and had the “pleasure” of doing the first rollout of a Windows NT 3.1 server. Print Spooler was a nightmare. For people not old enough to remember, the original Print Spooler was not even a service. It ran as an internal process and when it crashed, you had to reboot Windows NT to restart it. We were working with printing over TCP/IP so it constantly crashed and required rebooting. It was not until the Windows NT 3.5 “Daytona” release where it became a service. It still had issues but reboots were no longer required to get it going again.
Why is printing so hard to get right? I think a lot of it is that printing is a lot more complicated than most of us appreciate. There are a lot of moving parts, and at several levels. Part of it is the mechanics of getting ink or toner onto paper, some of it is in all the possible options of paper handling, plus multiple interactions between printer spooler in the operating system and printer drivers, and for most of us, there is usually a networking element, as well as the differences between wired and wireless. Plus things like printer manufacturers adding “call home” spyware elements, and other ways of trying to force continued purchases of consumables from authorized sources.
However, I do want to offer a defense for hard copy printing. There may be plenty reason for output to electronic content, not all output is suited to that. I recognize that there is some measure of personal preference, as well as established policies and procedures that require hard copy, but it’s important to remember that every communication media has strengths and weaknesses, and none is infinitely preferable to everything else. And this even applies to the difference between hard and electronic copy.
There are plenty of reasons to output to PDF (or for that matter, HTML), and I won’t try to recount them here. However, PDF has limitations, including that it’s a proprietary format, and depending on how you’re creating PDF, there can be problems that may not turn up until much later.
However, there are other problems problems with electronic copy (whether PDF or anything else). One significant problem (especially with PDF) is that it’s still page-centric, and on modern 16:9 screens, you can’t see a full page of output without scaling the display so small that it’s barely possible to read. This is especially true if you’re working on a small (e.g., 13″) screen. If you have several pages of output, hard copy can allow for seeing much more content than is possible from a screen. The electronic capacity for searching (assuming it hasn’t been disabled in a PDF doc) should not be discounted, but there are occasions where it’s a lot faster and easier to find certain things with visual scanning than trying to do searching to locate something specific.
Furthermore, electronic copy does not easily lend itself to the simple markup that can be done with a pencil.
And just because something is in a PDF file doesn’t mean that at some point, you’ll need to produce hard copy, anyway.
I am writing this here because: (a) this site is not only for Windows-related issues; (b) because it was not at all clear from the title that this is about a problem only Windows people may have (I found a link to the most recent comment in this thread in “New Posts: Last day”, clicked on it to see what this could be all about, and voila!)
So: I have a Mac and this neither is now, nor ever before has been a problem for me. First time I hear about anything like this, in fact. Print like crazy, day and night and throughout the holidays and, if you are using a Mac, I am sure you’ll have no problems whatsoever. Unless the printer conks out first, and that would be on you and the printer’s makers, not on the Mac. Nor have I had a security-related issue with some printing software, and be it noted that this thread is not really about printing as such, as I can see now that I have read the Blog, but about a Windows’ printing software vulnerability to cyber attacks.
Besides that, never in more than four years, since I bought my Mac, I’ve had any trouble with any of the patches that Apple kindly has been sending my way maybe three or four times a year.
So I think the title of this thread is not specific enough. It would have been more to the point if it had read:
Why printing with a Windows PC is so hard to get right?
And then I would not have come here and read what people have been writing in this thread, which actually is not about any Mac printing problems of mine, which are zero in total.
But even so, Windows users, you all have my deepest and most sincere sympathy for your recurrent printing problems.
Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).
MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV
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