#MBA in IT

[sicsrpune20]

Exploring The Best MBA In Information Technology Colleges In Pune For A Tech-Driven Career

The ever-evolving landscape of technology demands professionals who can bridge the gap between management and IT expertise. An MBA in Information Technology offers the perfect blend of business acumen and technological proficiency, preparing graduates for leadership roles in IT-driven industries. Pune, known as the "Oxford of the East," is a prime destination for students looking to specialise in IT management.

Why Pursue An MBA In IT?

An MBA in Information Technology equips students with the knowledge to manage IT systems, data analytics, software processes, and digital business strategies. It is ideal for those aspiring to build careers in IT consulting, project management, data analytics, and software management. The curriculum typically includes subjects like IT strategy, cybersecurity, cloud computing, and AI-driven decision-making, ensuring graduates stay relevant in the digital economy.

Pune: A Hub For IT MBA Programmes

Pune is home to several reputed institutions offering IT-focused management programmes. The city has a thriving IT sector, with top multinational companies and tech startups providing abundant job opportunities. Students pursuing an MBA in Information Technology Colleges in Pune gain exposure to real-world industry challenges through internships, live projects and guest lectures by industry experts.

The city also offers a student-friendly environment with cutting-edge educational facilities, making it a preferred choice for aspiring IT managers. The presence of tech giants and innovation hubs further enhances networking opportunities, ensuring students get hands-on experience with emerging technologies.

Career Opportunities After An IT MBA

Graduates from IT MBA Colleges Pune have diverse career options in technology and business management. Some of the prominent roles include:

IT Consultant: Advising businesses on IT infrastructure, digital transformation, and cybersecurity.

Data Analyst: Analysing big data to drive business insights and decision-making.

Software Project Manager: Overseeing the development, implementation, and maintenance of software solutions.

Business Analyst: Bridging the gap between IT teams and business operations.

Cloud Solutions Manager: Managing cloud computing services and enterprise solutions.

With industries becoming more data-driven, professionals with an IT MBA are highly sought after for their ability to integrate technology into business strategies effectively.

Choosing The Right IT MBA College In Pune

When selecting an MBA college, students should consider the following factors:

Industry-Relevant Curriculum: Ensure the syllabus covers emerging IT trends like AI, machine learning, and blockchain.

Internship & Placement Support: Check for strong industry tie-ups and internship opportunities with leading IT firms.

Faculty Expertise: Look for experienced professors and industry mentors.

Infrastructure & Learning Resources: Access to advanced labs, research centers, and digital tools is crucial for practical learning.

Why Choose SICSR For An MBA In IT?

Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research (SICSR) is one of the leading institutions offering an MBA in IT. Known for its strong industry collaborations, innovative curriculum, and state-of-the-art infrastructure, SICSR ensures students gain hands-on experience through projects, case studies, and real-world problem-solving.

With a dedicated placement cell and alumni network, SICSR provides excellent career opportunities, making it a top choice for students pursuing IT management in Pune.

[scit-pune]

5 Reasons to Pursue an MBA in IT Management at SCIT

Professionals who can close the gap between technology and business are currently in high demand. Therefore, the Symbiosis Centre for Information Technology is one of the top institutes offering a specialised IT Management MBA. This degree enables students to succeed in the IT field. Here are five compelling reasons to choose SCIT for your MBA in IT Management.

1. Tailored Curriculum for IT Management

SCIT's curriculum focuses on resolving the increasing complexities of the IT business world. It combines technical expertise with managerial skills. The curriculum covers IT strategy and technologies like AI and cloud computing. This specialised approach helps students prepare for leadership roles in tech industries.

2. Strong Placement Record

SCIT has always been known for its excellent placement record. The institute has always maintained its 100% placement record over all these years. Top IT service, consulting, and e-commerce recruiters visit the institute. Students have received packages as high as ₹30 LPA, with an average of ₹13-18 LPA for top-performing segments. SCIT's placement cell ensures that students are well-equipped with the skills and opportunities to succeed in competitive markets​

3. Industry- Relevant Certifications and Training

SCIT is not a traditional classroom with certifications in high-demand domains such as data analytics, cybersecurity, and IT governance. Students' hands-on experience is provided in live projects and internships through partnerships with leading firms. The practical exposure makes them employable and face real-life challenges​

4. Recognitions and Rankings

SCIT has won many awards and is one of India's top private B-schools in IT and analytics. Analytics India Magazine and Celonis Germany have ranked it as among the best. These ranks affirm SCIT's credibility in IT and management studies.

5. Lively Campus Life and Network Opportunity

Outside academics, SCIT provides an exciting campus life through student committees and corporate conclaves and seminars, all of which foster industry links and peer learning. There is also a good network of alumni who provide much mentoring and career guidance​

Conclusion

This positions one at the frontline of an industry growing with great rapidity. Equipped with a strong curriculum, excellent placements, and extended contacts in the industry, an MBA in IT from SCIT prepares students for their leadership roles as future IT management leaders.

[animentality]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Amazon annihilates Alexa privacy settings, turns on continuous, nonconsensual audio uploading

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in SAN DIEGO at MYSTERIOUS GALAXY on Mar 24, and in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2. More tour dates here.

Even by Amazon standards, this is extraordinarily sleazy: starting March 28, each Amazon Echo device will cease processing audio on-device and instead upload all the audio it captures to Amazon's cloud for processing, even if you have previously opted out of cloud-based processing:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/everything-you-say-to-your-echo-will-be-sent-to-amazon-starting-on-march-28/

It's easy to flap your hands at this bit of thievery and say, "surveillance capitalists gonna surveillance capitalism," which would confine this fuckery to the realm of ideology (that is, "Amazon is ripping you off because they have bad ideas"). But that would be wrong. What's going on here is a material phenomenon, grounded in specific policy choices and by unpacking the material basis for this absolutely unforgivable move, we can understand how we got here – and where we should go next.

Start with Amazon's excuse for destroying your privacy: they want to do AI processing on the audio Alexa captures, and that is too computationally intensive for on-device processing. But that only raises another question: why does Amazon want to do this AI processing, even for customers who are happy with their Echo as-is, at the risk of infuriating and alienating millions of customers?

For Big Tech companies, AI is part of a "growth story" – a narrative about how these companies that have already saturated their markets will still continue to grow. It's hard to overstate how dominant Amazon is: they are the leading cloud provider, the most important retailer, and the majority of US households already subscribe to Prime. This may sound like a good place to be, but for Amazon, it's actually very dangerous.

Amazon has a sky-high price/earnings ratio – about triple the ratio of other retailers, like Target. That scorching P/E ratio reflects a belief by investors that Amazon will continue growing. Companies with very high p/e ratios have an unbeatable advantage relative to mature competitors – they can buy things with their stock, rather than paying cash for them. If Amazon wants to hire a key person, or acquire a key company, it can pad its offer with its extremely high-value, growing stock. Being able to buy things with stock instead of money is a powerful advantage, because money is scarce and exogenous (Amazon must acquire money from someone else, like a customer), while new Amazon stock can be conjured into existence by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/06/privacy-last/#exceptionally-american

But the downside here is that every growth stock eventually stops growing. For Amazon to double its US Prime subscriber base, it will have to establish a breeding program to produce tens of millions of new Americans, raising them to maturity, getting them gainful employment, and then getting them to sign up for Prime. Almost by definition, a dominant firm ceases to be a growing firm, and lives with the constant threat of a stock revaluation as investors belief in future growth crumbles and they punch the "sell" button, hoping to liquidate their now-overvalued stock ahead of everyone else.

For Big Tech companies, a growth story isn't an ideological commitment to cancer-like continuous expansion. It's a practical, material phenomenon, driven by the need to maintain investor confidence that there are still worlds for the company to conquer.

That's where "AI" comes in. The hype around AI serves an important material need for tech companies. By lumping an incoherent set of poorly understood technologies together into a hot buzzword, tech companies can bamboozle investors into thinking that there's plenty of growth in their future.

OK, so that's the material need that this asshole tactic satisfies. Next, let's look at the technical dimension of this rug-pull.

How is it possible for Amazon to modify your Echo after you bought it? After all, you own your Echo. It is your property. Every first year law student learns this 18th century definition of property, from Sir William Blackstone:

That sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.

If the Echo is your property, how come Amazon gets to break it? Because we passed a law that lets them. Section 1201 of 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it a felony to "bypass an access control" for a copyrighted work:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

That means that once Amazon reaches over the air to stir up the guts of your Echo, no one is allowed to give you a tool that will let you get inside your Echo and change the software back. Sure, it's your property, but exercising sole and despotic dominion over it requires breaking the digital lock that controls access to the firmware, and that's a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense.

The Echo is an internet-connected device that treats its owner as an adversary and is designed to facilitate over-the-air updates by the manufacturer that are adverse to the interests of the owner. Giving a manufacturer the power to downgrade a device after you've bought it, in a way you can't roll back or defend against is an invitation to run the playbook of the Darth Vader MBA, in which the manufacturer replies to your outraged squawks with "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

The ability to remotely, unilaterally alter how a device or service works is called "twiddling" and it is a key factor in enshittification. By "twiddling" the knobs and dials that control the prices, costs, search rankings, recommendations, and core features of products and services, tech firms can play a high-speed shell-game that shifts value away from customers and suppliers and toward the firm and its executives:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

But how can this be legal? You bought an Echo and explicitly went into its settings to disable remote monitoring of the sounds in your home, and now Amazon – without your permission, against your express wishes – is going to start sending recordings from inside your house to its offices. Isn't that against the law?

Well, you'd think so, but US consumer privacy law is unbelievably backwards. Congress hasn't passed a consumer privacy law since 1988, when the Video Privacy Protection Act banned video store clerks from disclosing which VHS cassettes you brought home. That is the last technological privacy threat that Congress has given any consideration to:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

This privacy vacuum has been filled up with surveillance on an unimaginable scale. Scumbag data-brokers you've never heard of openly boast about having dossiers on 91% of adult internet users, detailing who we are, what we watch, what we read, who we live with, who we follow on social media, what we buy online and offline, where we buy, when we buy, and why we buy:

https://gizmodo.com/data-broker-brags-about-having-highly-detailed-personal-information-on-nearly-all-internet-users-2000575762

To a first approximation, every kind of privacy violation is legal, because the concentrated commercial surveillance industry spends millions lobbying against privacy laws, and those millions are a bargain, because they make billions off the data they harvest with impunity.

Regulatory capture is a function of monopoly. Highly concentrated sectors don't need to engage in "wasteful competition," which leaves them with gigantic profits to spend on lobbying, which is extraordinarily effective, because a sector that is dominated by a handful of firms can easily arrive at a common negotiating position and speak with one voice to the government:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Starting with the Carter administration, and accelerating through every subsequent administration except Biden's, America has adopted an explicitly pro-monopoly policy, called the "consumer welfare" antitrust theory. 40 years later, our economy is riddled with monopolies:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/17/monopolies-produce-billionaires/#inequality-corruption-climate-poverty-sweatshops

Every part of this Echo privacy massacre is downstream of that policy choice: "growth stock" narratives about AI, twiddling, DMCA 1201, the Darth Vader MBA, the end of legal privacy protections. These are material things, not ideological ones. They exist to make a very, very small number of people very, very rich.

Your Echo is your property, you paid for it. You paid for the product and you are still the product:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Now, Amazon says that the recordings your Echo will send to its data-centers will be deleted as soon as it's been processed by the AI servers. Amazon's made these claims before, and they were lies. Amazon eventually had to admit that its employees and a menagerie of overseas contractors were secretly given millions of recordings to listen to and make notes on:

https://archive.is/TD90k

And sometimes, Amazon just sent these recordings to random people on the internet:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/20/amazon-alexa-user-receives-audio-recordings-stranger-through-human-error/

Fool me once, etc. I will bet you a testicle* that Amazon will eventually have to admit that the recordings it harvests to feed its AI are also being retained and listened to by employees, contractors, and, possibly, randos on the internet.

*Not one of mine

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/15/altering-the-deal/#telescreen

Image: Stock Catalog/https://www.quotecatalog.com (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alexa_%2840770465691%29.jpg

Sam Howzit (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SWC_6_-_Darth_Vader_Costume_(7865106344).jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[stunning10s]

[ghost-37]

[nudjismo]

⠀⠀ ⠀ ⠀⬭͙̩̩̥🍎࿔ ⠀ ⠀ 月绿色⠀̩͙̾͒ ⠀⠀⠀𝜌𝜄𝜋𝜏𝜀𝑟𝜀𝑠𝜏

⠀─┈┈ 𝑠𝜌𝜎𝜏𝜄𝑓𝜑 ⠀꯰꯰ ̩̩͙˚ ᩙ ♡︭  

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

[bananaactivity]

Sooooooooo MBAV x SCREAM (1996)???? Anyone???

Scream 1996 is not only my fav Horror movie but my favorite movie in general. I love this movie it’s great. So why not combine it with a show that I love also! MBAV is definitely not my fav show but it is one I like to make art of.

Character Swaps:

Billy Loomis= Ethan Morgan

Sydney Prescott= Sarah Fox

Stu Macher= Benny Weir

Tatum Riley= Erica Jones

Randy Meeks= Rory Keaner

I actually really like this Au idea… I’m definitely making more art for it. In a weird way it makes sense ya know??

Rory’s the goofy horror buff, Erica’s the sexy bestie, Ethan is also a horror buff but in wayyy more self righteous way, Sarah is uptight and vampires are always a sex allegory so that makes sense that she would be a “prude”, and most fittingly Benny is the goofy overacting friend who goes with wtv his bestie wants just for the lols.

I think I like this AU more than my Descendants AU I dunnoooo. It’s just a lot of fun fr.

I think that it’d be the same plot as Scream 1996 ignoring the other movies because that’s what I’ve been doing my whole life. I know some of the later movies are really good but I decided long ago I’d never watch them so boohoo.

I’m sure if I think about it hard enough I could fit some characters into other AU roles but I’m mostly gonna be doing screenshot redraws of the main 5…

Enjoyyyy and ask questions if you’d like!

[hisbodycorpse]

𝐂͟𝐚͟𝐭͟𝐞͟𝐝͟𝐫͟𝐚͟𝐥. 黑河邊燭光守夜、 ⛪️

𒉴 ͟ ͟ ͟ ͟ ͟ ͟ ͟ ⌖ ©💭 I̸̝͍̟̙̔̉n̸̙̝̙̓̏̑ͅs̴̱̠̳̙̤͑͗͛̉t̴͈̤̃̒̆͊̚r҈̬͚̖̥̳͐̈͐̓u҈̖͖͙̞̫̌̉i̶̗͔̫͍͆̌̉d҈͍̭͇̜͋̃̈͆a҉̬̤̳̠̩͛̎̇̂̈́

[lostlibrariangirl]

June 19, 2024

171/366 Days of Growth

Keeping with my 3AM-4AM morning study sessions. I must admit it is harder after some years waking up this early, but I can do it.

I am grateful for the colder weather, it was hard to study with that heat, even at dawn.

Wednesday today, and it looks like the whole week has gone 🤨

[scit-pune]

International Opportunities for IT Professionals

In today's linked world, there is an unlimited demand for experienced IT experts. Working overseas may be exciting and lucrative for Indian IT professionals seeking to expand their career options outside their home country. However, navigating the employment market in a new nation may be intimidating for fresh graduates from MBA in information technology colleges. Begin by studying nations with robust IT businesses and pleasant work conditions. Popular destinations for Indian IT experts include the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and EU countries. Consider employment market demand, visa requirements, cost of living, and quality of life. 

Global IT Landscape

Several factors influence the global IT environment, including the fast growth of digital technology, the creation of new technologies, and the need to solve digitalisation concerns. Digital technology has altered almost every area of modern life, yet the advantages are distributed unevenly. In 2023, high-income countries had five to 10 times faster internet speeds than low-income countries. The necessity to fulfil customer demands has resulted in an increased emphasis on miniaturisation, dependability, and usefulness. The global IT environment is also affected by governments' and other stakeholders' use of new technology to better citizens’ lives. 

Benefits of Working Abroad

There are several advantages to working overseas, including: 

Working overseas can help you improve your flexibility, adaptability, and cultural knowledge. 

You may learn to converse successfully while overcoming language difficulties. 

Many firms provide travel allowances, allowing you to travel to other places. 

Many nations have greater economic chances or incomes. 

Conversing with individuals from other cultures can help you gain confidence and self-esteem. 

You may learn the language by conversing with and listening to native speakers. 

Working with individuals from various nations can help you develop excellent cultural knowledge, tolerance, and sensitivity.

If you ever return to your native country, you can increase your employability.

Tips for Finding International Opportunities

Here are some suggestions for discovering overseas opportunities: 

Create a network of relationships outside of your own country. You may use LinkedIn and Google to broaden your network. You may also take a networking trip and meet with your connections. 

Knowing a foreign language can help you study abroad and learn about another country's culture. It can also help you boost your CV and further your personal growth.

Volunteering is an excellent approach to getting international experience, particularly if you need more prior expertise. 

Freelancing is a popular option for working overseas without a degree. Because freelancers typically operate remotely, they may work from anywhere in the world.

Studying at a Symbiosis college in Pune for an MBA will improve your CV and make you stand out.

[wisteriagoesvroom]

all hail the return of the private equity yacht bro jacket

[slaygentford]

how am I supposed to work today when I need to get seth milchick out of there

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Brother makes a demon-haunted printer

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in RICHMOND TOMORROW (Mar 5) and in AUSTIN> on Mar 10. More tour dates here. Mail-order signed copies from LA's Diesel Books.

You guys, I don't want to bum you out or anything, but I think there's a good chance than some self-described capitalists aren't really into capitalism.

Sorry.

Take incentives: Charlie Munger, capitalism's quippiest pitchman, famously said, "Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome." And here's some mindblowing horseshoe theory for ya: Munger agrees with the noted Communist agitator Adam Smith, whose anti-rentier, pro-government-regulation jeremiad "The Wealth of Nations" contains this notorious passage:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.

Incentives matter – if you design a system that permits abuse, you should expect abuse. Now, I'm not 100% on board with this: every one of us has ways to undetectably cheat the system and enrich ourselves, but most of the time, most of us play by the rules.

But it's different for corporations: the myth of "shareholder supremacy" has reached pandemic levels among the artificial lifeforms we call corporate persons, and it's impossible to rise through the corporate ranks without repeating and believing the catechism that there is a law that requires executives to lie, cheat and steal if it results in an extra dollar for the investors, in the name of "fiduciary duty":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/18/falsifiability/#figleaves-not-rubrics

And this attitude has leaked out into politics and everyday life, so that many of our neighbors have been brainwashed into thinking that a successful cheat is a success in life, that pulling a fast one "makes you smart":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth

In a world dominated by a belief in the moral virtue and legal necessity of ripping off anyone you can get away with cheating, then, sure, any system that permits cheating is a system in which cheating will occur.

This shouldn't be controversial, but if so, how are we to explain the whole concept of the Internet of Things? Installing networked computers into our appliances, office equipment, vehicles and homes is an invitation of mischief: the software in those computers can be remotely altered after you purchase them, taking away the features you paid for and then selling them back to you.

Now, an advocate for market-based solutions has a ready-made response to this: if a company downgrades a device you own, this merely invites another company to step in with a disenshittifying plug-in that makes things better. If the company that made your garage-door opener pushes an over-the-air update that blocks you from using an ad-free, well-designed app and forces you to use an enshittified app that forces you to look at ads before you can open the garage, well, that's an opportunity for a rival company to sell you a better software update for your garage-door opener, one that restores the lost functionality:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

I'm no hayekpilled market truefan, but I'm pretty sure that would work.

However.

The problem is that since 1998, that kind of reverse-engineering has been a felony under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bans bypassing "an effective access control"

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

There's a pretty obvious incentive at play when companies have the ability to unilaterally alter how their products work after you buy them and you are legally prohibited to change how the product works after you buy them. This is the first lesson of the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

I've been banging this drum for decades now – like when I got into a public (friendly) spat with the editor of Wired magazine over their reviews of DRM-based media devices. I argued that it was irresponsible to review a device that could be unilaterally downgraded by the manufacturer at any time, without – at a minimum – noting that the feature you're buying the gadget for might disappear without warning after you've shelled out your hard-earned money:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/03/painful-burning-dribble/#law-of-intended-consequences

Of course, companies that get a reputation for these kinds of shenanigans might lose market share to better competitors. Sure, if the company that made your phone or your thermostat or your insulin pump reached into it across the internet and made it worse, you're shit out of luck when it comes to that device. But you can buy your next device from a better company, right?

Well, sure – in a competitive market, that's a plausible theory of "market discipline." Companies that fear losing business to rivals might behave themselves better.

In theory.

But in practice, the world's "advanced economies" have spent the past 40 years running an uncontrolled experiment in what happens if you don't enforce competition law, and instead allow companies to buy all their competitors. The result is across-the-board industrial oligopolies, cartels, duopolies and monopolies in nearly every category of good and service:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

Now, even a duopoly has some competition. If you don't like Coke, there's always Pepsi. But again, in practice, companies in concentrated industries find it easy to "tacitly collude" to adopt one another's worst habits – the differences between the outrageous payment processing charged by Apple's App Store and the junk fees charged by Google Play are about as meaningful as the differences between Coke and Pepsi.

Which brings me to printers.

I know.

Ugh.

Printers are the worst and HP is the worst of the worst. For years, HP has been abusing its market dominance – and its customers' wallets – by inflating the price of ink and rolling out countermeasures to prevent you from refilling your old cartridges or buying third-party ink. Worse, HP have mastered the Darth Vader MBA, bushing updates to its printers that sneakily downgrade them after you've bought them and taken them home.

Here's a sneaky trick HP came up with: they send a "security update" to your printer. After you click "OK," a little progress bar zips across the screen and the printer reboots itself, and then…nothing. The printer declares itself to be "up to date" and works exactly like it did before you installed the update. But inside the printer, a countdown timer has kicked off, and then, months later, the "security update" activates itself, like a software Manchurian Candidate.

Because that "security update" protects the security of HP, against HP customers. It is designed to detect and reject the very latest third-party ink cartridges, which means that if you've just bought a year's worth of ink at Costco, you might wake up the next day and discover that your printer will no longer accept them – because of an update you ran six months before.

Why does HP put such a long fuse on its logic bomb? For the same reason that viruses like covid evolve to be contagious before you show symptoms. If the update immediately broke compatibility with third party ink, word would spread, and some HP customers would turn off their printers' wifi before the "security update" could be applied to them.

By asymptomatically incubating the infection over a long, patient timescale, HP maximizes the spread of the contagion, guaranteeing a global pandemic of enshittiification:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

HP has done this – and worse – over and over, and every time I write about it, people pop up to recommend their Brother printers as the enshittification-free alternative. I own a Brother, an HL3170-CDW laser printer that's basically indestructible, cheerfully accepts third-party toner, and costs almost nothing to run.

But I still don't connect it to my wifi. The idea that Brother is a better company than HP – that is possesses some intrinsic antienshittificatory virtue – has always struck me as a foolish belief. Brother has means, motive and opportunity to push over-the-air downgrades to block third-party ink as HP.

Which is exactly what they've done.

Yesterday, Louis Rossman, hero of the Right to Repair movement, revealed that Brother had just pushed a mandatory over-the-air update that locks out third-party ink:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpHX_9fHNqE

Rossman has a thorough technical breakdown of the heist, but it boils down to this. Brother is just as shit as HP. Look from the men to the pigs and the pigs to the men all you want – you will never spot the difference. Take the Pepsi Challenge – bet you won't be able to guess which is which:

https://wiki.rossmanngroup.com/wiki/Brother_ink_lockout_%26_quality_sabotage

This was the absolutely predictable outcome of the regulatory incentives our corporate overlords created, the enormous, far-reaching power we handed to these corporations. With that great power came no responsibility:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/#franklinite

Filling our devices with computers that run programs that can be changed in secret, that we're not allowed to inspect or alter? It's a recipe for a demon-haunted world, where the devices we entrust with our livelihood, our privacy and our wellbeing are possessed by hellions who escape from the digital Tartarus and are unleashed upon humanity.

Demons have possessed the Internet of Things. It's in Teslas:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

and in every other car, too:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

Our devices – phones, pacemakers, appliances and home security systems – are designed to prevent us to find out what they're doing. That means that when malicious software infects them, then – by design – these devices prevent us from knowing about it or doing anything about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/18/descartes-delenda-est/#self-destruct-sequence-initiated

This should not come as a surprise to anyone. Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/05/printers-devil/#show-me-the-incentives-i-will-show-you-the-outcome