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Cool new prank idea: print a bunch of pictures of arses to a random printer. Seriously, you can do it—Google has indexed somewhere around 86,800 publicly available HP printers.
A little savvy searching shows that you can hit up any of the devices listed by clicking any of the links in the results. Surprise a library in Seattle with several pages of Notorious B.I.G. lyrics. Send the University of Cambridge a hard copy of a Rihanna cover. (We actually did this, and it worked). Congrats, random Chinese IP address, you just got bombed with a fifty copies of a report I once did on War and Peace. [Google via Port3000]
Image credit: Shutterstock/Marynchenko Oleksandr
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I see 2 pages of results, not 86,000..?
Second page, display omitted results.
Good move Google; because this feature totally won’t be abused in the slightest..
Out of interest, aside from the obvious prank applications, what did Google have in mind, for intended use, when they released this..?
Propaganda for the new age.
All the are doing is indexing web pages, if you chose to have you printer host a public web page that allows anyone to print stuff then it is your own fault.
@Spazturtle & Geoffreyc – Ah; thanks for clarifying. I didn’t realise that was the case and was a bit puzzled by it, honestly.
Google hasn’t exactly released anything. It just happens that people are dumb enough to leave printing panels open to the public, without even setting a simple robots.txt to tell google not to index it.
Fist I blame the sysadmin then I blame HP.
I blame the sysadmin for designing his network poorly and allowing a printer to be accessible from the outside world.
I then blame HP for not implementing a robots.txt to tell spiders not to index the webserver on a printer.
If on the other hand HP have implemented a robots.txt in the webserver in the printers and google have ignored it and indexed it anyway then there is a problem and people should be concerned.
Also this search string has been available for a long time, there is another one that allows you to view IP CCTV cameras that are open to the internet.
Hell I use those search strings to find plages on certain websites. Gizmodo for example the search facility is crap or im just useless at using it but in google if I type “site:gizmodo.co.uk searchterm here” google will then only return results from Gizmodo.com. Or if you are looking for a string in a url then you can do something like “inurl:gizmodo searchterm” that throws up results that have gizmodo in the url and matches the search term.
Unfortunately looks like all the Chinese IPs are actually in Taiwan, so my h-i-l-a-r-i-o-u-s prank of sending 1,000 copies of “Down with the Communist Party” leaflets would not work…
I doubt there’d be any sort of open connection in or out of China.
Besides, if that prank of yours worked, the poor owner of the printer would probably receive an unpleasant visit from the people that make people “disappear”.
Hence the hilariousness!
I remember being out there and my friend shitting themselves because he was saying some unsavoury things about China on MSN when his internet cut out and he heard sirens in the distance.
So who’s paying for the ink and paper here???
The idiot IT department who didn’t secure the network.
All they had to do was add a text file called robots.txt in the root directory with the contents
”
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
”
and google would not have indexed it.
Surely the thing to do here is to print messages pretending to be someone trapped in the printer?!
HeLP! I am StUck in the CraCKEr makINg machINE! I can:T get OUt. THE ROlLers WONt STopp…
and then some blood stains.
Print out your CV, Write “We need to hire this person immediately” and “pass to HR” on it in red ink. scan and then Print to every single printer on this list. The recipients will either:-
1. Throw it away (espially if they don’t read English.
2. Discover it’s a prank, then throw it away.
3. Contact you to find out how you did it.
4. Be impressed by your tech skill/cheek that they give you an interview
5. Pass the print to HR who will hire you
6. Contact the police to complain about you spamming them.
What have you got to lose