TECH: PRINTERANYWHERE shaping up nicely

This utility allows you to “share” someone else’s printer.

Doesn’t make sense (to me) if you’re on a lan with a printer. That is, if I am home and want to print on my home office’s printer from my laptop in the living room, then I can share without this utility.

BUT if I want to print on that home office printer when I am at work say so my wife can read something, then this fills the niche.

It would also seem to eliminate the dreaded fax machine. I can print on my friend’s printer in North Carolina if he wasn’t such a Luddite. Rather than try to fax something to him.

That’s not to say this isn’t without drawbacks.

Clearly, it routes thru a server outside of my control, so I wouldn’t use it for anything I wouldn’t want to see int he newspaper. But, then that describes email and the internet as well. It would seem easy to have the two stubs at each end negotiate a public private key pair allowing the architecture to stay the same but the security to be bullet proof. Then when I “fax” my order for dinner tonight, I wouldn’t have to be concerned that anyone will know what I was having.

That pki implementation would also prevent eavesdropping, and serve as a model for peer to peer encryption.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 24th, 2006 at 09:43 and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.