HP Inc is piloting a paper delivery service for Instant Ink subscribers as it looks to increase the amount of profit it can wring from customers.

The world is going to print fewer and fewer pages now that employees work from both the office and home, so achieving a greater "share of wallet", as it is often referred to by tech execs, is top of mind for print vendors.

According to IDC, some 2.8 trillion pages were printed in 2020, down 14 percent year-on-year (or 450 million fewer sheets) but it may recover to some degree.

"The amount of printing in the office will be around 80 percent of what we were projecting it to be before the pandemic started," Enrique Lores, CEO at HP, told attendees of the Cowan 50th Annual Technology, Media and Telecom Conference.

"There's going to be an impact because with fewer people in the offices there will be fewer pages printed in the office," he added.

That 80 percent is subject to change, and could be revised downwards. It is not certain how many people will return to their offices and the frequency at which they do.

HP changed tack in 2020 to rebalance profitability between print hardware and supplies following a drop in its bottom line and a proliferation of consumables remanufacturers. Ink was traditionally where HP made the lion's share of its profits.

Lores told the conference that HP had been "losing money with close to 25 percent of our customers.".

The solution? It raised the upfront price of hardware for customers that do not want to use HP-branded supplies and made printers that locked out non-HP consumables, meaning users couldn't load up off-brand toner. This is known as HP+, and gives customers one of these two options across the portfolio.

The heavy promotion of subscriptions has grown the installed base of Instant Ink customers to 11 million worldwide from 8 million 18 months ago. Lores said he sees Instant Ink "as one of the most exciting and more rewarding things from an investor perspective."

He added: "[W]hen we shift customers to the Instant Ink model, the subscription model… we make more money per customer. It's also a better value proposition for the customer. So it's a win-win for both. And we make sure that this customer is always using HP supplies. So really our goal is to shift as many consumers as we can to the subscription model."

Between 20 to 30 percent of new customers are buying printing in this way but HP would like that figure to be closer to 50 to 60 percent.

"It's very critical," Lores added, "not only because of the impact it has in the Print business, but also because of… making more money per customer, also because it's now a platform to sell additional services."

And those services? A new one was piloted last quarter.

"We have been testing now the service of delivering paper to these customers, which is another key value proposition because if you print at home having to go buy paper [is] heavy, very painful, and we are going to be delivering that."

He added: "And this is just an example of additional services that we are going to be building on top of the platform. And for every service, we will increase the amount of money that we make per customer."

HP said this will be scaled in the following months.

The Register has asked HP for more details of the pilot, including where it is taking place, what other services is HP preparing and where the paper is sourced.

Readers may be wondering if HP paper is competitive with market rates. The cost of print ink from all of the branded vendors is not cheap, costing on average 286 percent more than third party alternatives. ®

Late last month, France's BEA-RI, or Bureau of Investigation and Analysis on industrial risks, issued its technical report on the March 10th, 2021 fire at the OVH datacenter in Strasbourg.

The French report [PDF] and summary [PDF] echo the findings of the Bas-Rhin fire service in March, 2022 that the lack of an automatic fire extinguisher system, the delay of electrical cutoff and the building design contributed to the spread of the blaze.

The BEA-RI findings also hint at a possible cause – a water leak on an inverter – while stating that the cause has not been conclusively determined.

Analysis For all the pomp and circumstance surrounding Apple's move to homegrown silicon for Macs, the tech giant has admitted that the new M2 chip isn't quite the slam dunk that its predecessor was when compared to the latest from Apple's former CPU supplier, Intel.

During its WWDC 2022 keynote Monday, Apple focused its high-level sales pitch for the M2 on claims that the chip is much more power efficient than Intel's latest laptop CPUs. But while doing so, the iPhone maker admitted that Intel has it beat, at least for now, when it comes to CPU performance.

Apple laid this out clearly during the presentation when Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of hardware technologies, said the M2's eight-core CPU will provide 87 percent of the peak performance of Intel's 12-core Core i7-1260P while using just a quarter of the rival chip's power.

Microsoft has forgotten to renew the certificate for the web page of its Windows Insider software testing program.

Attempting to visit the Windows Insider portal was returning the familiar "Your connection is not private" warning – as if webpages larded with scripts and trackers can truly be called "private." The problem has now been fixed, and someone's no doubt getting an earful.

Browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari will attempt to deter visitors from accessing the webpage, but will provide a link for those who ignore the warnings and persist on clicking through to advanced options.

RSA Conference For the first time in over two years the streets of San Francisco have been filled by attendees at the RSA Conference and it seems that the days of physical cons are back on.

The security conference trade has been more cautious than most when it comes to getting conferences back up to speed in the COVID years. Almost all cons were virtual with a very limited hybrid-conference season last year, including DEF CON, where masks were taken seriously. People still wanted to mingle and ShmooCon too went ahead, albeit later than usual in March.

The RSA conference has been going for over 30 years and many security folks love going. There are usually some good talks, it's a chance to meet old friends, and certain pubs host meetups where more constructive work gets done on hard security ideas than a month or so of Zoom calls.

As compelling as the leading large-scale language models may be, the fact remains that only the largest companies have the resources to actually deploy and train them at meaningful scale.

For enterprises eager to leverage AI to a competitive advantage, a cheaper, pared-down alternative may be a better fit, especially if it can be tuned to particular industries or domains.

That’s where an emerging set of AI startups hoping to carve out a niche: by building sparse, tailored models that, maybe not as powerful as GPT-3, are good enough for enterprise use cases and run on hardware that ditches expensive high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for commodity DDR.

Review The Reg FOSS desk took the latest update to openSUSE's stable distro for a spin around the block and returned pleasantly impressed.

As we reported earlier this week, SUSE said it was preparing version 15 SP4 of its SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution at the company's annual conference, and a day later, openSUSE Leap version 15.4 followed.

The relationship between SUSE and the openSUSE project is comparable to that of Red Hat and Fedora. SUSE, with its range of enterprise Linux tools, is the commercial backer, among other sponsors.

Oracle is planning to build a national database of individuals' health records for the whole United States following its $28.3 billion acquisition of electronic health records specialist Cerner.

In a presentation, CTO and founder Larry Ellison said electronic health records for individual patients were stored by hospitals and physicians, and not replicated or shared between providers.

"We're going to solve this problem by putting a unified national health records database on top of all of these thousands of separate hospital databases," Ellison said.

Analysis The European Parliament this week voted to support what is effectively a ban on the sale of cars with combustion engines by 2035, and automakers are not happy.

MEPs backed a plenary vote on Wednesday for "zero-emission road mobility by 2035" – essentially meaning no more diesel and gasoline-fueled vehicles on the road.

The ambitious target means the automotive battery industry will have to service a much larger demand over the coming years, and electric carmakers stand to benefit hugely – that is, if they can source the requisite semiconductors and batteries.

Intezer security researcher Joakim Kennedy and the BlackBerry Threat Research and Intelligence Team have analyzed an unusual piece of Linux malware they say is unlike most seen before - it isn't a standalone executable file.

Dubbed Symbiote, the badware instead hijacks the environment variable (LD_PRELOAD) the dynamic linker uses to load a shared object library and soon infects every single running process.

The Intezer/BlackBerry team discovered Symbiote in November 2021, and said it appeared to have been written to target financial institutions in Latin America. Analysis of the Symbiote malware and its behavior suggest it may have been developed in Brazil. 

Microsoft has treated some of the courageous Dev Channel crew of Windows Insiders to the long-awaited tabbed File Explorer.

"We are beginning to roll this feature out, so it isn't available to all Insiders in the Dev Channel just yet," the software giant said.

The Register was one of the lucky ones and we have to commend Microsoft on the implementation (overdue as it is). The purpose of the functionality is to allow users to work on more than one location at a time in File Explorer via tabs in the title bar.

Over recent years, Uncle Sam has loosened its tight-lipped if not dismissive stance on UFOs, or "unidentified aerial phenomena", lest anyone think we're talking about aliens. Now, NASA is the latest body to get in on the act.

In a statement released June 9, the space agency announced it would be commissioning a study team, starting work in the fall, to examine unidentified aerial phenomena or UAPs, which it defined as "observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena."

NASA emphasized that the study would be from a "scientific perspective" – because "that's what we do" – and focus on "identifying available data, how best to collect future data, and how NASA can use that data to move the scientific understanding of UAPs forward."

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