Have tech companies forgotten about their users?

Here follows a short rant about something mindbogglingly user-unfriendly.

My mother recently upgraded her laptop to a new M2 Macbook Air. As someone who is a bit older and occassionally still needs to deal with things on real physical paper, she needs to set up her printer.

I was genuinely under the impression that we recognized that printers are inherently frustrating and therefore solved printers like 10 years ago.

She clicks a few buttons and the printer is apparently added to the system. So far so good.

Except now there’s a message “Encryption credentials have expired” and so no printing for her.

First of all, remember that we’re talking about my mother here. She’s an average user who doesn’t particularly care about encryption, especially in relation to a printer. You wouldn’t fault her for thinking that the two things could even be connected. Its a printer, not a high-stakes game of communication where you don’t want your adversary to be able to intercept a secret code or whatever. There’s an information page on the error message which takes you to an unhelpful documentation page telling you to check with your printer manufacturer about the printer’s certificate validity. Again, to a regular user, nobody knows or cares what a certificate is. They just want to print things.

Second of all, there’s literally nothing else wrong other than the fact that there’s some out of date signature on the encryption key. You can just ignore the expiry date and continue doing what you were doing before. Why the hell is there not some simple override to just say “hey, I accept the minute level of risk here, just print this anyway”. Remember, this is my mother, her Macbook and her printer, all behind a firewall in her home office that we’re talking about here. The printer is right there. Who cares if the certificate is expired because she knows for sure that she’s sending her documents to the right printer. But nope, expired certificate equals no printing for you, because god forbid someone might use an old certificate to impersonate the printer and set up a man-in-the-middle attack. I can understand this being a problem if I’m in a shared workspace of thousands of people and I don’t want others snooping on what I’m printing, but in this case, I should just be able to say “honestly, its fine.”

So anwyay, she’s suggesting that she gets a new printer over this which is a shame because there’s nothing wrong with the printer other than it being a bit old and this is starting to smell a lot like planned obsolescence. Fortunately, after some furious googling, we figure out that there might be a way to get around this, because fortunately the manufacturer had the foresight to deal with this problem.

OK, so get this. It requires first figuring out what the printer’s IP address and/or hostname is (remember, this is my mother who we’re talking about here), navigating to that page in your browser, clicking through a bunch of scary warnings about the page being there to trick you and steal your financial information, then going deep into the printer settings to create a self-signed SSL certificate, installing that one for the printer etc etc. I have a Masters Degree in Computer Science and even I’m reaching quite deep into my own expertise here and we’re expecting people like my mother to be able to figure this out.

So we create the new certificate, delete and re-add the printer and the OS is still complaining about the certificate being out of date. We verify that the certificate is, in fact, up to date, but apparently the OS has cached information about the old certificate somewhere and now we’re stuck with the error message. And here I am in another country trying to work out with her via screen-share what’s going on.

This is profoundly stupid and anti-user. There is nothing wrong with the printer, why can’t she just use it?