Your printer is spying on you—here’s the one firewall rule that stops it

Printers are pretty old tech made for a job that’s already losing relevance in many contexts. They really don’t need to do anything other than connect to the devices we want to print from. So, imagine my surprise when I fired up my router logs one boring Sunday and saw my office inkjet chatting away to a bunch of servers I never asked it to talk to. As suspicious as it seems, this is apparently what printers do now: constantly send data back to the mothership. Pretty cool, I suppose. Or is it?