CUPS Printing System Open-Source Development Has Seemingly Dried Up

[royce]

You already do have national ID in the form of internationally recognized passport. We do have also identity card - which btw works as a passport within EU (during travels into members state I don't need to have my passport along with me, ID card is enough). Nobody is stamping passports anyway. Inside EU there usually are not even any borders.

Arrest for refusing to show ID illegal? Police, border guards (on EU external border) have rights to ask for your documents. More, near border carrying some form of ID (be it even driver license) is mandatory.

Fucking ID card makes it also much easier to authenticate one's self against banks, state services etc, it has replaced client cards for stores - wallet is no longer full with 50 different cards. Only private info readable from it without you inputting PINs is your citizen's/resident's unique serial no.

Last I heard about US banks was that they release their client their own ID tokens and if you lose'm.. Well, you are fucked, unless you get somebody to witness that you are who you say you are and who will be responsible for you. Or smth completely brain dead like this.

It's always people in countries without ID cards who claim they're unnecessary. I'm from an EU country with national IDs and they're really useful on the day to day, as well as when traveling within the union to countries outside of Schengen.

[stiiixy]

Australia's national medical health service is still faxing

Come get us Chrussina

If you want my health records, here they are;

1 x broken leg

Enjoy!

[Paul Frederick]

Makes me happy I don't print. I'll say this about CUPS, the few times I have used it I thought it was way better than old printcap was.

[torsionbar28]

You already do have national ID in the form of internationally recognized passport. We do have also identity card - which btw works as a passport within EU (during travels into members state I don't need to have my passport along with me, ID card is enough). Nobody is stamping passports anyway. Inside EU there usually are not even any borders.

Arrest for refusing to show ID illegal? Police, border guards (on EU external border) have rights to ask for your documents. More, near border carrying some form of ID (be it even driver license) is mandatory.

Fucking ID card makes it also much easier to authenticate one's self against banks, state services etc, it has replaced client cards for stores - wallet is no longer full with 50 different cards. Only private info readable from it without you inputting PINs is your citizen's/resident's unique serial no.

Last I heard about US banks was that they release their client their own ID tokens and if you lose'm.. Well, you are fucked, unless you get somebody to witness that you are who you say you are and who will be responsible for you. Or smth completely brain dead like this.

x2 on this. I wish the US would get with the program and issue national ID cards. The standard already exists, created by HSPD12, and proven in years of government employee usage. Makes security and accountability so much easier for things like electronically signing your income taxes. And voting. Estonia already uses a similar smartcard national ID to enable secure electronic voting. They have none of the voter fraud problems that US has with antiquated paper ballots and different systems in every state. Not to mention the problem states like California and New York, that issue drivers licenses to illegals, and also have voter registration occur automatically along with drivers license issuance - illegals in NY and CA must request and complete an additional opt-out form stating "i am an illegal and ineligible to vote" - how many actually do that? Very few I would guess. National ID card solves all of this mess.

[MadeUpName]

It seems to me that only a novice, here in 2020, would not buy a network printer with ipp. Drivers? Lol. Printing from any computer Win/Mac/Linux/Android/whatever is just so simple and easy with IPP. No more driver hell. That said, I do still have a small VM running CUPS, that handles all print jobs for our older printers. We have some 15+ year old HP LaserJet models that refuse to die, they just keep on printing. CUPS saves the day with those, as it allows even the newest Win10 machines to print to them. (Win10 basically doesn't support any hardware older than a few years). But yeah, nowadays, IPP is the only logical answer.

When your work flow includes creating color critical prints on photo paper the driver requirements become a whole lot more complicated.

[aht0]

x2 on this. I wish the US would get with the program and issue national ID cards. The standard already exists, created by HSPD12, and proven in years of government employee usage. Makes security and accountability so much easier for things like electronically signing your income taxes. And voting. Estonia already uses a similar smartcard national ID to enable secure electronic voting. They have none of the voter fraud problems that US has with antiquated paper ballots and different systems in every state. Not to mention the problem states like California and New York, that issue drivers licenses to illegals, and also have voter registration occur automatically along with drivers license issuance - illegals in NY and CA must request and complete an additional opt-out form stating "i am an illegal and ineligible to vote" - how many actually do that? Very few I would guess. National ID card solves all of this mess.

Not just Estonia. I checked, something like 8 or 9 EU member states have smartcard national ID. Dunno how many have voting system built on it. I've used electronic voting system few times, it's convenient and wastes less of my time (no need to actually go anywhere except behind computer).
https://www.eesti.ee/en/ Government portal. Not sure how much is visible of its possibilities without you having logged in.

[stiiixy]

Speaking of National ID card's, something we Aussies have been toying with since, what, the 80's? what are the ACTUAL negative's regarding them? REAL security issues, caveats. How are existing system's implemented and some of their negatives, and if 'the system' was exposed, what would be leaked. How, and what are all the bonuses? If EU nations are doing it, with their added extra layer of EUness to boot, surely we (with NZ/PNG?) could implement something similar.

[Sonadow]

Hi, I am Till Kamppeter, leader of the OpenPrinting project (site link in my profile). I am closely working together with Michael Sweet. I am also organizer of the mentioned Microconference on Linux Plumbers, both 2019 and 2020.
If you look into my monthly news posts on the OpenPrinting web site (under "News and Events") you see in the "CUPS" sections that Apple's CUPS development is dormant and in the September news you see that I have started a (hopefully temporary) fork of CUPS on the OpenPrinting GitHub (link in the "CUPS" section of the September news). Both Michael Sweet and me have committed already some fixes there. In case that Apple does finally cease CUPS development I will continue the project together with Michael Sweet on OpenPrinting.
CUPS will still be needed in Linux. CUPS spools jobs (not all Printer Applications or native IPP printers do that), pre-filters the PDF coming from the user applications into a format the printer (or Printer Application) understands (IPP does not require that an IPP printer/server understands PDF), and shares printers over the network, also with sophisticated authentication systems like Kerberos.
CUPS will drop PPD file support soon (this is one of the major changes on the roadmap), so classic drivers consisting of PPDs and filters are not supported any more and Printer Applications are the only form to supply printer drivers.
Please refer to the Linux Plumbers Microconferences, the OpenPrinting Summit/PWG meetings (see OpenPrinting web site, "News and Events"), and my monthly OpenPrinting news posts.

Till

If that is going to be the case, what printer should I get nowadays in order to enjoy driverless networked printing on Linux?

Most of the the printers available in the market today have only Windows/macOS drivers, and those that do offer Linux drivers usually either provide only a PPD or in most other cases, a CUPS driver that is little more than a bundle of proprietary libraries and a custom PPD that depends on said proprietary libraries.

[Till Kamppeter]

First of all, you should look for driverless IPP printers. As AirPrint (the method iPhones use to print) is a flavor of driverless IPP printing and Linux also supports this flavor, simply look for AirPrint-capable devices. Other flavors are IPP Everywhere, Mopria, and Wi-Fi Direct Print, but they are less often advertised. They are also supported by Linux. And if you go with a multi-function device, if it does driverless IPP in some form it also offers driverless scanning and IPP Fax Out. So you get everything working.
All the existing legacy free software drivers will get converted into Printer Applications soon and we have even started working on concepts to wrap proprietary classic drivers into Printer Applications.
The printer manufacturers (at least most of them) are organized in the Printing Working Group (PWG) and the standards like IPP come from this group. OpenPrinting and the PWG work closely together and we have an annual meeting. So the manufacturers are aware of the deprecation and soon removal of PPDs and the new standard way of Printer Applications.

Till

[aht0]

Speaking of National ID card's, something we Aussies have been toying with since, what, the 80's? what are the ACTUAL negative's regarding them? REAL security issues, caveats. How are existing system's implemented and some of their negatives, and if 'the system' was exposed, what would be leaked. How, and what are all the bonuses? If EU nations are doing it, with their added extra layer of EUness to boot, surely we (with NZ/PNG?) could implement something similar.

Actual negatives? IF there is security vulnerability in smartcards themselves, it may lead to mass-replacement of ID cards while at the same time access to e-services is disabled. It may also lead to stolen or hacked ID's used electronically. Former has happened, latter cases I am not aware of. It's principally using public/private key pairs, nothing experimental.

3 years a go some scientist found vulnerability/weakness (cant recall, might have been done lack of sufficient randomness) in certificates of certain series of issued ID cards and it almost toppled government because initially it was covered up (starting from smartcard vendor who tried to claim there was no vulnerability) while government agency responsible tried to work around the issue. Overall it was first case of to do with security vulnerabilities over nearly 2 decades of use.

Final result: Bunch of ID cards had to be replaced, everybody had to generate new certificates and government changed the vendor of smartcards. People who did not re-generate new certificates had their smartcards stop working with government e-services. Such still remain valid as normal non-electronic documents until expiration.

Another negative: voting system is pretty transparent but cannot avoid cases where someone with another's ID at hand would cast a vote not his/her own. Doesn't have to mean stolen ID - might be elder care homes, where leadership is tasked with holding the documents of their patients. Few cases have surfaced where suspiciously votes from some care home unerringly go to to director of same, who's participating on elections.