0

I just bought a Canon PIXMA TS6150. I downloaded an app on my windows 10 machine as instructed from ij.start.canon. Then some magic occurred and my printer was automatically connected to the WLAN without first connecting via USB or me having to type anything into the printer.

How did my laptop manage to communicate with the printer without the printer being first connected to the WLAN router or directly to the laptop via USB.

I'm also surprised that the app was able to grab the WLAN password from somewhere on the computer without first asking to open a key safe or something like that.

Improve this question
3
  • I'm going to take a guess. I think it turned my laptop into a temporary WLAN hotspot with a special SSID. It then configured the printer and then it switched the laptop back as a wlan client.
    – bradgonesurfing
    Commented Jun 10, 2018 at 19:29
  • 1
    "How did my laptop manage to communicate with the printer without the printer being first connected to the WLAN router or directly to the laptop via USB?" Answer: "I downloaded [and installed] an app on my windows 10 machine as instructed from ij.start.canon." Can you be more specific as to your question?
    – fixer1234
    Commented Jun 10, 2018 at 19:45
  • ij.start.canon tells you to install an app which will connect the printer to the network. The printer is not connected via usb or bluetooth or any other means to the laptop. After you click through a few options something happens and then the printer is now connected to the same WLAN as the laptop. I was curious on what techniques the app could use be used to achieve this. My self comment above is a guess.
    – bradgonesurfing
    Commented Jun 10, 2018 at 20:06

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1

I’m assuming you followed direction similar to those found here: https://support.usa.canon.com/kb/index?page=content&id=ART167454

With that said, you left a lot of details out of your question about the process you followed which makes it fairly easy to determine what takes place.

First, you enable easy wireless connect on the printer.

Second, you complete the setup from the software on your computer. During that setup you are warned that, “the network connection is temporarily disabled during setup.”

Therefore, it is fairly clear that the printer is enabling its wireless interface and broadcasting a temporary wireless network that your laptop then connects to in order to finish configuring the printer.

Printers have had similar functionality for a long time, called wireless direct.

When you ran the setup program on your laptop, you were prompted to elevate to an administrative mode, when you chose to “allow the software to make changes to your computer.” That is all that is necessary to read any passwords of saved wireless networks from your computer.

Improve this answer
1
  • I guess the laptop had wireless direct turned on out of the box. Thanks for the answer.
    – bradgonesurfing
    Commented Jun 11, 2018 at 7:44

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .