Canon makes printers. Printers suck. They have been awful for so long, as I've mentioned before. Every company who makes them tries to pull some nonsense regarding price, lock-in and ink levels. For years, ink and toner cartridges have shipped with chips in them. It was a form of security that forced customers to only buy their ink or toner. If a printer doesn't see the chip (because you've chosen to buy 3rd party ink), it gives you a hard time or will stop printing. That's worked fine and dandy... until we've hit a global chip shortage. Canon can't source the chips they need to sell their ink to their intentionally-locked-in customers. This by tweet @mariowitte is *chef's kiss*:
The English translation is: Wrong world: thanks to the lack of semiconductors, Canon is now apparently producing toner cartridges without "copy protection" and sending out e-mails to customers with instructions on how to bypass error messages about counterfeit cartridges.
And sure enough, here's a link to Canon's website explaining how to get around their printer ink lock-in nonsense. Your browser should be able to translate it without issue. So, while chip shortages suck, I'll call this a big win for consumers.