I fear the day my 2014 hp LaserJet dies. There won’t be a decent printer on the market…
OTOH, I’ve been using a HP laser printer for years and the last time I spent 40€ for toner was almost two years ago. Just stay away from shitty inksquirters or even shittier “multi-function-devices”. They are customer-rippoff devices without real use, nothing else. Honestly, if you think you need to print colorful, fuzzy pictures that will fade at the first streak of sunlight you probably had it coming.
This firmware update applies to laserjets. Not inkjets.
It’s going to get to the point where you might be better off going back to dot matrix if tank-based inkjet printers are somehow locked down via chemical DRM too.
My general rule of thumb is that any software update has a 50% chance of making the software worse. So I don’t update anything without a good reason. That includes not just device updates but things like phone apps.
Yeah this is terrible from a security and usability point of view. Just stop using proprietary bs systems. Why do you think so many technical people use Linux and avoid IoT devices like the plague? So we don’t have to deal with companies doing stuff we don’t like without a choice.
Keeping up-to-date with security updates is incredibly important.
Every CVE I flip a coin.
Makes life more exciting.
I’ve never had an issue with viruses, I’m not a big company nor do I download sketchy files. I feel like if there’s something serious enough to affect me (like the iPhone Unicode character exploit), I’d hear about it.
You’ll never have an issue until you do. Not to mention all the issues you don’t know about.
But not so much for the printers…
Printer botnet goes brr.
Printers always go brr.
Unless they’re HP, then they only go brr if you buy their ink. And apparently Brother now too.
Brother loosing all competitive advantage they had via reputation. Doing a very big 180 and reversing the changes and commiting to no do t his BS is the only way to undo this
They must’ve hired some new analysts that said “hey, people are willing to accept less! Why are we doing more?”
It’s up to the people to prove them wrong, but that usually doesn’t happen :\
Losing*
I really wish we had open source 2D printers like we have open source 3D printers. That could solve a lot of the problems I think as we could have an open spec to allow people to do whatever they want. My Prusa doesn’t care what brand filament I want to use, just as long it can drive it, melt it, and lay it down the way I need. Also why is it my 3D printers are more reliable than my 2D printers most days?
nononononononpnNONONONONONO WHYYYYY I JUST GOT A BROTHER BECAUSE OF HP DOING THE SAME THING WTF
Keep it off the Internet and don’t update the firmware
Et tu Brute! :(
Someone needs to Luigi Brother’s CEO
I really hope Brother is telling the truth!
I got a 4 acre lot on Mars that I’m selling for cheap. You seem like a gulli…great fellow. $10k. Its pretty cheap right now because people don’t known the real estate trend yet. I’m taking amazon cards.
But this is a weird thing to lie about — the only reason to implement toner DRM is to get people to buy your cartridges. But if your public statement is, “it’s ok to buy off brand cartridges,” then…well… that’s kinda weird.
Not saying you’re wrong, and they could be trying to have their cake and eat it too (court the anti-DRM crowd but also scare people into sticking with their toner). I’m just saying your snarky/sarcastic response seems unwarranted here.
Same. My printer works fine, and I recently replaced my toner (went genuine because I found a decent deal), so I probably won’t need another anytime soon.
That said, I will no longer be recommending them until this is cleared up. I won’t be recommending against them though, because I don’t know of a better company, but I’ll just recommend people go to their local library or print shop or something and not deal with having a printer at home.
I’m actually looking for a good multifunctional printer. Our Samsung is dying. It was an LED printer and we only changed toner 1 time in 15 years.
It looks like to me as some redditor got bad quality third party ink and blamed it on firmware. Some karma whores picked it up, as dogging on printer companies is sure way to gain some free updoots.
And now Louis Rossmann picked it up and the lie spread further.
We live in a post-truth society.
ink printers are total scams, you might as well use a printing shop or library to do it, if you are planning on printing large number of pages. we got a canon laser jet printer, only need toner cartridge, no subscription based models. we orignally had scam-epson.
The printers in the article are using toner. The title is misleading.
anyone know about jailbreaking printers
It absolutely baffles me that there isn’t a huge custom printer firmware movement.
I’ve have had this thought too and the only reason I can think of is that the inkjet printers are sold at such a rediculous loss, that anything that could be sold next to them without the offset price from ink would seem like a bad joke.
I think they meant - movement to release custom firmware for existing printers.
I think it’s a legal issue, honestly. When printers first came out there was a fear that people would just print money and other illegal things, so printer firmware had to print out security identifiers on everything in yellow ink so it can be traceable. That’s also why yellow ink always goes out first, and why it complains about yellow ink when trying to only print black and white.
If that’s law, then it could be illegal to use firmware that does not have these features, and anyone making fimware that ‘just prints’ may be held liable.
Thus is all just an educated guess though, but seems plausible.
Ask Richard Stallman ;)
I’m only letting my latest Brother printer connect to my computer through the USB cable. No Internet connection at all.
Careful with that you though. I thought the same thing but someone pointed out in another thread that depending on your system, it may update the firmware over USB when you do system updates.
RPi as a printer server, with the printer connected to its USB port. Use FreeBSD on RPi just to make sure…
