Summary for those who can't watch at the moment?
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025
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Old printers on ebay are going to be the new game, until we start seeing kickstarter flooded with new printer companies.
I want to agree, but has there ever been a case of the free market saving itself?
Maybe I’m wrong, but I think it will just be cycles (assuming we all survive long enough). I’m in an industry where the large companies are imploding and smaller companies are starting to shine again, eventually those companies will likely become big as well and implode.
Well, whatever that update was, I probably installed it (assuming it's the same here in Japan).
Use pen & paper – Do you really need a printer?
I had to laugh at this. At least in my use case, it's printing out forms and documents that various levels of government needs and I am absolutely not talented enough to reproduce them by hand (also, my handwriting is not fantastic).
I also need one. Our library will print documents for 5¢ per page. Once my Brother HL-2040 craps out, I guess I'll be going there.
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Epson Ecotanks. Liquid ink in, prints out. There's nothing to lock out.
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Have to keep things offline and outdated nowadays 🫤 to prevent things like this happening.
Honestly, that's not a terrible idea in general. Like, if you have an Internet-connected device, you have a hook onto your network that someone can exploit down the line, including -- as Rossman points out -- making it function differently than it did at the time of your purchase in ways that you may not like. And even if you trust the manufacturer, that doesn't mean that someone cannot acquire them and then exploit that hook.
Kind of a problem with apps and other software too. Even open-source software, like the xz attack -- the xz package itself was fine, but you had someone, probably a country, intentionally target and try to seize control of an open-source project to exploit the trust that the open-source project had built up. I understand that it's also been a concern with even browser extensions.
The right to push updates to an Internet-connected device, unfortunately, has value. And there are people who will try to figure out ways to take advantage of that.
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I've been saying that for a couple of years now. They started fucking with third party ink at least a year ago
I've always promoted commercial inktank printers for people who do a lot of printing, and people always mentioned Brother as a response, but tbh I've never really hopped on the bandwagon to shill for any particular company.
Just a good commercial inktank printer. A regular printer with all the bells and whistles is going to cost you like $100 and $45 for each ink pack you buy, you might as well just spend $450 on a printer, write it off as home office expense, and call it good.
I have a Canon color laser printer which works pretty well and doesn’t pull any of this shit. They’re probably the last one standing now.
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I have a Brother MFC-9340CDW that I salvaged from work last year; we replaced it because it kept getting a ghost "paper jam" every time you tried to print something. Turns out the cause is an $18 board that's known to fail. Scanner still works fine though, strangely.
I also have a Kyocera FS-3900DN b&w laser printer from 2006...or somewhere around there. It does the thing, and can even be managed with a CUPS server since it has 10/100 networking.
Now to figure out how to disable automatic firmware updates on the Brother 🤔
Can't watch right now, but is there a list of affected devices?
Go with a bottle printer, or at least a laser and get a standalone scanner for USB. Cartridges suck, literally, all-in-ones even moreso.
Glad I've got an Brother laser that has no network connectivity.
Strictly-speaking, in this case, it's not the ability to be network-connected that's at issue, but rather the ability to push updates to firmware.
I don't know what type of computer you have it connected to, but Linux has a system that will automatically update firmware on USB-attached devices if the attached Linux computer is Internet-connected.
$ sudo fwupdtool get-devices
Will show you a list of managed devices.
I'm sure that Windows and MacOS have comparable schemes.
On Linux, I'm sure that you can blacklist a device for updates.
I'd guess that it's possible to get one of those dedicated USB print servers. Those probably don't support updating firmware on an attached printer. I might have some questions as to how much I'd trust a no-name one of those on my network itself, but...
Shit. I didn't even think of that. I'm using fedora. Tomorrow I'll be blocking firmware updates for the printer. Thank you for pointing that out.
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The last bid I reviewed for a new office recommended Brother printers (woot) but the color laser had toner lock-in. I recommended an alternative and the owner agreed.
Too bad these companies won't know about the products they don't sell because of this crap.
I didn't even know he had a brother.
Are there actually any good printers? I would pay more for the printer itself if you just don't try and scam me afterwards. It feels like a hopeless space.
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I heard Brother was good, then I spent way too long formatting different USB sticks in different cluster sizes and formats, and never got ours to work with any of them. Don't buy Brother if you want that feature, either.
FYI an MBR table with a fat32 partition is probably what it was looking for. If that doesn't work odds are the port is broken
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I have a Brother printer at work that's old enough that I don't have a single thumb drive small enough to work with it. Haven't tried in a while, but iirc it tops out at 8gb and the smallest I have is 32gb.
But it works fine over the network, so I'll just carry on ignoring the firmware update it's been begging me to install for two years.