[Louis Rossmann] Brother turns heel & becomes anti-consumer printer company
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How recent does the printer have to be for them to do this?
The two that I have are old and the toner cartridges don't even have a chip in them, so I doubt they could tell if the toner is 3rd party. -
We need an open source RepRap printer. Like, I wonder if this thing could be reverse engineered, given they still make the ink cartridge/head units for it.
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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 attached devices if the attached Linux computer is Internet-connected.
$ sudo fwupdtool get-devicesWill 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...
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Funny you mention apps. I turned auto-update off for all of them on my phone because I got tired of functionality being removed. A couple force updates after you get too far behind. Been alright so far, but it's been less than half a year ago we'll see how it goes in the long run. Security is obviously taking a hit by doing this.
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I actually bought a little tablet PC so that I could carry a working copy of FreeCAD into my workshop rather than print out plans and such. My little Epson printer does very little.
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Ironic username, but no, there are none righteous
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Summary for those who can't watch at the moment?
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Yeah, that can cover some cases (also, throwing data on a smartphone, which most people have and keep with them most of the time) but I think that for most people, electronic devices still aren't a complete replacement for paper.
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Power. Paper just needs some kind of light in the environment.
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Shareability. Okay, there are schemes to let one transfer data from phone to phone, but it's hard to compete with how intuitive and universal handing some paper to someone is.
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Battery. Just keeping the display on a phone or laptop, even if you aren't far away from power, on to keep the page visible tends to consume power, and many devices can't keep something visible all day. I'll concede that eInk displays can cover some of that.
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Disposability. Paper is pretty cheap, and if a piece of paper gets soaked in water or whatever, it's no big loss.
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Use of paper in the physical world. I can do things like create stencils on a sheet of paper and cut them out. It's a device that lets a digital computer interact with the outside world beyond purely showing information.
We're a lot closer to the paperless world than we were when I first started hearing the phrase "paperless office", and a lot of documents never leave electronic form, but I still do occasionally want to use paper.
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Background from me: Basically, a number of printers are sold using a razor-and-blades model The printer is cheap. The ink is expensive. This is done because for a number of products, humans have a bias towards a low up-front cost, don't weight ongoing costs as much -- happens with phone plans that come with an inexpensive phone but make up the money over time by being locked to a service that cost more, for example. So if a manufacturer can put a printer on a shelf that has a lower up-front cost, uses the razor-and-blades model, they get the sales, not the one next to them that has a high up-front cost but lower costs for consumables. Inkjet printers manufacturers had been increasingly-widely doing this for some years, with printers getting cheaper and ink being sold at increasingly-higher prices. Third-party ink manufacturers picked up on this and started selling ink at a much cheaper price. This dicked up the business model that printer manufacturers have, and printer manufacturers fired back by building authentication chips into their ink cartridges and similar.
For some time, this was pretty much entirely the province of inkjet printers. Getting a laser printer tended to avoid that. Brother is a prominent laser printer manufacturer that made printers that didn't have restrictions being placed on them, so was often recommended as a way to avoid all this.
What Rossman's saying is that Brother has started doing this as well now. He gives some examples of firmware updates being pushed out to Internet-connected laser printers to cause them to stop accepting third-party ink cartridges, as well as some other behavior that he considers anti-consumer. He had previously recommended Brother monotone laser printers as a way to avoid this [I had as well]. He says that he doesn't know of a type of printer to recommend now.
He then spent a while being licked by his cat, who he says likes the taste of his skin cream.
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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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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.
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My Canon photo printer can be converted to a tank-style with a drill and a highly illegal cartridge resetter.
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I would say "power" and "battery" are the same thing.
Yeah sharing digital documents between devices is still a complete urethra sanding, isn't it? If it can't go by email you probably shouldn't even try. Having an x86 tablet running desktop GNU/Linux and Syncthing...Syncthing works very well, Linux works well, Linux UIs on touch screen are more unpleasant than dental surgery, and FreeCAD is less touch screen friendly than the average CLI utility. I can just barely use FreeCAD to look at the spreadsheet on that thing, especially when it's got its keyboard snapped off.
It would be maybe more ideal to have an e-ink device that goes with me to the shop, something that will run for a month on a cell phone battery, that can display things like technical drawings made from CAD, a spreadsheet exported from CAD, along with things like tool manuals and similar reference materials, and with some utility apps like a calculator and maybe a little notepad...
Everything I want we have the technology to do right now, but no one does it the way I'd want it done because interoperability be damned.
As for making stencils and templates, it's something I really miss now that I don't have ready access to a laser engraver.
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Shit come down
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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.
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He gives some examples of firmware updates being pushed out to Internet-connected Brother printers to cause them to stop accepting third-party ink cartridges
This is not supported by the references in the linked article. They only talk about the printers refusing to do automatic registration with third-party cartridges.
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I want to agree, but has there ever been a case of the free market saving itself?
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Am I just jaded about the whole internet or does this read like an AI summary? It feels too specific to be written by a human.
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I no longer have any corporate relationships that aren't either apprehensive, strained, or downright antagonistic.
It's us versus them now and they've give their last shits. It's feeling like every company is a cable company 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.
Now to figure out how to disable automatic firmware updates
