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Roku’s Ultimatum: Surrender Jury Trial Rights or Lose Access to Your TVs
(programming.dev)
Did your Roku TV decide to strong arm you into giving up your rights or lose your FULLY FUNCTIONING WORKING TV? Because mine did.
It doesn't matter if you only use it as a dumb panel for an Apple TV, Fire stick, or just to play your gaming console. You either agree or get bent.
Ditto with my printer. Print over LAN: sure. Printer connect to internet: hell no, that's the first-party version of printer malware.
Especially when printers ask you to waive your class action rights just like this.
Makes sense, when they illegally push straight up malware that sets the ink flow rate to 0 should non-geuine ink cartridges be detected. This will destroy/clog the print head if attempting to print for too long.
Yes, I reverse engineered your fucked up Linux 2.4 (!) based firmware, Epson. Your printer is printing nicely offline with refillable cheap ink. Fuck you, I won.
Sorry about the rant, it had become personal at one point.
Congrats :) The idea that a few software bits are between you and getting a pile of junk working is infuriating. Did you extract and modify an image from flash or find a way in live?
I had a .bin where the change hadn't been implemented and one after. Was using file carving tools as I was just trying to figure out what was going on. Probably spent too much time, but once I found out what it was doing, I was pretty mad. I tried to just corrupt the firmware to force a fallback to a "safe" state, but eventually I had to look into reverse engineering the binary that seemed to be controlling different things, such as the genuine ink check and things like that. Many hours of trial and error staring at the xxd and gdb output, semi randomly breaking things, until I seemed to break the right thing. Was bit tricky to get around the firmware signing, but eventually got that worked out too by tricking it into not checking (very old firmwares for that printer weren't signed) and accepting the 'new' firmware, with a much higher version number, as that's also one thing it checks to prevent downgrading.
Tools used as far as I remember were
binwalk,foremost,autopsyradare2Nice, ty. I've only revenged PC firmware, not embedded, so I wouldn't think of several of those tools.
I know a model of HP inkjet from my childhood that had a service/factory mode where ink checks were disabled. After years of claiming that its carts were empty I was suddenly able to print perfect full-colour pages. RIP HP Photosmart 3110