Foss printer when?

I really hope Brother is telling the truth!

I'm curious how this will go down in Australia. Seems like a pretty solid slam dunk refund, oh the product doesn't work as advertised anymore?

Cool, I've had this for 5 years and now I'd also like a full refund under Australian Consumer Law.

Motherfuckers.

(I don't actually own a printer)

Buy an ecotank printer, they're more expensive initially but that's because they actually make you pay for the printer

Ecotank's use liquid ink that you fill in tanks instead of cartridges

There's no way they can check the ink on ecotank printers

Oh FFS. Not Brother as well. I used to recommend them to everyone. Who is left with unshittified printers?

"You were supposed to be the one"

Brother losing 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

If Brother starts playing that game, they will lose. Why bother buying their considerably more expensive printers over those of HP if they are going to be just as bad in the third party ink department?

Brother deny the claims: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/brother-denies-using-firmware-updates-to-brick-printers-with-third-party-ink/

You were the chosen one! 😭

In case anyone was thinking this applies only to inkjet printers: no, it ONLY seems to apply to laser printers -- the thing that Brother used to be known for. Where the article says "ink", they mean "toner". There is no ink in a laser printer.

Et tu, frater?

These motherfuckers are actively making tech as a whole less secure by destroying any trust the public may have had in firmware updates.

Urgent security fixes are gonna go unpatched on a lot of shit because consumers are seeing more and more firmware or software updates actively making things WORSE.

Thats's a shame, I always considered brother one of the better makers of paper manglers.

It's like every company that wasn't complete shit just suddenly decided to...go to complete shit.

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?

Et tu Brother?

Brother used to be the good guys... Damn.

I suggest whoever has old firmware files to upload them to the Internet Archive (if they allow those).

Any brands left? 🤔😅

Proton, Mozilla, Brother

Its not gonna stop there

😓

And once again the only available good tech is old 2nd hand.

And this is why I'll never connect my working printer to the internet.

Taking a USB stick to it to print is annoying, but fuck this shit.

They're all horrible companies

So… when there is some controversy over an article in Lemmy it gets the strike though? How did this evolve?

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.

anyone know about jailbreaking printers