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.
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.
As much as I love the brand, this was just obviously going to happen. It always happens, it’s the eventual outcome. All that is needed is one middle manager wanting to get an extra bones to come up with some short sighted idea that will make a little extra money in the short run and possibly bankrupt the company in the long term.
See Boeing, see Intel, see…
The only way to not have this happen is to get open source hardware. The open source eco system is amazing already but we need more focus on that, hardware. CPU’s, Computers, printers, phones, everything
What’s worse is remaining “ethical” in the world of business they exist in is a flat out detractor. A financial hindrance of the utmost.
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
Nice, Brother was the last one standing in my mind.
I’m glad I have an IoT vlan without internet access. Nothing is allowed to phone home here.
10 years later
Printers now include embedded cellular modems as backup for OTA firmware updates, ink subscriptions and telemetry.Printer Faraday cage.
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.
The government has mostly turned a blind eye to dark pattern business for years, and now the president is openly saying that he encourages it and wants companies to step up their game. Of course things are going to get worse, especially now where everyone will have forgotten this by the next election, so it’ll get to stay as “the norm”
Unrestrained Capitalism. Without those pesky regulations, companies can charge us all unlimited amounts and not have to consider our rights or health/safety.
With the current US government, there’s far more roadblocks to running a company ethically than turning it to absolute shit
Brother is a Japanese company.
It’s like every company that was
n’t completeplaying the social good will game and didn’t appear at a casual glance to be shit just suddenly decided to…goto complete shit.masks off, because they saw it might finally be acceptable to be ghouls again.Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure I FTFY. Wish it weren’t so, but that’s definitely what it looks like…
The mask of humanity fall[s] from capital. It has to take it off to kill everyone – everything you love; all the hope and tenderness in the world. It has to take it off, just for one second. To do the deed.
- The Deserter, Disco Elysium
They are just taking the mask off since they don’t have to wear it right now.
Game is such a fucking gem. I gotta do a replay soon.
They are just taking the mask off since they don’t have to wear it right now.
Cuts into profit margins pretending to not be a threat to the continued existence of the species and ecosystem as a whole. Gotta buy that 15th mega-yacht.
Something something, I’ll bring the BBQ sauce.
If regulators don’t stop them from doing it, the CEO’s of publicly traded companies will get the boot from the board for not doing it. They have a fiduciary duty to be as shitty as humanly possible.
We need laws to stop this, but the politicians are all bribed not to.
They have a fiduciary duty to be as shitty as humanly possible.
They don’t – that’s a cargo-cult misunderstanding of Dodge v. Ford Motor Co – but it’s so widely believed I guess it might as well be true.
Well, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary, such as the way Costco mostly operates. Being the good guys has a lot of brand value. With a little nurturing of the vast propaganda machine known as advertising, that could be improved.
If the people sitting on the Supreme Court believe it, and I believe the majority of those shitbags do, then that is unfortunately the law as it stands.
But when the law is unethical, I don’t see why we should be lawful.
Dude, Brother is not even an US company - like most big printer companies it’s Japanese and traded at the Tokyo stock exchange.
So… You’re arguments are invalid and only show your americentric world view.
That’s what happens when the government allows it openly.
if the update doesn’t allow the printer to calibrate with this aftermarket ink the cheaper carts become basically unusable
This isn’t true. It just means you have to do the registration manually.
This is scummy behavior for sure, but it’s also being exaggerated for clicks. You can read the sources linked in the wiki to see exactly what users are reporting.
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.
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.
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.
I suggest whoever has old firmware files to upload them to the Internet Archive (if they allow those).
Got this link from reddacted
Internet Archive is extremely lax in what it allows
Oh FFS. Not Brother as well. I used to recommend them to everyone. Who is left with unshittified printers?
use a laser printer? preferabally the ones that doesnt use updates or any newer versions.
Epson inkjets with refillable tanks probably.
That printer is a nightmare. But financially makes sense.
Did they ever make the excess ink parts user replaceable?
That they weren’t in some models kept me from getting one when I was in the market a few years ago.
The printer has the same ink problems, clogged, runs out easy, can’t print b&w when missing a color. But I can buy random ink.
Depending on the frequency of your printing, they can suck as well. Chronically clogged nozzles are maddening.
This. My partner’s office is stuck with “it has to be inkjet” and not toner, and on January their printer got clogged…
ink jet ones are so messy, and it waste a ton of ink.
Inkjet is great, for photo printing regularly. For absolutely every other situation a laser printer is better.
I have the 2850. Been using it for a couple years now. Print maybe once a month. Nozzles get clogged periodically but you run the automated cleaning process and it’s back to working again.
You can run a power clean cycle which should help, then just replace the foam pads they saturate with ink for the cleaning
They’re not perfect but they’re still the most consumer friendly option on the market at this point
After talking to support 15 times, they never suggested replacing anything, and power clean wasn’t enough. I’ve long since destroyed the thing out of malignant rage and turned to libraries and copy shops, but it’s good to know that there might have been a solution.
Aliexpress syringe cleaning kit
Wait until copy shops start raising their prices cause nobody has printers anymore and you have no choice but to use them
Still cost me less than a new printer every two years if they multiplied their prices by 10.
yup and your not using a printer every single day.
a personal printer/ink is far more expensive.
Not for me, 40€ toner cartridge gets me 10k pages, already have over 80k pages printed so the printer paid itself multiple times compared to a copyshop
Yeah, that’s true. That was a pain in the ass when my wife needed good color accuracy.
I don’t print that often but I do have a calendar event to tell me to print something monthly. This could be a nice side project for someone to write a program that sends a print to your printer on a schedule to keep the heads clear. Wastes paper but at least the heads won’t dry out.
I reuse old paper when I do this.
I don’t know if it matters, but I just bought a Canon laser printer. Didn’t see anywhere about forced subscription options for toner.
we bought laser canon printer to, toner cartridge doesnt use color, so if you want color you would need an ink printer, its better to print a library or a printer shop anyways. we are using an MF class one?
I have a color canon laser printer scanner.
That’s actually what I bought, too.
I’ve got a Lexmark laser printer, and while there are cheaper subscription toners, you can pay the higher price for normal toner, and buy compatibles, for now at least.
I don’t at all feel vindicated, but my Brother printer is the worst printer I ever owned (this was 20 years ago admittedly). Absolute hunk of junk with nothing but problems. I’ve always wondered why they were so well recommended online.
Could have been a Friday afternoon one. The one I have is a workhorse that could print on bark using toner made of charcoal and dust.
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
Losing*
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 :\
Et tu, frater?
And once again the only available good tech is old 2nd hand.
I got a tiny HP laser from an old job. Must be 15+ years old, runs perfectly and toner is $20 for god knows how many pages.
Looks like nobody can or is willing to do decent printers anymore. I’ll run my Laserjet 1100 till it dies, then I’m done with printing.
Yep. Just getting ready to replace the color laser printer I bought almost 10 years ago. I had been considering a new Brother before this but looks like I’m going the 2nd hand route again (last one was an open box HP from microcenter for $200 lol)
Are there more precise informations about affected firmware versions yet? Recently bought a refurbished laser printer and still have a brother toner, but my intent would be to buy aftermarket toners in future.
