Et tu Brother?
It looks like to me as some redditor got bad quality third party ink and blamed it on firmware. Some karma whores picked it up, as dogging on printer companies is sure way to gain some free updoots.
And now Louis Rossmann picked it up and the lie spread further.
We live in a post-truth society.
It’s like every company that wasn’t complete shit just suddenly decided to…go to complete shit.
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.
That’s what happens when the government allows it openly.
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”
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.
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.
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.
Unrestrained Capitalism. Without those pesky regulations, companies can charge us all unlimited amounts and not have to consider our rights or health/safety.
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.
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i came across this explanation of it, haven’t verified it directly but he seems to make good content:
https://youtube.com/shorts/ZX8OaZZDlM8
he says theres identification each time you print using the yellow ink, and basically is a counterfeit currency countermeasure
id kill to have a foss print setup though
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It’s a feature that can be turned on the confidential documents but I don’t think it’s actually on by default.
You can check for it anyway, just print a document then attempt to scan it, if it’s got the track marks it will refuse to scan because one of the things the track marks do is block scanning, although you can still take a photo of it because the camera probably won’t be able to see the track marks so it’s not 100% secure. In fact it’s largely considered an obsolete security method these days, along with pink flimsies.
Closest I’ve seen was rooting a printer via a security exploit
Unironically, this is why RMS was radicalized.
RMS: gestures at GCC and the whole GNU/Linux ecosystem Look man, all I wanted to do was to print this letter to my ma…
If it’s not already under the umbrella of right to repair, do we now need right to refill?
Proton, Mozilla, Brother
Its not gonna stop there
😓
The issues with each are very different:
- Proton - CEO sucks and for some reason is sucking up to Trump; products are still good
- Mozilla - PR team sucks, though AFAIK the product is still fine, and you can use a fork to avoid the PR/legal team
- Brother - actively screwing you
Every single company.
All it takes is your favorite company to suddenly be run by a CEO who wants to maximize profits or increase shareholder value, or worse, think they’re God’s Gift to the World. Or in the flip side, they’re fighting for survival so they have to make scummy decisions to keep afloat.
Pro tip: don’t have favorite companies, have favorite products. And don’t assume the next gen of your favorite product will be good.
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.
Oh FFS. Not Brother as well. I used to recommend them to everyone. Who is left with unshittified printers?
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 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.
Epson inkjets with refillable tanks probably.
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.
That printer is a nightmare. But financially makes sense.
Depending on the frequency of your printing, they can suck as well. Chronically clogged nozzles are maddening.
Yeah, that’s true. That was a pain in the ass when my wife needed good color accuracy.
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.
Wait until copy shops start raising their prices cause nobody has printers anymore and you have no choice but to use them
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
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.
Aliexpress syringe cleaning kit
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.
This. My partner’s office is stuck with “it has to be inkjet and not toner", and on January their printer got clogged…
Inkjet is great, for photo printing regularly. For absolutely every other situation a laser printer is better.
ink jet ones are so messy, and it waste a ton of ink.
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.
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.
use a laser printer? preferabally the ones that doesnt use updates or any newer versions.
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.
They were the last good guys :(
I guess it’s time to buy the printer I’ve been postponing
try looking for laser jet printers, only use toner cartridge. Ink-based printers are pretty much scams. we spent an untold amount on ink for epson, until the printer failed completely
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.
I suggest whoever has old firmware files to upload them to the Internet Archive (if they allow those).
Internet Archive is extremely lax in what it allows
Got this link from reddacted
I think its time we deprecate most forms of printing. Clearly corporations cannot be trusted to operate these kinds of companies.
Buy an Epson EcoTank printer. My family owns three. You pay more for the printer but just dump in bottles of ink when they need refilling.
Just make sure you schedule a test print every couple off weeks to prevent clogs, is a little wasteful but if you get aftermarket ink it’s cheap enough that is worth it, otherwise a new head will run you down around 50 bucks.
TIL EDIT: you can get continuous tank mods for most printers on AliExpress! I might give it a try with mine!
They do require maintenance to keep them running smoothly. I’m fairly mechanically and technically capable so I can disconnect the head and run DA-2A through the mechanism to clean it out.
DA-2A works to a point, but if you let the printer sit for a year it might not unfortunately. Like I said print heads aren’t crazy expensive, but still kind of sucks. But hey inkjets still do have their place sometimes.
DA-2A works to a point
I have a 210 L drum of the stuff.
We do a fair amount of printing and run the print head cleaning routine on our printer every few weeks to keep it happy. We’ve had the ET-4550 for over 8 years and it’s still chugging along. If it ever needs a replacement print head it will not owe me a damned thing.
That’s great but it doesn’t sound like this is relevant for home gamers ;)
I just got an old HP inkjet that doesn’t care about reported ink levels and cheap ink bottles from AliExpress.
I print white on black because I have so much damn ink and nobody expects dark mode documents. Kinda funny when I take out a sheet of paper and have to dry it out. 120g/m² is absolutely the minimum when doing such crap though. Regular 80g/m² just wrinkles up and leaks through, although that’s also a property of dye ink vs pigment ink.
But I also lucked out on sales combined with coupons
Currently it’s €18.50, though for 0.5L (~1 pint) that’s still cheap. Honestly I am surprised I actually received that.
Nice. We had one printer or another that required expensive ink cartridges before we got the Epson. I used to refill some cartridges but it was a pain. Now I just open a set of bottles and top up the tanks whenever it’s thirsty.
I just bought a printer. Everything I saw said that if you print infrequently then you don’t want an inkjet. They’re very prone to clogging if left alone for a while. Went with a laser printer instead.
