Now i had to put on the in-ears, hook up to phone to… listen to a guy talking. -_-
Short summary: after he got a firmware update, the MFC 3750 of Louis Rossman prints in worse quality with aftermarket ink.
So laser ones are safe (for now)?
Click the wiki link
I rarely use a printer now that my kids are in college. When it dies, I had a choice between laser printer, Brother inkjet, or none. “None” is now my first choice
That’s what we did.
For the few pages we need to print, I can use the machine at the library for $0.10/page.
So issue here is privacy, the library is likely scanning whatever device connected, not just the files and file metadata
Seriously? The library computers are running Windows 8 I highly doubt they have the technical expertise to do anything. Also why would they?
Yeah, with the Vault 7 releases and recent leaks showing NSA follows homeless people’s connections (who tend to hang out at libraries due to a lack of 3rd spaces), I don’t doubt there’s specific tracking, malware and other unwanted software at libraries. I don’t have any sources of this, but it wouldn’t surprise me
Maybe I’m overly parandoid because ::gestures at everything::
I kind of doubt it. Local libraries have a hard time staying open due to funding.
I trust the library a lot more than I trust Staples or a similar for-profit business.
$5 USB fob for printing
When I saw this title. I thought another YouTube hardware advocate turned their back on Louis and started an anti-consumer group to fight off policy debate that Louis does. My brain is wild.
Same but I thought Louis had a brother who became evil for some reason 😭
Me too! I was like. Who is this brother? How have we not met him!
“Bröther, please dö nöt becöme anti-cönsümer!”
“I töö yearn för the cöntrölled mönöpöly, thë ensittificätiön, the röt ecönömy!”
“Brother…”
“I’m leäving töö müch möney on thë täblë! We also hävë öür men Ëlön Müsk as thë shädöw prësidënt, Trümp ïs jüst hïs, ör räthër - öür püppët. Hë wïll dïsmänlë äll cönsümër prötëctïons, as thëy’re in thë wäy öf öür pröfits.”
“Bröthër… Plëäsë rëcönsïdër!”
“Änd whät ärë yöü gönnä dö if not? Go tö thë cönsümer prötection agencies Ëlön Müsk’s DÖGË jüst dïsmäntlëd? Üse an öld HP LaserJet until yöü cän get repläcemënt rollers för it? You know öther parts öf it cän brëäk töö.”
“Bröther… You became… ËVÏL! You betrayed EVERYTHING you previously stood for!”
“And Ï wïll dö it as mäny tïmes as nëëded. Ëvil? It’s jüst büsïnëss. Mäybë yöü shöüld hävë rëcönsïdërëd yöür vötë för Trümp.”
“Bröther… Büt thë tränsës hävë cäncëlled Pikamëë för thë wïzärd gämë! The wökenëss häve been deströying the gäme ïndüstry! I nëëded tö vötë för Dönäld Trümp! Why isn’t it wörkïng äs ït wäs süppösëd tö!”
“Yöü vötëd ägäïnst yöür cläss interest öut öf püre hatred. I like ït vërÿ müch! Yöü knöw önë rëäsön she wäs älsö cäncelled wäs düë tö lölï? Ï dön’t think Pröjëct 2025 wïll ällöw it för sö löng düë tö tötäl pörn ban!”
“PLEÄSE BRÖTHËR, NÖT THE LÖLÏ! PLEÄSE LET ME KEEP THË CÜTË ÄND FÜNNŸ!”
“Yöü vöted against yöür class interest, yöür personal interest… hahahahahaHAAHAHAHAHAAAA! Yöür sö fünny! Ÿöü’rë thë përfëct vötër för më! Ÿöü’rë thë përfëct cönsümër ëvën! Töö dümb tö rëälïzë äll thë pöliticäl wörkings aröünd yöürself. Änd when anything göes wröng, yöü bläme the minörities öf this söciety. Nöw get exited för Bröther AI, a sübscriptiön service which is essentiäl för öperating the printer! Get ready för price hikes! Get ready för shörter lasting printers!”
“You’re truly despicable bröther!”
You are crazy, but good crazy.
Wake up babe, new copy pasta just dropped.
I’m glad there’s a printer service close to where I live, I can go there and print every page for cents. There’s also one on my faculty, more expensive, but still affordable. I only use my HP printer/scanner to scan documents, ink is expensive as hell.
Can’t watch right now, but is there a list of affected devices?
Do we really need to crowd fund a FOSS printer? Really?
You actually can’t sell third-party printers legally, because all printers will include an ink fingerprint which can be traced back to that specific printer. So if someone prints a ransom note or counterfeits cash with it, the FBI will be knocking on their door by the end of the day.
There’s literally a certification process to be allowed to sell printers, and one of the biggest criteria for that certification is agreeing to maintain that fingerprint database. One of the other big criteria is that the printer needs to be able to recognize and refuse to print images of cash, to prevent counterfeiting. If you try to print an image of a dollar bill, the printer’s firmware will refuse to continue the print job. The issue is that this certification process also ensures there’s a de facto near duopoly on printers, which leads to BS like HP making it increasingly difficult to use affordable ink. They can be blatantly anti-consumer, because they’re protected from any competition.
There’s a reason HP hasn’t already been priced out by some cheap Chinese competitor who is able to undercut the competition. And it’s not because of the difficulty in manufacturing or the price of components. It’s because no other companies are allowed to sell printers.
May I have the legal text, of any country, requiring a certification to sell any printers, or have EURion contellation dection implemented, or legally required to implement tracking dots?
Inside the US, sure. That just means you don’t get the cool FOSS printer.
You can still build it yourself.
yeah let’s build “ghost printers” wait are we in a cyberpunk dystopia?!
AR15 lower receiver model. You can buy a kit that’s 85% of the way to done and only needs basic tools from there.
We have great examples of things sold as parts or kits to be assembled
Take handguns as an example. If a murder weapon can be assembled from parts with only the frame 3d printed, and avoid similar laws for traceability, surely a printer is an easier task
You make it sound like a huge conspiracy but there are laws and regulations around everything you try to sell, especially for electronics.
You also have to do EMF radiation testing, ensure that your printer doesn’t produce toxic aerosols or fumes, and probably a bunch of other things to prove that your product is safe. I don’t see why the fingerprinting isn’t just another thing on the list of things you have to do to be in compliance with the rules. If your company is capable of producing something as complex as a printer, encoding the device’ serial number into a bunch of yellow microdots that you add to the printout shouldn’t be an issue.
ensure that your printer doesn’t produce toxic aerosols or fumes
But they do? I literally got sick after i spent a day in a small room with a big office printer. And each printer makes my skin itchy, if printing in close proximity.
You actually can’t sell third-party printers legally, because all printers will include an ink fingerprint which can be traced back to that specific printer.
All color printers.
Capitalism is the breeding ground of parasitism. The incentive structures needs to change. Good corporate governance and long term sustainability need to trump short term turnover and fiduciary role to always go up. As it exists, corporate incentive structures promote leadership by psychopaths that will go to the utmost consequence to drive the last cent out of their customers. This is especially true in the US, which by virtue of competition, metastasises to the entire western world.
Its been doing that for 50+ years. But just like how capitalism expects growth, the trend is exponential.
Man I’ve had a brother printer so long because of their Linux support this is so annoying
Same. I’m good for a while, but it’s going to suck if I ever need to replace it.
good news is modern Linux has great support for printers
I haven’t printed anything in years, but damn, this sucks.
Glad I’ve got an Brother laser that has no network connectivity.
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 USB-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…
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.
I should qualify that – I don’t know for sure whether and which distros enable updates to run non-interactively.
fwupdhas the ability to do so and it’s billed as doing so on its github page, but that doesn’t mean that a distro has to actually take advantage of that. Could be that in a default configuration on a given distro, it only updates stuff next time you invoke it.The only reason I’d guess that it might not run automatically is that some devices do not deal well with power loss during firmware updates, and I can imagine that a distro – which has no way of knowing when a user might start flipping power switches – might want more-conservative settings. Might be something like the last bit of distro installation, but they might not want to run during normal operation.
But yeah, I bet that Louis Rossman didn’t think of that either when he was talking about using USB connectivity to prevent firmware updates.
EDIT: I also vaguely remember reading something claiming that smart TVs from some manufacturer that are not connected to the Internet were using nearby smart TVs of the same brand and within WiFI range that can reach the Internet for Internet connectivity. Ordinarily, I’d say that that’s not generally an issue for most devices, but printers often do have wireless networking capability, so probably one more at least theoretical vector via which a printer might potentially reach the Internet. I have not read any claims of a printer doing this, though. I also don’t know whether-or-not those claims for the smart TVs were legitimate, but they are technically-possible to do, so…shrugs
enshitification of technological things continues…
Framework printer.
Make it happen.
dude I would pay gold for that
sorry maybe I missed a memo, people are still printing things… like, on paper?
I personally don’t, on the off chance I do need to print something I do it at work.
Not saying they couldn’t/shouldn’t but printers are a nightmare hellscape and it’s a miracle, mostly of HP’s marketing department, that they’re a household object.
Back before everyone had maps on their phone, printing MapQuest maps was fantastic. This was the early 00’s though and we all had money to burn still.
Well, whatever that update was, I probably installed it (assuming it’s the same here in Japan).
Use pen & paper – Do you really need a printer?
I had to laugh at this. At least in my use case, it’s printing out forms and documents that various levels of government needs and I am absolutely not talented enough to reproduce them by hand (also, my handwriting is not fantastic).
I had to laugh at this. At least in my use case, it’s printing out forms and documents that various levels of government needs and I am absolutely not talented enough to reproduce them by hand (also, my handwriting is not fantastic).
If we want to get pedantic, it is possible to get a pen plotter. There are fountain pen compatible pen plotters, and the whole fountain pen world has a healthy and mature third-party ink market.
Now, that’s not simply a drop-in replacement for a regular printer, starting with the fact that you need to use monoline fonts so that the plotter traces out what a hand would rather than filling it in, and that a plotter just can’t produce all the same stuff. The speed is going to be abysmal compared to a conventional printer for virtually any image. And I don’t know if there’s anyone who has built one with a paper feed system (there are large-format pen plotters that can work with a continuous-feed roll of paper, but I don’t know if those can handle fountain pens. I don’t know of a fountain pen plotter that can just take a ream of A4 or US Letter pages and then handle those correctly).
But you can, strictly-speaking, have a computer create output that uses ink from the fountain pen world.
I also need one. Our library will print documents for 5¢ per page. Once my Brother HL-2040 craps out, I guess I’ll be going there.
Ehhh. I rarely print anything, but I really don’t want to give up the ability to print things at any time I want and have them promptly available.
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.
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.
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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I used to just print at the convenience store closest to us, but that got to be a real pain buying a house, moving across Japan, renewing SoR (visa), applying for PR, starting my business, doing my taxes, etc. Printing was like 10 yen/page for black and white A4 I think.
O, damnit. Not the last bastion of hope!
Edit: 100% serious. Like Rossmann, Brother was the go-to brand.
