Damn, Brother was the only company left I was happy to blind purchase from by name alone.
Brother’s been anti-consumer for at least 5 years now. Not sure why people are just learning about it now.
Brother blocking 3rd party toner was the primary reason why I went with Canon back in 2020.
Probably because we all bought printers 10 years ago, or at least I did.
Man I’ve had a brother printer so long because of their Linux support this is so annoying
good news is modern Linux has great support for printers
Same. I’m good for a while, but it’s going to suck if I ever need to replace it.
I no longer have any corporate relationships that aren’t either apprehensive, strained, or downright antagonistic.
It’s us versus them now and they’ve give their last shits. It’s feeling like every company is a cable company now.
Always has been like that.
Not one single corporation is your friend or wants to be. All they want is your money. No exceptions.
Companies were never our friends, but it used to be the case that companies sold products. They sold a product and you got to use it and that was the end of it.
Now instead, thanks largely to the Internet, companies barely care about ‘product’ at all and instead are all trying to get in on that gravy train of monetised data slurping, subscription models, DRM on every consumable, firmware updates that change the terms on you after the fact, and so on. Every electronic thing in your home is now super hostile to you.
TVs, printers, fridges. These products used to be just products, but now they are trojan horses.
This shift in business model also means a drop in customer service. They used to sell you a product and stand behind it because eventually they wanted you to choose them when you needed a new or different product. Now that they have you roped in via a sort of forced dependency, they don’t have to pretend to be nice to you even.
Exactly. The way to make money pre-Internet was “generate repeat business” and the way to do that was to create a product and service the customer was happy with.
The way to make money now is to get the customer trapped, then pump them as hard as possible.
The last step is to put us all in prison and mandate we purchase their product (produced in the prison) from them while earning 69 cents an hour.
I have VERY few and I cherish them.
Fairphone feels great to me. I think My coffee stuff is the same (Profitec, Eureka Mignon); no app or wifi or anything, fairly available spare parts.
Didn’t fairphone start selling Bluetooth headphones after getting rid of the headphone jack
Sure did. Repairable ones. I strongly prefer wired headphones and will keep using them as I can, and I ain’t buying earbuds.
But I’d rather not let perfect be the enemy of good. I am not giving up a cellphone, so I’d rather have Fairphone trying (ans sometimes fucking it up) than give my money to anyone else in the market.
Them not being perfect in my eyes doesn’t qualify as a hostile relationship between their corporation and me.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Click the wiki link
So laser ones are safe (for now)?
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.
Okay, so after reading this, they’re not specifically degrading print quality, they’re just making you do the alignment manually. This is probably legal, but still scummy.
O, damnit. Not the last bastion of hope!
Edit: 100% serious. Like Rossmann, Brother was the go-to brand.
It looks like the latest firmware on their website for my old-ass black & white brother laser was released in 2019.
Hopefully that thing lasts another few decades on top of the ~15 years I’ve already had it, because it sounds like it’s the last printer I’m going to buy.
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.
-
Power. Paper just needs some kind of light in the environment.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Disposability. Paper is pretty cheap, and if a piece of paper gets soaked in water or whatever, it’s no big loss.
-
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.
-
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.
enshitification of technological things continues…
I’ve been saying that for a couple of years now. They started fucking with third party ink at least a year ago
Have to keep things offline and outdated nowadays 🫤 to prevent things like this happening.
Honestly, that’s not a terrible idea in general. Like, if you have an Internet-connected device, you have a hook onto your network that someone can exploit down the line, including – as Rossman points out – making it function differently than it did at the time of your purchase in ways that you may not like. And even if you trust the manufacturer, that doesn’t mean that someone cannot acquire them and then exploit that hook.
Kind of a problem with apps and other software too. Even open-source software, like the
xzattack – the xz package itself was fine, but you had someone, probably a country, intentionally target and try to seize control of an open-source project to exploit the trust that the open-source project had built up. I understand that it’s also been a concern with even browser extensions.The right to push updates to an Internet-connected device, unfortunately, has value. And there are people who will try to figure out ways to take advantage of that.
Funny you mention apps. I turned auto-update off for all of them on my phone because I got tired of functionality being removed. A couple force updates after you get too far behind. Been alright so far, but it’s been less than half a year ago we’ll see how it goes in the long run. Security is obviously taking a hit by doing this.
