Technology

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

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.

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

You were the chosen one! 😭

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

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

Et tu Brother?

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.

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

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 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

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.

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

"You were supposed to be the one"

Proton, Mozilla, Brother

Its not gonna stop there

😓

Et tu, frater?

Foss printer when?

nononononononpnNONONONONONO WHYYYYY I JUST GOT A BROTHER BECAUSE OF HP DOING THE SAME THING WTF

anyone know about jailbreaking printers

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)

Et tu Brute! :(

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

Going to be honest, didn't realize my Brother laser printer got firmware updates, lol.

In 7 years I've replaced the toner cartridge once, given that the stater cartridge isn't very full I imagine it'll be awhile before I have to replace it again, at least.

I really hope Brother is telling the truth!

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?

I think its time we deprecate most forms of printing. Clearly corporations cannot be trusted to operate these kinds of companies.

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

This is a total shit move but I have tried many printers and I'm still choosing Brother everytime. Especially on some older generations with copy scan and print. None of the other big brands are worth a shit. They all fail or jam in some form or fashion.

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

If it's not already under the umbrella of right to repair, do we now need right to refill?

This shit happened to me recently. Installed firmware update and immediately my 3rd party toner stops working. Try to find old firmware to roll back to and couldn't locate it anywhere. Found some for other models via Google drive links in Reddit posts, but nothing for my printer.

I replaced the toner with new 3rd party toner which worked. And now I'll never install another firmware update on the printer and should probably block it from the internet.