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?

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

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.

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.

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

Proton, Mozilla, Brother

Its not gonna stop there

😓

anyone know about jailbreaking printers

Et tu Brute! :(

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.

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

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

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

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?

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.

They were the last good guys :(

I guess it's time to buy the printer I've been postponing

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.

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.

Nooo, you were the only remaining printer company that wasn't a customer-hating dumpster fire of a company!

Oh, Brother.

It's going to get to the point where you might be better off going back to dot matrix if tank-based inkjet printers are somehow locked down via chemical DRM too.