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.
Definitely true. I’ve been putting off an upgrade of my NAS because they have randomly decided to completely remove the video streaming software that came with it when I bought it. So infuriating.
Tell me you are using synology without telling me you are using synology
Time to DIY.
I use a regular Linux system and set stuff up manually, but there are options that do more out of the box if you don’t know how (and don’t want to learn) to DIY the software.
I’m working on that. I have little previous experience with Linux and self hosting but I’m slowly making progress. I now have switched my gaming PC over to Linux almost full time. I know I can switch to Jellyfin for video streaming but it’s been a lower priority to figure out compared with other services I’m trying to understand how to self host.
Id recommend Proxmox on a cheap n100 nuc.
Makes it easy to spin up VMs, take snapshots of them, tinker and break them, then roll back to the snapshotRock on, you’re killing it! Please don’t hesitate to ask questions either here or a place like !selfhosted@lemmy.world.
Urgent security fixes are gonna go unpatched
I don’t understand why a printer would ever need an “urgent security fix”. Or a software update for that matter.
… Because products can contain security exploits, and if not patched could leave homes and businesses vulnerable.
This shouldn’t need to be explained, but here we are.
Depends on whether you absolutely need your printers connected to the internet or not.
The fun part is the security exploits often come from things like DRM ink cartridges that allows an attack to come from the goddamn cartridge!
Wouldn’t be a problem if you didn’t include a serial connection to the cartridge in the first place!
Oh hey I can think of a solution to improve security here!
Any networked device can be used to gain access to the rest of the network (kind of).
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.
Even with a backup, there are chance they put a “security feature” to prevent downgrade.
I fear the day my 2014 hp LaserJet dies. There won’t be a decent printer on the market…
Haha, my crappy ass old HP printer still takes refills. No printer company shall ever see another cent of mine 😈
anyone know about jailbreaking printers
It absolutely baffles me that there isn’t a huge custom printer firmware movement.
I’ve have had this thought too and the only reason I can think of is that the inkjet printers are sold at such a rediculous loss, that anything that could be sold next to them without the offset price from ink would seem like a bad joke.
I think it’s a legal issue, honestly. When printers first came out there was a fear that people would just print money and other illegal things, so printer firmware had to print out security identifiers on everything in yellow ink so it can be traceable. That’s also why yellow ink always goes out first, and why it complains about yellow ink when trying to only print black and white.
If that’s law, then it could be illegal to use firmware that does not have these features, and anyone making fimware that ‘just prints’ may be held liable.
Thus is all just an educated guess though, but seems plausible.
I think they meant - movement to release custom firmware for existing printers.
Ask Richard Stallman ;)
They deny it was the firmware update. But not that something else has happened
I’ve had issues with colour but not B&W
We seriously need a FOSS+FOSH printer
I have even thought of some names:
- Gutenberg
- Aldus
- Manutius
1000x this.
We’ve got all this figured out for 3D printers with all kinds of cool tools to make the job easier, and yet, take away a dimension and there’s crickets?
The hell?
Let’s make a 3D printable 2D printer.
Or a modular printer
It’s really surprising this doesn’t already exist. It’s such a hated piece of tech, I would have thought someome would have thought they could do better! I don’t know enough to do it myself but I’d sure as hell support a project to do it!
It’s not, though. Printers are actually fairly expensive to manufacture, and they’re sold heavily subsidized by the companies in order to sell you a decade of printer cartridges where you make up for that loss. It was the first tech subscription model.
If someone made and sold a shitty inkjet printer at cost, the last time I saw something written up on this years ago, it was several times more than the current cost of printers. And consumers are stupid, so they will go for the immediate cheap thing and get locked in to buying proprietary cartridges rather than invest in saving money long term.
What we need is a Graphine OS for existing printers. A repo of firmware updates that anyone can install to jailbreak a handfull of widely sold printers to allow printing every drop of ink, and DIY refills. Let’s be real, we’re not a huge part of their market, so IMO the gains are to exist like wolves preying on the occasional sheep, rather than be wolves that try to evolve thumbs and force everyone to learn how to cook and go shopping in order to eat.
In my experience, people who are aware of open source and the like are also people who only print something when they absolutely HAVE to.
It will cost too much because they can’t get back R&D money back via sales of proprietary ink and spare parts, plus competitors will immediately take advantage of your improvements
Like a prusa (open source 3d printer) costs like 3 bambulab (walled garden closed source 3d printer that uses a fork of prusa slicer)
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.
Could this be anything related to government printer tracking requirements?
I believe that only applies to ink jet. You can hardly make secret dots in B&W.
Wait, I thought that’s something that only color laser do with yellow toner…
Edit: Possibly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
There is something similar for B&W laser printing. Text is never 100% black, but rastered. You can digitally hide a whole lot of information in microraster on a page of printed text.
Text is never 100% black, but rastered.
Does “rastered” mean the image is mapped onto a very fine grid and each square is given a 0-100 value for intensity of ink? I looked it up, and it seemed like the squares are given a binary value, but this is nowhere near my wheelhouse and I’m honestly not sure I understood the Wikipedia page, let alone the references
It is actually quite easy: “Black” print does not mean that 100% of all pixels are actually set. Print pixels are never perfect squares, so even if the printer only prints half of the dots, the print is still dark enough. If not, it could print 70% or 80%, but lets stick to 50% for ease of argument.
So instead of
XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXit would print
X X X X X X X X X X X XFor you, it would still be a “roughly black” spot (keep in mind these 8x3 pixel are 0.032mm wide and 0.012mm high on good laser printer).
Would you notice if the pattern was slightly different, like
X X X X X XX X X X X XMake a bonanza of those small changes nobody can see, and you can hide thosands of bytes of data in those patterns on any printed page.
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.
You were the chosen one! 😭
I have a Ricoh that doesn’t give me any problems, works out of the box with Linux pcl6 drivers. Bought a third party toner cartridge like 8 years ago, still using it today. It’s an old model, but worth checking newer ones.
I Remeber something about that being buyitforlife on reddit, would you consider posting it to !buyitforlife@slrpnk.net
They had two things going for them… Decent linux support and non-shitty DRM ink/toner
ink printers are total scams, you might as well use a printing shop or library to do it, if you are planning on printing large number of pages. we got a canon laser jet printer, only need toner cartridge, no subscription based models. we orignally had scam-epson.
The printers in the article are using toner. The title is misleading.
Fuck I just got rid of my 2008 BW laser brother and bought a new one that hasn’t arrived. Thanks for the warning, at least I will be able to set my firewall before I even connect it to my network
I too watched Louis Rossman’s YouTube video to author.
Buy an ecotank printer, they’re more expensive initially but that’s because they actually make you pay for the printer
Ecotank’s use liquid ink that you fill in tanks instead of cartridges
There’s no way they can check the ink on ecotank printers
Drag thought Brother were supposed to be the makers of user friendly printers. Are they enshittifying?
At least they aren’t transphobic.