Brother accused of locking down third-party printer ink cartridges via forced firmware updates, removing older firmware versions from support portals
www.tomshardware.com
RepairTuber Louis Rossmann taken aback by Brother’s quiet turn to the dark side.
  • Limonene@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    9 days ago

    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.

        • Treczoks@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          9 days ago

          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.

          • idiomaddict@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            8 days ago

            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

            • Treczoks@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              8 days ago

              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
XXXXXXXX

              it would print

              X X X X
 X X X X
X X X X

              For 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 X

              Make 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.

  • Naich@lemmings.worldEnglish
    2·
    9 days ago

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

    • gutter_angel@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      7 days ago

      i came across this explanation of it, haven’t verified it directly but he seems to make good content:

      https://youtube.com/shorts/ZX8OaZZDlM8

      he says theres identification each time you print using the yellow ink, and basically is a counterfeit currency countermeasure

      id kill to have a foss print setup though

      • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
        2·
        7 days ago

        It’s a feature that can be turned on the confidential documents but I don’t think it’s actually on by default.

        You can check for it anyway, just print a document then attempt to scan it, if it’s got the track marks it will refuse to scan because one of the things the track marks do is block scanning, although you can still take a photo of it because the camera probably won’t be able to see the track marks so it’s not 100% secure. In fact it’s largely considered an obsolete security method these days, along with pink flimsies.

  • m-p{3}@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    9 days ago

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