Technology

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'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.

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)

Or a modular printer

RMS: gestures at GCC and the whole GNU/Linux ecosystem Look man, all I wanted to do was to print this letter to my ma...

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.

I know about the yellow dot thingy. Literally metadata on paper for no reason imo. I highly doubt a person could make a realistic fake through the use of a conventional printer.

In the UK, we don't even have paper money anymore, it's plastic... Maybe it's more of a USA skill issue, too?

I found this help article where they say "Although not all non-genuine supplies may cause quality issues".

They said they recommend using theirs, but up until this they didn't say you couldn't.

https://support.brother.com/g/b/sp/faqend.aspx?c=us_ot&lang=en&prod=dcpl2647dw_us&faqid=faq00000184_002

Plus, it's been universally understood that you have been able to use third-party cartridges. I really think if you're persistent enough, you'd get a refund in Australia. Because else (in Victoria at least) you could take them to VCAT for like $70, which will cost them wayyy more in lawyer expenses than the price of a refund.

This is not legal advice, but I reckon a refund under Australian Consumer Law is extremely doable if they go down this path (for existing printers).

We don't know if it's wrong though, we just have a statement from the company claiming it is. Now it's on the community to prove it.

It's potentially wrong. I guess we'll see in the coming weeks as people try to prove it one way or another.

That said, the allegation that old firmware isn't accessible is easy to verify and very troubling for Brother if true (what are they hiding?).

Totally agree. Just the first time I have seen the notation.

I see editability as generally an improvement, especially since the older versions are still visible with a couple of clicks. Reddit titles are not editable. Tweets used to be uneditable; toots are.