Brother refutes "false claims" that it bricked printers using third-party ink
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I know a lot of people are fans of his content, but this is hardly the first time he's rushed out a video with unverified claims that later turned out to be false/exaggerated. He also has a habit of moving the goalposts when manufacturers actually try to do something good, like when he continued to complain about Apple after they introduced their hardware repair program with loaner equipment.
He's very confident in his videos and presents a calm and collected demeanor, but his claims and content feel like they're scraped from the angry parts of social media. Take with a grain of salt.
A prior time he did this was with GrapheneOS which ended in tears when he had epic fallout with the primary maintainer and withdrew all support because.. no surprise.. all the security of that fork is in the pocket of a single individual who may or may not, as according to Rossmann, be stable any given day of the week.
We all make mistakes and I hope he will retract if needed but the attention economy is clearly an -attention- economy, not a truthful-content economy..
Librewolf is judged by its track record of being open source, rapidly fixing security issues, and strict stance on user privacy. Why do people always attack these projects on "Hacker" News?
It's not an attack. It's a pertinent statement of fact that some privacy-conscious people may want to consider when choosing their browser.
"organisation behind the fork to serve as a legal entity."
There is a legal entity behind both Chrome & Safari.
I think this actually makes things worse.
This isn't related to the point. I'm not recommending any specific product.
I'm just saying that the anonymity (or not) of the maintainer(s) can and should play a role in the decision of which browser you use. You may decide that you don't care about that, or that it's a risk you accept, and that's completely fine. But having the information to base the decision on is important.
A big company tracking you generally does so in a fully algorithmic manner, with little to no human eyes on the actual data, and any individual's unauthorized access to such data is generally considered a Big Deal™ in these companies and grounds for instant termination.
Furthermore, these companies generally have good security controls that would be hard to subvert by a hostile attacker to release a malicious build or leak the collected data.
Finally there's also safety in numbers - you are statistically unlikely to be the "most interesting" person using a major company's software product such as Chrome, so even if someone managed to gain full unfettered access to the collected tracking data and/or is able to push a malicious update, it's very unlikely you will be the target.
A smaller project led by a lone developer or a small team of contributors lacks those various checks and balances, large security team, and the numbers of users, such that once breached you may very well be interesting enough for the attacker to actually take a personal look at.
If it is trust based i would rather trust someone who's open source and privacy advocate than any corporation that will abuse the data as soon as it is profitable for them. but that is my choice that follows my priorities.
Even more so when company - in the cited examples - already has heavy conflict of interest when it comes to service provided(chrome tracking <-> google ads feedback loop that gives them even higher unfair advantage)
An anonymous open source developer of a popular tool is identified by a bad actor. This developer is offered a million dollars to install a backdoor that allows the bad actor access to any device used by consumers or that software product.
Now, if that developer is anonymous to you, you have no legal recourse after the developer used their software product to launch a cyber attack on you.
That is the issue.
Also, not hypothetical, many such cases: https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/01/dozens-of-backdoore...
It looks like the source is hosted on codeberg, which a company in Germany. Presumably they would know which account was used to sign in and upload the malicious code, and that account would be tied to things like an email address and IP address which could be traced back to a person. It might not always be enough to find the person, but that's always true. Red Hat and The Debian Project being non-anonymous didn't mean they knew who backdoored the XZ Utils package.
Anonymous email services and VPNs exist.
I differentiate between someone who holds political beliefs that I don't, or that are a little wild; and someone who holds the belief that I am trying to get them killed. Particularly when there is an easy way to figure out which phone is mine if one were so inclined.
The former may not like me, but the latter ? if you believed someone was trying to kill you, what lengths would you go to? i think grapheneos & librewolf are two very different cases.
Anyway, it's weird looking back at various tech YouTubers and how they've either fallen out of favor or changed and adapted to reach further heights I guess. One schism I remember was TekSyndicate, I personally went on to follow Wendell to Level1Techs.
No, the original source was reddit. His video just reported on what other people had already been saying.
Ultimately social media is where we're going to hear about these issues. The companies themselves aren't going to publish an article detailing how they're screwing their customers over on their websites.
https://wiki.rossmanngroup.com/wiki/Brother_ink_lockout_%26_...
Going after Rossmann when he is just repeating what multiple people have posted on social media feels like shooting the messenger.
I don't think that's moving the goalposts. Apple set things up in a way that still made it extremely difficult for a repair shop to do the work. No ability to stock parts being one of the really bad features. With the rental costing enough money to cancel out any savings, it becomes a tool for a small number of people that don't want the phone leaving their sight, a toy for some others, and not much more.
Has that changed since?
I was quite aggravated that the tech press managed to put focus on the piece of kit they were sending people to fix devices, rather than on the real issue; telling distributors they're not allowed to sell us individual components that they would otherwise make available to anyone willing to wire them money for a large enough order.
The aggravation over the tools rental, to me, was always a nothingburger.
I get that everyone wants to make this a story about tech enshittification, but Brother barely bothers to keep their website updated. The idea that they are secretly and suddenly changing their sales strategy and publicly lying about it is a bold claim that requires bold evidence.
I don't know about "sudden". The reddit post is kind of old. That said, I have no idea when "Brother Genuine ink" even became a thing. I saw nothing at all about it when I bought my printer from them 10-15 years ago. It certainly wasn't mentioned as a requirement for getting support.
It sounds to me like at some point they got their tech support to tell customers that they need to have "Brother Genuine ink" in order to get support (or at least techs were told to strongly imply that was true) and now it's come back to bite them in the ass
This program was proven to be a complete scam, beyond a shadow of a doubt
Apple's repair program requires that you do the equivalent of replacing a car's engine when just its spark plugs go bad. He's absolutely right to continue complaining.
> Rossman created a Wiki page breaking down the reported issues, including “printers continue to function with third-party toner but print at degraded quality unless OEM toner is installed.”
People are probably overreacting when their knockoff Chinese toner fails in the machine and the Brother rep's official response is "Use genuine toner".
Especially when there is an equal number of complaints that are essentially "I bought the cheapest knockoff toner I could and the print quality went down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_windshield_pitting_epi...
The irony is here is that the mass paranoia created by inferior knockoffs is exactly why the evil printer companies justify their ink/toner restrictions.
There is nothing "definitely" about that; you could have just replaced a defective, knockoff or recycled chip that doesn't work: the grey market for ICs is absolutely rampant and full of trash. Replacing the chip doesn't prove some firmware check. All of the popular, disposable ICs used in mass market products like toner cartridges are cloned and/or recycled and are widely available at low cost, and problems with these are common.
Inks are not "simple science". I don't object people using 3rd party replacements, but if/when quality goes down with 3rd party refills, blaming the manufacturer is the easy way out.
I prefer to use original cartridges because even if my printer's color inks are dye based, they do not fade and change colors after 5+ years under normal conditions (I print photos with it sometimes), and I don't know the dye/pigment quality of the 3rd party cartridges yet alone their color rendering.
Heck, even something relatively simple like fountain pen inks have thousand different properties, and they all behave slightly differently. Some inks do not work well with some pens, even.
Everybody has their favorite pen, without even noticing, too.
Thinking that a much more complex assembly to work as equal to its first part counterpart is a bit optimistic. Esp. if you're going for the cheapest.
My bias with respect to the headline is that it seems, to me, highly improbable that Brother specifically would pull a stunt like this because their laser printers seem to be bulletproof. Plus their genuine toner cartridges aren’t ridiculously overpriced.
HP? Lexmark? I wouldn’t be surprised even a little bit. These two definitely seem like they’re in the razors and blades market. They sell you the printer and then pull all sorts of stunts to get recurring revenue out of you.
Epson? They’ve historically been pretty good about not disrupting inkjet refills and recently have started selling inkjets where you just refill them with a relatively cheap bottle of ink.
Brother? As far as my own experiences go they seem to be in the business of selling you a printer that’s going to last a decade and then hope you come back for another one down the road. My current HL-2270dw was purchased in 2012. I can still get toner for it at Staples. It still works amazingly well. I might replace it soon but only because I’m starting to need to be able to print 11x17 mechanical drawings. Or maybe I get an Epson inkjet with the refillable ink wells and keep the brother for day to day use.
Brother is lying. It might be that not all of their printers have this restriction. But I do not see another explanation for my experience other than DRM locking of the printer.
-edit- I experienced this with both a HL-L2350DW and an MFC-L2690DW
To answer these questions, we need to know: what do the chips do? Where did the replica cartridge companies get them from? Etc. You said you would test the chip before swapping, how do you do that? Is it just a flash chip? If it is, why are the replica manufacturers not putting the correct information on it?
https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/14xgrym/does_afte...
> No firmware blocks them out. Major issues have to do with the chip holder and brothers intellectual property on their floating chip technology. Additionally, when power cycling the chips on aftermarket tend to blow the little battery capacitor in them. 2 main aftermarket chip suppliers and awhile back they made some progress in the chip design. I sell ink and toner for a living and for the past year, have had 1 defective only pertaining to the chips...and considering how often they had trouble before..a solid result. Trouble is most consumers have no idea of the technicals, and just order whatever. Not great for this model.
https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/v8imcc/aftermarke...
> Tbh, if u want an actual fix, it's to get some better toners...for a few years now we have no longer had this issue. It goes back to the chip assembly, and quality of the chip. There is so much variation on these depending on what factory in China they are pumped out of.
> If you utilize a remanufactured tn227 with oem floating chip technology, with the current chips that don't seem to short, you'll have no issues.
>There really is no suggestion or work around in my book besides better supplies. I am glad this issue is behind us based on the workmanship of the supplies.
The issue seems to be that aftermarket manufacturers had problems manufacturing the chips, not that Brother was enforcing DRM on them.
The capacitor is, I suppose, a more credible explanation and would explain my observations, but tbh, Both options sort of just seems like DRM by a different name. I can't think of a legitimate reason for requiring such a feature, other than making it more difficult to use 3rd party cartridges.
That would mean that it isn't a firmware issue, which is good to know, but it also means that Brother is engaging in the same category of practice: making it unecessarily more difficult to use 3rd part toner.
Because the replaced chip worked, not in the sense that it passed a drm check, but in the sense that it functioned and wasn’t a broken counterfeit.
It's no different than the lids you could stick on third party K-cups to magically get the DRM infested Keurig machines to work.
Well consider if you had a USB charging cable with a junk-tier emarker chip that stops working when your phone updates its firmware because it adds some additional checks to prevent charging problems. (But the phone starts charging again as soon as you follow a youtube video on how to replace your cheap cable's emarker chip with a properly engineered one.)
I don't think anyone would reasonably consider the emarker chip in a USB cable to be a DRM chip.
Causing all the replacement screens to stop working until Apple added the driver back.
It was very cheap. $11 for a high-yield refill, $85 for the official one, $30 or so for a 3rd party cartridge.
I have a Canon color laser and while it's quality is to be desired, it functions just fine with 3rd party toner cartridges.
I also recently bought an Epson Inkjet mostly because it didn't use cartridges - ink comes in a bottle you fill the tanks with. You can get 3rd party ink bottles but the Epson branded ink bottles are very affordable.
Just to contrast the $/mL for ink for the Epson tanks, the Epson costs 25 cents/mL ($16 for 65mL of black ink), while a random HP printer I found costs $9/mL ($18 for 2mL of black ink).
Bestest cheapest printer I've ever owned except for my first dot matrix.
The laser is way quieter though.
Removing old firmware versions from their download site is bullshit though.
“Ive run into this issue before with brother printers when we would bulk buy cheaper toner and drums from third parties at the large school i worked at. It was pretty much always something wrong with the thrid party toner or drum. it especially could get weird when with a toner from one company and a drum from a different one. a toner that was exactly the same from the same company would work with one drum but not with another even if they were from the same place as well so you sometime had to mix and match to see which would work at a decent enough quality”
“Brother technician here. Who produces stuff for giving away? Who is working for free? Nobody. Manufacturers want and must earn money. Also they want to make sure their reputation wont get bad. I know companies which only sell dealers the stuff when technicians are trained. I was certified lately for Kyocera. Their toner contains a lubricant for the fuser unit, and some ceramic particles for refreshing the drum unit. Using third party crap from backshops in third world countries contains everything but not the material Kyo has the patent for and spent much research. Same with Brother. They redesingned the fuser unit to last up to 25% longer, to reduce waste. Their toner is refilled in their own factories and every cartridge will return in the refill-cycle as long as the user is sending it back(for free) or hand it to the dealer like my company. I dont find that very bad. Many units end up on my workbench that got destroyed by above crap or wont produce good results. Some machines get destroyed beyond repair. All that for saving a little money and end up with a huge estimate of costs. I can force the color registration in the technician menu(I am not allowed to answer how to get there), but the result wont be really good, just saying. Sooner or later, the cartridges fail, the drum unit is damaged or wont last the designed lifetime. Think of the camera perspective of the user calling the printer crap because the results are bad, this is what Brother and other manufacturers want to avoid. People think and are fucking stupid sometimes. Thats why they took that step.”
I don’t think that last comment’s argument supports that Brother is lying, but it does support that using third-party supplies can cause decreasing quality.
i look at the telemetry their shitty spyware drivers collect and think I should do some vuln research on them just as a matter of principle and to regain some sense of screwing them back, but don't want to make my life about it anymore than I have to. printers are just a scam. consumer electronics companies just produce landfill, and don't get me started on their products.
Buy a printer, buy third party toner, and try and confirm or refute the claims.
Either way, this is yet another reminder to do everything within reason to block your printer from updating it's firmware automatically. If it's working, there's no reason to let it update itself.