This is what OpenWRT is for.
We need FOSS scanner and printer stack.
Given we have open source 3D printers… why are there no good open source regular printers? Does no one really care that much? Is it too much of a niche desire given the ubiquitous nature of shitty printers round the world being sold for less than they cost in a parasitical effort to trap owners into a sunk cost fallacy of paying for overpriced ink?
This sounds plausible, the actual nozzle holes in an inkjet printer are around .003 inches (76 µm for the rest of us) according to Wikipedia [1]. That sounds like some pretty high-order manufacturing is needed, I'm not drilling that out in the shed.
Perhaps the best bet would be to find a commercially available printer (laser or inkjet) and reverse engineer it, perhaps replacing the control board with a Raspberry Pi or something more suitable (ESP32?) to drive the existing electro-mechanical components with an open firmare.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkjet_printing#Continuous_ink...
It’s sort of surprising there isn’t a well established reprap of plotting given it’s simplicity. The biggest missing piece is arguably the paper feed.
And as for an inkjet… why does a reliable printer need to be that good, I’d be pretty happy with a “higher dpi” pseudo dot matrix printer using a lift retract style mechanism and a hacked up refillable ink pen. Tapping out the art one dot at a time.
It’s not a bad argument for a lot of consumer printing use cases, but the “they need too much precision” never felt compelling to me given the breadth of printer technology both past and present.
It wouldn't be easy, but 3d printers also made immense progress despite technical challenges. I first heard about them in the reprap days and now we can buy well-engineered 3d printers with fancy features like resonance compensation ("input shaping").
On the other hand you have 2D printing on paper, which is nowhere near as fun and interesting, so you have less people gravitating towards hacking on 2D printing software and hardware. Granted, a few FOSS giants are obviously maintaining the stack, which is amazing.
Same with programming languages for example. You give a developer unlimited free time to learn whatever language they want, they'll probably either go for a language that was newly released and hyped (like Rust) or something obscenely old (like COBOL), probably won't spend time learning PHP or Perl which are too old to be new but too new to be old.
Most engineers can get an adequate printer - such as a small office laser printer - for 1-2 days wages. And can print things at work, their boss doesn't mind a few pages here and there. And can get photos printed at the supermarket for 10 seconds wages. So there's not much motivation to scratch an itch.
Existing printing technology can also produce photo-quality prints, and is heavily cost-optimised (albeit with very expensive ink). So there's not much motivation to improve on the state of the art in regards to print quality, or upfront purchase price.
We live in that world today. Most enterprise networking equipment operates with the licensing model.
If you are buying an enterprise switch you know exactly what you're getting
(In reality it features you don't buy on Juniper seem to still work, just print nags to the log file. Arista from what I can see are fully featured anyway. I'm talking basic routing features like BGP rather than some cloud based librenms the sales guy keeps trying to flog)
We have been explicitly told that a DNA Advantage 3 Year License will continue to work after the 3 year license though. All companies are moving to a per-year charge though, as it keeps the money rolling in.
Your IOTs are all on subscription plan. All it takes is a defunct company, yank from the App Store, or unpatched CVEs and you'll need to physically uninstall that puppy, whether it's your dishwasher, fridge, thermostat, or lawn sprinklers. Have fun.
Only if they require some internet connection.
OpenWRT says hi. https://openwrt.org/toh/start
reddit.com/r/printers/comments/s9b2eg/brother_mfc_firmware_update_nongenuine_toner_now/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/business/media/am-radio-c...
"Carmakers noted that drivers can still stream AM radio on apps and not all electric vehicles have dropped it."
I see ransomware coming to cars.
Almost no one will do it - it's a lot of work, loss of warranty, loss of small conveniences.
In the U.S., this is not true. If Apple claims so, they are violating the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act.
> a warrantor cannot, as a matter of law, avoid liability under a written warranty where a defect is unrelated to the use by a consumer of “unauthorized” articles or service.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2018-title16-vol1/xm...
your resale value is now zero
your service options have been limited to third party workshops only
In the U.S., this is not true. If the manufacturer claims so, they are violating the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act.
There is at least one Indian manufacturer pushing subscriptions on some features on their high end models.
Thin end of the wedge.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/12/23204950/bmw-subscription...
This should be illegal.
I’m not sure how to feel about it now. I think the satellite version is more secure, but does have a different cost structure.
(I only found this out when our account wouldn’t work for months. Then a few months ago there was a security issue with that system that reset our account.)
https://mobile.twitter.com/samwcyo/status/159779209717567488...
Tl;dr: They didn't actually bother to put security into the app
> We could execute commands on vehicles and fetch user information from the accounts by only knowing the victim's VIN number, something that was on the windshield.
With electrical equipment like oscilloscopes it is quite common to sell the physically identical unit with different softwarelocks for different prices (Want 350 MHz bandwidth instead of 80? Pay some extra).
Want that HDMI cable to run 8k? Here os a simple subscription. As resolutions go up there comes a point where cable will have to have some active components in them anyways.
The basic model XX40 gives you 40 pages a minute. Want the XX80? An engineer comes out and flips the DIP. Exact same hardware.
I'm 100% okay with artificial limitations on hardware I buy, too, so long as they're upfront about capabilities - Running something at half capacity for service reliability reasons is still a valid strategy when dealing with warranties. I have no problem buying an AMD Ryzen 7900 which is literally the same silicon on the same fab as the 7950, but binned differently. They are clear about what they're providing, what the specs are, and it's possible that it could perform better, but I know what they're guaranteeing. Sometimes I don't like it - If yields are good, they could bin many more cards at the higher tier and drop the price, but they're under no obligation to provide me a better product out of charity; They should have competition that forces their hand.
It's where it's unclear or deceptive that it's a problem, and HP's scheme is a shakedown. We should invest in competitors.
John Deere sells you a tractor and you honestly don’t care that you can’t have it repaired by a local tractor shop?
I mean it’s great if you happen to live next to a dealer and are rich, but not everyone is so privileged.
Monopolies are a problem. Businesses exploiting consumers are a problem. Both are worth solving.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AMD_Athlon_Pencil_Tr...
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/general-computing/hacking-nvid...
The.
Fuck.
Literally every "scan tool" for troubleshooting machinery is like this.
The upgrade consisted of popping open the case to pull an SD card out and update a text file with a list of enabled features. Could be a few grand in new features after the ‘upgrade’.
I can only imagine a few technicians figured this trick out on their own.
AT&T already did this. You were paying not only for the service but all of the equipment as well. You didn't actually own anything from the phone company.
100% fact, at least where I grew up. we had no reception problems (flat farmland) and we were one of the first houses in one of the first towns in the area to get cable service. cable company promised no commercials ever, and that's why he subscribed, after a trial period. there were zero commercials.
I remember my father on the phone with the cable company, the company that owned the cable company, our state representative, and our governor, all within a month after the first commercials started airing. obviously it did no good.
Per Wikipedia [0]:
“The abbreviation "CATV" is used in the US for cable television and originally stood for community antenna television, from cable television's origins in 1948; in areas where over-the-air TV reception was limited by distance from transmitters or mountainous terrain, large community antennas were constructed, and cable was run from them to individual homes. […] The early systems simply received weak (broadcast) channels, amplified them, and sent them over unshielded wires to the subscribers, limited to a community or to adjacent communities. The receiving antenna would be taller than any individual subscriber could afford, thus bringing in stronger signals; in hilly or mountainous terrain it would be placed at a high elevation.”
And IMHO it's a done deal. Almost no one nowadays listens to MP3s, rather than Spitify or Apple Music. Few people buy or download movies, rathen than subscribing to Netflix and other streaming services. Most people are accepting the requirement that they need an online account to use an iPhone, Chromebook or a Windows PC.
Same with Apple. At the time we moved, we had a few movies in our library that wouldn't transfer to the new region. We had to go "buy" them again (at which point it would realize you already owned it and charge zero currency). FWIW, Apple has since fixed this and when you change regions, your purchases come over (mostly) without any issues.
If we could fix the region shenanigans, all of this would be fine IMHO. At least when it comes to digital content.
If we want a different slate of choices we should use the collective power we have to make it happen. ‘People vote with their wallets’ is just a way for self-interested companies to shift the blame.
US is world's biggest market and home to most big tech companies. It has a two party system. Do you suggest that the majority of people will select which of the two parties to vote for, based on their stance on subsriptions? Or that it's possible to force one of the two parties to take a strong position against subscriptions?
Of course not. Culture war bullshit will keep them distracted.
On second- and third-tier issues, politicians take their cues from friendly activists and interest groups, for whatever "friendly" means to that particular elected. Think about how many politicians' reelection messages are basically bullet-points of small-bore asks delivered. Each individual item may not win many votes, exactly, but they create a general sense that the candidate is engaged and effective. And perhaps more importantly, it's hard for potential opponents to build support when the incumbent is delivering for the most engaged voters in the district. Anyways a politician needs to do something while in office; it might as well be the stuff that people they respect want.
So: you frame this issue, and how it's confluent with the broader [Democratic/Republican] outlook. You clarify the desired legislative outcome. You show some public support, which takes many fewer people than you might think, and set up some meetings. Hopefully you find a sponsor. Then repeat as necessary to get the bill introduced, voted on, and maybe even passed.
None of this is easy; it's a ton of work, and by no means guaranteed of success. It's especially difficult in today's US where so much gets bottled up behind partisan showboating. But it also happens all the time. See the traction the right-to-repair movement is getting.
Really it's the same for "voting with your wallet" - to actually vote with your wallet, you need to start a competing company that offers the service that you want.
In actual practice, as here, ‘vote with your wallet’ stands in for “people are choosing this, nothing to be done.” And ‘voting’ stands for collective action to change the choices on offer.
But sure, starting a company’s great too. Though with concentrated markets and high barriers to entry, that won’t always be feasible: I wouldn’t want to start a printer company, and that’s probably not the worst case.
Nobody is saying that, though. Time is money, and if your printer is bricking itself because you forgot to update your credit card information, that will be wasted time, and you'll remember that when it comes time to pick a printer vendor in the future.
People just don't want to vote with their wallets. Voting with your wallet isn't sustainable when the options you have to pick from are what's on the market. What's on the market will never be what you want to vote for; you want to vote for change.
-Emily
No, they can't. A lot of new releases never leave streaming services.
You still need a Netflix subscription to obtain some of the DVDs for their "netflix originals". They do still ship DVDs, but they aren't available to buy separately, you need the streaming subscription to access them.
Some "netflix originals" have DVDs sold outside of Netflix (i.e. on Amazon), but not all; you need to order DVDs directly from Netflix as part of their DVD service, I believe. (If they are even available at all.)
> Can buy a digital recording of a song, or a Spotify subsription
No, they still can't. A lot of indie artists release on Spotify but never make physical media of any kind. You can't buy songs DRM-free from Spotify.
The answer is "well don't listen to that song then" but this kind of voting is really dumb and people do not like to do this. They'll suck it up and throw money even if they hate it with their entire being. Because society as a whole has been conditioned to do this, unfortunately, and no matter how hard you try to start a revolution, this is a fact of life and you cannot avoid it.
Tell me: when what you want is no longer on the market at all, how do you vote for it? With your wallet? Do you just not buy its replacement? Nobody will care. Unless you manage to start a revolution all at once, you not buying something will be statistically insignificant.
-Emily
> No, they still can't. A lot of indie artists release on Spotify but never make physical media of any kind.
You're contrasting spotify with physical media, but responding to a remark that didn't say physical media. Are you aware that digital downloads of music have been DRM-free from iTunes and Amazon for many years now? Physical media is irrelevant.
I'm sure you might respond by saying that some artists are spotify-exclusives (I wouldn't listen to them on principle, but you do you). But the way you contrasted spotify with physical media specifically makes me think you might not be aware that DRM-free digital music downloads have been the norm since the late-00s (about the last time I ever bought a CD!)
I am not blind to the existence of DRM-free music downloads, no.
-Emily
The only way to have the option to have your preferences met in a large and mature enough market is to be completely price insensitive.
There should be a law against this tethering of devices by the vendor when you buy a product as opposed to a service.
That's a slightly different world than requiring a valid, working credit card. iPhones work without a working credit card.
And if you use the device long enough, I'm sure there will be sufficient information for Apple to link the device back to you.
Cisco says hi.
I guess the enterprise customers don't care about everything being a subscription.
There is something to be done in legislation, or such malicious behaviors will become more and more rampant.
These were banned in America decades ago because they were unfair to women (urinals were always free.) So this one at least probably won't be coming back.
A long time ago, I once had a Netgear WGR614v10 (802.11g router). Imagine my surprise when I learned that it was possible to enable telnet access, alter the model number in the NVRAM, and flash WNR1000v3 firmware onto it, converting it to an 802.11n router. They were identical internally.
Everybody I know buys Brother because they don't do that shit. And, of course, they produce decent printers that do their job properly and aren't that expensive to maintain.
Ads. There could be a freemium model where, before every print job, a couple of pages of ads are printed if you don’t have the premium ink subscription.
Sure, we should expect them to be greedy, but when they get too greedy we should hold them accountable. It's too late for me though, I stopped buying HP printers ages ago and while all inkjet printers are scams, and I would advise anyone to avoid them in general, HP currently tops the list of printer companies I'd recommend people avoid.
It's like those terrible runaway train memes where one track has 100 people and the other track has 1 rich man. Guess which side they always choose to run over?
I think the question is whether you're providing an actual service that has value, or just charging rent for the software and calling it SaaS. Software has a marginal cost of ZERO, so SaaS is often simple rent-seeking. A company might actually use the money to develop a better version of the software, but that's actually optional on their part.
I now see that he was probably right about everything, and every year, users lose more and more ground in the war.
How is this the same at all?
There absolutely is an upfront cost - a company has paid to create the software that enables that SaaS.
They are simply hiding that from view of the customer, and only offering a rental option.
You used to be able to actually buy stand-alone software, which you installed, and managed on hardware you'd bought, and which upgraded only when you decided to buy again.
But... it turns out it's less profitable to sell standalone software - so the vast majority of vendors are just quietly dropping that option and moving to subscription only licenses: SaaS.
Basically
> there is nothing you "buy" that you can reasonably consider to be "yours" and use in isolation.
Is entirely intentional, and exactly what the printer manufacturer wishes they could do - except they have the pesky problem of having to provide hardware that actually prints at some point. But it's DEFINITELY not the only way to sell software.
> You used to be able to actually buy stand-alone software, which you installed, and managed on hardware you'd bought, and which upgraded only when you decided to buy again.
That's not what Saas is usually considered though, at least in my experience. A note taking app needing a subscription to work isn't what I imagine this thread means when we talk about SaaS.
There is no ongoing cost (to HP) when I buy a printer from them. Whereas, a SaaS has to pay (presumably) server fees.
I do appreciate that many of these decisions have required effort and self actualization. Like I'm not particularly expecting a non-tech yuppie to seek out a libreboot machine. But if I were in the market to replace any of these things, I'd turn to the commercial and the used markets rather than walking into Best Buy (or worse searching Amazon) and narrowing my field of view to only shiny surveillance traps.
I do have to wonder what it will take to get the technologically sustainable choices into the general public consciousness, so they stop buying things designed to milk your wallet and spy on you for a few short years, before they're deliberately obsoleted.
What's the sustainable alternative to buying a new locked-down laptop? If it's a ten-year-old laptop running coreboot then almost nobody is ever going to go that route. You could explain your principles until you're blue in the face but it will never seem like a better alternative than a fast, warrantied new laptop that does almost everything they want to do fairly easily.
Also the point of opting for media self-ownership (which may include piracy) isn't to save money on subscription services, but rather to avoid the inevitable rug pulls and other backstabbing down the line. All these articles about Netflix clamping down on account sharing are only relevant if you've bought into their zero sum world. I understand that's where pop culture is these days, but it's unfortunate that the tech community, who should know better, treats it as if it's anything more than a passing fad.
Because manufacturers will not mention their product is defective by design. Until I heard of the HP ink subscription scheme a year or two ago, I would not think twice if they advertised such a feature since the expectation is that I could still buy ink independently. I would not expect the printer to stop functioning if I did not subscribe.
That's not to say that I would have bought HP. I already knew that they were not upfront about a lot of things and I already had a company that I trusted. (Ironically, a company that people claimed produced cheap junk back in the 90's.) That said, there are a lot of people buying their first printer and who have little concept of what the pitfalls are. Certain types of pitfalls are rarely mentioned in reviews and, when they are, they may come off as hyperbolic. That said, even commercial products have their pitfalls. I had to deal with a Xerox printer a while back that refused to work with a toner purchased under a support contract since the printer was not covered by the support contract. (The printer was purchased separately since the Internet connection wasn't reliable at that site.)
And yeah the same crapification is happening to commercial markets, at slower or faster paces. The point is that most of this gimmicky consumer shit is just advertising skins on functionality that was already solved 20 years ago, and buying a new old stock or refurbished products would meet the need while avoiding backdoors.
It just feels like so many of the headlines these days about Internet of Trash and subscription service rugpulls are like the old doctor joke - "Doc, it hurts when I do this" ... "Well, stop doing that".
Imagine your printer fails, and you need a new one ASAP for work. Now what?
I'm a member of the 10 year old printer club, and hating the idea of needing a replacement at some point.
I totally understand the impulse to spend a bit of money and feel that you're solving a problem now and for the future. But these companies have evolved their offerings to fully take advantage of this behavior, and the only way to protect yourself is to take a step back and act deliberately.
The apparent wear on the head seems minor, so far. The $80 brush came with only one head.
Some people seem to be getting counterfeit brush heads from Amazon, so I'm going to have to visit my Walgreens for a spare, and then wait to see what happens.
I also have a Sonicare toothbrush, and other then the head it came with, I only use generic heads on it. The "feature" you are talking about is called the "BrushSync" and it enables the "Brush head replacement reminder". That feature doesn't activate with generic heads, and you can easily turn it for Sonicare heads. Here's a link to the manual for my brush. See page 11 for the feature description and 12 for the instructions to turn it off. Depending on your model you may need to do a different sequence.
https://www.manualslib.com/manual/1507567/Philips-Sonicare-P...
Now, you might say that without reminders, I'm not getting the clean I deserve, but I buy heads with those fade away indicator bristles, so I just change it out when the blue turns white.
> you're free to not use their services and instead turn to the non-existent companies that will put the users over maximizing profits
This is just a strawman argument though. No company on earth is putting users over maximizing profits, but that doesn't lead logically to your conclusion that people don't have choices. People have plenty of choices, because the act of maximizing profits requires exploring and providing many ways of buying something. Some people want to pay per-page, some people want to buy a printer outright and handle maintenance themselves. Both options are available.
> Brother as a brand that doesn't do this. However, what guarantees are there that they won't?
The void in the market it would leave, and some company would (and as you can see, has) take advantage of it to provide consumers with this buying format.
That isn't even remotely true. Many companies are run by people who actually have morals and, even if only for selfish reasons, want customers to not hate them.
I've worked for companies that refused to do things like sell user data, knowing full well that they'd be making lots of money doing it, but knowing that it was wrong and would make customers hate them. They weren't worried that unhappy customers would flock to competitors either. One was a telecom who was the only game in town for many of their users.
It's not always and entirely a race to the bottom where companies do as little as possible for customers while charging customers as much as humanly possible and it shouldn't be, but that is how things often end up. It's why we have that cycle where good products/companies gain massive popularity by putting users over maximizing profits until someone steps in who is too greedy and suddenly users are forced to find alternatives when greed ruins yet another good thing.
There are good companies and great products that put users before maximizing profit every single day. The fact that exploitative assholes also exist doesn't mean that's how everyone behaves, or that it's how everyone should.
> That isn't even remotely true
> even if only for selfish reasons
So we're on the same page. You just repeated what I said. Companies don't put users before profits, but the act of seeking profits (the "selfish reasons" as you put it) require stopping short of some things.
I promise you, there really are companies that put their users before maximizing profits. There genuinely are people who aren't obsessed with money over all else.
Definitely entering the surreal disposable humanity
> The way Salima found out that Boulangism had gone bankrupt: her toaster wouldn’t accept her bread.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-...
I know. All of it, and worse, unless we fight back. And no, "voting with your wallet" is not fighting - it's retreat to not yet conquered ground, which is shrinking daily.
What's next? Scanners only working under a subscription? Your Wi-Fi router or switches only working when a license is active (even your LAN)? Your chargers, PSUs or UPSes only being allowed to work for 6 months, before you're forced to buy a newer model? Needing a monthly subscription to use your OS or browser? I don't even know anymore...
The printer example feels like it shouldn't be legal. The whole printer ink situation feels a lot like that. The companies are probably going to get away with this, because they're the ones setting the rules, you're free to not use their services and instead turn to the non-existent companies that will put the users over maximizing profits.
Edit: Louis suggests Brother as a brand that doesn't do this. However, what guarantees are there that they won't?