News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Brother accused of locking down third-party printer ink c... by ciiiicii on Tuesday March 04, 2025 @11:09PM (#43262647)
Can the firmware be downgraded to a version that doesn't do this? That is, assuming the older firmware images are archived somewhere.
Re:Brother accused of locking down third-party printer ink c... by dlenski on Wednesday March 05, 2025 @01:17AM (#43263468)
Yes, with https://github.com/sedrubal/brother_printer_fwupd it's frequently possible.

(I've contributed to it. Very useful tool.)

Re:Brother accused of locking down third-party printer ink c... by MostlyStable on Wednesday March 05, 2025 @03:05AM (#43264045)
That tool appears to be getting the firmware from brother servers. They have removed the old firmware as of more than a year ago (this issue is not new)
Re:Brother accused of locking down third-party printer ink c... by 3abiton on Wednesday March 05, 2025 @01:41AM (#43263584)
Is there anything useful usually in those fw updates?
Re:Brother accused of locking down third-party printer ink c... by wazoox on Wednesday March 05, 2025 @05:11AM (#43264887)
Probably some dubiously useful features such as a nicer web UI (I never use it anyway), some utterly useless features like "scanning to Dropbox/GDrive", or most probably now some "AI assistant" that tells you how to switch cartridges.
Re:Brother accused of locking down third-party printer ink c... by dlenski on Saturday March 08, 2025 @12:38AM (#43297772)
Not in my experience. No user visible changes.

There might be some fixes to bugs