The original source was Louis Rossmann, a YouTuber known both for advocating for Right to Repair and for producing a lot of videos in the rant/complaint genre.
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.
Rossmann also wholesale recommends LibreWolf as a replacement for Firefox with full calm assurance despite the maintainer(s) obviously being anonymous and unvetted and there being no organisation behind the fork to serve as a legal entity.
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..
> despite the maintainer(s) obviously being anonymous and unvetted and there being no organisation behind the fork to serve as a legal entity.
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?
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.
It is all also trust based, with plenty of examples showing that access was available despite all checks and balances supposedly being in place.
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)
>Yeah, in both cases it is user hostile entity hellbent on tracking you, with strong legal defense.
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.
Let me demonstrate the issue to you with a hypothetical situation:
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
A lot of the criticism of librewolf is for being "woke"
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.
I don't see how the anonymity of the maintainers of Librewolf are at all relevant to this discussion. You're just doing a gish gallop argument and undermining your credibility.
That's not the original source, that's the video that made it go viral. The original source, as detailed in the article, is online reports from people (like me) who have experienced a Brother printer stop working when 3rd party toner is installed and that swapping the DRM chip fixes the issue.
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.
I used to enjoy Louis' videos when he started out on YouTube, his troubleshooting process for repairs was cool to watch along with his soldering technique. I might've found him through Eli the Computer Guy (another early YouTuber), but these days both of them seem kind of jaded and cynical while pandering to people who seem angry at tech in general.
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.
> 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.
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.
This is interesting since I never had an issue with the loaner program, or apple making those tools available. The tech press had a field day laughing over that, but it wasn't anything professional repair people considered an issue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vhCaFW5xTk
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.
All do respect to Rossmann, but he definitely falls under the genre of "professional complainer". And like a lot of tech journalism he applies the same narratives to everything.
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.
> The idea that they are secretly and suddenly changing their sales strategy
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
> 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.
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.
I have a brand new color laser printer on the latest firmware and have no such problems running aftermarket toner.
> 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.
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.
I don't know Brother, but Xerox and HP do their own toner/ink R&D and both have in-house labs.
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.
I agree with you wholeheartedly and definitely have my favourite (refillable, only refilled with genuine ink) pen.
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.
In my experience, once I replaced the 3rd party toner chip with brother's, it started working fine. Definitely something to do with the chip that brother checks...
> Definitely something to do with the chip that brother checks...
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.
I have a brother printer. I swapped out OEM toner for 3rd party. The printer stopped working with a mysterious error message. Support told me to replace with geniune toner. Taking the DRM chip off my empty (OEM) cartridge and installing into the 3rd part cartridge fixed the issue (and it has remained fixed for many months at this point).
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
> 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.
> 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.
That is somewhat confusing. If the problem is that 3rd party toners can't get the "chip holder design" right, then why would putting in a new chip fix it? Either that is a confusing name for something about the chip itself, rather than the mechanism on the cartridge for holding it in place, or else swapping the chip won't work because the "chip holder" is on the cartridge.
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.
Is it a DRM chip? Or is it just a basic flash chip that tells the printer roughly how much toner is left and to alert the user that they put the toner in the wrong color slot.
It's a DRM chip if your working printer stops working after a firmware update because your third party toner cartridge doesn't have the chip, but the printer works again as soon as you follow a youtube video on how to stick the chip onto the third party toner cartridge. That's what's been reported.
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.
> It's a DRM chip if your working printer stops working after a firmware update because your third party toner cartridge doesn't have the chip, but the printer works again as soon as you follow a youtube video on how to stick the chip onto the third party toner cartridge.
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.
A real world scenario of this happened. 3rd party iPhone screens were using the controller chip from the previous iPhone, but it still worked fine. Until a new iOS update released, since that iOS version wasn’t going out to the previous iPhone, the driver for that controller got removed since in theory there would be no devices using it anymore.
Causing all the replacement screens to stop working until Apple added the driver back.
I got a Brother printer (MFC-L2750DWB) entirely because they were the only good guys on the market when it came to this sort of thing. But instead of buying a 3rd party toner cartridge, I reused the original starter cartridge and refilled it with 3rd party toner (inkowl). Then had to override some setting on the printer and lie that I had replaced the cartridge with a high yield one. Seems to be working fine.
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 an HL-L2370DW, since probably 2020 or 2021. I've installed multiple third party toner cartridges in it, as recently as last week, and never had any problem. However I also have never knowingly updated the firmware.
Given the number of reports (and the fact that this is common enough that I found a youtube video explaining how to swap the DRM chip), that seems possible, but less likely. These chips are not complicated or hard to make. The prior on failure rates should be extremely low. But the next time I need a toner cartridge, I will make sure to test it before I swap the chip, just to double check.
If the chip isn't defective, why did it work with a known good one? If it isn't complicated to make them, why does your chip not work?
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?
It should be easy enough for Ars to buy one of the exact models being complained about and test it. I know reporters try not to be part of the story, but a reliable first hand account would be useful here.
Louis surely also has enough money to test this. Buy a $100 Brother laser, update to latest firmware. Buy 10 different el cheapo toner carts and test them all.
I'd prefer that a credible journal do that as that would be even better. Also the idea of "journalists try not to be part of the story" should preclude product testing on verifiable claims is a really bizarre stance to take.
Pleasing. Brother has been one of the few -- or possibly only, I don't know printers well enough to know -- that don't appear to be governed entirely by rent seekers. I've bought exactly one printer in the last 20 years; six month ago: a Brother laser printer. So far, it's great.
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).
Not surprised. If you looked at the sources (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43262650) for Louis’ claims they seem to be poorly sourced. There could be a variety of reasons why aftermarket toners/inks weren’t recognised apart from intentional bricking.
This seems like a reasonable reply from Brother. I have not seen verification (screenshots, videos) of what is being alleged. I wonder if it is poppin up scary messages or refusing to do some of the troubleshooting steps without a chipped ink cart.
Removing old firmware versions from their download site is bullshit though.
This response is good because it means Brother has basically committed to not doing this, so if it's found they are they'll have to reverse that with an update to save face.
“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 actually buy a new printer every 18 months because the ink "dries out" and whatever crappy box store I get it from surprisingly doesn't carry the ink cartriges for the printers they sell when I need it, and for another $60 I can print whatever I need.
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.
Sounds like inkjet problems; laser printers never dry out and print 3-10K pages. You can also buy and store multiple backup toner cartridges because they never dry out, just shake them before install.
This is hilarious because Brother can do it selectively to people it targets, never allowing a tester like Rossman to verify the bricking. The ultimate determinant here is verified user reviews.
I read this article overwhelmingly thinking: do a test Ars. The subtext read like “Oh woe is us well just have to wait and see what happens there’s nothing we could do to move this along. We have an editor that has one but theirs isn’t internet connected. Oh if only there was something we could do to give more substantive reporting.”
Buy a printer, buy third party toner, and try and confirm or refute the claims.
Hopefully, Brother has not in fact succumbed to the dark side. This was a significant story because Brother is known for generally not already doing this shit.
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.
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.