Comment on HP customer claims firmware update shoved printer off support cliff

Quexotic@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

• XLE@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  “Buy a Brother printer” was bound to only be good advice for so long. If I’ve learned anything from watching competitive tech markets, it’s that the best competitor eventually starts diluting their own offering in favor of profit.

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  • Quexotic@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I’m lucky enough that all I’ve gotta do is prevent my brother from connecting to the internet and I should be fine.

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• pomegranatefern@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  My personal big suspicion is that the legally required anti-counterfeiting measures for printing (those near invisible yellow dots that color prints require) has prevented this from happening yet, but surely there must be some way.

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  • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I think the bigger issue is that printers are a commodity item in the public eye. Cheap and disposable, yet backed by thousands of hours of secret sauce engineering to achieve extremely high print quality.

    Finding people willing to do that kind of work for free is very difficult, not to mention the fact that prototyping hardware is still very expensive, though it has come down in price dramatically over the teats.

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  • Quexotic@infosec.pub ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    That’s only required for color printers though. I’d be fine with a FOSS B/W printer. Gotta start somewhere!

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    • pomegranatefern@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      As would I!

      Though I also did find a few interesting links about people attempting to make FOSS printers earlier after getting inspired by this comment, which I share here now:

      www.crowdsupply.com/open-tools/open-printer

      hackaday.io/project/167446-diy-inkjet-printer

      Also a discussion on open source printer firmware here: hackaday.io/…/6176-why-is-there-no-open-source-fi…

      Honestly, that Open Tools one looks really interesting to me (it can be wall-mounted!!) but I can’t for the life of me figure out when the project was last updated to see if it’s currently active or defunct.

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