Comment on [Louis Rossmann] Brother turns heel & becomes anti-consumer printer company

harsh3466@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

• tal@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Strictly-speaking, in this case, it’s not the ability to be network-connected that’s at issue, but rather the ability to push updates to firmware.

  I don’t know what type of computer you have it connected to, but Linux has a system that will automatically update firmware on attached devices if the attached Linux computer is Internet-connected.

  $ sudo fwupdtool get-devices
  

  Will show you a list of managed devices.

  I’m sure that Windows and MacOS have comparable schemes.

  On Linux, I’m sure that you can blacklist a device for updates.

  I’d guess that it’s possible to get one of those dedicated USB print servers. Those probably don’t support updating firmware on an attached printer. I might have some questions as to how much I’d trust a no-name one of those on my network itself, but…

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  • harsh3466@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Shit. I didn’t even think of that. I’m using fedora. Tomorrow I’ll be blocking firmware updates for the printer. Thank you for pointing that out.

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    • tal@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I should qualify that – I don’t know for sure whether and which distros enable updates to run non-interactively. fwupd has the ability to do so and it’s billed as doing so on its github page, but that doesn’t mean that a distro has to actually take advantage of that. Could be that in a default configuration, it only updates stuff next time you invoke it.

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