this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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Brother accused of locking down third-party printer ink cartridges via forced firmware updates, removing older firmware versions from support portals (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Set some firewall rules. The printer doesn't need to be able to make any outbound connections. It only needs inbound connections on a few ports to work.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I feel like you glossed over the “you have a rogue device on your network” side of things. Even if it can’t reach the internet directly, it will still quietly sit there and try to infect every other device on your network.

If you’re not in the habit of updating your firmware, (and in this case, you’re actively defeating firmware updates), that infection can quickly snowball.