I had to buy a printer recently. I intentionally went through all the information i could to find out which manufacturers pull this trick and bought their competitor instead.
I didn’t have a wide array of choices, as I had a selection of printers in front of me at a brick and mortar store, but I went with the Brother HL-L2325DW. They offer a subscription (I don’t mind an optional convenience and monetization method) but they don’t disable your printer or force you to buy it.
It came with a full sized toner cartridge at about 3,000 pages compared to the “demo cartridge” most printers will give you with the unit, and it worked out of the Box with CUPS and Linux, and was supported by Brother for Windows and Mac.
Wildly enough there was a Linux utility too from Brother, but I didn’t need it.
+1 for Brother HL printers. 2 toner bars got me through 3 years of nursing school.
If I need something printed in color, I'll just let a professional do it.
I have a 12 year old laser printer that I got for $3 from a garage sale and I’m riding this baby into the ground. Every year or two I get some generic toner for about $15.
It’s worse than it sounds… You’re not actually paying for ink, you’re paying for pages, in a similar context to how you used to pay for minutes for your cell phone.
A buck a month gets you 10 pages printed, 100 pages printed a month sets you back $6/mo, and so on.
The ink is shipped “free” when your cartridge runs out, and naturally, they figured out how to increase the ink capacity in the carts to be much higher than the ones they sell, so shipping a cart out will be much less frequent if you’re ponying up for each page you print.
Odds are it’ll be cheaper over the life of your printer as long as you’re a member of the residual income brigade…
Great, so between Chrome and Safari’s total 80% market share we’re basically fucked. Now’s the time to get friends/family to change to a non-Chrome browser.
There is always a free and open source alternatives to this garbage. Imagine if the government funded these open source projects. Jitsi is a good open source alternative to zoom. It’s rough around the edges, but a good funding can turn it around to be better than zoom. That way, even the government can use it and doesn’t have to deal with zoom’s privacy nightmare.
Security this, security there, as if increasing surface area for attacks wouldn’t decrease security. It’s clear that they want to track you for the sake of data vulturing.
It's scary because there is an incredible amount of data that can be gained just by knowing when your lights are turning on and off (when people leave/return for the day and when they're on vacation are examples). Combine that with information on what IP Address the app is reporting from and you may be able to get a decent bit of location data even without officially querying for location.
Without an account, potentially having this information is bad enough but mandating an account and then having it tied to your email address is worse (since most people aren't going to make a per-service address).
Right now, my Hue hub is prevented from accessing the Internet and everything using the local API works without issue, except the app is trying to force a TOS agreement and without agreeing I cant do anything with the official app (add/remove devices, adjust on/off state, adjust brightness, etc...). Home Assistant control works, so, my lights still come on automatically based on my motion sensors and my light switches through HA will still turn them on and off and adjust brightness and all that ... If I were relying on the official app though, I'd have no choice but to agree to their TOS or would now have to take all the bulbs out.
This really sucks because I paid a shit ton for these bulbs vs their competitors because I liked that they allowed local control natively without needing to mess around with anything to get it to work and had a quality product ... Had I known this would happen I definitely would not have paid the hefty surcharge I did and would have gone with a competing product.
This really sucks because I paid a shit ton for these bulbs vs their competitors because I liked that they allowed local control natively without needing to mess around with anything to get it to work and had a quality product ... Had I known this would happen I definitely would not have paid the hefty surcharge I did and would have gone with a competing product.
I personally know others who made the same decision. Sounds like a class action suit, similar to when Sony removed the ability to install linux from the PS3.
The ability to lock stolen phones should be under the control of its owner. Keeping it under OEM is just asking for that capability to be abused and misused against the wishes of the owner.
How do you keep that only to the owner without proprietary software Should only the owner have a private key? And how would it be set to be the correct one in the first place?
I don’t understand the requirement for a proprietary software for this. Meanwhile, boot chain verification exists already. And there is no reason why it can’t be under the control of the user - with a user-supplied private key.
Free software should be able to be replaced by anything - by the owner. There is no technical reason the device can’t still be locked to prevent modification by someone else. There are already free software that allows you (the owner) to remotely screen-lock the device.
Apparently they already reverted that. I guess people need to write every bullshit Microsoft pulls, at least for the sake of people who still use Windows.
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