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kalleboo 2 hours ago [-]
The interesting part to me in there is seeing a TRON kernel in the wild.
In the 80's TRON was Japan's bet for the future of operating systems, but it just lived on as an embedded kernel in cars, printers and other industrial applications.
1989: US officials feared Tron could undercut US dominance in computers.
2026: Tron is mostly found dominating printers, and an AI far beyond anything envisaged in the movie Tron explains it to humans.
Truth is stranger than fiction.
MayeulC 1 hours ago [-]
This is something I have been wondering for a while: do custom laser printer firmware projects exist? I'm mostly interested in that to remove toner manufacturer checks, and fix a few annoyances in CUPS and the printers' postscript drivers.
I imagine that is shouldn't be too complicated to support more HW in the agentic age.
I hope there is a way to reset the toner level/page count detection as that would let me refill the new toners which are chipped.
gradous 24 minutes ago [-]
Cool post, I was interested in doing this to my own Brother printer too!
amstan 4 hours ago [-]
I can't tell if any of this gives you more access than the normal http admin interface.
cheschire 2 hours ago [-]
Well now you can point an LLM at it. I’m not sure that gives you anything either, but I’m not sure the hacker ethos makes that a priority.
Sometimes a hack is just cool because it’s a hack.
dizhn 2 hours ago [-]
As far as I can tell, it doesn't. The web interface is like 90s website but it does have a million suboptions. None of these seem like it needed any hacking. I am not sure about the Debug ones. I'll have to check. I wouldn't be surprised if there was an available api listening with the same commands available. If not that would be the useful outcome from work like this. A CLI that implements these.
Now if you could use to allow firmware downgrades when the installed firmware doesn't, that would be useful too. I disabled updates on mine at a version that already allows it. I bought it a few weeks ago but luckily it didn't come with the latest "I don't like your ink chip" firmware.
ciex 2 hours ago [-]
But what are the things you would want from a printer that is already quite reliable, not DRM'd, and presumably compatible with all the devices you want to use it with?
rationalist 1 minutes ago [-]
Idk if they still do this, but a long time ago I had a Brother inkjet that wouldn't print black and white if one of the color cartridges was empty (cyan iirc).
Lots of utterly shit printers limit what ink cartridges you can actually use, being able to mod the firmware to remove that limitation (which should be made illegal but alas) would be a win for humanity at large.
devy 4 hours ago [-]
Great write up and reverse engineering of firmware! I hope to see Epson MFC inkjet printers to have similar discovery too (perhaps it literally a prompt away with a link to this article).
gregoryl 3 hours ago [-]
I was digging around an epson receipt printers firmware recently; got as far as discovering http endpoints (hardcoded auth) to remotely enable ssh (but not login), and some other diagnostic access. They seem fairly well put together.
greyface- 3 hours ago [-]
The same SET USER 640184.571119 command works on my 2012 Brother MFC-9460CDN.
mlfreeman 39 minutes ago [-]
It also works on my Brother HL-L3280CDW
nubinetwork 3 hours ago [-]
But what do those numbers mean?
cellsstudio 3 hours ago [-]
This is a really cool little project. Also, the title gave me a strong hit of like mid 2000's internet "hacking" content that I tore through when I was in high school.
NitpickLawyer 3 hours ago [-]
The e-zines can make a comeback, there's probably enough content now. phreak2030s: "put the local load in the bearing firmwares". Or something :)
josteink 2 hours ago [-]
This piece had potential but IMO was a bit disappointing. The entire thing could be summarized as:
1. "I used AI to download and analyze a firmware image, and found a way to unlock DEBUG mode."
2. "I didn't actually explore the DEBUG mode at all, but here are the commands the AI found for me (link)"
I'd love for the author to at least put in a little real effort, explore some of these debug commands, and tell us why they are interesting.
As this is - I find it to be very minimum-effort, AI-assisted blog-slop. Sorry!
(Now for the link[1] to the actual (unexplored) debug-commands... It has really weird casing of the descriptions in the "behaviour"-column. Does anyone know why that is?)
In the 80's TRON was Japan's bet for the future of operating systems, but it just lived on as an embedded kernel in cars, printers and other industrial applications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_project
https://www.osnews.com/story/145872/japan-tried-to-build-an-...
1984: The Japanese launched an OS called Tron.
1989: US officials feared Tron could undercut US dominance in computers.
2026: Tron is mostly found dominating printers, and an AI far beyond anything envisaged in the movie Tron explains it to humans.
Truth is stranger than fiction.
I imagine that is shouldn't be too complicated to support more HW in the agentic age.
Sometimes a hack is just cool because it’s a hack.
Now if you could use to allow firmware downgrades when the installed firmware doesn't, that would be useful too. I disabled updates on mine at a version that already allows it. I bought it a few weeks ago but luckily it didn't come with the latest "I don't like your ink chip" firmware.
1. "I used AI to download and analyze a firmware image, and found a way to unlock DEBUG mode."
2. "I didn't actually explore the DEBUG mode at all, but here are the commands the AI found for me (link)"
I'd love for the author to at least put in a little real effort, explore some of these debug commands, and tell us why they are interesting.
As this is - I find it to be very minimum-effort, AI-assisted blog-slop. Sorry!
(Now for the link[1] to the actual (unexplored) debug-commands... It has really weird casing of the descriptions in the "behaviour"-column. Does anyone know why that is?)
[1] https://inventor7777.github.io/brother-mfc-commands-list.htm...