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Last year dozens of 'Right to Repair' bills were introduced throughout the US, but defeated. Maybe this time its time has come.
Right to Repair bills, designed to foster competition in the repair industry, require manufacturers to allow repair, and even provide manuals, diagnosic software, and parts. Manufacturers oppose these laws as it can cost them more to address devices repaired by third parties, because repairs are a source of revenue, and because repaired items are less likely to be replaced with new ones.
[O]ne of the most effective anti-repair tactics is to spread FUD about the supposed security risks of independent repairs.
Without a concerted and coordinated effort to counteract this tactic, legislators receive primarily well-heeled opposing views, and vote accordingly.
Last year, a newly formed lobbying group called the Security Innovation Center began placing op-eds in local newspapers like the Minnesota St. Cloud Times and the Illinois State Journal-Register advocating against right-to-repair bills in those states. The articles often argued, without much evidence, that the proposed laws would allow hackers to steal people's personal information and sow chaos.
Now, Right to Repair is again gaining traction with more than a dozen states, including California, considering bills, and even one presidential candidate calling for a national Right to Repair law. This time Right to Repair has its own lobbying organization to speak before legislatures considering these laws.
Enter Securerepairs.org, a new nonprofit founded by Paul Roberts, whose experts (including "Harvard University's Bruce Schneier, bug bounty expert Katie Moussouris, and ACLU technologist Jon Callas") will attend Right to Repair hearings to counter this industry [FUD] and explain how "Fixable stuff is secure stuff."
Roberts and his organization are up against an industry with deep pockets, and it's hard to know how well they will succeed in persuading lawmakers to enact right-to-repair initiatives. So far, only one repair law, targeting the auto industry, has passed in the US, in Roberts' home state of Massachusetts in 2012. But the bill had an outsize impact: After it was put in place, major car manufacturers agreed to share repair information with independent mechanics across the entire country.
The hope now is that Securepairs.org could help bring similar legislation to other places, starting with California. It's an enormous state and the home of many of America's largest technology companies. This is the second time California has tried introducing a right-to-repair bill; a previous effort failed last year. A representative from the Security Innovation Center is set to testify at the hearing, but so are experts who believe the right to repair won't pose any security risks to be worried about.
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 01 2019, @11:10AM (6 children)
The "right to repair" law will not work because manufacturers will just make hardware not repairable. And it's not only about own chips designs, which cannot be replaced by another - it's about a fused or glued hardware casings, one-piece mainboards and unrepairable software kill switches like in some Asus router, which when faced with incompatible firmware update could just blow its data line on the flash chip.
When in EU incandescent light bulbs were banned, because EU wanted more people to put fingers into working lathes, distribute mercury in soil and buy more Chinese LED "blink-blink-burn" stuff to pollute environment even more (hey, if it will be polluted it will be possible to sell fresh air! vive le capitalism!), filament bulbs were still sold - this time as "heating apparatus". The same thing will be with "irrepairable" hardware. This will NOT be hardware, but, I don't know... toys, space filling, fishing bait, doesn't matter.
The proper way to make it would be:
1. To rename this law as "right to audit". The "repair" is not appealing to companies and governments who are maniacs of Chinese/Russian/American/Israeli (dependent on country) spies and suspect everyone that is spying. Don't even think about marketing this as "protecting environment". The main rule of modern economy is "steal and then sell" so environment must be "stolen" to be sold, it's only made slower not to make people do something wrong like not buying new junk every month.
2. To specify in the law a specific support period. In this period, all hardware (schematics, matrices, chip descriptions) and firmware related information should be available in the limited range both for service and for security auditing purposes.
3. To standardize the support. No "impossible to repair". We live with inch-thick UMPCs, it's not a problem with inch-thick smartphone.
4. After this period, all information regarding the obsolete hardware and firmware should be released in the way that it's possible, by other companies, to reproduce the firmware components (read: compile it and run it) and substitute hardware (read: program an FPGA). This will make a nice market room for manufacturers of spare parts like was in 1980s and 90s for cars, before it was possible to ban manufacturing of e.g. triangle plastic parts as it may violate "intellecshual propyerty" and for alternative software components.
5. To ban all other hardware as insecure and risky. The same way as many sites ban Windows XP-powered computers even if they're secured as hell and use a very secure (read: just unable to execute any code, including malware) browser.
Now hear the squeak of all these "intellectual property" crazies! :-)
Yes, this will slow the development down a bit, but that's a price for repairability. Maybe you won't be able to play clickers in your thoughts and think about pleasures of watching another ad, but hey, you may spend this time more creative way, as it definitely should be with such powerful tool like a computer.
Some time ago I decided to buy only repairable hardware: Which can be disassembled easily and for which parts are universal and common enough to be accessible. It was after I was a witness of an unknown air gap breaking exploit I traced to some component on the mainboard which was just structurally impossible to remove and documentation was omitting this part.
My 10 year old notebook is not powered by Coreboot (but I consider it when the project will be mature, maybe after 20 years or so) but has no ME, no hardware locks preventing against e.g. installation of components and replacing them as they wear - now I have a second display panel and third battery. Another 12-year-old Asus has third hinge set, second display panel and keyboard and fourth battery (but it got more cycles on it). Surprisingly the cooler is still in a good shape after 12 years of continuous work (it's Turion, it spits fire all time).
Recently I had opportunity to try to fix one of quite high-end 2018 notebooks and I found it just impossible to disassemble it non-destructively. Parts were glued, only RAM and WLAN compartments were accessible after breaking partially fused "doors" (!) and after getting access to broken WLAN board I replaced it and... it doesn't even boot as it needs specific brands of adapters. Battery was impossible to replace. Display panel was pushed in and probably metal-formed into casing. The software loaded on it by default shown ads, but fortunately the owner asked me "to put a Linux Mint there". So why do I pay for this device, to manipulate me even more?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 01 2019, @02:15PM (5 children)
In basically all modern equipment the standard "repair" procedure is this:
Step 1) Identify which board is failing
Step 2) Swap out the board for a brand new one.
The service manuals for things like modern TVs basically contain some test procedures to identify the failing board, at which point you put in a new board.
So in practice, "right to repair" will mean the service manuals and replacement boards would be made available "officially" so we won't need to get parts of questionable origin from eBay. This would still be a good thing. It's not asking too much: these things already exist they're just not usually sold through official channels.
From an economic standpoint replacing boards makes sense, because the replacement boards cost bugger all in mass production and it is simply not worth it to pay someone, say, $50/hr to troubleshoot when you're all tooled up and the marginal cost of replacement boards is like $25.
Gone are the days of electronic equipment coming with full schematics, theory of operation, parts lists, etc. "Right to repair" won't bring that back. But a lot of products are still built with commercial-off-the-shelf components and a lot of failures are repairable the old fashioned way.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday May 01 2019, @04:16PM (1 child)
Component level repairs are a thing and those schematic manuals do exist. Even for things as complex as a MacBook. This guy does it and teaches others how to do it: https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup [youtube.com] If you have a dead MacBook with soldered-in SSD and you want to get the data back he's the guy you want to call.
The thing is that he had to get those schematic manuals illegally. He bought them from a dubious "reseller" in Russia. For components he has to get them grey market or from scrap boards tagged for recycling, and Apple is taking overt steps to kill the grey market for components. They don't want him (or me) fixing your kit. They've fought us tooth-and-nail ever since we started replacing busted screens.
This ignores other goatfuckery like Toner cartridges that have single-use-no-refill-burnout chips in them or John Deere transmissions with functionally identical features.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 02 2019, @01:38AM
Or M$ own secret APIs.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Wednesday May 01 2019, @04:27PM
When the replacement boards aren't made any more, that's when the schematic diagrams really come into play.
I repaired a ~10-year-old 28" HD TV for a family member this way. The IR receiver was busted, and didn't respond to the remote control. I couldn't find any of the receiver assemblies for sale any more, but the schematics listed the part number of the photodiode. Even though the part has been obsoleted by the manufacturer, I was able to use datasheets to find a substitute and solder it in there.
£1 of components, but a few hours legwork to research what needed to be done.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 02 2019, @01:16AM
Some time ago a friend asked me to try with repairing a programmer for a machine of quite significant size. The idea was to make everything controlled under the full automation system (more expensive) or resurrect the existing one, built in 1980s and operated since then (if less expensive). Generally OK, but the surprise was on the mainboard.
So a whole machine's driving was ran by 6 ULA chips. Types unknown, and one pin of one chip burnt.
Generally ULA were before FPGA and they were factory-programmed. Additionally they were quite fragile electrically. Manufacturer shut down in 1990s and the manual (I expected a nice description, this is not a pair of shoes, this is an expensive manufacturing stuff) stated to "replace ULA board". Contacting a factory using similar machine, it was possible to obtain a "Technical reference manual", which was a 280-page book with a few dozens of centrefolds. The situation in which they got this manual was interesting, the manual was left by accident by a serviceman and they just quickly photocopied it.
Fortunately this internal documentation was well enough to see that the missing signal is in fact dependent on 4 other in quite simple manner (AND, NAND and a flipflop). A breadboard with 74 chips in, and test run. In the docs, there were just details of rules implemented in machine. Great, seems to work...
Hey stop the thing! This conveyor goes all time with small breaks, it shouldn't!
oops, let's invert the result...
OK, now it works. It looks like the AC driver takes the inverted signal.
The modules are really totally OK if they are like I/O modules for industrial systems, Logika blocks, TTL 74 or 40 chips, generally standardized enough to be understood and replaced without blind faith like this ULA module.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday May 02 2019, @10:32PM
I'm old enough to remember my father pulling out tubes from the TV, taking them in and testing them on the machine provided by most retailers, then replacing the burnt out tubes. You could go to places like Sears or Two Guys and do this, you didn't have to find a special repair shop, It would be nice to see such things surface again (I don't mean tubes, but the practice for things like the circuit boards). I suppose though that this would fly in the face of the policies of retailers like Best Buy, who only stock the very latest crap, who don't want you to repair (unless you use their crap services to do so) because that would prevent you from buying more new crap.