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Fixers Know What 'Repairable' Means—Now There's A Standard For It - Ifixit:
[Earlier this year], three years of arguing with industry finally paid off, as the European standard EN45554 was published. This official document with an unexciting name details "general methods for the assessment of the ability to repair, reuse and upgrade energy-related products." In plain English, it's a standard for measuring how easy it is to repair stuff. It's also a huge milestone for the fight for fair repair.
We want to repair the stuff we own, so we can use it for longer. This is not only important because we want our money's worth out of the things we paid for, but because manufacturing new products is a huge and underestimated driver of climate change. So if we want to avoid cooking our planet, we need to stop churning out disposable electronics and start repairing more. Like, right now.
The problem is, industry won't do this by itself. Managers get ahead by showing quarterly sales growth, not increased product lifespans. Hence we need the government to step in, banning unrepairable products and helping consumers—that's you!—to identify the most durable products out there, so as to empower them to make better purchasing decisions. And in the EU, our political leaders are getting ready to do so.
But here's the rub: those leaders don't know what a repairable product is. If you ask manufacturers, they will all tell you their products are repairable. If you ask us, some devices clearly are more repairable than others, and some are frankly just not repairable at all.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday July 06 2020, @08:49AM (7 children)
Finally, we step up again to fight for standardization [arstechnica.com] to reduce electronic waste, as we fought for privacy rights [zdnet.com], leading the way for the rest of the world. USA! USA! USA!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @10:32AM (6 children)
Right to privacy and right to free speech are directly contradictory without the mental gymnastics that label some speech as effectively being not speech because someone didn't like it.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Monday July 06 2020, @11:38AM
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Monday July 06 2020, @01:21PM (4 children)
Not necessarily - you can be free to say what you like (so long as it's true), while also NOT being free to violate my privacy by spying on me.
If you're not spying on me, you have no information that would violate my privacy by speaking about.
Historically (in the US at least), it's generally been the case that spying is allowed on public figures (politicians, companies, etc) whose privacy is often leveraged to screw over the population, but NOT on private individuals who lack the power to screw over thousands or millions of people at a time (unless you have a legal warrant - which often also holds you to a higher standard of privacy).
Meanwhile specific sectors that inherently collect sensitive private information are held to a higher standard - medical and legal systems for example are expected to keep the sensitive information they handle private - and individuals often take an oath to that effect before being given the job.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday July 06 2020, @02:07PM (1 child)
I believe you're painting an idealized image of the historical setting, but that's the theory anyway. Unfortunately it involved things like the theory that police obey the law, etc. Note, for example, that holding "health care providers to a higher standard" means things like "they all must use the specified version of MSWindows, because that's what the feds certified". It doesn't mean they must not connect those EoLed systems to the internet.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @05:22AM
Police are by their nature expected to reveal arbitrary information they collect about you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @02:18PM (1 child)
GDPR is way more than that though; "right to be forgotten" is a direct infringement on speech. Is logging downloads of a 1x1 pixel or a button logo an infringement of your privacy? How far can you go down that path while preventing others from being unjustly silenced?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday July 06 2020, @04:56PM
It certainly is, with one of the biggest flaws being that it applies to public figures, whose "secret" activities are very likely to be of ongoing public interest.
In general, I would say that if you care about privacy then logging *any* information about private citizens (without a warrant) should be presumed to be illegal, unless absolutely necessary to provide the service they are there for (e.g. medical records are okay, keeping track of who visited what on your web site is not) Maybe you have some way to be able to waive that right so, e.g., Netflix and Amazon can recommend things they think you'll like. Maybe. But *sharing* that information with any third party should be forbidden, as it makes it far to easy to construct massive surveillance databases ripe for abuse.
I would even go so far as to say allowing outside access to that data should be a criminal offense, regardless of whether it was intentional, accidental, or stolen due to insufficient security. Even if you get permission to collect the data, it's still 100% your unwaivable responsibility to keep it secret. If you can't be bothered to keep it secret, expect to spend time in prison and/or pay massive fines far exceeding the value that data had to your business.