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Hacking Ventilators With DIY Dongles From Poland:
As COVID-19 surges, hospitals and independent biomedical technicians have turned to a global grey-market for hardware and software to circumvent manufacturer repair locks and keep life-saving ventilators running.
The dongle is handmade, little more than a circuit board encased in plastic with two connectors. One side goes to a ventilator’s patient monitor, another goes to the breath delivery unit. A third cable connects to a computer.
This little dongle—shipped to him by a hacker in Poland—has helped William repair at least 70 broken Puritan Bennett 840 ventilators that he’s bought on eBay and from other secondhand websites. He has sold these refurbished ventilators to hospitals and governments throughout the United States, to help them handle an influx of COVID-19 patients. Motherboard agreed to speak to William anonymously because he was not authorized by his company to talk to the media, but Motherboard verified the specifics of his story with photos and other biomedical technicians.
William is essentially Frankensteining together two broken machines to make one functioning machine. Some of the most common repairs he does on the PB840, made by a company called Medtronic, is replacing broken monitors with new ones. The issue is that, like so many other electronics, medical equipment, including ventilators, increasingly has software that prevents “unauthorized” people from repairing or refurbishing broken devices, and Medtronic will not help him fix them.
[...] Delays in getting equipment running put patients at risk. In the meantime, biomedical technicians will continue to try to make-do with what they can. “If someone has a ventilator and the technology to [update the software], more power to them,” Mackeil said. “Some might say you’re violating copyright, but if you own the machine, who’s to say they couldn’t or they shouldn’t?”
I understand that there is an ongoing debate on the "right to repair". However, many manufacturers increasingly find ways to ensure that "unauthorised" people cannot repair their devices. Where do you stand on this issue? During the ongoing pandemic, do medical device manufacturers have the right to prevent repair by third parties?
Previously (Medtronic):
(2020-04-14) Raspberry Pi to Power Ventilators as Demand for Boards Surges
(2020-03-31) Professional Ventilator Design "Open Sourced" Today by Medtronic
(2019-11-18) US-CERT Warns of Remotely Exploitable Bugs in Medical Devices
(2018-10-17) Medtronic Locks Out Vulnerable Pacemaker Programmer Kit
(2018-08-15) Hack Causes Pacemakers to Deliver Life-Threatening Shocks
(2014-10-28) US Security Agencies Look at Medical Device Security
Previously (right to repair):
(2020-07-06) Fixers Know What "Repairable" Means--Now There's a Standard for It
(2020-04-21) 'Right to Repair' Taken Up by the ACCC in Farmers' Fight to Fix Their Own Tractors
(2020-03-13) Europe Wants a 'Right to Repair' Smartphones and Gadgets
(2020-01-09) Popularity of Older Tractors Boosted by Avoidance of DRM
(2019-06-21) Hackers, Farmers, and Doctors Unite! Support for Right to Repair Laws Slowly Grows
(2019-04-30) Reeducating Legislators on the Right to Repair
(2019-02-22) Right to Repair Legislation Is Officially Being Considered In Canada
(2018-10-13) 45 Out of 50 Electronics Companies Illegally Void Warranties After Independent Repair, Sting Reveals
(2018-09-21) John Deere Just Swindled Farmers Out of Their Right to Repair
(2018-04-17) Apple Sued an Independent iPhone Repair Shop Owner and Lost
(2018-03-08) The Right to Repair Battle Has Come to California
(2018-02-02) Tractor Hacking: The Farmers Breaking Big Tech's Repair Monopoly
(2018-01-28) Washington State Bill Would Make Hard-to-Repair Electronics Illegal
(2017-05-25) Apple, Verizon Join Forces to Lobby Against New York's 'Right to Repair' Law
(2017-03-08) Right to Repair
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday July 11 2020, @12:31PM (2 children)
As you imply, there is no simple clear solution to complex problems - if there were, they wouldn't be complex problems would they?
I strongly believe in the principle of "first do no harm" and people using hackavators should understand the risks before using them - otherwise you get the 737 MAX effect of reasonably competent pilots being misled by their equipment and people being injured or dying basically due to a lack of training on the equipment in use. As demonstrated by the aircraft, this is a very real risk with very real consequences (the risk of operators not understanding the risks - compounded by the devices not undergoing proper risk identification/management and operator training...)
As for: if those ventilators weren't so expensive... thank your capitalists and their "free market" for that one. I've worked in medical device development for 30 years now, I've seen a number of innovative ideas that could have been saving lives for decades already - not developed because the resources required could be applied to making more money in other endeavors. If you want to be nice about it you can say that "making more money is saving more lives, or at least benefiting more people" but, the correlation is imperfect at best. Why doesn't the "free market" make cheaper ventilators? Very simply, because there is more money to be made in making expensive ventilators. Changing that simple fact is... a complex problem.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday July 11 2020, @12:47PM (1 child)
It's more than that. It's confusing a mean (market/economy) with and end.
Further aggravated by the picking poor metrics to use in the measure the economy - money (I know no other science that is trying to express the realities it supposedly describes using just two units - money and time - hell of a reductionist vision of this world).
Even more complicated by the fact that there's no a clear/accepted image of what that end (for the market mean) should be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday July 11 2020, @01:02PM
If you want to take a simple, humanist, view of it - it's a 7.8 billion dimensional problem, but in reality it's more complex as people's opinions and actual needs morph over time.
🌻🌻 [google.com]