Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956
Over the last year, we've noted the surge in so-called "right to repair" laws, which would make it easier for consumers to repair their electronics and find replacement parts and tools. It's a direct response to the rising attempts by companies like John Deere, Apple, Microsoft and Sony to monopolize repair, hamstringing consumer rights over products consumers think they own, while driving up the cost of said product ownership. John Deere's draconian lockdown on its tractor firmware is a large part of the reason these efforts have gained steam over the last few months in states like Nebraska.
In New York, one of the first attempts at such a law (the "Fair Repair Act") has finally been making progress. But according to New York State's Joint Commission on Public Ethics, Apple, Verizon, Toyota, Lexmark, Caterpillar, Asurion, and Medtronic have all been busy lobbying to kill the law for various, but ultimately similar, reasons. And they're out-spending the consumer advocates and repair shops pushing for this legislation by a rather wide margin:
"The records show that companies and organizations lobbying against right to repair legislation spent $366,634 to retain lobbyists in the state between January and April of this year. Thus far, the Digital Right to Repair Coalition—which is generally made up of independent repair shops with several employees—is the only organization publicly lobbying for the legislation. It has spent $5,042 on the effort, according to the records."
Source: techdirt.com
Related Stories
Wired has published a long article about how the farming equipment manufacturer John Deere has just swindled farmers out of their right to repair their own equipment. Basically the manufacturer was allowed to write the agreement governing access to the firmware embedded in the farming equipment.
Farmers have been some of the strongest allies in the ongoing battle to make it easier for everyone to fix their electronics. This week, though, a powerful organization that's supposed to lobby on behalf of farmers in California has sold them out by reaching a watered-down agreement that will allow companies like John Deere to further cement their repair monopolies.
Farmers around the country have been hacking their way past the software locks that John Deere and other manufacturers put on tractors and other farm equipment, and the Farm Bureau lobbying organization has thus far been one of the most powerful to put its weight behind right to repair legislation, which would require manufacturers to sell repair parts, make diagnostic tools and repair information available to the public, and would require manufacturers to provide a way to get around proprietary software locks that are designed to prevent repair.
Motherboard also covered the topic about how farmer lobbyists sold out their farmers and helped enshrine John Deere's maintenance monopoly.
Earlier on SN:
The Right to Repair Battle Has Come to California (2018)
Apple, Verizon Join Forces to Lobby Against New York's 'Right to Repair' Law (2017)
US Copyright Office Says People Have the Right to Hack their Own Cars' Software (2015)
Jailbreak your Tractor or Make it Run OSS? (2015)
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.
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?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @09:37AM (5 children)
people is sovereign only when they pass without even debating a law that says whatever you sell must be documented and repairable by anyone with SUFFICIENT skill, else it is not a sale, it is a service contract which must clearly specify duration and cover maintenance costs both by wear and by consumer snafu. Goes without saying.
I stopped buying one of the three big electronic giants' stuff because a cellphone, and not among the cheapest, was not repairable after a mere 4 years.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday May 25 2017, @10:08AM (4 children)
A lot of this junk isn't even workable after 0 days.
The first computer I built came with full technical specs on all the components and an exhaustive dictionary for the software.
Ever since, the trajectory has been fairly clear, even if it occasionally reversed for a year or two.
It's not in a good direction.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @06:26PM
Documentation is haaaaard!
But in seriousness, things have gotten so complicated that manuals are next to impossible for anyone to read and would be very very large. I agree with your sentiment, but unless consumers are willing to demand and pay higher price for full open / documented systems then we're shit out of luck.
Thankfully, I think we're probably a decade at most away from open computing efforts to create hardware that does enough. Right now the options are too under powered and bulky, but soon enough people will be able to choose options that are good enough and I have faith that the young people will be cynical enough to distrust general computing / software. Snowden was one revelation, but it will take a while for a full generation to grasp why Stallman isn't a crazy neckbeard. Neckbeard yes, crazy no.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday May 25 2017, @08:08PM
There's always been junk. It hasn't always been computers.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday May 26 2017, @11:34AM (1 child)
IMSAI 8080?
Mine still works... ( last time I checked... several years ago ).
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday May 26 2017, @10:50PM
Soon we will have to do like the Intel 4004 replica [wikipedia.org] at 41 x 58 cm for 2300 transistors to be able to repair.. ;-)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by kaszz on Thursday May 25 2017, @12:09PM (8 children)
Good ideas on how to make corporate life for Apple, Verizon, Toyota, Lexmark, Caterpillar, Asurion, and Medtronic a big pain?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Thursday May 25 2017, @12:36PM (6 children)
One way is to vote with your dollars. As a single consumer that doesn't have much effect on the companies, but at least you can then complain with a clear conscience. It also does make a difference to talk to your circle of acquaintances about why you won't buy from Apple or the others anymore.
The same principle becomes more effective if you happen to be a manager with budget to spend. When the salesman from company X shows up and wants to sell you a gross of something, tell him no thanks and why you're saying no thanks. Salespeople are very vocal whiners when they lose sales, and usually have the ear of the MBAs who run most companies. In short, the PHBs tend to listen to the whiny salespeople.
Legislation in America is the least effective way to accomplish anything because the party that pays the biggest bribes gets what it wants.
Longer term, one way to put a permanent end to all of these corporate shenanigans is to change the economic behavior and mindset of the average person. "Disintermediation" is one B-school term for it. Holding a monopoly on buggy whip manufacturing doesn't help you much if everybody stops buying buggy whips. Holding every patent known to man on film doesn't help you much if suddenly everybody stops taking pictures with film cameras and uses the digital camera in their phone instead.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday May 25 2017, @12:48PM (5 children)
Disintermediation sounds to hard for many consumers considering their behavior in general.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday May 25 2017, @12:59PM (4 children)
Perhaps the concept is, but if it's done right the outcome proceeds swiftly. The film example is one. It's so much easier to pull your phone out, snap a picture, and instantly see if you need to take another because the first one wasn't so good, than to take a roll of film to a store and wait some period of time for the film to be developed before you can know if it was a good picture or not. Nobody had to touch any kind of legislation to make that happen, and it happened so swiftly that Kodak went bankrupt in a couple years. That's far too fast for business school trained managers to cope with.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday May 25 2017, @02:22PM (3 children)
Maybe that is the gigantic blind spot for the managerial clique. Speed and insight?
So how does one outdo the lobbying to prevent repairing? distributed plans for 3D printers? or cheap x-ray machines?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday May 25 2017, @03:09PM (2 children)
Something like that. You'd also need a hopper to recycle existing material into a new object. I saw one for plastics a few years ago that re-extrudes the plastic as coil you can put into a Makerbot, etc. My little brother the mech-e melted down soda cans and cast links for the tread on an RC tank, so seems you could do something like that to make a backyard smelter for metals.
Wouldn't take long before you had all the raw material you needed to produce whatever you wanted. Kids tired of their old toys? Throw them in the hopper and process them into new ones.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday May 25 2017, @03:51PM (1 child)
Good luck with your home microchip fab.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @06:28PM
Thanks man :)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by LoRdTAW on Thursday May 25 2017, @12:46PM
Hack all their insecure IoT gadgets and use them for pure evil.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @01:26PM (10 children)
I do side work for a family run forklift repair business. Father, son, and daughter run it out of a small building. Father started it in the 70's after he was forced to retire from the police force as he was badly burnt saving a woman from a burning car. Like Caterpillar and John deere, the fork lift makers have filled their machines with "proprietary" electronic components which only dealerships get the tools to repair. Why not become a dealership then? Well first off, the major brands already have dealerships in their territory. Second, you'd have to be a dealership for all the major brands to be able to survive as a small business. They used to have some pretty good contracts with warehouses full of machines but those all dried up once they could no longer service them. Whereas before they were simple machines with an engine, transmission/pto, hydraulic pumps, hoses, and valves. That was easy stuff to repair regardless of the make. It's similar to working on a really small, really heavy car. Now they all have electronics in them requiring specialized tools to repair. So what are they supposed to do? Obviously go out of business. And that is what they are looking to do.
I also spoke with the owner of a vacuum pump repair shop (vacuum as in industrial and scientific stuff). One story he told me was when IBM bought new Edwards (largest vacuum equipment maker in the world) dry vacuum pumps for their semiconductor plant in NY. One of them broke down and he was called to service the pump. Turns out a temperature sensor was bad. He calls Edwards who informs him that part is proprietary and they had to either ship the pump to Arizona for repair or fly out a tech to replace the part. Now the pump isn't exactly small, we're talking 1000lbs. And the cost for the tech was about $2000/day. All to replace what hew said was a sensor that couldn't be more than a few dollars with two wires coming out of it. What used to be a simple mechanical pump with the only electronic bits being perhaps a motor and maybe a thermal cutout or oil solenoid valve is now equipped with a VFD, closed loop speed controller and electronic monitoring. Maybe don't buy Edwards? That would be great save for the fact that the EU decided to allow Atlas Copco to buy both Edwards and the second largest vacuum manufacturer, Leybold. Atlas Copco is also busy buying out a shit load of compressor reapir shops and distributors in the USA (http://www.atlascopcogroup.com/investor-relations/key-figures/acquisitions-and-divestments [atlascopcogroup.com]). So now you have a behemoth who dominates the market and is moving all service and repair in-house forcing independent dealers and service companies out of business.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Thursday May 25 2017, @02:25PM (6 children)
Emulate the pressure sensor? and install generic control boards that replace the whole proprietary blob and is then configured with a laptop?
How much does that 1000 lbs vacuum pump cost to buy?
(Score: 4, Informative) by mhajicek on Thursday May 25 2017, @03:56PM (3 children)
And spend how much to reverse engineer the original hardware? And then get sued for how much for copyright infringement?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday May 25 2017, @04:14PM (2 children)
A simple PID loop should be easy. Reverse engineering by automated measurements which is then feed into a generic control board. Selling a generic control board unprogrammed is unlikely to be vulnerable to legal attack. Everything that can be expressed in bits can float around anonymously.
Emulating a sensor as a one off repair is unlikely to be known to the manufacturer or enable any suing.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Friday May 26 2017, @09:41AM (1 child)
With the "internet of Things", it will come to pass that manufacturers are aware of every modification or use of their products, with accompanying terms of service, licensing agreements or such.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday May 26 2017, @10:31PM
Oooh.. "malfunction" .. "very good sir, no idea, works very good," ;)
Or just chop the connection and replace as necessary with emulation.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday May 26 2017, @12:08PM (1 child)
That's exactly the thing I have helped a few local businesses with around here using these little Arduino-compatible boards I design. I build an industrial version, where I have more noise immunity, and isolated inputs/outputs.
I'd love to go into business and sell these things, but frankly, I have not figured out how to make mine nearly as cheap as one can get one from Fry's.
I am reticent to place devices without sufficient isolation into industrial equipment. I like to see things completely galvanically isolated. If something fries, the extent of the damage is limited.
Last one I helped was a pizza restaurant with a 50 year old Hobart dough kneading machine. It would cost about $15,000 to replace it. The mechanical stuff was in perfect condition... that old thing is made like a tank, but the electrical stuff was pretty dated. It now has new solid-state relays and timer. Optical control switches.
And it all fit where the old mechanical timer used to be. However, I did have to make a new aluminum panel.
It took me a little time. I got free pizza from then on. ( I could not take the man's money.. he was a friend of mine and had just bought the restaurant, and was already having a serious cash flow problem. He made me an offer that if I fixed the thing, he would treat me right for pizza. )
My current project is building a powertrain controller for my diesel van. There has been all sorts of talk on the web about problems people are having, and I am convinced the E4OD transmission is a really well built device. I just need to control it carefully, and it should last me the rest of my life. Just don't burn it up letting it slip! There are just so many things I want the computer to help me with, that I finally decided it best to make a project out of it, and make my dream come true.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday May 26 2017, @10:44PM
Interesting regarding the dough kneading machine. Any photos? maybe that could be a thing. Salvage old machinery can give them a new controller card? Old fridges worked for decades so that may be worthwhile to refurbish.
Do your solid-state relays give galvanic isolation? and no leakage current that matters?
As for Arduino. Maybe it's worthwhile to go for 32-bit ARM? the price difference is small these days.
Regarding cars, have a look at this DIY electric car [triplepundit.com] for 12 900 US$. That outperforms the 20 times more expensive high end model S P100D. The key seems to be recycling of batteries.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @03:43PM
For cars (atleast) EU mandates that manufacturers need to make the software and tools available to all maintenance shops, not just dealerships.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by linkdude64 on Thursday May 25 2017, @04:55PM
Rtd? Only so many things it could've been. My solution would be to find a good working one, take some resistance readings at different temperatures, and search for those figures in NIST charts
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 27 2017, @05:13AM
Start your own forklift company?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday May 25 2017, @03:32PM (7 children)
If we had spines, we would stand up, en masse, and TELL the corporations that they don't get things their way. We want what we want, and we'll have it, or you can all go out of business.
Then, back it up with some serious boycotts, and maybe take a few of them to court. Contracts our asses - we're tired of being coerced to sign contracts that benefit only the corporation! Take your goods and stuff 'em, we aint' buyin' here no more!
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday May 25 2017, @04:56PM
Like a fund which consumers can apply for a corporation to be shitlisted. The fund will then announce a boycott, sue them, reverse engineer and publish, investigate the board etc.. ?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @06:32PM (5 children)
Enough people have stood up, but the thing is without a high profile politician / judge / whatever you can't get traction. Money buys influence and power, masses of people have a very limited amount of power and are much harder to organize than some bank account numbers.
It is probably the biggest problem for our democracy, the will of the people is so easily ignored and manipulated. Insanely hard question: how do we fix that?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Thursday May 25 2017, @06:52PM (4 children)
Simple: we don't.
The solution is for people to stop buying from these companies. No, enough people have no stood up; if they had, these companies would be out of business or at least in dire straits financially. But they're not, they're prospering, even though they do all have competitors which are not on this list.
The will of the people is not being ignored or manipulated here: the vast majority of the voters don't give a shit about this issue, and really have no idea what it means. They just buy shit, and then when it breaks they take it back to the factory-authorized dealer to have it repaired at an exorbitant price and think that's normal. Politicians work for ALL the people, not a tiny minority that cares passionately about some issue. Sometimes they'll do stuff for a small minority, but only when that minority is extremely vocal, and not opposed by some other group that's far better funded and tells them about how their view is better for business and jobs.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday May 25 2017, @07:30PM (3 children)
Exactly. I have some companies that I don't buy from. This is a nerd site - I don't like Microsoft's practices, and I don't buy from them. I don't like Intel's business practices, so I don't buy from them. Unfortunately, I am part of a minority, in both cases, so my "boycott" is pretty meaningless. If the number of people who refuse to buy Microsoft and/or Intel were to multiply ten thousand fold in the next few days, THEN we might have an impact. Probably negligible, but we'd be noticed. If, instead, our numbers increased a million fold, instead of ten thousand, we would have a bigger impact. That impact WOULD be noticed, when all of us spent money on an alternative. That impact would show a decline in revenue at Microsoft or Intel, and at the same time, an increase in the competition's revenues. THAT would be noticed.
But, the numbers are against us, or me. Most people don't know enough to give a damn. Most people who know enough still don't give a damn. So, neither Microsoft nor Intel gives the smallest damn that I am boycotting them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 26 2017, @09:33AM
No boycott action is truly meaningless. Not noticeable perhaps, but not meaningless. Deprived of $1 of profit, 1 web page hit, one cpu sale at a time.
I avoid halal certified food and shops, if possible.
Do they notice? No
I sent them a letter to tell them that they lost a sale stating why.
No single drop of rain thinks it is responible for the flood, but I would like to be the pebble that started the landslide knowing that for it to happen one event had to come first.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday May 26 2017, @10:46PM (1 child)
Microsoft is kind of actively being smacked with viruses. Perhaps that will change peoples mind given enough beatings?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 27 2017, @05:16AM
It took the windows 10 spyware and forced reboots to get me to install linux as my primary OS