6 ms·

This is tangential, but I really wish that their would be legislation, valid retroactively, to enable old unsupported devices to still be utilized. I think this

This is tangential, but I really wish that their would be legislation, valid retroactively, to enable old unsupported devices to still be utilized. I think this goes somewhat beyond right to repair? Take for example digital backs for medium format cameras - these things are built in low numbers, with high end FPGAs and camera sensors, with JTAG interfaces ready to go and everything - but then forgotten about a few years later. Why not enforce the creation of some document on how one would build their own OS for it? Or how the bus from the sensor ADCs works? This all existed at one point internally, but now is lost, and most of this backs will slowly die and go to waste, even though they could easily be repurposed or repaired.

CarelessExpert 5y ago
> This is tangential, but I really wish that their would be legislation, valid retroactively, to enable old unsupported devices to still be utilized. Not at all. This is precisely on point, and directly intersects with the Right to Repair as well. It's about damn time we, as a society, put a stop to black box devices over which we have no ability to inspect, repair, or repurpose after the vendor decides to end support.
- horsawlarway 5y ago
  Could not agree more. At the bare minimum a vendor should not be allowed to sell a device that has digital locks if the user is not also given a copy of the keys. You can lock the device, but if I don't get a key at time of purchase, then I don't own the damn thing.
  - CobrastanJorji 5y ago
    I'm trying to think of a situation where this is objectively bad, and I having trouble thinking of areas where this is objectively bad. The best I came up with is purchasing an elevator, which has a key for firemen. I wouldn't really want to just give everybody a copy of that key. But on the other hand, you can buy that key on Amazon for $5. It would maybe help people think about security a bit more if they bought a TSA-approved lock and it came with a TSA key with a little warning that read "Note: this key opens any TSA-approved locks, please only open your own baggage." One possibility is around DNS. A public/private keypair is basically a lock and a key. If you can't put ANY public keys on my device without giving me the private key, HTTPS is going to be problematic. Software updates become a little scarier as well, since a man-in-the-middle attack becomes MUCH easier to pull off. But perhaps the answer there is, like DNS on a desktop computer, to simply allow the user to edit those local keys. As long as there's a "Yes, I am also cool with installing unsigned software updates," then I don't see a problem.
    - sneak 5y ago
      The reason Apple doesn't do this is because users will get deceived into providing those keys to malicious entities which will compromise their devices and everything on them in exchange for the promise of free games, or free in-game currency, or whatever.
    - samueldr 5y ago
      Thinking about situations [...] > where this is objectively bad Thinking here about a smartphone. Note that I'm explaining the current state of things, I am *not* excusing the state of things. Directly for end-users, generally no real scenario where it's bad as long as they can enroll their own keys in a safe fashion preventing evil-maid type attacks. Tangentially for end-users, locked devices are easier to make worthless for thieves. FRP on Android, or whatever Apple does, when it's locked to a user account even when reset. This is one thing that would become harder to implement when the root of trust can be manipulated on the device. Then there's supply chain integrity for OEMs. This is the reason some android vendors only allow unlocking when attached to an online account after a delay (e.g. xiaomi). Some unscrupulous vendors would open the box, replace the system image with a malware-ridden system image, and sell those to end-users. Finally, there's somewhat a case for DRM and similar uses. The current implementations are built on the current "security" model, where it's security for the businesses first, then security for end-users last. Still, I agree wholeheartedly that users should be in control of the root of trust, in a way that does not reduce their abilities to use their owned devices. Add to that that standards-based boot should be used. All the time. All devices.
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      > I wouldn't really want to just give everybody a copy of that key. Why would you give the key to everybody? Just give it to the owner... That's what I want. I shouldn't need to hack my own smartphone or have to solder a board to my Xbox to run my own code on it.
- sbarre 5y ago
  I wonder as we (slowly) march towards "greener" laws and more climate-conscious ways, if some of this will tie into that? I feel like you could get good traction on right-to-repair if it was framed around waste reduction and a cleaner future. Which means we might not get there for a generation still, but these things feel related to me.
  - CarelessExpert 5y ago
    They're absolutely related. In fact, a lot of discussions around the Right to Repair specifically center on the issue of e-waste. For example, you'll find that all over Framework's website. From https://frame.work/ca/en/about https://frame.work/ca/en/about : > Consumer electronics is broken. We’ve all had the experience of a busted screen, button, or connector that can’t be fixed, battery life degrading without a path for replacement, or being unable to add more storage when full. Individually, this is irritating and requires us to make unnecessary and expensive purchases of new products to get around what should be easy problems to solve. Globally though, it’s much worse. We create over fifty million tons of e-waste each year. That’s 6 kg or 13 lb per person on earth per year, made up of our former devices. We need to improve recyclability, but the biggest impact we can make is generating less waste to begin with by making our products last longer. Certainly, for myself, the right to repair is very much about ending the cycle of disposable products so we can create a more sustainable future.
    - sbarre 5y ago
      Thanks for that link, it's a much better articulated version of what is in my head. :-)
userbinator 5y ago
Right to modify --- i.e. what the automotive industry has had for around a century now. It's why you can still get parts (aftermarket, usually) for vehicles many decades old. I wish companies like Tesla weren't trying to change that, however.
gibbonsrcool 5y ago
What if we required lifetime warranties for everything? By lifetime I mean human lifetime, not lifetime if the device. It sounds crazy when thinking how it’d work out in practice, especially with electronics, but we need drastic action like this to respond to climate change.
- CobaltFire 5y ago
  This would completely close markets to new entrants. As an inventor I can't financially hope to support a device for a human lifetime and break even, much less profit. Right to repair and allowing these things to be legally opened and hacked by the end user is the right way, not burdening every manufacturer with unrealistic support laws. For an example, look at military equipment costs. 20 year support is often built into those to give you an idea of the cost of this. Spoiler: things will cost 10-20x what you think they will for a business to hope to profit.
  - rob74 5y ago
    Of course for military equipment there are also other cost drivers - more demanding specs, less units produced to spread the development cost etc. etc.
    - CobaltFire 5y ago
      This is true, but you may find that if you had to support something (and keep it relevant) across 20 years those specs and requirements may look much the same whether they are military or civilian. For example, the amount of bending of the case of a device has to be DRASTICALLY less to allow effectively sealing contaminants out for 20 years vice 2, as well as the seals themselves being an order of magnitude better if there is no servicing involved. For most military equipment we have all of those AND regular servicing, something that consumers would absolutely revolt against nowadays. One other thing people fail to realize on the electronics front: many of the chips in these older systems are getting very difficult to come by. About 10 years ago I was involved in repairing F/A-18 avionics, and one specific chip in that system was extraordinarily important. It was a radiation hardened 80286 CPU, and had a single production run for the entire budgeted lifecycle of the systems it was in. Unfortunately a design flaw in the power delivery systems meant that the CPUs were being destroyed at a rate roughly 4x as fast as expected and they had to figure out what to do. This specific chip was one of the many reasons (but a key one) that we retired that airframe.
foxfluff 5y ago
> I think this goes somewhat beyond right to repair? Something like right to use would be nice. If you need specs or docs or source code for the software/hardware to be usable, then it should be provided. And IMO that should include not gating essential functionality behind online services unless it is inherent to the function.
entangledqubit 5y ago
> I think this goes somewhat beyond right to repair? Definitely goes beyond it. This should be able to get traction as an anti-electronics waste policy. Designs and relevant documentation should be packaged up and handed over to the Library of Congress (or alternate entity) as soon as any design goes into mass production. LoC may release them when the product is no longer supported by the manufacturer or the company has gone out of business -- which could be fairly automated on the LoC side. One side-effect of this may be that companies will be incentivized to support hardware longer, if they believe that these designs have notable design elements that they do not wish to disclose. I'd settle for something non-retroactive. Since I don't think that'd be tenable technically at this point anyway. One of the cruxes in this are things like GPUs and wireless chips which are pretty unfriendly in terms of getting documentation but even providing a subset of functionality would be great.
- plebianRube 5y ago
  I agree. Electronic waste is only getting worse over the last decade, with everyone getting a new phone every year, new laptop etc. Even if everyone optimally buys/sells used, the devices still end up in landfills because the hardware is no longer supported. Not acceptable anymore.

CarelessExpert 5y ago

> This is tangential, but I really wish that their would be legislation, valid retroactively, to enable old unsupported devices to still be utilized. Not at all. This is precisely on point, and directly intersects with the Right to Repair as well. It's about damn time we, as a society, put a stop to black box devices over which we have no ability to inspect, repair, or repurpose after the vendor decides to end support.

horsawlarway 5y ago
Could not agree more. At the bare minimum a vendor should not be allowed to sell a device that has digital locks if the user is not also given a copy of the keys. You can lock the device, but if I don't get a key at time of purchase, then I don't own the damn thing.
- CobrastanJorji 5y ago
  I'm trying to think of a situation where this is objectively bad, and I having trouble thinking of areas where this is objectively bad. The best I came up with is purchasing an elevator, which has a key for firemen. I wouldn't really want to just give everybody a copy of that key. But on the other hand, you can buy that key on Amazon for $5. It would maybe help people think about security a bit more if they bought a TSA-approved lock and it came with a TSA key with a little warning that read "Note: this key opens any TSA-approved locks, please only open your own baggage." One possibility is around DNS. A public/private keypair is basically a lock and a key. If you can't put ANY public keys on my device without giving me the private key, HTTPS is going to be problematic. Software updates become a little scarier as well, since a man-in-the-middle attack becomes MUCH easier to pull off. But perhaps the answer there is, like DNS on a desktop computer, to simply allow the user to edit those local keys. As long as there's a "Yes, I am also cool with installing unsigned software updates," then I don't see a problem.
  - sneak 5y ago
    The reason Apple doesn't do this is because users will get deceived into providing those keys to malicious entities which will compromise their devices and everything on them in exchange for the promise of free games, or free in-game currency, or whatever.
  - samueldr 5y ago
    Thinking about situations [...] > where this is objectively bad Thinking here about a smartphone. Note that I'm explaining the current state of things, I am *not* excusing the state of things. Directly for end-users, generally no real scenario where it's bad as long as they can enroll their own keys in a safe fashion preventing evil-maid type attacks. Tangentially for end-users, locked devices are easier to make worthless for thieves. FRP on Android, or whatever Apple does, when it's locked to a user account even when reset. This is one thing that would become harder to implement when the root of trust can be manipulated on the device. Then there's supply chain integrity for OEMs. This is the reason some android vendors only allow unlocking when attached to an online account after a delay (e.g. xiaomi). Some unscrupulous vendors would open the box, replace the system image with a malware-ridden system image, and sell those to end-users. Finally, there's somewhat a case for DRM and similar uses. The current implementations are built on the current "security" model, where it's security for the businesses first, then security for end-users last. Still, I agree wholeheartedly that users should be in control of the root of trust, in a way that does not reduce their abilities to use their owned devices. Add to that that standards-based boot should be used. All the time. All devices.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    > I wouldn't really want to just give everybody a copy of that key. Why would you give the key to everybody? Just give it to the owner... That's what I want. I shouldn't need to hack my own smartphone or have to solder a board to my Xbox to run my own code on it.
sbarre 5y ago
I wonder as we (slowly) march towards "greener" laws and more climate-conscious ways, if some of this will tie into that? I feel like you could get good traction on right-to-repair if it was framed around waste reduction and a cleaner future. Which means we might not get there for a generation still, but these things feel related to me.
- CarelessExpert 5y ago
  They're absolutely related. In fact, a lot of discussions around the Right to Repair specifically center on the issue of e-waste. For example, you'll find that all over Framework's website. From https://frame.work/ca/en/about https://frame.work/ca/en/about : > Consumer electronics is broken. We’ve all had the experience of a busted screen, button, or connector that can’t be fixed, battery life degrading without a path for replacement, or being unable to add more storage when full. Individually, this is irritating and requires us to make unnecessary and expensive purchases of new products to get around what should be easy problems to solve. Globally though, it’s much worse. We create over fifty million tons of e-waste each year. That’s 6 kg or 13 lb per person on earth per year, made up of our former devices. We need to improve recyclability, but the biggest impact we can make is generating less waste to begin with by making our products last longer. Certainly, for myself, the right to repair is very much about ending the cycle of disposable products so we can create a more sustainable future.
  - sbarre 5y ago
    Thanks for that link, it's a much better articulated version of what is in my head. :-)

userbinator 5y ago

Right to modify --- i.e. what the automotive industry has had for around a century now. It's why you can still get parts (aftermarket, usually) for vehicles many decades old. I wish companies like Tesla weren't trying to change that, however.

gibbonsrcool 5y ago

What if we required lifetime warranties for everything? By lifetime I mean human lifetime, not lifetime if the device. It sounds crazy when thinking how it’d work out in practice, especially with electronics, but we need drastic action like this to respond to climate change.

CobaltFire 5y ago
This would completely close markets to new entrants. As an inventor I can't financially hope to support a device for a human lifetime and break even, much less profit. Right to repair and allowing these things to be legally opened and hacked by the end user is the right way, not burdening every manufacturer with unrealistic support laws. For an example, look at military equipment costs. 20 year support is often built into those to give you an idea of the cost of this. Spoiler: things will cost 10-20x what you think they will for a business to hope to profit.
- rob74 5y ago
  Of course for military equipment there are also other cost drivers - more demanding specs, less units produced to spread the development cost etc. etc.
  - CobaltFire 5y ago
    This is true, but you may find that if you had to support something (and keep it relevant) across 20 years those specs and requirements may look much the same whether they are military or civilian. For example, the amount of bending of the case of a device has to be DRASTICALLY less to allow effectively sealing contaminants out for 20 years vice 2, as well as the seals themselves being an order of magnitude better if there is no servicing involved. For most military equipment we have all of those AND regular servicing, something that consumers would absolutely revolt against nowadays. One other thing people fail to realize on the electronics front: many of the chips in these older systems are getting very difficult to come by. About 10 years ago I was involved in repairing F/A-18 avionics, and one specific chip in that system was extraordinarily important. It was a radiation hardened 80286 CPU, and had a single production run for the entire budgeted lifecycle of the systems it was in. Unfortunately a design flaw in the power delivery systems meant that the CPUs were being destroyed at a rate roughly 4x as fast as expected and they had to figure out what to do. This specific chip was one of the many reasons (but a key one) that we retired that airframe.

foxfluff 5y ago

> I think this goes somewhat beyond right to repair? Something like right to use would be nice. If you need specs or docs or source code for the software/hardware to be usable, then it should be provided. And IMO that should include not gating essential functionality behind online services unless it is inherent to the function.

entangledqubit 5y ago

> I think this goes somewhat beyond right to repair? Definitely goes beyond it. This should be able to get traction as an anti-electronics waste policy. Designs and relevant documentation should be packaged up and handed over to the Library of Congress (or alternate entity) as soon as any design goes into mass production. LoC may release them when the product is no longer supported by the manufacturer or the company has gone out of business -- which could be fairly automated on the LoC side. One side-effect of this may be that companies will be incentivized to support hardware longer, if they believe that these designs have notable design elements that they do not wish to disclose. I'd settle for something non-retroactive. Since I don't think that'd be tenable technically at this point anyway. One of the cruxes in this are things like GPUs and wireless chips which are pretty unfriendly in terms of getting documentation but even providing a subset of functionality would be great.

plebianRube 5y ago
I agree. Electronic waste is only getting worse over the last decade, with everyone getting a new phone every year, new laptop etc. Even if everyone optimally buys/sells used, the devices still end up in landfills because the hardware is no longer supported. Not acceptable anymore.