5 ms·

The question really isn't whether we should be able to modify computers we own, its whether we own them at all.

by _heimdall 1y ago

yesbut 1y ago
regardless of what the corporations say we do own the devices we purchase.
- _heimdall 1y ago
  Not always. There have been car manufacturers that sold vehicles with features only enabled by a subscription. You may buy a car with heated seats, but the heated seats only work if the manufacturer enables them.
  - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    And there should be no law against enabling the heated seats in the car you own without interacting with the manufacturer.
    - alexvitkov 1y ago
      Too bad there is one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...
      - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        Laws can be interpreted in such a way that invites robber barons to pound sand, or repealed.
        bayindirh 1y ago
        Considering the same law is used to strike a 3 hour GPU documentary over a ~30 second clip, I think it serves to corporate pretty well. GamersNexus' 3 hour documentary about GPU smuggling (which is way more than a vlog as HN commenters like to portray) is struck down by Bloomberg because they didn't want their 30 second clip, which is squarely fair use BTW, of POTUS speaking to be in that. GamersNexus repealed successfully, but Bloomberg tried to bully them [0]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUnRWh4xOCY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUnRWh4xOCY
        AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        I don't understand why people think this is something corporations desperately want. It's something they'll abuse if you leave it sitting around for that, but that's just the argument for getting rid of it. How does the ability to be a petulant grouch benefit them? It has negligible monetary value and causes PR damage. It's a footgun that nobody needs and only fools want. And if they're actually the cartoon villains it would imply, rather than just banal petty autocrats carelessly fooling around with a toy they deserve to have taken away from them, then we should maybe less be saying "it makes sense that they would want it this way" and more be sticking their heads in a guillotine so we can show the children the proper way to resolve a dispute with a tyrant. In neither case should a law like that remain on the books.
        bayindirh 1y ago
        Looks like it's complicated. The video has some theories. - Bloomberg has a similar investigation which is deeply undercut by GamersNexus video. GN seen the labs, Bloomberg got their access revoked, so theirs is an empty video, and they want the views. - The video holds no punches back about anyone, and Bloomberg has an NVIDIA sponsored section dedicated to them. - There's no other source which recorded POTUS' words, and maybe they don't want these words to be widely available, video argues. - Lastly, they wanted a licensing fee for that 30 seconds to leave their videos alone. So, when you're a beancounting billionaire corporation, you can have the reasons to go after a bearded guy who manages to do a better job and make you look bad. Because, monies.
        AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        That's precisely the "petty autocrats carelessly abusing a footgun" scenario. They've made themselves look bad for negligible benefit while harming innocent people. It's the argument for taking it away from them.
    - gf000 1y ago
      The heated seat is an edge case, but there is also the entirely valid argument that you shouldn't be able to arbitrarily modify your car (e.g. replace the breaks with some home-grown solution), as it can put yourself and others in danger, and I see no evil in that being enforced by the government. A more IT-related example might be what radio frequencies can we use - if anyone could spam the whole spectrum, we would lose more than from the "freedom" of being able to do that. So it's actually far from trivial to draw a line.
      - GeoAtreides 1y ago
        > there is also the entirely valid argument that you shouldn't be able to arbitrarily modify your car In at least two european countries that I know of (but probably in all of them) cars need to pass periodic technical inspection to be allowed on the road. Breaks are tested, among other things.
        jonasdegendt 1y ago
        Technical inspections are mandatory across the board in all of the European Union, although the rules (such as the interval between inspections), may differ between countries. The minimum is every two years, some countries do yearly. This is actually governed by a European mandate.
        swiftcoder 1y ago
        In much of the EU you are also required to request an additional technical inspection if you have made major changes to the car - for example, I had to take mine in when I had a tow hitch installed, and a friend had to take their camper in when they installed an additional seat.
        darkwater 1y ago
        On top of that, you totally can modify your car (even the brakes) provided that you use some certified part that's good enough for your type of car. And you should pass the inspection that tests everything. I understand that GP point was about home-made brakes (like the software counterpart), but software on a smartphone is not (yet) deadly for others if it doesn't work as expected.
  - at-fates-hands 1y ago
    This is the same argument people make between Apple and Android. Can I use an Android phone without using Google? Yes, of course you can. There are plenty of secure OS's like Graphen, Lineage, Calyx and many others. Do people really care enough to use them? Hardly any, which proves my point. Same thing here. Most people will just pay the fee to get the seats. Some might just opt out and not get them. Others will shop around and find some legacy cars that are older that have them but don't require a subscription. At the end of the day? There's ALWAYS a choice. How hard do you want to look to avoid the subscription? Is it really worth your time and effort? Some would say yes, the vast majority really DGAF. People have been lulled into not caring about stuff like personal privacy and having a say in what's being peddled to you.
    - LtWorf 1y ago
      There's always a choice… unless you want to access your bank account that is. In which case there is no choice but to use the official unrooted android OS.
      - _heimdall 1y ago
        You can still find banks that have physical buildings for retail customers as well as online portals to login and manage your account. Mobile apps aren't absolutely a must.
        LtWorf 1y ago
        You can also hunt your food and use candles to produce light, but can you realistically do that?
  - protocolture 1y ago
    Am I the only one that found that to be a reasonable edge case? The seat heating was apparently shortening the life of the leather seats. Its cheaper to include heated seats in all cars, than it is to maintain 2 different sets of production. The subscription basically offsets the cost of needing to replace the seats more frequently when the heating is enabled. Likewise, if you manually enabled the seat heaters, then complained that the seats were falling apart quickly, having given you a legal out to get that feature enabled in warranty, would not have to replace your seats for free. Not to mention, they apparently already ditched the subscription over backlash.
    - rickdeckard 1y ago
      > The subscription basically offsets the cost of needing to replace the seats more frequently when the heating is enabled I never heard of car-manufacturers periodically replacing seats within warranty because of the wear of the material, regardless of being "more frequently" or not. This sounds like a massive oversight in product-design. Of all the cases I know, the customer had to bear the cost of such "wear and tear" cases.
      - _heimdall 1y ago
        That tracks. Dodge seats from the 90s and early 00s were absolutely terrible. I swear half of them came from the factory torn on the outside of the drivers seat just from the delivery driver getting in to drop the truck off at the dealership.
    - bayindirh 1y ago
      How about automated high/low beam switching or enabling the nominal power of your car instead of handicapping it by default? If you agree that above are edge cases too, I have a Volkswagen to sell you [0]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQNeIcQXy74 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQNeIcQXy74
      - protocolture 1y ago
        >How about automated high/low beam switching I would want the ability to change that. I actually think I can mess with that on my car. >enabling the nominal power of your car instead of handicapping it by default? Big topic for me. My car has a DPF, and appears to have been geared such that despite containing an automatic DPF burn process, the engine never quite reaches the required temperature, so I need to perform manual burns. I have straight up asked the dealer for a method to enable the auto burn process, manually. And have asked if theres a retune available, to make the gearing just a little bit less efficient, giving me more power and more engine heat. The issue, pretty much verbatim from their head regional diesel mechanic is that any modifications of that nature would fuck the emissions standards they had to limbo under. So its categorically denied. They also issued me with stern official warnings that anything I do to make the car more reliable may also void my warranty. And the unofficial advice I have received is that the DPF is "f*cked mate" and to "get the petrol hybrid before the government forces it to wear a similar PPF" The car also very suspiciously moderates the engine output unrelated to gearing/tune. Just sometimes underperforms at random. I believe its computational again, like you say, handicapping it for emissions reasons. These things are largely optional for me, but I wont mess with them too much until I am out of warranty.
- makeitdouble 1y ago
  The contention point will be whether you purchased the device or not.
- estomagordo 1y ago
  This is a ridiculous take.
- dns_snek 1y ago
  In a legal sense, yes. In a practical and technical sense, no.
- Fokamul 1y ago
  Ok, let's say you own an iPhone. Please try install alternative OS on your iPhone, if you succeed, you own your phone.
_def 1y ago
The question of how private property, intellectual property and posession/ownership should work is indeed something humanity hasn't properly figured out yet. But if anything, regular people should have more of the cake.
- somenameforme 1y ago
  We have! The only problem is a very limited amount of legal decisions accidentally paved the way for a massive dystopia. In particular, the first sale doctrine [1] solves everything immediately. The courts assumed good faith with a licensing exception, and maybe it was. But that opened the door to essentially completely dismantle the first-sale doctrine. Get rid of that loophole and all this stupidity ends, immediately. Well that and the DMCA. Once you buy something, it's yours to do whatever you want to do with it short of replicating it for commercial benefit. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
  - john01dav 1y ago
    We also need regulation to prevent unbreakable hardware locks. Integrating the locks deep into VLSI makes removing them unrealistic. As a more specific way to do this, I'd like to see any software that hardware companies make for their own hardware designated (at the choice of the company) as either part of the hardware or a separate product. In the former case, it must be made available under GPLv3 with full anti-tivoization provisions. In the latter case, it must use only public and documented interfaces and must be completely realistic for another company to make a competing product on a level playing field. Ideally the separate products would also need to be highly cross platform if technically feasible where the burden of showing that it isn't is on the developer.
    - _heimdall 1y ago
      I'm not sure if we need regulations preventing it as much as we need regulations that manufacturers have to make it clear before buying the product. Informed consent goes a long way.
matheusmoreira 1y ago
And the answer is we don't. If we can't run our own software, then we do not own the computer. To run software of our choosing we need the cryptographic keys to the machine and we sure as hell don't own those keys.
sumtechguy 1y ago
The thing is most people do not want to mess with computers. They are terrified they are going to break them. Frankly they are not wrong. I spent yesterday just trying to get a div tag to flow correctly with all the objects around it, a whole day down the drain. I have a pretty good idea what I am doing. However, for others these things we call computers are inscrutable devices that just 'decide' to do something wrong. We have built this https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/ and expect everyone to be cool with it. Most people most certainly are not, and are willing to give away whatever just to make it easier to use, and not randomly screw up. Apple and Google can take whatever they gave away now because well most people really do not care. The rest of us can pound sand for all they care. We effectively have a duopoly and they are acting exactly in the manor of that.

The question really isn't whether we should be able to modify computers we own, its whether we own them at all.

yesbut 1y ago

regardless of what the corporations say we do own the devices we purchase.

_heimdall 1y ago
Not always. There have been car manufacturers that sold vehicles with features only enabled by a subscription. You may buy a car with heated seats, but the heated seats only work if the manufacturer enables them.
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  And there should be no law against enabling the heated seats in the car you own without interacting with the manufacturer.
  - alexvitkov 1y ago
    Too bad there is one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      Laws can be interpreted in such a way that invites robber barons to pound sand, or repealed.
      - bayindirh 1y ago
        Considering the same law is used to strike a 3 hour GPU documentary over a ~30 second clip, I think it serves to corporate pretty well. GamersNexus' 3 hour documentary about GPU smuggling (which is way more than a vlog as HN commenters like to portray) is struck down by Bloomberg because they didn't want their 30 second clip, which is squarely fair use BTW, of POTUS speaking to be in that. GamersNexus repealed successfully, but Bloomberg tried to bully them [0]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUnRWh4xOCY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUnRWh4xOCY
        AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        I don't understand why people think this is something corporations desperately want. It's something they'll abuse if you leave it sitting around for that, but that's just the argument for getting rid of it. How does the ability to be a petulant grouch benefit them? It has negligible monetary value and causes PR damage. It's a footgun that nobody needs and only fools want. And if they're actually the cartoon villains it would imply, rather than just banal petty autocrats carelessly fooling around with a toy they deserve to have taken away from them, then we should maybe less be saying "it makes sense that they would want it this way" and more be sticking their heads in a guillotine so we can show the children the proper way to resolve a dispute with a tyrant. In neither case should a law like that remain on the books.
        bayindirh 1y ago
        Looks like it's complicated. The video has some theories. - Bloomberg has a similar investigation which is deeply undercut by GamersNexus video. GN seen the labs, Bloomberg got their access revoked, so theirs is an empty video, and they want the views. - The video holds no punches back about anyone, and Bloomberg has an NVIDIA sponsored section dedicated to them. - There's no other source which recorded POTUS' words, and maybe they don't want these words to be widely available, video argues. - Lastly, they wanted a licensing fee for that 30 seconds to leave their videos alone. So, when you're a beancounting billionaire corporation, you can have the reasons to go after a bearded guy who manages to do a better job and make you look bad. Because, monies.
        AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        That's precisely the "petty autocrats carelessly abusing a footgun" scenario. They've made themselves look bad for negligible benefit while harming innocent people. It's the argument for taking it away from them.
  - gf000 1y ago
    The heated seat is an edge case, but there is also the entirely valid argument that you shouldn't be able to arbitrarily modify your car (e.g. replace the breaks with some home-grown solution), as it can put yourself and others in danger, and I see no evil in that being enforced by the government. A more IT-related example might be what radio frequencies can we use - if anyone could spam the whole spectrum, we would lose more than from the "freedom" of being able to do that. So it's actually far from trivial to draw a line.
    - GeoAtreides 1y ago
      > there is also the entirely valid argument that you shouldn't be able to arbitrarily modify your car In at least two european countries that I know of (but probably in all of them) cars need to pass periodic technical inspection to be allowed on the road. Breaks are tested, among other things.
      - jonasdegendt 1y ago
        Technical inspections are mandatory across the board in all of the European Union, although the rules (such as the interval between inspections), may differ between countries. The minimum is every two years, some countries do yearly. This is actually governed by a European mandate.
        swiftcoder 1y ago
        In much of the EU you are also required to request an additional technical inspection if you have made major changes to the car - for example, I had to take mine in when I had a tow hitch installed, and a friend had to take their camper in when they installed an additional seat.
      - darkwater 1y ago
        On top of that, you totally can modify your car (even the brakes) provided that you use some certified part that's good enough for your type of car. And you should pass the inspection that tests everything. I understand that GP point was about home-made brakes (like the software counterpart), but software on a smartphone is not (yet) deadly for others if it doesn't work as expected.
- at-fates-hands 1y ago
  This is the same argument people make between Apple and Android. Can I use an Android phone without using Google? Yes, of course you can. There are plenty of secure OS's like Graphen, Lineage, Calyx and many others. Do people really care enough to use them? Hardly any, which proves my point. Same thing here. Most people will just pay the fee to get the seats. Some might just opt out and not get them. Others will shop around and find some legacy cars that are older that have them but don't require a subscription. At the end of the day? There's ALWAYS a choice. How hard do you want to look to avoid the subscription? Is it really worth your time and effort? Some would say yes, the vast majority really DGAF. People have been lulled into not caring about stuff like personal privacy and having a say in what's being peddled to you.
  - LtWorf 1y ago
    There's always a choice… unless you want to access your bank account that is. In which case there is no choice but to use the official unrooted android OS.
    - _heimdall 1y ago
      You can still find banks that have physical buildings for retail customers as well as online portals to login and manage your account. Mobile apps aren't absolutely a must.
      - LtWorf 1y ago
        You can also hunt your food and use candles to produce light, but can you realistically do that?
- protocolture 1y ago
  Am I the only one that found that to be a reasonable edge case? The seat heating was apparently shortening the life of the leather seats. Its cheaper to include heated seats in all cars, than it is to maintain 2 different sets of production. The subscription basically offsets the cost of needing to replace the seats more frequently when the heating is enabled. Likewise, if you manually enabled the seat heaters, then complained that the seats were falling apart quickly, having given you a legal out to get that feature enabled in warranty, would not have to replace your seats for free. Not to mention, they apparently already ditched the subscription over backlash.
  - rickdeckard 1y ago
    > The subscription basically offsets the cost of needing to replace the seats more frequently when the heating is enabled I never heard of car-manufacturers periodically replacing seats within warranty because of the wear of the material, regardless of being "more frequently" or not. This sounds like a massive oversight in product-design. Of all the cases I know, the customer had to bear the cost of such "wear and tear" cases.
    - _heimdall 1y ago
      That tracks. Dodge seats from the 90s and early 00s were absolutely terrible. I swear half of them came from the factory torn on the outside of the drivers seat just from the delivery driver getting in to drop the truck off at the dealership.
  - bayindirh 1y ago
    How about automated high/low beam switching or enabling the nominal power of your car instead of handicapping it by default? If you agree that above are edge cases too, I have a Volkswagen to sell you [0]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQNeIcQXy74 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQNeIcQXy74
    - protocolture 1y ago
      >How about automated high/low beam switching I would want the ability to change that. I actually think I can mess with that on my car. >enabling the nominal power of your car instead of handicapping it by default? Big topic for me. My car has a DPF, and appears to have been geared such that despite containing an automatic DPF burn process, the engine never quite reaches the required temperature, so I need to perform manual burns. I have straight up asked the dealer for a method to enable the auto burn process, manually. And have asked if theres a retune available, to make the gearing just a little bit less efficient, giving me more power and more engine heat. The issue, pretty much verbatim from their head regional diesel mechanic is that any modifications of that nature would fuck the emissions standards they had to limbo under. So its categorically denied. They also issued me with stern official warnings that anything I do to make the car more reliable may also void my warranty. And the unofficial advice I have received is that the DPF is "f*cked mate" and to "get the petrol hybrid before the government forces it to wear a similar PPF" The car also very suspiciously moderates the engine output unrelated to gearing/tune. Just sometimes underperforms at random. I believe its computational again, like you say, handicapping it for emissions reasons. These things are largely optional for me, but I wont mess with them too much until I am out of warranty.
makeitdouble 1y ago
The contention point will be whether you purchased the device or not.
estomagordo 1y ago
This is a ridiculous take.
dns_snek 1y ago
In a legal sense, yes. In a practical and technical sense, no.
Fokamul 1y ago
Ok, let's say you own an iPhone. Please try install alternative OS on your iPhone, if you succeed, you own your phone.

_def 1y ago

The question of how private property, intellectual property and posession/ownership should work is indeed something humanity hasn't properly figured out yet. But if anything, regular people should have more of the cake.

somenameforme 1y ago
We have! The only problem is a very limited amount of legal decisions accidentally paved the way for a massive dystopia. In particular, the first sale doctrine [1] solves everything immediately. The courts assumed good faith with a licensing exception, and maybe it was. But that opened the door to essentially completely dismantle the first-sale doctrine. Get rid of that loophole and all this stupidity ends, immediately. Well that and the DMCA. Once you buy something, it's yours to do whatever you want to do with it short of replicating it for commercial benefit. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
- john01dav 1y ago
  We also need regulation to prevent unbreakable hardware locks. Integrating the locks deep into VLSI makes removing them unrealistic. As a more specific way to do this, I'd like to see any software that hardware companies make for their own hardware designated (at the choice of the company) as either part of the hardware or a separate product. In the former case, it must be made available under GPLv3 with full anti-tivoization provisions. In the latter case, it must use only public and documented interfaces and must be completely realistic for another company to make a competing product on a level playing field. Ideally the separate products would also need to be highly cross platform if technically feasible where the burden of showing that it isn't is on the developer.
  - _heimdall 1y ago
    I'm not sure if we need regulations preventing it as much as we need regulations that manufacturers have to make it clear before buying the product. Informed consent goes a long way.

matheusmoreira 1y ago

And the answer is we don't. If we can't run our own software, then we do not own the computer. To run software of our choosing we need the cryptographic keys to the machine and we sure as hell don't own those keys.

sumtechguy 1y ago

The thing is most people do not want to mess with computers. They are terrified they are going to break them. Frankly they are not wrong. I spent yesterday just trying to get a div tag to flow correctly with all the objects around it, a whole day down the drain. I have a pretty good idea what I am doing. However, for others these things we call computers are inscrutable devices that just 'decide' to do something wrong. We have built this https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/ and expect everyone to be cool with it. Most people most certainly are not, and are willing to give away whatever just to make it easier to use, and not randomly screw up. Apple and Google can take whatever they gave away now because well most people really do not care. The rest of us can pound sand for all they care. We effectively have a duopoly and they are acting exactly in the manor of that.