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The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#51

Post by Retric »

twblalock wrote: post #49
Retric wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programmers are not going to decide what is an acceptable MPH vs posted speed or if the car will use DRM. Much like how programmers at Volkswagen, Audi, etc are not the ones that chose to cheat emissions tests. The real choice is going to be what to do about soft obstacles. Hitting a person or deer can easily kill passengers and hitting trees is actually normally safer thus making the discussion fairly moot. People a…

Programmers have to make decisions about those things all the time. It isn't like the product team defines every nitty-gritty detail of implementation -- especially for machine learning and AI algorithms.

Sure, in the how cautious should I be in rain situation. Not, it's a sunny day and open road, the speed limit is 65 what should I do situation.

PS: I expect company's to punt with a user selectable: how much to speed buttons.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#52

Post by twblalock »

Retric wrote: post #51
twblalock wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programmers have to make decisions about those things all the time. It isn't like the product team defines every nitty-gritty detail of implementation -- especially for machine learning and AI algorithms.

Sure, in the how cautious should I be in rain situation. Not, it's a sunny day and open road, the speed limit is 65 what should I do situation. PS: I expect company's to punt with a user selectable: how much to speed buttons.

You're wrong. Programmers cannot escape making decisions when they design these algorithms, no matter the situation they are designed for.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#53

Post by wfo »

robert1976 wrote: post #44

If substantial numbers of consumers are demanding fixable/open electronics, a manufacturer could comply and fill a great need! My guess is that market is v small. Regulation is unneccessary here.

If the market has failed to protect a right that is important, that's exactly when regulation is necessary.

Handling the constant failures and disasters created by the market to the detriment of the populace is the purpose of regulations and the entire justification of the mixed economy model every modern society operates under.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#54

Post by DSMan195276 »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #24
maxerickson wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is pretty likely that the full self driving system will be the thing that gets licensed. If that were the case, your exploited systems would not be licensed for operation on public roads. This can be completely orthogonal to whether you are able to modify the vehicle or not.

How would you detect these changes in a licensed system if you are allowed to modify the vehicle? If you do behavior based testing - the person will just hide the features behind a backdoor so the testing looks normal. If you do some type of checksum based testing, you have defacto made modification illegal, and it is bypassed by doing a "factory reset" prior to the licensing check, and loading the modified software…

I don't think it is really that complicated. On boot, a piece of embedded software (that can't be overwritten) does a checksum of the current software installed. If the checksum doesn't match the original, then it sets an internal bit to 1 to mark that the software has been changed. That internal bit can't be set back to 0, so the car is essentially marked as non-licensed and now can't be legally driven on the road.

Checking for non-licensed modifications is simply checking if that bit is set. Implementation would be a little more complex then the above, but similar technology already exists and is in use. The result is that modifications would be possible, but driving the resulting car on public roads would not.

A system for allowing new software to be placed on a car could be setup, but it would still require re-licensing the whole car so it wouldn't necessarily be an easy process.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#55

Post by mindslight »

twblalock wrote: post #45
Aelinsaar wrote: post #2

A lot of issues surrounding the move to make anything and everything a "Service" are starting to become very clear. The issues with IoT devices being bricked, Tesla 'ownership', and so on really do need scrutiny from a functional body with a hint of the public's interest at heart.

> The issues with IoT devices being bricked, Tesla 'ownership', and so on really do need scrutiny from a functional body with a hint of the public's interest at heart. Oh great, another bureaucracy. Why should manufacturers be forced to make their products repairable by users? Why don't they have the right to make a non-repairable product, and let the market decide whether or not it succeeds? If people really want re…

Okay, but to be consistent you have to argue for getting rid of copyrights and patents as well. It makes no sense to regard these devices as "creative works", yet then deny that the end user has been sold an instance of this abstract structure.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#56

Post by badminton1 »

Well, this is common sense. Remember the "Ecce homo" painting? there are some things that will likely go wrong if you do them by yourself. Sometimes with consequences that are not desirable for "the common good".

This includes repairing devices that are required to be reliable for public safety.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#57

Post by AnthonyMouse »

nathan_long wrote: post #13
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #4

I think this whole open source and right to repair/modify will be very interesting with self-driving cars, because of their interaction with the commons. Here are some issues. There have been some discussions about the ethics of self-driving cars if it should sacrifice the lives of the people in the cars to save more lives. In a right to repair/modify wouldn't a lot of people pay to have the algorithm changed for the…

You bring up very interesting questions, but the self-driving car should be taken as a very special case. A manufacturer can hardly argue that they have a safety reason to keep you from repairing your TV, printer, or cell phone.

> A manufacturer can hardly argue that they have a safety reason to keep you from repairing your TV, printer, or cell phone.

The safety argument can easily go the other way. If you see your car misbehaving then you should have the right to understand why and fix it before it kills someone.

And if you find a legitimate bug you may end up saving a thousand lives.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#58

Post by Retric »

twblalock wrote: post #52
Retric wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, in the how cautious should I be in rain situation. Not, it's a sunny day and open road, the speed limit is 65 what should I do situation. PS: I expect company's to punt with a user selectable: how much to speed buttons.

You're wrong. Programmers cannot escape making decisions when they design these algorithms, no matter the situation they are designed for.

A lot of AI is based around training sets not traditional Algorithms like your thinking of. There are simply to many edge cases to deal with by hand. Yes, there is also a lot of hand coding in these systems, but good training sets are very critical.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#59

Post by acbabis »

rando3826 wrote: post #33
mikeash wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the ethical question is greatly overblown. The odds of being in a situation where there's any sort of ethical choice to make are so remote as to not really be worth considering. 99.9999% of the time, the correct choice when faced with an impending crash will be to brake as hard as the driving surface allows and steer to avoid obstacles as much as possible. In any case, tinkering and commons already intersect…

> I think the ethical question is greatly overblown. Not at all. One programmer is going to make choices that affect ~ a billion vehicles one day, so something that doesn't happen 99.9999% per hour will happen 100 times per hour. And it's going to be more mundane things, like programming the speed limit 1 mph slower results in 500 less deaths per year, or using drm/copyright to stop poor people from getting driving s…

If the cars obey the posted speed limit and slow down and split-the-difference when on curves or near hazards (such as children running on the sidewalk), the hypothetical moral dilemmas shouldn't even happen. So far, I've only heard of one accident involving a Google car, and there wasn't a fatality.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#60

Post by twblalock »

Retric wrote: post #58
twblalock wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're wrong. Programmers cannot escape making decisions when they design these algorithms, no matter the situation they are designed for.

A lot of AI is based around training sets not traditional Algorithms like your thinking of. There are simply to many edge cases to deal with by hand. Yes, there is also a lot of hand coding in these systems, but good training sets are very critical.

The choice of those training sets, including their contents, their size, how they are consumed, and the algorithms they are fed to, affects the output. Therefore, programmers make decisions. It is unavoidable.
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