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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”

#91

Post by Silhouette »

Nullabillity wrote: post #73
Silhouette wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A manufacturer can hardly argue that they have a safety reason to keep you from repairing your TV, printer, or cell phone. I believe this is not the strongest argument to make. There are plenty of products that do have legitimate safety or other regulatory concerns, where there is a good reason to prevent someone who doesn't know what they're doing from meddling. However, the relevant point is whether they know what…

> There are plenty of products that do have legitimate safety or other regulatory concerns, where there is a good reason to prevent someone who doesn't know what they're doing from meddling. The safety of themselves or others?

The safety of themselves or others?

Potentially both, but I think either is sufficient argument for reasonable regulation.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#92

Post by jpatel3 »

moyix wrote: post #21
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…

We already have some of these issues without open source. People today modify their cars to make them perform better at the expense of violating emissions standards. It's a very tiny number of people that actually end up doing so, and they sometimes get caught and are then fined appropriately for emissions violations. My feeling is that if there are regulations that require certain ethical behavior for self-driving c…

I think the smaller percentage is very time specific thing. What today looks like small percentage, over the period of time won't be the same. Need to think beyond the current scenario. As push for coding, awareness around tech growing, the future force won't be same.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#93

Post by jackhack »

saidajigumi wrote: post #69
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. Agreed. At least at the level these cars are likely to enter the market, the whole concept of what the car "knows" isn't likely to extend to "other people", "my passengers", "inanimate objects" and a probability matrix of injury/death/damage among these categories. Instead of this heavily anthropomorphized view, cars are much more likely to have a highly simplified…

More likely than one might want to think.

A car traveling the same direction swerves into your lane, crowding you off the road.

Does your self-driving car allow the collision and push the offending car back in order to hold your lane? Or does it avoid the collision and run you off the road?

(As a person who drives in the mountains, this could have deadly results. If you live in the plains of Kansas, maybe not so much.)

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#94

Post by mmagin »

paulsutter wrote: post #23

This is carburetor nostalgia, from a time when everything was human scale and adjustable. Look at how chips are stacked and interconnected within packages in modern design[1], that trend will only intensify. Software is also getting more complex, with deep learning the system develops its own if/thens. [1] http://img.koreatimes.co.kr/upload/news/070905_p10_hynix.jpg

AFAIK, this sort of stacked die thing has barely started to reach actual commercial products. It's been an idea for a long time, but quite hard to get right. Anyway, it's no different than another IC of considerable complexity -- obviously there's no ability for an end user to repair what's inside it.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#95

Post by Nullabillity »

wil421 wrote: post #18
waterphone wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are all definite issues, but even in the case of simple computer hardware there's a problem when the manufacturer tries to lock the owners out of repairing with special screws, glue, etc., so that they can make money off the repairs themselves. New MacBook Pros have their batteries glued in and they can't really be replaced without replacing the entire top case they're glued to at the same time. They claim this…

MacBooks and MBPs are becoming throw away devices after 3 or 4 years. In 2013 I upgraded my 2011 MBP to have more RAM and a larger SSD. The new ones have the RAM soddared on so I guess I'll need to max it out when I buy and forfeit the possibility of a future upgrade. The custom SSD is expensive and only one maker seems to have decent quality ones.[1] I know laptops aren't increasing in power/abilities like they used…

Or you could buy another brand of laptop instead, next time...?

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#96

Post by CodeCube »

Houshalter wrote: post #83
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 don't think it's overblown at all. There would be large advantages to programming your car to be more aggressive and risky.

I'm curious to hear what these advantages would be ... not saying there aren't, just having a hard time thinking about what you might mean.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#97

Post by astrange »

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.

Do you remember CRT TVs? Those were pretty dangerous to open up.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#98

Post by twblalock »

zerohp wrote: post #87
twblalock wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly did you derive this from my argument? I see no logical connection.

Patent and copyright are an external force created by a bureaucracy that prevents a free market for these products.

It is certainly not a logical conclusion of my argument that all bureaucracies that interfere with the market ought to be abolished, or that the market should be free in all cases. My point was that in this particular case, the market would be a better way to solve the problem than a bureaucracy.

Therefore, advocating the existence of some bureaucracies and not others does not contradict my argument, nor is it inconsistent with my argument.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#99

Post by gherkin0 »

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…

Realistically, you handle such things via deterrence. When an accident happens, the car's software can be dumped (in some cases), and criminal/civil liability can be assessed based on the results. The risk of heavy fines or jail will probably keep most people from hacking their self-driving cars to be more aggressive.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#100

Post by mindslight »

twblalock wrote: post #98
zerohp wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patent and copyright are an external force created by a bureaucracy that prevents a free market for these products.

It is certainly not a logical conclusion of my argument that all bureaucracies that interfere with the market ought to be abolished, or that the market should be free in all cases. My point was that in this particular case , the market would be a better way to solve the problem than a bureaucracy. Therefore, advocating the existence of some bureaucracies and not others does not contradict my argument, nor is it incon…

In general, while market dynamics are quite important, "the market" doesn't actually constitute a valid argument for anything (as said thing would happen anyway), and usually indicates an attempt to stubbornly ignore differing opinions.

The point is that companies are already asking for state intervention to protect their products as being a creative endeavor. So this is no longer some noble two-party private transaction. (Which I would be all in favor for, but we're just not in that realm!)

Demanding the protections of their creative work while shirking the responsibilities (an end-user accessing and modifying the whole creative work that they've purchased) may not be definitively inconsistent, but it's extremely one-sided.

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