Copyright Office Ruling Imposes Sweeping Right to Repair Reforms • Hacker News Board

Re: Copyright Office Ruling Imposes Sweeping Right to Repair Reforms

#121

Post by astrange » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 8:49 PM UTC

TomMarius wrote: post #94

dleslie wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American McGee is probably the most famous example of this. > Dead-end jobs followed – washing dishes, polishing rings at a jewelry store, ringing orders at a record store and, finally, fixing Volkswagens at Uncle J.O.'s auto repair shop. > The tinkering that's required of mechanics appealed to the teenage hacker. The $6-an-hour job "was the first time I ever felt like I accomplished something at work," McGee said. >…

A lot of software engineers around me love poking in their cars

Are they not afraid of regressions?

Re: Copyright Office Ruling Imposes Sweeping Right to Repair Reforms

#122

Post by biktor_gj » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 8:49 PM UTC

imglorp wrote: post #19

crwalker wrote: post #4

This is great! The push by large companies to replace personal asset ownership with perpetual rent is worth fighting against.

On that note, I wonder if the law will ever view misprepresenting the ownership of a device as fraudulent business practice. Suppose some hardware is sold to you, in the ancient ownership sense[1]. Then some time later, the maker decides that you must use only authorized parts, or they will not continue to provide a cloud service for it, or that it's just plain EOL. Then, you never really owned it - you were renting…

If Rich Rebuild's Youtube channel is to be believed, that's exactly what happens with Tesla if they're declared as dead and then someone buys it, fixes it but in Tesla's system the VIN has been declared dead. They lock you out of the supercharger network and won't sell you parts for it (at least that's what he explains)

Re: Copyright Office Ruling Imposes Sweeping Right to Repair Reforms

#123

Post by djbelieny » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 8:51 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #65

nimbius wrote: post #56

As an automotive mechanic, this is awesome. You have no idea how many sensors/controllers in a car can only be reset by violating the DRM. Example: the suspension control computer for newer fords (so far just raptor and newer commercial F series) is separate from the ECU, and if it faults out you need to buy a new $2500 computer and sensor pack. You can, however, replace a commonly blown diode or fuse on the computer…

> With a raspberry pi and a bit of python however you can reset this tamper code once the whole assembly is closed. This sentence is interesting to me. It tells me that now mechanics need to learn programming skills to be successful. Software really is eating the world...

This is very interesting indeed. Please keep talking ;)

Re: Copyright Office Ruling Imposes Sweeping Right to Repair Reforms

#124

Post by tempestn » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 8:51 PM UTC

cptskippy wrote: post #115

quadrangle wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ford is basically stopping production of cars anyway as they found that trucks are more profitable. But yeah, don't buy one of their trucks either. But what manufacturer is an alternative? Tesla set up DRM to artificially limit the driving range of their cars until you pay them a ransom to simply let your car drive longer distances!

> Tesla set up DRM to artificially limit the driving range of their cars until you pay them a ransom to simply let your car drive longer distances! That's a lie. Yes they have DRM in place to artificially limit the range of certain models, everything else you said is mischaracterization, misrepresentation, and lies. They saw opportunity in offering different ranged batteries of the same model, however the cost to pro…

Seems like a stretch to (repeatedly) characterize your parent's post as a "lie". You're both characterizing the same practice in different ways. I'm inclined to agree with everything else you said (although I dislike the barriers to independent maintenance of Teslas in general), but the parent's post was a spin, not a lie.

Re: Copyright Office Ruling Imposes Sweeping Right to Repair Reforms

#125

Post by saagarjha » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 8:52 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #14

This is nice, but it isn't as nice as it should be. This is a section 1201 exemption[1] which is where the Library of Congress decides there needs to be an exemption to the law and puts it into place for a period of 12 months. Every year they review these exemptions and they often fall off. If you go to the link below and replace 2018 with 2008 - 2017 you can see exemptions for the last 10 years that have been added…

Exemptions last for three years I believe (your link doesn’t work for the other years, BTW), and the law has recently been changed to make them more permanent, requiring significant change in order to prevent automatic renewal.

Re: Copyright Office Ruling Imposes Sweeping Right to Repair Reforms

#126

Post by Drdrdrq » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 8:53 PM UTC

cptskippy wrote: post #115

quadrangle wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ford is basically stopping production of cars anyway as they found that trucks are more profitable. But yeah, don't buy one of their trucks either. But what manufacturer is an alternative? Tesla set up DRM to artificially limit the driving range of their cars until you pay them a ransom to simply let your car drive longer distances!

> Tesla set up DRM to artificially limit the driving range of their cars until you pay them a ransom to simply let your car drive longer distances! That's a lie. Yes they have DRM in place to artificially limit the range of certain models, everything else you said is mischaracterization, misrepresentation, and lies. They saw opportunity in offering different ranged batteries of the same model, however the cost to pro…

What you wrote basically confirms what GP said, you are just judging it differently.

Re: Copyright Office Ruling Imposes Sweeping Right to Repair Reforms

#127

Post by 51lver » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 8:57 PM UTC

celticninja wrote: post #105

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a biolermaker ¹ with 20 years experience in the trade. Now I operate a laser cutter, have a fairly extensive AutoHotKey script, can navigate my way around the post processor that generates the particular dialect of G-Code our laser prefers, and know a touch of python. I'm definitely an outlier, but I'm not the only computer-nerd-come-metal-fabricator I've worked with. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boilermaker

* boilermaker, I thought the italics meant it was intentional and was really interested in what you did. I still find it fascinating but wonder what a biolermaker would do?

The Bio/LeR industry is very innovative but also very secretive so I doubt you will find very much about it.

Re: Copyright Office Ruling Imposes Sweeping Right to Repair Reforms

#128

Post by saagarjha » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 8:58 PM UTC

joemi wrote: post #96

That's a really great overview of the situation. I much preferred this to the Vice article that's also on the HN frontpage.

I think both posts have been merged?

Re: Copyright Office Ruling Imposes Sweeping Right to Repair Reforms

#129

Post by incompatible » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 8:58 PM UTC

nimbius wrote: post #56

As an automotive mechanic, this is awesome. You have no idea how many sensors/controllers in a car can only be reset by violating the DRM. Example: the suspension control computer for newer fords (so far just raptor and newer commercial F series) is separate from the ECU, and if it faults out you need to buy a new $2500 computer and sensor pack. You can, however, replace a commonly blown diode or fuse on the computer…

Perhaps you can use a raspberry pi and a bit of python on the current version, but maybe they will be able to improve the "security" on future versions? Having a legal right to bypass DRM doesn't help if nobody knows how.

Also, I wonder how much that $2500 computer and sensor pack costs to manufacture. Perhaps replacing the entire unit with a raspberry pi version would ultimately be the way to go.

Re: Copyright Office Ruling Imposes Sweeping Right to Repair Reforms

#130

Post by Drdrdrq » Thu, Oct 25, 2018, 9:00 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #120

nimbius wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i started learning python in my spare time after I attended a training course for shop software that ran on Linux. As for the pi, theyre awesome. for $30 or so I have a computer powerful enough to pull OBD codes and do pretty much anything else in the shop wirelessly. And if someone drop it, backs over it, or splashes it with friction modifier or something I can just ask my boss for $40 to replace it instead of $1400…

Can you point me at some good tutorials on making a pi read ODBC codes?

Did you mean OBD(2)? There are Bluetooth, wifi and usb controllers available that you can use to read and write data. Some of them are very cheap, not sure how well they work though.