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There's another right to repair fight brewing in Massachusetts

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Re: There's another right to repair fight brewing in Massachusetts

#81

Post by gbrown »

sschueller wrote: post #65
hprotagonist wrote: post #2

The No side's ads are incredibly scummy. The retired boston police commissioner has done an ad spot for Yes on Right To Repair specifically to slap down the "you will be raped in a parking lot" FUD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bye5DRBSpw The EFF is also strongly in favor, naturally, but i think Ed Davis will pull more weight if anyone's undecided. (when marijuana legalization was on the ballot in 2016, the then-…

It's absolutely disgusting how privacy and the right to repair are being mixed together. We need better privacy but that is a separate topic.

Control over your device and the data it generates/transmits is fundamental to both. You can choose to care about one or the other, but they’re practically and ideologically closely related.

Re: There's another right to repair fight brewing in Massachusetts

#82

Post by CivBase »

unholiness wrote: post #55

MA voter who's genuinely torn here. The thing that bugs me out about this law is that, AFAICT, this data is _already_ required to be available to any 3rd party manufacturer through a physical "non-proprietary interface" (so far, an OBD-II port) after a similar ballot initiative from 2013 [0]. This law essentially just makes the data available wirelessly. I care about security holes and I care about consent. Having a…

I was also extremely confused by the smartphone app requirement. I don't imagine most car guys want to fumble around with their personal, expensive, fragile smartphone while doing automotive work.

Modern vehicles generally have very advanced media consoles installed in the dash. Why can't they just display the information there? Or just add a standardized port under the hood with a publicly documented interface that mechanics could plug a device into?

Re: There's another right to repair fight brewing in Massachusetts

#83

Post by stronglikedan »

pc86 wrote: post #78
hprotagonist wrote: post #2

The No side's ads are incredibly scummy. The retired boston police commissioner has done an ad spot for Yes on Right To Repair specifically to slap down the "you will be raped in a parking lot" FUD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bye5DRBSpw The EFF is also strongly in favor, naturally, but i think Ed Davis will pull more weight if anyone's undecided. (when marijuana legalization was on the ballot in 2016, the then-…

To be fair, police already had the option to stop wasting their time on stupid college students, it's called discretion.

In a city near me, they gave officers the discretion to either write people a ticket, or haul them to jail, for personal amounts of marijuana. After a few months, it was reported that not a single ticket had been written. I don't think most officers know what "discretion" means. Sad state of affairs, that.

Re: There's another right to repair fight brewing in Massachusetts

#84

Post by rurcliped »

The ballot question is actually about the "Right to WebApp Development Competency." Voting yes means you believe that, after a "Such platform shall be directly accessible by the owner of the vehicle" law passes, webapp developers will MAGICALLY gain the competency needed to rapidly deploy a life-or-death-critical service for access by millions of unsecured client endpoints, and deploy it with no security-relevant design or implementation flaws.

There's at least some hope of delivering a secure service to dealerships. (I don't know whether this has succeeded.) There's also some hope of delivering a secure service to registered endpoints at independent shops that can be audited for client security practices. This is the correct next step. With the state of webapp security today, there is NO HOPE AT ALL of delivering a secure service to the general public.

Re: There's another right to repair fight brewing in Massachusetts

#85

Post by kazagistar »

kibwen wrote: post #13

The other ballot option in MA this year, Question 2, would enable ranked choice voting for state and federal elections. There was a bit of a thread about this the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24561551 What's weird is that before moving to MA I had never even heard of ballot options. As far as I can tell they just don't exist in PA, so social studies curricula just don't teach them. I'm increasingly…

Indeed. As a Montana citizen, its been excellent seeing medical marijuana legalization pass through ballot initiatives, and hopefully this year full legalization and regulation.

The people and their representatives don't always agree on every issue, and having an outlet for that nuance is very beneficial. I think any amount of direct democracy we can add is a good thing.

Re: There's another right to repair fight brewing in Massachusetts

#86

Post by pbhjpbhj »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #35
nerdponx wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon my ignorance: what centralized platform? As far as I can tell, the proposal requires direct two-way communication between the vehicle and end user.

They were talking about requiring service literature to be available in a standardized format through a government web portal.

Sounds like a great idea.

Re: There's another right to repair fight brewing in Massachusetts

#87

Post by mindslight »

unholiness wrote: post #55

MA voter who's genuinely torn here. The thing that bugs me out about this law is that, AFAICT, this data is _already_ required to be available to any 3rd party manufacturer through a physical "non-proprietary interface" (so far, an OBD-II port) after a similar ballot initiative from 2013 [0]. This law essentially just makes the data available wirelessly. I care about security holes and I care about consent. Having a…

I see where you're coming from, and this proposed law doesn't seem super useful in isolation. But consider:

1. Publishing the same data over OBD-2 ends up being an afterthought. Without even looking at the specifics, I guarantee that there is data transmitted through telemetry that is not output through OBD-2. That's just how embedded development works - focus on making the main feature work, then forget about the rest. It seems quite hard to apply the law to the details of a technical system ("Sorry, when developing we didn't consider that type of data necessary for repairing the car, even though we are using it to diagnose. Anyway we'll fix it in the model year after next"). Whereas it's straightforward to say that no matter how many different interfaces automakers develop, independent auto repair has to be able to access all of them.

2. If we're concerned with privacy (and we should be), then we need an orthogonal privacy law that prohibits automakers from backhauling this information without consent, and selling this information without consent (eg to insurance companies). Letting them unilaterally collect and only make it accessible to their dealers, practically guarantees a terrible security implementation - something like one master login for each "trusted" dealer, that can access any car's data by VIN. Mandating access for third parties will actually result in the attack surface being properly designed and audited.

3. Once you're taking the privacy hit, then there is a stored history that won't be available over OBD-2. Imagine going to a repair shop and they tell you to borrow a dongle and drive around for two weeks, where a dealer can help you immediately. This ties into data ownership, in that you should be able to retrieve your own records.

4. Imagine a hypothetical service that keeps tabs on your car's metrics and alerts you to developing conditions. With mandated access, this can be done as a simple web service. Without that, you'll need a separate dongle, probably specific to your car if things advance beyond OBD-2. I'd personally rather have a dongle and a local service that I control (coupled with a privacy law or pulling the cell modem), but unfortunately that's not how the consumer market works.

Re: There's another right to repair fight brewing in Massachusetts

#88

Post by kazagistar »

ISL wrote: post #25
Retric wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a double edged escape hatch. In practice the vast majority of voters know little to nothing about what’s being decided. On the other hand many third rail political views have a great deal of popular support. So, IMO the trick is to require a very large number of signatures to get on the ballot.

Agreed. It is useful to pass things that a legislature may never pass, like term-limits for legislators. In Washington State, the initiatives frequently yield legislation that has conflicts/dependency problems with the existing law, something that happens far less-often with bills from within the legislature. Also agreed that a high signature-number bar is one of the simplest/expedient ways to limit ballot-initiative…

Yeah, on the ballot in our state is a law that supposedly prohibits the enforcement of local gun regulation, only allowing state regulation. Except its so poorly worded its unclear to judges and police and such what it even means.

Re: There's another right to repair fight brewing in Massachusetts

#89

Post by hprotagonist »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #38
jghn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're incredibly scummy but a super thin veneer. I don't know how anyone buys their BS. On one hand they feature grease monkeys talking about people hacking your car, I'm not sure people should be using their local mechanic for cybersecurity advice. More important, the fine print at the end makes it clear that it's the auto manufacturers sponsoring those ads, and their bias is obvious. I'll lose some faith in human…

>I don't know how anyone buys their BS. Treat people like they're too stupid to think for themselves long enough and it becomes a self fulfilling prophesy. If the people of Massachusetts buy that crap they need only look in the mirror to find who to blame.

The last time anyone bothered to run a poll on this question, it was 65-35 Yes, which is roughly the same margin that Right to Repair passed by in 2012.

Re: There's another right to repair fight brewing in Massachusetts

#90

Post by kazagistar »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #36
hpkuarg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Direct democracy also leads to dumpster fires of a policy choice like Proposition 13 for your southern neighbors. No guarantees it wouldn't have passed through regular legislative channels, I suppose...

Given that it's also a third-rail for politicians to try to touch, it sounds like it worked precisely as it should, and gave people what they wanted and voted for. Oregon passed something similar, albeit weaker; I wish we'd passed something much stronger. Not because I'm anti-taxation, but because funding anything via property taxes is an incredibly bad idea and leads to funding and service quality that's correlated…

If it were redistributive instead of local that wouldn't be a problem, and excluding primary lived in properties gets rid of any moral hazard.
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