Live data from Hacker News

New York Senate passes Right to Repair bill

ifixit.com

171–180 of 206 posts

Re: New York Senate passes Right to Repair bill

#171
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on which phase of the moon it is. Best to look at the total cost of ownership over the warranty period and see if you’re happy with the monthly total. Anything outside that is a bonus! Same applies to Apple. Keysight’s semi legendary reputation for reliability comes from the second hand market which has had all the lemons removed from the table. Their production reputation is “average” and their in warranty f…

And that disconnect between economics and what’s environmentally manageable is at the very heart of a lot of modern problems. I often wonder, if there will ever be a way to make that widening chasm disappear, other than going back to living in caves …

The manufacture, storage, and ultimate disposal of all those spare parts also has an environmental cost, unless you assume that the measures end up driving some industry wide shifts, such as toward many more common parts, on-demand manufacture of certain elements, etc. It's a lot easier to warehouse a bunch of STL files than the actual bits, and maybe if your dishwasher's controller unit is just a 3v3 Linux computer with a standard GPIO connector, then a "spare part" in ten years is a totally different unit that happens to plug in and run the same interpreted software, and everything on the other end of that connector is just standard discrete parts like drivers, signal conditioning, etc, that can be replaced a la carte.

In any case, there certainly have been some proposals for how to bring some of these costs into the economic picture, most obviously pricing carbon and charging upfront disposal taxes for things like automobile tires. More aggressive measures might specifically punish the extraction of anything non-renewable— John Michael Greer talks a bunch about this [1] in a framework where the "primary economy" is in fact the natural processes like rain, pollination by insects, fertilization by animal waste, etc. Anything humans do on top of that which disrupts it is "secondary economy" and should have to pay the appropriate compensations for stewardship.

It sounds reasonable, but obviously it's a political nonstarter in any place in the world (like Canada) whose economy is mostly still built on conventional primary industries like oil, logging, fishing, mining.

[1]: https://newsociety.com/books/w/the-wealth-of-nature

Re: New York Senate passes Right to Repair bill

#172
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Louis Rossman gave an example which I believe really happened. A surgery chair that cost tens of thousands of dollars needed a new riser motor. Just an electric motor to move the chair up and down. But the company that makes the electric motor had an agreement with the chair manufacturer not to sell replacement parts. So the only recourse instead of replacing a $500 motor is to replace an entire surgery chair for ten…

> Given the cost of medical care in this country although in this specific case in example, if the country you're talking about are the US, having access to the $500 motor only means wider profit margins for the hostpital, not necessarily lower bills for hospitalized people.

You do understand the reason why US has such high health care cost is because the only player getting screw is the payer, also known as the patient.

Re: New York Senate passes Right to Repair bill

#173
post #119

Can anyone comment on this please? (from the nysenate.gov link in the article) "This bill require original equipment manufacturers (OEM) to make diag- nostic and repair information for digital electronic parts and equipment available to independent repair providers and consumers if such parts and repair information are also available to OEM authorized repair providers. " This seems to imply that if something is being…

Your take sounds right. Like if Apple replaces phone screens at an Apple facility, they must also make the screens (and supporting equipment) available to other parties. If they don't replace screens, then they don't have to make them available.

Exactly. Which would make sense in case of spare parts, "we don't make spare parts for us, so we can't distribute them for others", but that would apply also to firmware and technical information, which they have and doesn't require distribution in physical form.

I'm afraid that for some time we'll continue to see old phones discarded in landfills because there will be no technical information available allowing developers to port open operating systems, drivers and apps to them.

Re: New York Senate passes Right to Repair bill

#174
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the risk you take on with promoting right to repair. It’s be better if we had stronger consumer legislation globally that forces manufacturer responsibility rather than demand we can do the job ourselves. Imagine if you bought a laptop and the battery died after 2 years and the state mandated option was for the manufacturer to buy it back at 60% of the original value because it didn’t last the prescribed 6 yea…

I like the idea of mature, self-responsible people. Who can be trusted to make decisions by themself. And the right to repair aims not, that everyone should fix their devices by themself, but that everyone who is capable, has the possibility to do so. Like repair shops. Or skilled individuals. And those who think they are more competent, than they actually are ... find always ways of shooting themself in the foot. I…

If the world wad run by mature responsible people then we wouldnt have the issues of e-waste, more plastic than fish in the ocean and climate change.

Systemic problems require systemic solutions that achieve results in the real world, not just ideal one

Re: New York Senate passes Right to Repair bill

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we should just have some pretty clear literature that if you modify a device, the manufacturer is not responsible for any injuries it might cause you. Modify a dishwasher and now it fills your kitchen with soap bubbles? Modify a CPAP machine and get killed by it? Not the manufacturer's fault. The US is too litigation happy as it is...

By passing a right to repair on medical devices you also open up the aftermarket for repairs. Would you like to be handed a medical device by your insurance company that has been repaired by an untrained person that considers himself to be a handyman? Or be put in a scanner that was repaired by a service engineer from a broker that is cutting corners to win in the competing market. Without clear quality and regulator…

But if the insurance company doesn't want to be liable for it it would require a certified and/or bonded tech. In the US cars don't even require this to be stringent. You don't need any schooling to become ASC Certified mechanic, just take a test, no limiting factors for how often you need to recertify, or if you fail it so many times you need to school/train. At least in Canada you need to go to school, and then be a journeyman for a number of years before you can actually be a mechanic.

To really fix it we need a non-profit group to be in charge of the certification, preferably one who can be held accountable for failure due to their certification. My removing the incentive for profit we make it so the Medical industry won't try to control it, the insurance industry to mitigate their requirements, and government from trying to have political agendas pushed.

I have more that I would love to put in here but my employer has opinions that might differ from mine, and can be directly involved with some things that the law can impact.

Re: New York Senate passes Right to Repair bill

#176

What would be the best argument against this sort of legislation?

1. This law is extremely broad and covers any "digital electronic equipment". Since everything has a computer in it nowadays, it's hard for a person to even understand what industries this covers.

This is unnecessarily much broader than the original intent. Right to repair was mostly pushed for by computer repair shops, who mostly work with consumer electronics. The New York lawmakers acknowledged there was some problem with this, that's why they excluded everything medical or automotive. But every other industry is still effected and it will have unintended consequences. They excluded only cars and medical devices, but did they still intend for this to apply to boats, planes, construction equipment, missiles, building access management, even pipelines?

The Colonial Pipeline must have some "digital electronic equipment" that controls it. How likely is it that if all the maintenance manuals for that stuff are released, people will find some security-by-obscurity there? Computer repair shops are not going to repair oil and gas pipelines, so is there any reason these manuals need to be made publically available?

2. Everything this law requires is going to be made public, it won't just be for independent repair shops, and that may not be in the public interest. The law acknowledges that for security-related information, there may be a reason not to make it publically available. It says that "such documentation, tools, and parts may be made available through appropriate secure release systems." But they can't actually enforce that. The law says that manufacturers have to provide these maintenance manuals for free to any "independent repair provider", which could be a 1-person company, and the right to repair folks already stated they want to dump everything online. So all this confidental information will get leaked immediately and there's nothing the manufacturers will be able to do about it.

3. Security. For electronics, security-by-obscurity is all over the place, you can find it everywhere. Devices always need some privileged mode for things like testing, administration, or maintenance, and it's hard to do that securely on processors that are as cheap as possible for business reasons.

Consider e.g. building access control, like the keypads on apartment buildings. These have a need for someone to be able to unlock the door in unusual situations, e.g. for maintenance, building administration, or for firefighting. Instead of a TLS stack, they probably have some obscurity-by-security keycode, like pressing #12345 to enable the maintenance mode. This would be documented in a maintenance manual and not provided to most end users. When the right to repair folks dump this manual on the internet, it's going to help criminals a lot more than repair shops. Repairs to apartment keypads are rare, but thefts from apartment buildings are very common.

This same thing will happen with a million other devices that no one has thought about yet. If the manufacturer created some features that the user is not supposed to access, there's probably a reason for that. But all this stuff will be recorded in maintenance manuals, and making it public won't really benefit users as much as it will harm security.

Re: New York Senate passes Right to Repair bill

#177
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you rather have amateur repairs being done by someone who has access to proper documentation or by someone who does not?

This assumes that the first party seller is competent, motivated and capable of using their first party documents to good effect performing repairs. Consider the Apple Genius bar for an easy counter example. edit: may have misinterpreted what you wrote. Nobody should have to have amateurs perform repairs, whether they are first party or not.

Nobody should be forced to use an amateur, certainly. I'm saying that if you can't afford a professional repair, you want the amateur to have access to the best information available, whether that person is you or someone else.

Re: New York Senate passes Right to Repair bill

#178
post #172
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given the cost of medical care in this country although in this specific case in example, if the country you're talking about are the US, having access to the $500 motor only means wider profit margins for the hostpital, not necessarily lower bills for hospitalized people.

You do understand the reason why US has such high health care cost is because the only player getting screw is the payer, also known as the patient.

yes, but nah.

the reason the US has such high healthcare is because healthcare is both private and paid-by-insurance.

a lot of other nations have free healthcare, both in the american continent and in Europe.

Re: New York Senate passes Right to Repair bill

#179
post #178
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do understand the reason why US has such high health care cost is because the only player getting screw is the payer, also known as the patient.

yes, but nah. the reason the US has such high healthcare is because healthcare is both private and paid-by-insurance. a lot of other nations have free healthcare, both in the american continent and in Europe.

> the reason the US has such high healthcare is because healthcare is both private and paid-by-insurance.

Lots of countries have combined public/private systems and get equal or better results with lower per capita and per GDP expenditure than the US.

The US has expensive healthcare because it has an exceptionally poorly designed public/private system, not because it has a public/private system.

Re: New York Senate passes Right to Repair bill

#180
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's "digital electronic product...found in medical settings", I'd imagine

It's comma soup, there's no way to parse this reliably.

The sole "and" combined with the bill's use of "digital electronic product" outside of section four makes it fairly clear that it's only discussing medical devices. "You have the right to repair digital electronic product's except digital electronic products" doesn't make much sense.
Post reply on HN