It's all fun and games until your fridge gets reclasiffied as a computer.
Aren't there already fridges that run Android?
Of course. We have kitchen range venthoods with screens and Android now a days.
British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers
131–140 of 377 posts
Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trying to find a good non smart tv is impossible now, I want dumb tv and dumb fridge
TV manufacturers are responding, often clumsily and based on their self-interest (data collection), to what consumers want. Trying to find a dumb TV is like trying to find a car without a built in radio. You're welcome to leave it switched off. Smart TVs are dumb if they aren't connected to the internet. Some may be slow. Some may have a poor interface. I'd worry about solving for that rather than expecting manufactu…
I just want a TV that actually responds quickly to button presses. With the latency you experience hitting the volume buttons or navigating menus on flat screen TVs, it feels like they haven't touched the hardware since 2002, and with the computing gains over those nearly 20 years you'd think a TV could at least turn instantly on and off like a desktop monitor by now.
Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Apple solve this by making spares super expensive and only available from partners. This is even more hilarious: they sell you a "spare part" which is the logic board, for nearly the price of the laptop. But they (1) do provide spare parts and (2) sell them at a ""reasonable price""
That's okay - if people care about this they will stop buying Apple products.
By that logic, we shouldn't bother recalling cars either since people will just stop buying the broken ones.
Another problem solved!
Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
AFAIK, anything phones can do on a hardware level can be done on more open platforms. What could unlocking phones enable evil people to do? What's one of these valid points of the other side?
Phones are ubiquitous. A phone sitting on a desk is invisible, in a way a random enclosure with a fire wires sticking out of it isn’t.
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Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Automatically connecting to an open WiFi network without being instructed to do so seems reckless to say the least. Are you aware of any TVs that are doing that?
Not directly a TV, but Amazon Sidewalk is building a mesh network in residential areas for pretty much this purpose.
cant wait until we read articles about someone using sidewalk connected unpatched TVs and fridges to mine crypto
Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Smart TVs are dumb if they aren't connected to the internet. Unless they find an open WiFi network.
Automatically connecting to an open WiFi network without being instructed to do so seems reckless to say the least. Are you aware of any TVs that are doing that?
Last I heard Samsung devices were doing this, I'll need to see if I can find the source again.
Found it: https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/bpr6xs/if_you_choo...
Ugh. Looks like the contents of the post got deleted.
But here's another example of devices getting sold with their own cellular connectivity preinstalled.
https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/01/huawei-reportedly-plans-f...
Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
My Roku-built-in TV is usable in maybe 3-4 seconds—when it's in sleep mode. A cold boot (say, if it's lost power for any reason) does take tens of seconds. Meanwhile, my dumb LCD TV from ~2008 only does cold boots and comes up in maybe 2 seconds, no matter what.
I assume Roku does not have the sufficient resources to properly equip their products with the necessary hardware to cope with their software, resulting in a compromised product that manifests as slow start times. Unfortunately, I do not see how some of these smaller players can come close to being competitive with the big players seeing how small the profit margins are on physical devices. Unless they have a reputat…
Its not just Roku. Every single TV sold is like this from every single manufacturer. They are all slower and shittier at being a TV screen than my 720p screen from like 2005. What's with that? It's like a giant cabal of an entire industry deciding that their customers aren't worth the hardware, no matter of its some Walmart only entry level TV or the top of the line thousands of dollars screen from a major brand. The only way to get a competent TV is to not even buy retail, but buy the same exact panels without the dumb hardware from the commercial market.
Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't do that because someone (probably not you) will then unlock the phone and [insert something evil here - perhaps involving the radio]
Are you missing an /s or are you saying that it shouldn't be done because it would enable e.g. use of radio hardware that goes against radio regulation? If you're really expressing concern, what do you think of e.g. modem modules for regular computers or SDR hardware?
No, even if this is not the optimal response to the issue it's at least a popular concern to cite.
Our ubiquitous radio devices only work because the invisible commons that is the radio spectrum noise floor is aggressively and totally managed. Intentional emitters can only be sold after testing to ensure that their output is within regulated power levels and frequencies. It is trivial for an end user with a high-power transmit-capable SDR or amateur radio to unintentionally, unknowingly, and invisibly pollute this resource, denying nearby devices (scaled to your transmit power and depending on the frequency/bandwidth) the ability to communicate. This could be some noise on your neighbor's FM car radio, or it could be the communicators used by emergency services.
Honestly, I think radio spectrum management is one of the greatest success stories of the 20th century - if air or water pollution were as effectively regulated the world would be a very different place! To be clear, I don't think that smartphones with unlockable bootloaders, likely reusing the stock radio binary blob, are actually going to bring about the apocalypse and set us back to the telegraph era.
There was a process where Apple or Samsung or whoever brought that device with their bootloader to an expensive laboratory to get their CE mark, and that process proved that combination of hardware and software to be compliant with regulations. That process may have involved modifying some hardware filters and EMI shields, and almost certainly involved adjusting parameters in radio firmware/software, which are subsequently fixed for the lifetime of the product. If you give end users the ability to modify these parameters, you're inviting them to break the law. While enforcement is currently highly effective by requiring this certification process for OEMs, it wouldn't scale if you give everyone the ability to modify their certified emitters. You at least have to consider the possibility that someone could create a "High Power Radio" app or OS that would make smartphones running it have higher-power, faster access to cell towers and cause nearby devices to lose connection; no one wants that outcome.
Personally, I think the harm caused by preventing this through locked bootloaders and disposable smartphones is a tragedy. However, I don't know what a comparably effective alternative would look like, and the current state of affairs has both inertia and the backing of major institutions with strong conflicts of interest, and will continue to be very hard to advocate against.
Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Phones are ubiquitous. A phone sitting on a desk is invisible, in a way a random enclosure with a fire wires sticking out of it isn’t.
On the other hand, a Pi/ESP32/whatever shoved into a plastic case instantly becomes almost as inconspicuous once again.
A WiFi pineapple in a backpack is pretty innocuous
Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers
#140It's all fun and games until your fridge gets reclasiffied as a computer.
Trying to find a good non smart tv is impossible now, I want dumb tv and dumb fridge
How do you define TV
There’s the LCD screen
A driver to convert an input (hdmi, vga, ntsc, DVB/ATSC, MPEG, HLS)
A speaker (or more), with input (from driver or not)
A control plane of some sort to control the other bits (brightness, gamma, input, volume)
It seems that people who want dumb TVs want most of that, including different inputs, but just a specific driver and/or control plane
A computer monitor will do most of this just fine, especially if matched with a separate speaker.