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British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

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Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#201

Post by smnrchrds »

gnopgnip wrote: post #160
smnrchrds wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my province, landlords cannot terminate a periodic tenancy except for a small number of causes, but they are free to change the rent price to whatever they want once a year. Result: if the landlord wants you gone, they just tell you your 2k per month rent is increasing to 20k per month and voilà, gone! No user protection is effective unless it comes with some sort of price cap. This is why GPL requires the source…

NJ statewide has is no cap on increases in rent, but there is a requirement for good cause to terminate a lease. An unconscionable or unreasonablerent increase is illegal

That's a sensible approach. My province does not have a cap, period.

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#202

Post by bluGill »

pessimizer wrote: post #101
bluGill wrote: post #46

Earlier 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]

[abuse children and drugs, or be racist.]

That are the current choices. That could change in the future, it has changed in the past. At one time not of the right Christian sect was in the list, today nobody cares - just one example that I won't get into trouble for mentioning.

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#203

Post by als0 »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #188
als0 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bus between the CPU and the TPM is exposed, so there are plenty of physical attacks that you can do, assuming a certain level of skill and tools.

Right, for configurations where the tpm automatically releases keys, they can be sniffed. It can be configured to only release it's secret once a correct password is given. It also rate limits I believe.

With a physical bus reset attack you can also set PCR values without any authentication, which essentially breaks attestation. Also only some TPMs have anti tamper features and security certification (best ignore the ones that don't).

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#204

Post by mnouquet »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #15
FridayoLeary wrote: post #2

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57665593 This doesn't sound very exciting to me. From experience spare parts from the manufacturer cost a fortune.

China makes spares of EVERYTHING for pennies.

which is gonna be useless if the part require write-only firmware which you cannot extract from the original part, eg. macbook's SMC.

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#205

Post by alerighi »

nerdawson wrote: post #47
ShaneMcGowan wrote: post #26

Earlier 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…

They are not. Smart TVs are slow as hell. I don't want a TV that has "to boot" and takes time to turn on because it has to load a full Android OS, takes 10 seconds to load the channel guide, have a ton of buttons that you didn't ask to open Netflix or other services for which I don't have a subscriptions to press by mistake (and each time you loose 10 seconds or so of the programs you where watching).

Really, I find modern smart TV too lagging, it's like you press a button on the remote and the TV responds even 1 seconds after, it gives you the impression that the remote is not working properly, but it's not there the problem.

A TV has to do one thing, and do it well, let me watch some TV programs, from external sources or from the aerial, with a good image and sound quality (but the last one it's impossible to find on any TV these day and you need always an external sound system). I don't need Netflix or other video streaming services, if I need that I just plug a media center PC in the HDMI port, why complicating the TV with stuff that still doesn't work well and it's slow as hell?

Speaking about car radios... car radios these days are horrible. They present you DAB radio as the primary choice, that has an terrible sound quality. FM reception is still bad. The quality of the speakers either as bad. And I'm taking about the car radio of a Mercedes car that costs 40k euros. The stock car radio of my 2010 Volkswagen Golf is far better, better sound quality, better radio reception, better responsiveness of the radio (physical knobs and buttons that I can operate without looking at them VS unresponsive touch screen interfaces that are dangerous to use when you drive).

And the worse thing? You cannot update the radio in every modern car. They destroyed the market of aftermarket car stereos, how can you replace the radio if it's not only a radio but it's the interface that you use to control all the car functions?

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#206

Post by mnouquet »

swayvil wrote: post #146
roody15 wrote: post #74

Building a surveillance state. Want direct data devices locked down and proprietary (TPM and apple T2). Want devices directly tied to the user. Want to prevent “hacks” that detect snooping or other low level background “proprietary” services that may be running. My two cents. We are rushing to emulate china.

Oh yes. The oligarchs over here look at China and think, "That's a pretty good system".

It is actually a pretty good system for the CCP "politburo".

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#207

Post by mnouquet »

crazygringo wrote: post #152
ajkdhcb2 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that it is a purely propaganda that these things are mutually exclusive. Like how all smartphone manufacturers had phones that were fine with removable batteries, but then suddenly that was gone from literally every brand in the world because it is so powerful for planned obsolescence

People want thin phones. A non-removable battery allows for thinness you simply cannot get otherwise. And while you can argue about whether thin laptops are necessary, for people who carry their phones in their pants pockets, an extra couple millimeters gone is genuinely a meaningful difference. There's no propaganda there.

> People want thin phones

[Citation needed]

My "thin" phone double in volume with the require case, so "thinness" is really a joke...

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#208

Post by mnouquet »

varispeed wrote: post #117

Why journalists don't call it as fraud? They spent money on drafting this legislation and this is not fit for purpose. But by the looks of it, big money must be behind it so it ticks the box, but does not actually change anything.

> Why journalists don't call it as fraud?

Because those who write these laws are the same signing the journalists' paycheck.

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#209

Post by heavyset_go »

plainnoodles wrote: post #90
emouryto wrote: post #16

Well, smartphones must be updated to include better spyware. And newer computers are also better locked down to allow better surveillance. So, the older ones can't break down fast enough! You don't want a repairable computer so creeps install, like, a Linux distro. You want disposable TPM machines with Windows 11 Home Edition and unstoppable "telemetry".

To be fair, TPM's are really cool from a hardware perspective. They're HSM's which can fundamentally change what threat models on your OS look like. Unfortunately, the purpose here will be to use the fact that most users use a non-free OS to turn these TPMs against the user in order to make DRM harder to break.

> Unfortunately, the purpose here will be to use the fact that most users use a non-free OS to turn these TPMs against the user in order to make DRM harder to break.

Stallman[1] and others[2] have talked about just this issue for over a decade now.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html

[2] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#210

Post by R0b0t1 »

alerighi wrote: post #193
bluGill wrote: post #46

Earlier 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]

The radio firmware is something that is at another level. Even if you end up unlocking the bootloader, that doesn't give you access to the radio firmware, that is proprietary and needs to be signed, and cannot be modified. It's basically seen by the OS as a modem to which they talk trough AT commands (yes, they are still in use), the same thing that you would obtain by plugging in an USB modem to a normal PC. For Wi-…

This is not always true. There are chips where the radio DSP cores have their program loaded into main memory and it's unsigned. You talk to them with mutexes and shared memory pages. There is also no legal basis for requiring radio controllers to have signature enforced firmware loading.

He's being sarcastic. It's think of the children but with electronics and PII.

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