251–260 of 377 posts
It's all fun and games until your fridge gets reclasiffied as a computer.
My late 30s Frigidaire has no electronics at all...
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I feel like there's a large subset of people who don't understand what TPM does, so just assume the worst and hand wave about how it [somehow] causes [random bad thing]. In this case I guess TPM causes telemetry?
Stallman[1] and others[2] wrote about TPMs nearly 15 years ago, and the former revisited the topic in 2015. Trusted Platform Modules can be used enforce app DRM, ensuring that only "approved" apps are able to run on a system. That's already the reality for iPhones and iPads. We see desktops converging on this reality with systems like Apple's M1 which won't run unsigned binaries at all, and makes it difficult to near…
About every time something like this is placed on a consumers product, it is to exploit the consumer some way, so, no it's just bad.
There is the very rare exception of it being a product intended for the owner to lend it to other people, and the very common exception of it being disabled by default, but being cheaper to include on every product than just the business ones. But well, Windows 11 Home edition computers are neither of those.
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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.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27701977 which links to https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/bpr6xs/if_you_choo... which is archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20201003141448/https://old.reddi...
So one Reddit post with zero evidence that has since been deleted? While I understand the distrust I'll take some repeatable evidence (which would be excedingly easy to do) over a random, now deleted Reddit post.
False. You would need to buy (or just randomly happen to have) a smart TV model that exhibits this characteristic, which would be very difficult to find, as there is a very wide spread of smart TV models and features, and obviously this "feature" wouldn't be advertised. This is neither easy nor free.
You're also clearly moving the goalposts. You first asked for evidence, and then discarded the evidence because "it wasn't good enough".
Nor is this capability either technically difficult to implement, illegal, easily-noticed by the average consumer, or abnormal for companies like Samsung, which already engage in highly-intrusive ad-surveillance activities[1].
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User-replaceable batteries by law might be a better first step. Heck, maybe even some standard sizes for mobile device batteries (and while we're at it, also EV batteries... some sort of standard 'battery module' used by most/all vehicles would hugely help reuse/repair/recycling/upgrades).
User-replaceable has nothing whatsoever to do with right to repair. Zero, zip, nada. A right to repair law might mandate that any device with a battery also have the battery sold, by the manufacturer, for a reasonable period of time. That gives you a practical right to repair the device by replacing the battery, and it's well-defined. "User replaceable" is not well defined. Does it mean you need to be able to do this…
A battery is a consumable and should be user-replaceable. It might be a bit fiddly, with tiny screws and fragile connectors, but shouldn't require heat guns and chemicals to remove adhesives...
(And if we're about to replace billions of vehicles with EVs, perhaps consuming the entire planet's supply of lithium, we should be thinking very carefully about how those batteries will be constructed, replaced, reused, recycled - and ensuring that we don't let capitalism create EVs that after a few years are almost as disposable as few-year-old iPhones...)
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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.
There is also no legal basis for requiring radio controllers to have signature enforced firmware loading. If someone actually tried to write their own radio firmware and made a mistake, there very soon would be. Messing around with radio transmission is not a game. Make enough noise on the wrong frequency and now you're interfering with communications for emergency services responding to a disaster or air traffic con…
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I don’t want to pay a premium for dumb TV though. Just like a laptop without crapware is more expensive because the crapware actually subsidizes it, a dumb TV can be more expensive. But if you pick a good (quick, without annoying UI, allows USB upgrade and offline configuration and so on) smart TV and just don’t connect it, I think that’s probably a better idea than getting a commercial monitor for example.
I bought a mid-range Vizio about two years ago. Vizio has progressively made its OS more and more laggy every few months and filled it to the brim with unblockable ads. Software updates would regularly break things for a few days/weeks at a time until the changes get rolled back. When Apple came out with their new Apple TV, I bought one, connected that to my TV, and disconnected my TV from the internet. Now life is g…
I mean I don’t actually use any of the “smart” stuff. No Apps or anything. Not sure why anyone would want to? I watch my TV channels on the built in receiver (90% or more of what I watch is regular scheduled TV, I love my old fashioned TV channels!), and I cast stuff to it when I want to stream Netflix or sports.
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User-replaceable has nothing whatsoever to do with right to repair. Zero, zip, nada. A right to repair law might mandate that any device with a battery also have the battery sold, by the manufacturer, for a reasonable period of time. That gives you a practical right to repair the device by replacing the battery, and it's well-defined. "User replaceable" is not well defined. Does it mean you need to be able to do this…
But there's not much point having the right to repair if products are designed to be non-repairable and spare parts are unavailable. A battery is a consumable and should be user-replaceable. It might be a bit fiddly, with tiny screws and fragile connectors, but shouldn't require heat guns and chemicals to remove adhesives... (And if we're about to replace billions of vehicles with EVs, perhaps consuming the entire pl…
A better solution is that the manufacturer must provide battery replacement services at a cost specified at the time of purchase and only allowed to increase at the rate of inflation.
Not even mentioning the hardware bits, I have been collaborating with postmarketOS for a while now, and believe that the main thing we need to make those devices longer-lasting would be an unlockable bootloader by law. This sounds so logical (why cannot I run, by voiding the warranty, any code I want on my machine, whatever it is?), yet apparently so hard to make openly illegal, since the problem is barely acknowledg…
In the US, at least, unlocking devices is legal as of 2015(?) through DMCA exemptions, which has been huge for recyclers and refurbishers. Still couldn't get game console unlocking through, but at least phones / tablets / other devices that are locked can be unlocked and resold. https://resource-recycling.com/e-scrap/2018/11/01/digital-de...
Right to repair laws are (would be) a whole different beast, it would mean the manufacturer would have to sell the devices unlocked or provide the unlock method themselves.
In other words, DMCA exception removes a legal hurdle for repeatability, but Right to Repair legislation would remove the technical hurdles (and some other legal hurdles).
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User-replaceable has nothing whatsoever to do with right to repair. Zero, zip, nada. A right to repair law might mandate that any device with a battery also have the battery sold, by the manufacturer, for a reasonable period of time. That gives you a practical right to repair the device by replacing the battery, and it's well-defined. "User replaceable" is not well defined. Does it mean you need to be able to do this…
But there's not much point having the right to repair if products are designed to be non-repairable and spare parts are unavailable. A battery is a consumable and should be user-replaceable. It might be a bit fiddly, with tiny screws and fragile connectors, but shouldn't require heat guns and chemicals to remove adhesives... (And if we're about to replace billions of vehicles with EVs, perhaps consuming the entire pl…
There is some nuance you are missing here. Mandating some design decisions, such as "user replaceable batteries" limits the products that make be made and sold and unfairly adversely affects users with different priorities (such as water proofness, durability or bulk.)
However, there are design decisions that we should outlaw because they impose an unreasonable burden on repairability. I think it is reasonable to prohibit companies from attempting to detect non-OEM or refurbished components and bricking devices. I think it is also reasonable to prohibit companies from usong IP laws to legally attack refurbished component suppliers and third party repair services.
I think pressure to make devices more repairable could he accomplished by mandatinf inclusion of standardized repairabilitu scores so the consumera have better information available when making purchasinf decisions.