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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

#261

Post by MrStonedOne »

samatman wrote: post #247
bluescrn wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

User replaceable means you can replace it during warranty and have the OEM repair/replace it if you broke anything while replacing it.

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#262

Post by MrStonedOne »

spoonjim wrote: post #258
bluescrn wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

User-replaceable battery means that entire product categories like wireless earbuds e.g. Airpods cannot exist. 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.

> User-replaceable battery means that entire product categories like wireless earbuds e.g. Airpods cannot exist.

Acceptable, why turn an entire device into ewaste for a single component dying, especially one with a known limited service life, like a battery.

10 year warranties minimum on all electronics. Regardless of size and fragility. Any electronic device that can't last 10 years in service is unnecessarily contributing to ewaste and should not be allowed.

User replaceable batteries to avoid using battery life decay as a means to drive sells of "new" versions, something that causes e-waste.

To be honest, don't stop at batteries. Any component in a device that can not last 10 years while retaining atleast 75% of its "ability" must be user serviceable, no exceptions.

User serviceable is defined as any service a user can perform where the OEM will replace the device at no charge (not even shipping) if the device breaks during or because of the user servicing it during normal warranty.

Replacing a device under warranty resets the 10 year timer. To discourage OEMs halfassing it for 5 years and hoping for low warranty claims.

We can not allow companies to treat the earth like a garbage can.

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#263

Post by aembleton »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #176

"From Thursday, manufacturers will have to make spares available to consumers, with the aim of extending the lifespan of products by up to 10 years, it said" Whoah. Can you imagine trying to make sure your iphone 4 still worked today? I'm all for right to repair, but that seems a bit excessive, no?

> I'm all for right to repair, but that seems a bit excessive, no?

No. We need to be able to repair devices so that they continue to function for longer without throwing them away.

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#264

Post by pessimizer »

chrisseaton wrote: post #214
cmendel wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, so not to put words in varispeed mouth. But their claim is that Right-to-repair that doesn't give you the Right to repair what they want the right to repair is deliberately deceptive and, thus, fraudulent. The damages would be that the product that they wish to repair are irreparable.

I don't know what to tell you apart from that's not what 'fraud' is in practice. Things being not what you want and someone having spent money does not equal fraud. You can't just pick a legal term and interpret it as literal English without any knowledge of the actual precedent around it. I don't know if you think the entire legislation is the words 'right to repair'? It obviously isn't - it's far more nuanced than…

> You can't just pick a legal term and interpret it as literal English without any knowledge of the actual precedent around it.

That's exactly what you are doing. You responded to somebody typing literal English with an spurious debate about a legal term no one asked about and is different depending on what jurisdiction you live in.

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#265

Post by bluescrn »

spoonjim wrote: post #258
bluescrn wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

User-replaceable battery means that entire product categories like wireless earbuds e.g. Airpods cannot exist. 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.

'Cannot exist' or 'must be just a little bit bulkier'?

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#266

Post by pessimizer »

cameronh90 wrote: post #223
pessimizer wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TV manufacturers are responding, often clumsily and based on their self-interest (data collection), to what consumers want. No, they're not. They're collaborating to eliminate choice. The vast majority of the market being taken by smart TVs is a theoretical result of the market. The fact that no manufacturers slip in to clean up the 5% of the market who are willing to pay a slight premium not to have a smart TV is…

Literally everyone I know except for me uses and enjoys their smart TV features. Many people I know are programmers or other technical people. I think you may be over-estimating how typical you are.

I didn't make a claim about how typical I am. If you don't know non-technical people who don't like smart TVs, you rarely talk to people about their TVs (which is not unusual.) This is akin to the oft-repeated claim on HN that nobody but people on HN cares about privacy.

What people are is utterly powerless, and living in a kleptocracy that allows markets to be funneled in particular directions by eliminating all alternative choices.

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#267

Post by dan-robertson »

heavyset_go wrote: post #209
plainnoodles wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Stallman has quite a particular view on security, e.g. [1]. I think it is important to understand where he’s coming from.

I think the last 30 years have shown that, in some sense, even competent computer users can’t really be trusted to keep their systems secure. I’m not saying that the only solution is to have a totally locked down system, but I’m also not saying that having an HSM is a bad thing.

I understand that the M1 Macs get improved security from the more iPhone-like architecture but that the system is still somewhat hackable (eg there is a possibility of running Linux). So it would appear that one can have one’s cake and eat it. I think hardware security modules are mostly orthogonal to having a hackable system and companies like apple must be persuaded somehow to leave systems openable through other means.

[1] https://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/Manuals/coreutils-4.5.4/html_nod...

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#268

Post by pessimizer »

bdamm wrote: post #230
apk17 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope very much that that CPU isn't running android, though. I can't clock it, but our current TV seems to take longer to, well, turn on, than the tube tellys of yore.

The TV of my childhood took so long to warm up, you'd be standing there for at least 5 seconds wondering if it had turned on at all before seeing something. Usually it was the click of a relay and the hum of a capacitor soaking up a field that was the real clue.

My current TV takes longer than 5 seconds to turn on, and it's not even smart.

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#269

Post by netr0ute »

Silhouette wrote: post #239
R0b0t1 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You say all this as if the megacorps with signed firmware can't make mistakes.

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#270

Post by canadianfella »

cunidev wrote: post #40

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…

>why cannot I run

Can’t

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