Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

9to5mac.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 377 posts

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#271

Post by shadilay »

als0 wrote: post #227
milesvp wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure it is. What verb does someone do when they collect and collate data about products at consumer reports, tom’s hardware, or even the low bar of linus tech tips? I’d say while the primary role may be journalist at most of these types of orgs, there is definitely a role for people who focus on the research side of things, and if you’re actively running experiments and benchmarks, you are definitely moving o…

What you describe sounds like the role of an analyst e.g. like the famous Patrick Moorhead

I think the role of an analyst is to draw conclusions from an existing dataset whereas research is the act of creating a new dataset.

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#272

Post by hvdijk »

alerighi wrote: post #200
hvdijk wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 11 previews do not require a TPM module, but the final Windows 11 will. Quoting from https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2021/06/28/update-... : > In support of the Windows 11 system requirements, we’ve set the bar for previewing in our Windows Insider Program to match the minimum system requirements for Windows 11, with the exception for TPM 2.0 and CPU family/model.

So I can install Windows 11 previews, then when the definitive version comes out I would need to downgrade if I don't have a TPM hardware (or if I don't want to enable it for not loosing the possibility to dual boot Linux)? It's nonsense. I want the old Windows back, couldn't Microsoft just stop making OS and support Windows 7 forever? The last Windows version that just worked, buy a license and use it, no updates ev…

> then when the definitive version comes out I would need to downgrade if I don't have a TPM hardware

Yes, if you do not have TPM hardware you will not be able to run Windows 11 when it is released.

> (or if I don't want to enable it for not loosing the possibility to dual boot Linux)?

TPM does not prevent you from installing or running Linux.

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#273

Post by [deleted] »

MrStonedOne wrote: post #262
spoonjim wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 contr…

[deleted]

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#274

Post by chrisseaton »

pessimizer wrote: post #264
chrisseaton wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The jurisdiction is Britain (meaning the UK). It's literally in the title of the thread.

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#275

Post by _carbyau_ »

fouric wrote: post #254
deadbunny wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> which would be excedingly easy to do 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 the…

While I am rather cynical about manufacturers of all sizes and their attitudes towards customers, I agree with the GP.

If this is a common thing, this should be easy to replicate. If it is one unverified reported incident in the whole world then... I have to be skeptical.

Don't get me wrong though, my innate cynicism expects this or similar via 5G to be coming in the near future. But it doesn't appear to be happening yet.

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#276

Post by tenebrisalietum »

toast0 wrote: post #124
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.

I see the value in using a TPM to protect a disk encryption key; but also the downside of it being harder for me to recover data when the TPM fails before the disk (or if the motherboard fails and the TPM is tamper resistant and doesn't want to be moved to another board, etc). For me, data recovery is more important. Boot time security sounds kind of useful, but I don't have time or desire to audit and sign everythin…

I think this is why you don't store the encryption key of the disk directly in the TPM but a "key to unlock the key" - that way you can enter a recovery code or something to access if the TPM or something in the boot path fails. I don't know how the encryption mechanics work in detail but it has to work like that somehow for Bitlocker recovery to function. I know under Linux LUKS you can have up to 8 keys and each will allow access to the disk.

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#277

Post by R0b0t1 »

alerighi wrote: post #221
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.

I don't think that is the case of any smartphone SOC. Even for questions about power management you tend to implement radio function with a dedicated hardware, so that for example the CPU can go to sleep and be waked up when a phone call arrives (for examaple). It would be too expensive to have the main CPU implement the 4G radio in software, they don't do so, it would also require precise timing that a non real time…

The MT6737 is a chip that works as I have described. The baseband is fully accessible. Even for other more common chips, like the Qualcomm ones, the AT command set is actually synthesized with shared memory as I detailed. These coprocessors are not microcontrollers, they are realtime application processors and may have MMUs.

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#278

Post by _carbyau_ »

thescriptkiddie wrote: post #226
mnouquet wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Upwards of 90% of the population of China are CCP members.

"Mr Xi oversees the party and its 92 million members — that might sound huge compared to Australia’s population of 25 million, but it is less than 7 per cent of China’s 1.4 billion people."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-01/ccp-100-years-chinese...

Honestly, that article has some shit "play with your emotions!" bits in it too but there are facts to be gleaned.

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#279

Post by jlokier »

MrStonedOne wrote: post #262
spoonjim wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 contr…

The amount of ewaste in something tiny like a pair of Airpods is... tiny. Because they are physically small.

Probably Airpods thrown away every 2 years for 50 years is less ewaste than a single laptop, and those don't last 50 years.

So does banning Airpod-like devices really make sense as a policy to minimise total ewaste?

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#280

Post by R0b0t1 »

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…

People do this all the time with routers. The FCC has been trying to require firmware signing but it has been pushed off for now because there is very little demonstrable harm.

I can go buy a bunch of passives off of ebay and make a noisy oscillator that will kill everything for a couple blocks but nobody seems to do it.

Post reply on HN