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Apple is lobbying Californian lawmakers against 'Right to Repair' bill

theinquirer.net

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Re: Apple is lobbying Californian lawmakers against 'Right to Repair' bill

#11

Post by rockinghigh »

natch wrote: post #3

The tradeoff here is between right to repair, and users having secure, trustworthy devices that will not spy on them. Put yourself in the shoes of an abused family member who lives with a hardware tinkerer who can pwn your device, unbeknownst to you, enabling further abuse (not talking about physical abuse necessarily here). Just to take one slice of the population as an example, Apple has many gay and trans employee…

The right to repair does not make the device less secure. Most vulnerabilities are exploitable via the lightning connection. And being able to change your battery or your screen will not magically legitimize "honor killings" or prevent atheists from being open.

Re: Apple is lobbying Californian lawmakers against 'Right to Repair' bill

#13

Post by EliRivers »

natch wrote: post #3

The tradeoff here is between right to repair, and users having secure, trustworthy devices that will not spy on them. Put yourself in the shoes of an abused family member who lives with a hardware tinkerer who can pwn your device, unbeknownst to you, enabling further abuse (not talking about physical abuse necessarily here). Just to take one slice of the population as an example, Apple has many gay and trans employee…

The tradeoff here is between right to repair, and users having secure, trustworthy devices that will not spy on them.

I disagree. I suspect (but cannot prove right now) that right to repair would lead to devices becoming more secure, more trustworthy.

Re: Apple is lobbying Californian lawmakers against 'Right to Repair' bill

#14

Post by natch »

rockinghigh wrote: post #11
natch wrote: post #3

The tradeoff here is between right to repair, and users having secure, trustworthy devices that will not spy on them. Put yourself in the shoes of an abused family member who lives with a hardware tinkerer who can pwn your device, unbeknownst to you, enabling further abuse (not talking about physical abuse necessarily here). Just to take one slice of the population as an example, Apple has many gay and trans employee…

The right to repair does not make the device less secure. Most vulnerabilities are exploitable via the lightning connection. And being able to change your battery or your screen will not magically legitimize "honor killings" or prevent atheists from being open.

OK it's true there are also more issues at play.

Since you mention battery, that's a big one. When Apple cannot control which batteries get swapped into their devices, their brand is at risk due to fires caused by bad batteries.

You can generalize this point to other components and quality in general. If people swap out third party parts, which some repair shops and end users will do to save money, the products end up looking bad and it damages Apple's reputation, which is valuable to them.

Re: Apple is lobbying Californian lawmakers against 'Right to Repair' bill

#15

Post by [deleted] »

natch wrote: post #3

The tradeoff here is between right to repair, and users having secure, trustworthy devices that will not spy on them. Put yourself in the shoes of an abused family member who lives with a hardware tinkerer who can pwn your device, unbeknownst to you, enabling further abuse (not talking about physical abuse necessarily here). Just to take one slice of the population as an example, Apple has many gay and trans employee…

[deleted]

Re: Apple is lobbying Californian lawmakers against 'Right to Repair' bill

#17

Post by ekianjo »

> "When an electronic product breaks, consumers have a variety of repair options, including using an OEM's [original equipment manufacturer] authorized repair network."

Yeah, it's called taxing users for the defects you engineered in the first place. Look at how ridiculous the glued keyboard fiasco was with Apple, which refused to admit any guilt in their design for several years and charged users several hundred bucks for official repairs if they did not subscribe any special warranty.

Re: Apple is lobbying Californian lawmakers against 'Right to Repair' bill

#18

Post by layoutIfNeeded »

natch wrote: post #3

The tradeoff here is between right to repair, and users having secure, trustworthy devices that will not spy on them. Put yourself in the shoes of an abused family member who lives with a hardware tinkerer who can pwn your device, unbeknownst to you, enabling further abuse (not talking about physical abuse necessarily here). Just to take one slice of the population as an example, Apple has many gay and trans employee…

So basically “think about the c̶h̶i̶l̶d̶r̶e̶n̶ gay/trans!”

Re: Apple is lobbying Californian lawmakers against 'Right to Repair' bill

#19

Post by henryackerman »

tombert wrote: post #5
benmarks wrote: post #2

> "With access to proprietary guides and tools, hackers can more easily circumvent security protections, harming not only the product owner but also everyone who shares their network" Of the many consumer insults present in this entire topic, this one really shows the ridiculousness of Apple's position.

For that matter, if more altruistic people had access to these tools, couldn't you argue that security bugs would be found quicker as well? As of right now, it's possible that there are a million security bugs that black-hat hackers are sitting on that the average person doesn't have the tools to know about. Isn't security-through-obscurity considered the worst kind of security?

Security-through-obscurity can be very effective by using it to throw up a smoke screen.

Case: you need to protect a web server. If you can successfully hide/spoof your OS/software fingerprint, an attacker won't know whether your server has vulnerable software. This makes exploit selection extremely difficult.

You can protect an already secure system from 0-day or unknown exploits by hiding whether you're running windows/linux/bsd/whatever with IIS/apache/nginx/traefik/caddy.

Of course this should not be used as an argument to introduce laws that limit the rights of repair shops, users or even security researchers.

Re: Apple is lobbying Californian lawmakers against 'Right to Repair' bill

#20

Post by [deleted] »

natch wrote: post #3

The tradeoff here is between right to repair, and users having secure, trustworthy devices that will not spy on them. Put yourself in the shoes of an abused family member who lives with a hardware tinkerer who can pwn your device, unbeknownst to you, enabling further abuse (not talking about physical abuse necessarily here). Just to take one slice of the population as an example, Apple has many gay and trans employee…

[deleted]
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