New York Senate passes Right to Repair bill

That is a totally different story! No, I for one am not okay with that at all.

That’s the risk you take on with promoting right to repair.

It’s be better if we had stronger consumer legislation globally that forces manufacturer responsibility rather than demand we can do the job ourselves.

Imagine if you bought a laptop and the battery died after 2 years and the state mandated option was for the manufacturer to buy it back at 60% of the original value because it didn’t last the prescribed 6 year life span. Removable batteries would appear overnight in everything.

Imagine that at the end of the useful life the manufacturer had to buy it back for 20% of the value to recycle it. Global trash heaps would disappear overnight.

I'm tired of my closet of broken devices, too. But I'm also tired of my closet of perfectly working devices, which the manufacturer just up and decided to no longer ship software updates for. Hardware that's totally functional as the first day I bought it, except 1. with software that no longer does what it's supposed to because backends have been turned off, and 2. the device will be 0wned instantly if I ever connect to the Internet.

We need mandatory bootloader unlocking for products that the manufacture finds unprofitable to ship software updates for.

The attack scenario is, that the mobile just listens to you via the microphone and saves it - and later when normaly turned on, sends away all the data. All of this on a very low hardware layer, so no need for complex cpu operations or engage with the OS(in case of turned "off"). So very low power demand.

And it would also not show up, in anyone doing radiotraffic/wlan analysis.

So it would be indeed very hard to spot. (don't have the sources, but I think on some defcon was a talk with proof of concept about this)

So if anyone thinks, he is a specific target of some powerful intelligence agency, (like someone strongly engaged with the opposition in Hong Kong) - I think they definitely should consider this scenario as a possible one (but I don't know how likely it actually is, probably not high, if your are not considered a leader).

But that this change for non-removable batteries in general was made, so that even the paranoid part of the population can be tracked non-stop by the global Illuminati ... is indeed very much tinfoil area.

But the part about your phone maybe spying on you, when you think it is off:

Well, Snowden actually said, they can do it.

https://www.androidauthority.com/watch-edward-snowden-phones...

You won't hear any here. HN, while libertarian-leaning on many issues, is overwhelmingly in favor of government regulation on this topic.

I'll be downvoted, but here's a few real potential downsides (which exist anytime a small group of people with good intentions THINK they understand a complex issue enough to fix it). All regulation has unintended consequences:

Ineffective at stopping E-waste - The main reason people throw electronics away is not because they break, but because they become obsolete. In electronics, the next generation of products is almost always faster, smaller, and more energy efficient. Hence why we have landfills full of old beige computer towers that are fully functional and user-repairable, yet nobody wants.

Dampened innovation - When you tell companies they have to build things a certain way, you remove the option for something better to evolve. Once you pass a law, it's almost impossible to get it removed, and who knows what the future will bring (eg. biodegradable electronics, miniaturization on a microscopic scale, etc)

Increased costs for consumers - baring the extra engineering/documentation costs (which aren't trivial), any requirements to supply spare parts for X years would be insanely expensive. Forcing companies to create small quantity B2C supply chains and retail channels for consumers to purchase individual parts on obsolete models would be an absolute nightmare.

Disincentivized R&D - if you're forced to create manuals that tell your competitors how to clone your products and also let them easily buy all your parts, why invest in creating something unique? You'll just be cloned by an army of chinese competitors even faster. Just sell commodity crap hardware and focus on branding.

Entrenching incumbents - incumbent big companies may simply use this regulation as an opportunity to entrench their position in the marketplace. If they can make it harder for upstarts to get off the ground, that's good for them! Anytime a company is coming out in favor of legislation and "restrictions" on their business, beware.