All 50 States Have Now Introduced Right to Repair Legislation 46
All 50 U.S. states have now introduced some form of right to repair legislation, marking a significant milestone that "shows the power of the grassroots political movement," reports 404 Media. From the report: Thursday, Wisconsin became the final state in the country to introduce a right to repair bill. So far, right to repair laws have been passed in Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota, Colorado, California, and Oregon. Another 20 states are formally considering right to repair bills during this current legislative session. The rest have previously introduced bills that have not passed; so far we have seen that many states take several years to move a given right to repair bill through the legislative process. iFixit's Kyle Wiens said covering the entire map is a "tipping point" for the movement: "We've gone from a handful of passionate advocates to a nationwide call for repair autonomy. People are fed up with disposable products and locked-down devices. Repair is the future, and this moment proves it."
Repair is the future... maybe (Score:5, Interesting)
Repair is the future, and this moment proves it."
Well we've already seen Automobile companies refusing to abide by right to repair laws and opening challenges in court. It's going to be a long road if the corporations don't want to, and it's not clear that the politician support is there to drag companies kicking and screaming.
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Why not comment on the inefficiencies incentivized by economic "efficiency", i.e. why is it economically more efficient to make you buy a new widget and engineeringly efficient to make widgets easy to repair?
Re:Repairing menstrual cups is the future... maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
why is it economically more efficient to make you buy a new widget and engineeringly efficient to make widgets easy to repair?
Because they get more money selling you a new $1,000 skate board only they make than selling you a $30 battery that anyone can make.
Oh, you mean why is it more efficient for the buyer, not the seller! My bad.
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Did you just say producer economic efficiency leads to user inefficiency?
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Short answer, we are optimizing for the wrong thing.
Long answer: Because efficiency is defined on what you are trying to optimize. Economists measure everything in money because utility is difficult to judge. Buying a new thing means more money so its more efficient at creating money. If I fix something then much less things are produced so less GDP. If I put up a sign in a park saying $10 to enter I am increasing GDP although nothing of value has been produced, even though I have to expend resources collec
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Of course, they also skip over losses. If a $1 part in my flatscreen fails, I can save hundreds in value if I can buy a new $1 part and put it in using $20 worth of my time. It seems about half of our economy now is running on the broken window fallacy.
Re:Repair is the future... maybe (Score:4, Interesting)
I feel the same way it is going to be really difficult to legislate in a way that really matters. I mean don't get me wrong, to have some law that protects my right to repair things like small appliances.
Mostly though you can still fix a toaster or a microwave oven if you are really determined to do so. Even a lot of these things have micro controllers and what not in them and the code isnt available, in a lot cases you can find something that will work on alibabba etc, or even bodge up something on your own with ESP32 or similar.
Its the expensive safety critical stuff like large appliances and cars where i don't really want make my own. I'd hate to get the logic the cuts off the gas on my furnace wrong, or two months later discovering just connecting that CMOS logic to TTL wasn't as 'ok' as I thought it would be in practice. These is where we need actual laws to help, so that real engineered replacement parts are availible. The trouble is manufactures that don't want to play nice can still make it prohibitive.
FCA cars are a great example. They'll happily sell you a replacement door handle with the keyless entry sensor and everything. Guess what happens when you install it. It works just fine...but your odometer will blink constantly because you need a 'proxy alignment', which AFAICT just tells the computer to calculate and store some new hash of the ids/serial numbers of the connected equipment, but it is a privileged operation that you can't do unless you have the dealer tools, or one of the models people on the internet have cracked.
Manufacturers that want make are going to find ways to do so. Stopping them will be an unending game of legislative whack-a-mole, that won't help consumers already stuck with an unrepairable item because ex post facto rules, or likely cause legislation so difficult to comply with it will have a lot of unintended consequences for anyone trying to enter markets. I am glad legislators are trying, I hope they succeed but I am pretty pessimistic government can really address this effectively.
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... with a soldering iron. The right to repair. It's MAGA and all that. Fully supported by your President and the Corporate Oligarchy, I doubt They believe in MAGA for them but you have to pay for it.
As promising as this news is, I was going to post something in the same vein as you did, in recognition of the new regime in the US. And I was prepared to be modded down as you have been, probably because it's considered Offtopic.
But let's get real here: as good as the news in TFA is, Right to Repair initiatives can be overturned on a whim by a federal government which simply doesn't recognize nor adhere to court rulings which don't further its own agenda. So discussing the merits and the ins-and-outs of Rt
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Well, yeah.
At any time in history, a regime may choose not to follow laws and procedures, until they're stopped.
No mandate to make it easy. (Score:5, Insightful)
As I read it, the legislation mandates part availability, instructions, and the banning of technical locks that prevent otherwise identical parts from pairing with the whole device. What it does not do is mandate changes to design to make it easier to repair. So phones that have a high chance of being destroyed during battery removal are still okay. But... that's probably enough. Just make it possible.
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I'm actually all for the adhesive on phones. Waterproofing a portable computer that is not cheap and goes everywhere is worth doing. The tools to do it right are currently expensive and probably because phone makers hold back a lot of information.
Apple's "self-repair" option for phones involves a 79-lb kit [theverge.com]. But it has a heat station with custom-rigging to match the frame of the phone (with heat conducting copper embedded to match the location of the adhesive). And a similarly custom-rigged press to al
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> Why hasn't the free market stepped up?
Becuase people are told what they want and are idiots.
Which is why regulation is needed to show people a better way.
Which you clearly as a troll already know.
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I fear we are heading towards a "Throw away everything after two years' life society". This will be extremely bad for the environment. but business don't care. All they care about is that "Recurring revenue stream"
Apple and others could ultrasonically weld the phones case shut preventing it from being repaired in any meaningful way. They could also add a switch which if the case is opened, blows fuses in the chips which render the phone inoperable.
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I'd argue that for smartphones, the "recycle it after 2 or 3 years" philosophy is already firmly entrenched in consumer psyche and has been for the past 8-10 years or so. For things like laptops, it's probably more like 3 to 5 years.
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They could also add a switch which if the case is opened, blows fuses in the chips which render the phone inoperable. and get sued into oblivion? The "rest of the world" is not USA. No one would ever get away with that in Europe.
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I fear we are heading towards a "Throw away everything after two years' life society". This will be extremely bad for the environment. but business don't care.
Businesses don't care because people don't care. People buy new TVs every 4-5 years just for the cool factor of the new plasma/LCD/LED/OLED UHD/4K/8k 32" 50" 60" 72" etc., even though you absolutely can watch shows on any TV from 20 years ago. TVs have no discharged battery pack, no dirty rusted charging port forcing them to buy a new one. People eagerly go out and pay the $1500 premium price for the newest one on Black Friday just because they can, and credit card deficit spending is the basis of every fir
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Buy-N-Large, you might be right.
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I fear we are heading towards a "Throw away everything after two years' life society". This will be extremely bad for the environment. but business don't care. All they care about is that "Recurring revenue stream"
Ah, don't worry, corporations are colluding... er, working on a solution to that problem. See, if they just make it so that you can never actually buy a product and instead you just have a "subscription", then they get that recurring revenue stream, but without any need for that constantly getting people to buy a new device stuff.
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It's also very bad for the concept of ownership. The importance placed on that is what seperates exploitative money grubbing billionaires and temporarily embarrassed millionaires from actual capitalists.
For a supposedly Capitalist society, we seem to have quite a shortage of Capitalists in Washingtion.
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Yeah, and in Paris/France every Korean/Chinese/Vietnamese shop knows how to do it.
Same in Thailand.
Such a "machine" might be useful, but is most certainly not a requirement to exchange a screen on an iPhone.
Re: No mandate to make it easy. (Score:2)
In countries where there's cheap enough labor, the time doesn't matter. Eventually people get fast at it, though. In the US, there are few shops and they all do it the hard way as well. With labor at a premium, expensive repair hardware actually makes it cheaper to fix. Repair costs are still too high here.
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I'm actually all for the adhesive on phones. Waterproofing a portable computer that is not cheap and goes everywhere is worth doing.
I'm not. We waterproof plenty of other devices using gaskets, screws, and maybe a little dielectric grease. Even if they used a crush gasket that had to be replaced if you opened the phone we'd be in a better place. The only reason to do things the way they do now is for petty aesthetics.
Introduced (Score:5, Insightful)
And where it is passed it is generally diluted in scope by actions of the industry.
Why are the legislators not working for the advantage of their constituents?
(Yeah I know, in the US many legislators speak for the highest bidder.)
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Why are the legislators not working for the advantage of their constituents?
It takes time to understand what "right to repair" actually means, and why it is best.
On the flip side, lobbyists have paid for access; that is, the right to explain "their side" directly to the politician.
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And the right of the pols to accept the highest bid for their services.
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If one side is a smooth-talking lobbyist specifically hired because he is smooth talking and the other side is an angry mob (or alternately, people who are rather good like Bruce Parens, but not professionally smooth), then the lobbyist is just naturally going to be more convincing to an undiscriminating mind.
Geez...and ending slavery didn't create equality (Score:2)
That's the problem, the legislation is introduced and only in a few cases passed. And where it is passed it is generally diluted in scope by actions of the industry. Why are the legislators not working for the advantage of their constituents? (Yeah I know, in the US many legislators speak for the highest bidder.)
In my mind, this is economic justice and all justice movements take time. You end slavery, you end up with Jim Crow...it's imperfect progress, but progress, leading to civil rights, mainstream acceptance, and whatever state we're in today (complain all you like, but it has improved a LOT since 1860 and even in my lifetime).
If you prefer a more recent example, first homosexuality was removed as a DSM disorder...then it was decriminalized...then there was "don't ask don't tell"...then there was broad soci
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Why are the legislators not working for the advantage of their constituents?
They consider these corporations and their reps to be some of their most important constituents
and the corporation's management as representing all the workers of the business in their state.
Repeal 1201 (Score:2)
A lot of good it'll do, if the maintenance, as well as creating or selling the tools required to perform it, is still illegal under federal law. DMCA's 1201 needs to repealed, or else manufacturers can just slap some DRM on their products and those 50 states laws will all be irrelevant.
Until it's watered down (Score:2)
Right to repair sounds great until the politicians step in and water it down, like what happened in New York, making the laws useless. I hope actual right to repair becomes standard in the future but until then you need to protect yourself as much as possible.About 8 years ago I got tired of seeking out yet another set of fans because of the junk that retailers offer today. The motors in today's Chinesium fans die within a year or two and you can't fix them. So I sought out some really good metal fans made
The downside of repairability (Score:2)
I imagine that most here view repairability as an unalloyed good. In most ways I agree. But there is a downside, one that will be important to different people in different degrees.
Context: I work on Android platform security. My job is to protect the data of roughly half of humanity against various sorts of attack. Lots of work goes into hardening the software in various ways, but there are lots of hardware-based attack risks in mobile devices, too. Most people tend to think of a mobile phone or tablet
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Computers in general, and this extends to phones, are designed to be resilient to external attack (ie over the network), but the assumption has always been that someone with physical control of the device has access to everything unless the data is encrypted and the key is offline.
The idea that a phone is somehow secure against an attacker in physical possession of it just creates a false sense of security, and opens people up to compromise. Sure you can design the hardware to be resistant to attack but it
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The idea that a phone is somehow secure against an attacker in physical possession of it just creates a false sense of security, and opens people up to compromise. Sure you can design the hardware to be resistant to attack but it all amounts to obfuscation in the end, and it will be broken if someone has the resources to do so.
All security can be broken, so it's always about raising the bar, posing enough obstacles that it is not worth the attacker's time or money. I disagree that consumer devices can't be designed to set that bar high enough to deter most attackers. Obviously, if a major government agency wants to break it, they will, but it's possible even against those sorts of adversaries to make the process expensive enough to deter them except when they have very strong motivation.
Your claim that it is merely "obfuscati
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All security can be broken, so it's always about raising the bar, posing enough obstacles that it is not worth the attacker's time or money.
You add a lot of negatives in the pursuit of hindering an attacker, and all you're doing is sliding from "any kid can own this" to "well resourced attackers can own this". The number of people who have moderately skilled attackers willing to expend time and effort against them is probably a lot lower than the number who want to repair damaged devices.
I consider a device that is out of support and no longer receiving security updates to be non-useful. YMMV.
An open device such as an IBM compatible PC can continue to be used long after the original manufacturer has abandoned it - eg a device that shipped with windo
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If users are told that a device is secure, they will be less vigilant
On this note, marketing is also to blame.
Manufacturers won't be honest and say "this device has mechanisms which will make it more difficult to attack, but someone well resourced will still be able to compromise it, meanwhile it will be less reliable and more difficult/expensive for you to repair if it breaks"... They will advertise it as "secure" and non technical users will assume that means perfection and that they can rely on this magic security without having to be vigilant.
Any manufacturer that is hon
You have the right, not the guarantee of successs (Score:2)
As a software engineer, maintaining legacy s
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You're presenting security concerns. If you were a device maker, you'd be required to not actively prevent a user from repairing. You're not required to ensure they successfully repair your device.
Yes, but stuff like permanent cryptographic pairing of components, while certainly defensible and probably legitimately motivated by security, can also be cast as an attempt to prevent repair.
From what I've read, John Deere has been running an unnecessarily sleazy racket
Indeed.
Federal Preemption (Score:2)
John Deere et al. will write a bill for congress to pass which will preempt all of the laws the states have passed. This will be done under the name of having a "Unified law" instead of a patchwork of state laws. The "Unified law" will be written to only provide token improvements, and will attempt to keep the status quo as much as possible The banks did this dirty work at the federal level and that's why we have usurious credit card interest rates, low savings interest rates, consumer pre-dispute arbitrat