New technology is eroding your right to tinker with things you own | Hacker News Reader

New technology is eroding your right to tinker with things you own

economist.com

83 pointsjs218 comments

Name and shame the companies that use those techniques, then vote with your wallets and never buy their products again.

This is a problem that will mostly solve itself, given enough time...

Oh and never get tired to tell this to others, less technical folks why they shouldn't buy X from brand Y because Z, even if they don't fully understand why - tell them to give you a call, if in doubt...

Unfortunately this simplistic strategy doesn't work in many cases, that's why these victories in court are important.

http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/08/17/432...

Exactly. The most irritating thing to me these days is Apple's policies regarding running your own code on my iPad, but it's not like any other company is much better about it (even Microsoft is getting back into that game with Win10S, despite the massive court loss it got them back then).

While this is a good thing to do, it will probably never be enough. The loss for companies from this is so small, and the potential profits so large, that no company is going to let this affect their behavior. What is ultimately necessary to make a dent in this is, sadly, regulation. Which must in turn come from a greater public awareness of these issues. So that’s what you should be spreading: awareness and advocacy on these issues.

The number of comments about this article just show you how people just don't care.

>This is a problem that will mostly solve itself, given enough time...

It won't. In this sense it's just like openness in software. No matter how much crap and unacceptable 'features' MS pushes on people in win10 (as an example), its usage will not shrink and people will not boycott these power-hungry assholes.

Same with this, the right to repair is fundamental and cannot be taken away. Yet, most just don't care and it will be taken away eventually.

Educating our children and those who we love is probably the best shot at this but it's unlikely it will be enough.

> Same with this, the right to repair is fundamental and cannot be taken away. Yet, most just don't care and it will be taken away eventually.

Therefore what helps is to encourage civil disobedience, unfortunately even that is illegal in many places.

> Oh and never get tired to tell this to others, less technical folks why they shouldn't buy X from brand Y because Z, even if they don't fully understand why

The thing is no one will listen and your non tech friends will call you a whining nerd

Ok: Tesla. Your vehicle runs at the sufference of Tesla, and that right can be revoked.

Not that I think most people will care that Tesla owns the car they just bought.

> Not that I think most people will care that Tesla owns the car they just bought.

I think you meant "paid for" not bought.

Given the choice I always go with more open...

- I have an Android because their app ecosystem is more open.

- I have an Amazon Echo because you can write your own skills for it.

- I have a Vera for home automation instead of those "Smart Hubs" because it runs Linux and I can SSH into it.

- My Firewall is a homebuilt box running pfSense

- etc

But I have long given up on the idea of being able to open up any of my consumer electronics and hack away at them.

I have an Amazon Echo because you can write your own skills for it.

Yea, I got Google Home as a gift. I'm totally baffled by how locked up it is. You're not listening to/interacting with anything by anyone who doesn't have some type of agreement with Google.

Wait does this mean I was committing a crime when fixing game consoles and laptops? No way...

Depends on what you're doing.

If you had to, for example, re-flash the firmware on a PS3, you probably broke the law. If you replaced the eject button, you didn't.

You only violate DMCA if you break some form of "copyright protection" mechanism.

How to get past the paywall?

I don't see any paywall, maybe is location-related. Anyway, do a `curl termbin.com/olua | less` and read it freely (1 month lifetime).

Open the link in a Private Browser window. This will prevent the site from reading your cookies, so it will not know how many articles you have read. Either that or find and delete the relevant cookie.

get the "self-destructing cookies" plugin. it is also one of the best mechanisms to protect your privacy

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