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Comment by jake_the_third | Hacker News Reader

Good. I hope that vulnerabilities like this continue to surface until legislators take notice. Morally bankrupt vendors will never stop locking down hardware unless governments get involved. Fuck each and every company that does this. Fuck them all to hell.

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While I agree with you that vendors need to be held accountable for shipping crap, we also have to beware that we don't end up in a world of devices we cannot do anything on.

All kinds of jailbreaks, no matter if for the first generations of iPhones, for consoles, or for rooting Android devices, are based on vendors implementing shoddy security. Take it away and whoops, now we as users are fully in the death grip of what vendors and RIAA/MAFIAA allow us to do.

we also have to beware that we don't end up in a world of devices we cannot do anything on.

IMHO it's already gotten a bit too far in that direction, and if there's no mass revolt (which is itself quite unlikely), it's only going to get worse. The old Franklin quote has never been so relevant... people these days are so highly valuing "safe" over "free", that they don't realise they're building prisons around themselves.

An actionable way to discourage this outcome is to use the General Public License version 3 or later, which contains "right to repair/right to tinker" provisions: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.en.html

In the United States, you can also join The Repair Association advocacy group: https://repair.org/

We're actually on the same page here. I should have worded my comment more clearly: Governments should get involved and force vendors to allow device owners full control over their devices. Not only to secure them selves from vendor mistakes, but also to repurpose the device to fit their needs.

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