Hacker News Reader

Comment by RecycledEle | Hacker News Reader

We need a law, and that"s coming from a libertarian.

If the owner of a hardware device is using it, that person has total control over the device. Nothing can be blocked. Nothing can be hidden. All data must be available in plain language. That owner/user should have the right to inspect and modify everything in the device in plain language.

With today's memory / storage capacities and with today's LLMs, that should be easily implemented by starting over and reprogramming everything.

Maybe I should fork a few FOSS products and build this in.

View on HN

We need a no-tether law.

If you buy a product you should be able to use it as advertised even if you break all ties with the original vendor. Otherwise it's a service and not a product.

> Nothing can be blocked. Nothing can be hidden.

In US/EU there is a law which explicitly forbids complete access to the wifi part of any device. So that you can't modify it's maximum power/frequencies.

Any company giving you complete wifi access is criminally liable in US/EU.

I haven’t checked the laws in those jurisdictions, but having worked with a mobile radio network in the past, that doesn’t look entirely unreasonable. People don’t realise how much carnage a single rogue device (whether through failure or intentional hostile act) can cause and how hard it can be to track down the source of a rogue transmission. There is no physical barrier that prevents the normal laws of physics from applying to frequencies carrying control signalling and disrupting everyone else using them, so legal and technical barriers are all you have to try to maintain a working network for everyone as much as possible.

That is not my understanding as an American amateur radio operator. I can modify and posess any radio transmitter I wish. I can transmit within the limits of my FCC license(s.)

I admit my answer is cheating. Throwing in my ham radio license was not on topic.

We need a law that protects transfer of rights in general. It must become illegal to stop people from selling things they have, from hardware to things like accounts on various platform. Ensuring transferability brings us closer to a free market, which should take care of the problem.

Yes. And this law should apply to tickets for flights and venues.

The secondary markets law. What a lot of people and a lot of libertarians don't realize the contract law can and is regularly used to undermine the private property rights

As a libertarian, I think keeping markets free is more important than contracts. Ownership, for consumers at least, should be ultimate. We also must ban the use of terms like "buy" or "get" for things you are not actually going to own, like access to walled garden services. They must say "license" instead.

> We need a law, and that"s coming from a libertarian.

> easily implemented by starting over and reprogramming everything.

Press X to doubt. Theoretically a free market would/should solve this. That's been the dream of Free Software and hardware. Today you can run GNU/Linux on a PinePhone, or GrapheneOS or similar de-Googled Androids on a Pixel.

> Today you can run GNU/Linux on a PinePhone

and on a Librem 5 phone.

How would a free market prevent Samsung from doing this?

In his mind a free market enables customers to boycott phones with such shenanigans.

Problem is, this assumes all people are properly educated, aware and motivated which is never the case. The market can never be 100% free.

I truly free market ends in monopoly and total loss of choice. Current regulations seem to end with duopoly which is not much better.

In a free market, people choosing not to buy Samsung phones would prevent them from doing this.

But they pulled this after the phones were bought.

This is called reputation.

People will stop buying from you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com