Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

For people outside the US (maybe?), CarFax has no meaning, so the analogy is a bit confusing.

The whole thing make no sense. They plan to store the report on the SSD (but not just any SSD, an HP SSD), so that the telemetry is retained between operating system install. I'll give them points for doing on device data collection, but what if I replace the SSD? Maybe they don't plan on making that user replaceable, but that would work against what they are trying to do here.

Honestly if HP cared they would make the device more easily serviceable by the end users, and upgradable. Even that doesn't matter a great deal, beyond having companies slow down their upgrade cycle slightly, there's no real gain. Right now I'm looking at used laptops, but the local refurb place have apparently scraped all their laptops that are unable to run Windows 11. Without the software companies putting in a bigger effort to keep old devices viable for longer I don't really see who's suppose to buy all these old HP computers.

This reminds me of an old story about Hertz and Ford Mustangs.

Goes something like this:

- Ford makes the original Mustang (which everyone loves)

- Ford makes different versions of the Mustang (some more powerful than others e.g. the Shelby)

- Hertz had a special custom Shelby model made for them

- You could rent that special model from Hertz

- So, people would buy a lower end Mustang, rent the higher end Mustang from Hertz, swap out the engines and return the Hertz Mustang

There is actually a lot of extra detail in this article if people are interested: https://www.motorcities.org/story-of-the-week/2024/rememberi...

"People" could really use a number attached to it.

https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/legends-of-...

So... 0.5? Thanks. :)

Didn't want to party-poop, but yeah, it's mostly mythical.

The current urban legend is swapping a junkyard 5.3 for the Chevrolet 6.0 in a U-Haul truck, rent one and switch them and return it.

I guess the joke is on you if you rent one and it already has a swapped engine.

Sometimes the early bird gets the worm, sometimes the second mouse gets the cheese.

This is actually what HP is doing.

They are taking a sku without telemetry, and quietly swapping in a machine with extensive telemetry and hardware locks that they can drive after you have taken possession.

I have also heard of people swapping parts with rental cars, including tires. And apparently some rental agencies will mark their tires to make sure you didn’t swap them.

the min-wage guy at uhaul isn't checking the inner dual all that carefully.

6x 22.5 tires cost a lot more than 3x of their biggest truck rental.

Rental companies are starting to run their vehicles through booths that scan the vehicle from every angle for automated inspections

https://www.uveye.com/rentals/

Happens a lot.

Hardware store near me has a tandem axle rental trailer where no two rims or tyres are the same.

This is likely just something that corporate users would care about. Companies often lease PCs from IT service providers rather than own and maintain their own hardware. The owner of the hardware now has a metric they can point to for how "usable" a machine is after the initial lease. As a customer, I may not want to rent laptops that have been through who knows what sort of wear and tear no matter how cheap but if the owner can now show me actual data saying how used the laptop is, I may feel more comfortable paying less for used. It's like the odometer on a car, I'd never buy a used car that didn't have an odometer (even if such a thing existed). But with an odometer, I can get a general idea of how much use a car has had despite the age. Only a year old with 30k miles? Hell no. Three years old with only 10k? That car might as well be new.

I'm assuming since it writes to a vendor-reserved sector, replacing it would make the whole thing moot. The rental company wants to retain that data because it makes a used PC more valuable. Since the corporate renter doesn't own the PC, they would only be allowed to wipe the SSD (excluding this section), not remove and destroy it.

"Odometer" for HDDs and SSDs are already provided in SMART data that is more or less standatized and accessible using many tools. The data is not resettable by mortals similarly to car odometers.

Everyone should test their hard drives within the return window after purchase for these kinds of errors as it is a warning and failure condition, but there is no reason to buy a caution or warning status drive. The metrics are standardized somewhat but the interpretations of the values are vendor and model specific. I’ve used CrystalDiskInfo in the past but don’t know what the state of the art in this is at the moment and this isn’t a recommendation per se. I just have backed up a lot of hard drives, and when I have block or file level access issues, there are usually SMART errors, but not always on the vendor provided tools. Sometimes the third party tools are wrong, but I had a pretty large sample size of computers that had unknown problems which is not likely representative of most computers or computer users, but the tools were helpful as far as knowing more about the hardware to inform the user, so I can see where HP is coming from. I suspect some kind of gaming of the metrics but can’t prove this. It’s not a horrible idea, but I don’t love more failure modes. I’ve seen BitLocker issues from updating firmware without turning it off first, which is cautioned against as a possibility, but if this helps with those kinds of issues too, it will be sold as a feature for the corporate market to help with fleet management.

Sure but that doesn't apply to the whole machine. What HP is proposing is SMART data for much more than just the storage device. The only thing that would make this better is if the data can be stored in NV flash on the motherboard rather than a vendor-reserved sector on the SSD. This way failed drives can be replaced while preserving the data.

>but what if I replace the SSD?

Im guessing the brilliant part of this strategy was copied from Apple - laptop wont work with non paired SSD. No SSD you buy new HP laptop.

> but what if I replace the SSD?

Also many companies want to destroy the SSD on selling old laptops. Paranoid about security and thinking they need Pentagon level security theatre. But companies should delete potential liabilities.

But I'd never allow an enterprise SSD to be reformatted. If some old data leaked from the business and the business was taken to court, the prosecution might argue it leaked from SSDs and you couldn't prove otherwise.

Cars in the US are cheaper so in some countries they are shipped, fixed, and sold. People pay to see the CarFax to see how bad the accident was. There's a big market for it outside the U.S. surprisingly. U.S. cars can be easily identified by their yellow indicator lights. You'll see the term "clean CarFax" a lot in online dealerships outside the U.S. Although I feel for PCs it's a bit silly

> U.S. cars can be easily identified by their yellow indicator lights.

Surely you mean lack of?

One thing thats been notable with cars in North America is the dual use brake and indicators lights.

What about the front-side indicators? I was referring to those.

Because yellow front indicators is definitely not limited to North America.

Well it's one "indicator" that the car is a US one.

I heard about Carfax in a comedy skit, but that was the only case I saw this word in many years.

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