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Comment by EvanMiller | Hacker News Reader

Another possibility that hasn't been mentioned is that the purchase agreement might include some kind of first refusal for the manufacturer to repurchase the equipment if the original owner wants to sell. This kind of provision prevents the emergence of a used-equipment market, the existence of which would cut into the manufacturer's pricing power on new equipment. Requiring the manufacturer's consent to relocate the equipment would be one way for the manufacturer to enforce such an agreement.

tl;dr if you sell expensive machinery then do everything in your power to prevent buyers from reselling.

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The market isn't small enough for these tactics to work.

It's much more likely that this was a response to the very real and well documented problem of illegal exports. Another Japanese company, Mitutoyo, was caught several times illegally exporting these machines to embargoed countries, including North Korea and Iran. Some of Mitutoyo's executives were jailed for this.[1] Adding tamper-proofing and tracking is a great way to make sure that regain confidence and avoid prison.

Edit: I'm not sure why this was downvoted. A representative from Mori said something similar on the board linked to by the original article:

"Regarding the device, Weapons of Mass Destruction. Worst case for a negligent violation would be Dr. Mori himself spending time in the slammer. That along is enough motivation for DMG MORI to follow the regulation very carefully. Other reasons include all of those stated above!

btw, no need to waste time on bypassing it. It is pretty solid. We have to make it so Iran, N. Korea, etc's best can't bypass it." [2]

I think that this is a perfectly plausible explanation and don't think that the real ulterior motive is controlling resale, especially when other foreign competitors do not have the same restrictions.

[1] http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2006/09/02/news/mitutoyo-ti...

[2] http://www.practicalmachinist.com/vb/dmg-mori-gildemeister-m...

Isn't that a problem for Customs to worry about?

Then why not just white-list all the areas not covered by the embargo so customers are not required to got trough this lengthy procedure every time they want to re arrange the shop.

Also it's not very difficult to trick a GPS sensor into thinking its somewhere else as long as your signal is a lot better then the ones coming from the satellite so i would disagree with them being solid.

> it's not very difficult to trick a GPS sensor into thinking its somewhere else as long as your signal is a lot better then the ones coming from the satellite

and that's probably the reason why they include a gyro and shut down the machine if it is moved at all, regardless of what the GPS says.

And once you're dome moving it you fake your location by spoofing the GPS and call to get it activated again and none's the wiser.

A gyroscope doesn't do much besides detect if it was moved it can't tell where it was moved so you're basically relying on spoof-able input.

That's not entirely true. Early navigation was done with gyroscopes, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system specifically:

"The INS is initially provided with its position and velocity from another source (a human operator, a GPS satellite receiver, etc.), and thereafter computes its own updated position and velocity by integrating information received from the motion sensors. The advantage of an INS is that it requires no external references in order to determine its position, orientation, or velocity once it has been initialized."

One good earthquake will cause some real problems...

I find it interesting that the GPS is even receiving signals inside of a machine shop. One would think that the interference from the machine itself, not to mention the typically metal building, would attenuate the already weak signals pretty badly.

While it is true that INS's exist, the cost of a reliable and accurate one is on the same order of magnitude as the CNC Machine itself. Also, errors accumulate [0] over time in an INS (aka "Integration Drift"), such that it becomes wildly inaccurate after a certain critical threshold. Also, almost all INS's require regular calibration and tuning, [1] and are sensitive to vibrational stresses (which is abundantly present in a machine shop). Therefore it seems unlikely that these machines include INS's.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system#Erro... [1] http://www.aerostudents.com/files/avionics/navigationBasicsA... (scroll down to bottom for tuning discussion)

Again, it is true that drift exists, but you're mischaracterizing, from [0]: "these errors accumulate roughly proportionally to the time since the initial position was input. Therefore the position must be periodically corrected by input from some other type of navigation system." [0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system#Erro...

You misunderstand, I think. The gyro detects movement, and the machine becomes locked until the manufacturer decides to unlock it for you. When deciding whether to re-enable the machine, the manufacturer can verify its new location using whatever means they want.

Wasn't there a YC company whose business is to resell semiconductor capital equipment? Must be a bit of a goldmine business.

edit: Found them. http://www.asseta.com/

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