Comment by lifeisstillgood
7 months ago
I think most “techies” know in their gut what causes this and where it’s heading - I remember doing PC repair post first dot com crash (first bankruptcy) and the amount of shit shovelled onto consumer PCs (every device manufacturer had its own weird set of drivers, drivers installers, app), every piece of software put something in there, let alone what MSFT started you out with. All of it trying to be “user friendly” whilst achieve it the opposite
We are going to see this play out in every device (car, fridge, TV) that is not locked down by the OEM (apple gets a lot of kudos and knocks for this)
Cars are going to be the front line of this war- it’s not a “right to repair” it’s “a right to have good defaults” and “no upselling opportunities” (I think of it as there are no commercial businesses anymore - just utilities who give clearly defined service that have clear APIs and endpoints.
Sadly I think the world will head towards a point where I will make a fortune selling Augmented vision glasses that remove the adverts reality …
It should be a "right to not have product forced on you." When I buy a device, whether it is a car, a refrigerator, or an application, I want that thing that I saw in the store, as it exists on the store shelf, including the features and capabilities. I do not expect that I am going to maintain some kind of ongoing relationship with the manufacturer where they get to modify my device at their whim over the air.
Manufacturers should feel free to offer updates. If the user feels the tradeoffs make sense, then they should be free to accept updates. But this business where the manufacturer thinks they are somehow entitled to mess around with a product you've already purchased from them has got to end. It's not their product anymore, it's yours.
> It should be a "right to not have product forced on you."
Even better, a "right to modify everything you own, in any way you like". Don't you like the micro-controller installed by the manufacturer? Buy another one, with the correct firmware programmed from scratch, and swap it off.
We are already well into a new era of software, in which software can be programmed by itself, especially Rust. What is missing is money transactions for software companies and their employees located everywhere in the world.
"Devices with no surprises". Retail shops in conjuction with electronics engineers put new controllers in everything and re-sell it. Open source software, auditable by anyone and modified at will.
Programs for every car, every refrigerator etc cannot be programmed by a company located in one place, not even 10 places. It has to be a truly global company.
In other words, I want your device, I don't want your closed source software.
Are you willing to indemnify the manufacturer from any liability for anything that might go wrong on the car from then on? No factory warranty once you make changes. Potentially losing access to recall repairs because of the changes you made. In this age of software the entire car is increasingly designed holistically. The engineer might decide to use a particular grade of aluminum on a control arm knowing that the controller software is designed to never exceed certain limits.
3 replies →
We've lost this game ages ago.
Its the CFAA for you and me, but not for corporate thee.
Sony was the first mass application of "lol nope, we sold a feature we decided to remove. Too bad". If our government cared about citizenry, this should have been a criminal and civil case both, under computer fraud and abuse act. But no criminal anything was done, and users go what, $20, 10 years after the fact?
If I did this, I'd be rotting in a jailcell for 20 years.
Yeah, when Fall Creators Update came out for Windows 10, it crippled styluses down to an 11th touch input --- I very nearly returned my then-new Samsung Galaxy Book 12 --- rolled back, and stayed on the previous version for _years_.
Currently using a Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 --- have to keep the Settings app in the Task bar so I can toggle stylus behaviour depending on which app I run, and use Firefox w/ a specific setting to enable text selection/disable stylus scrolling (scrolling w/ touch feels far more natural).
I'm about at the point where I'm going to make a Cyberdeck using an rPi 5 and Wacom Movink or Wacom One display....
There was an unreal lack of awareness when the Windows Ink team engaged Reddit on this issue -- talking about "legacy" apps when such apps included the latest release version of Photoshop.
1 reply →
Problem with that is that if it's an online product then the manufacturer also _must_ provide updates to keep the device secure so that it continues to do whatever they sold you in the first place.
Also, adding features on its own is great, but obviously stuff like what happened here can't be allowed to happen, and those Samsung or LG smart fridges that became advertising boards is obviously also not acceptable...
Easy to call the bullshit out, hard to actually define the responsibilities of a manufacturer in a law.
The manufacturer must offer updates to keep the devices secure, but it should never be able to force those updates onto already-purchased devices. The choice should always be with the user.
1 reply →
Ok, this is a little off-topic. I have to say it somewhere.
Yeah, The crazy stuff is that when we are out of warranty, and they push an update... who's problem is it now? Who pays? My TV gets updates I don't necessarily want (I'll have to take that upon myself to get an external device for streaming services) and it's out of warranty. What happens when they push something that causes it to not function properly anymore? I didn't break it, they did. We know who pays: we do. I'm almost fearful of bringing anything online these days. I really don't want most things I own to be connected. I find it sad that we are being sold dishwashers, washing machines, refrigerators, guitar pedals, and just about anything and they somehow need the net. It's gross. We own nothing, we control nothing, and yet we're expected to pay for it when someone else decides they don't want to continue to support, or even offer, the thing you paid for.
No, this is not what causes this. Most ECU's have a BSP package and some drivers bought from vendors, then the tier1's build the whole thing to OEM specifications. OEM's then integrate the whole thing. Stuff starts to break when you put them together. Maybe a diag is slightly different or an ECU has slightly different timing, or one of the gateways doesn't like what a bootloader is doing, or you have some weird race conditions that fail at 1 out of 1000 cases.
At least if you open a "smart" fridge/dishwasher/washer/dryer/etc, it's basically the same old cost-optimized bare-bones design (maybe one or two extra sensors for special marketing bullet point features), and then all of the "smarts" is on a control board that could mostly just be replaced (ECM motors seem to be the exception to this, and even those are straightforward to design a circuit to drive).
Whereas the problem is that cars have had computers for a long time (eg ECU, ABS, entertainment), then those started getting connected together locally via CAN, then finally they added an Internet connection for surveillance and control. So the centralizing proprietary software tentacles go deep into the car in a way that's not easy to remove or replace.
There is the black box approach of disabling network interfaces, but I could even see that going away - cannot contact network -> car cannot be sure that warranty recalls have been done in a timely fashion -> disable itself after a month until you "take it to a dealer" (or reconnect the cell backhaul).
Replacing the control board is going to cost $400. That’s most of the price of the device.
Requiring a control board swap to lose the “smarts” / lockdown isn’t really a good enough option.
I suppose the emergence of the GNU Washing Machine Control Software would be a wonderful thing, but are we there now?
I didn't say it was a good enough option. It's just one of the only self-help options we have. And my point was that it is even less applicable to cars.
I think the end customer shares some of the blame for the current state of things. Cars have gotten worse and worse reliability wise since 2010. Yet sales only continue to increase. People don't own cars any more, they simply see them as a $500 a month payment and once they get too annoyed with it, they just go and get a different one. I don't know about other manufacturers, but with everything GMC, all dealer repair shops are independent. GM does not make any money off of those, therefore they are only interested in giving you another car and another payment plan. How many times of you heard someone trash talking a specific model? "That car was a POS! I took it back to the dealer and got a different one" Yea you sure showed them....
We are going to see this play out in every device (car, fridge, TV) that is not locked down by the OEM (apple gets a lot of kudos and knocks for this)
The problem in this case is because it is Locked down by the OEM. Owners are completely at the manufacturer's mercy, and don't have the option to add aftermarket software.
It's not quite that. It's features you never asked for being forced upon you by the market with hardly any uncompromised alternatives without these misfeatures.
I live in a city so I don't need a car, but if I had to buy one, "it should not have a network interface" would be my most important requirement. "It should not have a video display" would be a secondary one. If I had to buy a car with a network interface, I would do my best to neutralize it to make sure it stays 100% offline.