Support for right-to-repair laws slowly grows
I am generally in favor of being able to repair things, but this is complicated and I have yet to see a good discussion (let alone legislative proposal) that takes into account all of the nuance I see as necessary:<p>1. There has definitely been abuse of cryptographic locking by parties such as John Deer. I feel that places where such locking is used only to prevent third-party repairs it should be illegal.<p>2. I feel that manufacturers should have ways of showing that third-party repairs have been done, and so enable them to make reasonable denials of warranty claims when those repairs are the cause of damage (no idea how to codify that into law).<p>3. There are cases, such as the touch-id sensor on Apple&#x27;s iPhone that are legitimate cases of cryptographic locking. Absent that there is no way for Apple to defend against hardware-based attacks without this locking, and they need to have some way of trusting technicians (and the hardware involved) who make replacements. There is a complicated conversation to be had here (an no-one seems to be having it).<p>4. Devices that are built to be repaired are in the general best-interests of everyone at large (e.g.: environmental issues), but the forces of capitalism are generally against reuse. So we clearly need some system to rebalance the scales a bit, but how to do this without killing progress seems difficult (e.g.: the system-on-a-chip makes most of the guts of a cell phone one piece, and that is the direction of better devices).<p>(edited for better spacing)