Tractor Hacking: Documentary About Farmers Fighting for the Right to Repair
I work in the embedded field and this drives me nuts.  I personally feel that companies should be required to go one step further and be compelled to release their embedded keys and source code for any product that they no longer provide complete support for.<p>The embedded field is strange because the lock-in is generally on the side of the hardware design and tooling.  Nobody is going to try to clone a tractor because they have the source code for it.  They also need the CAD drawings, machine paths, tooling, supply chain, etc...  Yet just about every company in the space feels that their code is absolutely sacred above all else.  Just about everything you own running embedded software that has some update functionality has a bootloader containing cryptographic keys such that the firmware patches&#x2F;images cannot even be disassembled.  For a few devices like routers, some toys, a couple handheld radios and the like, people have been able to modify them through exploits that cause firmware dumps from the uC&#x27;s memory but otherwise it&#x27;s typically prohibitively time intensive to rewrite new firmware from scratch without having access to the device schematics (and even then).  Worse, just about all these devices have some access to JTAG ports such that you could easily program them yourself if you wanted to and had something useful to flash them with.  I&#x27;ve run into so many products I use on a regular basis with bugs or simple but badly needed features that I could have easily fixed&#x2F;hacked in with access to the source code but alas, I cannot.