What a bunch of greedy bastards. Not being able to repair an appliance/device/tool/whatever in some contexts could make the difference between life and death.
And not just in combat. Imagine if the air filter on the Apollo 13 couldn't be hacked with what the astronauts had at hand up there because it was driven by closed electronics whose brain was sandwiched in multiple layers of DRM, NDAs, stupidity and lawyers: the guys would have been doomed.
"We're sorry this Lithium Hydroxide canister does not appear to be genuine or has been refilled. Please contact Boeing for assistance and to order genuine parts."
As an aside one of the things I love about old school military equipment is the "battle short." It effectively disables all the safety equipment and limit switches and allows the device to run even though the device believes it should not. There's an extra measure of confidence you get just from seeing that option available to you. "No, damnit, RUN!"
Curiosity (the Mars rover) has a battleshort mode and when we use it there's a message that says "putting my battle shorts on." Never fails to crack me up.
Ever since the first time I encountered HDCP I have had a little fantasy about the bridge screen on the Enterprise refusing to display anything because of an hdcp glitch.
These days the imaginary recalcitrant screen isn't simply blank though, now there are ads which never fail.
I was at a local gyro shop a few weeks ago and all their menu displays were showing Amazon ads over their menus. I gave up on humanity right then.
> Ever since the first time I encountered HDCP I have had a little fantasy about the bridge screen on the Enterprise refusing to display anything because of an hdcp glitch.
Speaking of SciFi, I fantasized about a novel in which an alien species visiting our long dead planet in the future can't recover what's left of our culture because it had been all wrapped in DRM whose keys died with us. By extension, if the Rosetta Stone makers adopted the same practices, we would know squat about ancient Egyptian language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone
What I hate the most is when companies will come out and say they don't want people touching things due to safety concerns. The awful thing is that it is working.
More and more I see people saying "Oh I won't touch the brakes on my car because what if I mess up". I am confident most people could replace the brakes on their car.
It's not just repairing cars, I told a coworker I replaces the fuse in my Bosch blender and he looked at me as if I was insane. "But what if it catches fire?" was his reply.
Dragging my team to the nearest maker space for a teambuilding exercise as soon as I figure out how to convince HR to pay for it. People need to know things do not catch fire if you repair it.
I dunno... I had a microwave that came on when you opened the door... turns out it would boil water with the door closed without entering time too... Thanks GM, love the "safe" microwave that nobody can service. Replaced with the dumbest microwave option I could find.
Seems just a rehash of the same old excuse: "someone think of the children!" which usually comes from people not giving a damn about children but worried about their own interests.
It makes sense that the military would be the first organization to get widespread federal R2R protections. The US Gov't basically uses the DoD as a funding firehose for private sector R&D, so it's only natural that there would be some ground rules for companies that want to "take a drink from the hose," so to speak.
Hopefully this will serve as a "Eureka" moment for the powers that be in DC. Just cut out the part that says "but only when the military is the customer."
Many of the powers that be, particularly those with positions of influence in the DoD make their riches off exclusive contracts with the DoD with private companies they own or are invested in. Not to mention lawmakers themselves who invest in such contractors. The powers that be in DC are the problem, they don't want to fix it.
If my exmil co-workers have taught me anything its that anything and everything can be macgyver'd in a pinch. If jerry rigging was a sport these guys would be ranked competitive players.
In this case, your 'threat actor' is servicemen and 'arms race' is like, their whole thing. These guys are bored out of their mind for 95% of their career and will take anything apart if the activity gets them 2 hrs closer to a break.
Screwdrivers and duct taped on wires can be remarkably effective at bypassing switches and relays.
And having a random private stand around and poke something with a screwdriver when you want something to explode is, well, pretty much how much of the military works anyway.
This sub-thread is about "your 'threat actor' is servicemen and 'arms race' is like, their whole thing", but academic researchers at TU Delft, TU Dresden, ETH Zurich & peer institutions might have relevant skills.
See the top story on HN front page: air conditioner customer bypasses software-locked broken tablet to run Android control panel app on generic hardware, avoiding $1600 extortionate "repair" fee. Not only did they learn an entirely new reversing toolkit just to solve this one problem, they did a 10-year upgrade of their blog so they could tell the world how they did it. Macgyver would approve. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41386319
> If you're referring to the military industrial complex, I don't think this is what Eisenhower was warning about.
The opposition to the "right to repair" is coming from the "military industrial complex"
That complex is the nexus of industrial players who have become to feel entitled to anything they want
That is what they are doing with the opposition to "right to repair" and that is what, in general terms (he was predicting the future - cut him some slack) Eisenhower was warning about.
The military-industrial complex is a complex of the interactions between the military and the industry that supplies it, not just the latter. It's the industry side of the complex that is opposing it, the military is asking for it.
It is just business in general that opposes the "right to repair" . Military contractors are not exception to the rule and there's no need to single them out specifically.
We have a business culture that unhealthily prioritize short term profit at the expenses of product excellence and stakeholders.
An easy litmus test if a company is part of the complex is whether they're a defense contractor or not. The companies in TFA don't pass this smell test.
What are they going to do when they are in a real war with a capable enemy? In the midst of battle call the manufacturer and request a service tech to fly in while bombs are flying? Or maybe spend a few hours calling customer service?
That's exactly the scheme for for defense contractors, actually. They'll happily send technicians to an austere environment to do maintenance for an extra fee. This has been going on for years, but it is just getting worse.
Right, so just make it a requirement that contract repairs have to be done in battle conditions and watch how quickly the contractors now want to allow right to repair. "Sorry, you've lost another repair person, please send two this time in case one gets blown up."
"The Section would require Department of Defense procurement contracts to be contingent on a contractor's agreement to continually provide access to all repair materials and information, with no carve-outs or limitations to protect sensitive trade secret information."
"To enable access to sensitive proprietary and trade secret information beyond that necessary for standard repair and maintenance, customized license agreements can be tailored on a case-by-case basis to achieve specified repair and maintenance objectives.
Mainly because I've never heard anyone extend right to repair to software except fellow open source fans.
The average person completely understand why a farmer should be able to fix their tractor. I don't think they're likely to extend the idea to software.
Having worked on DoD projects, often procurement processes change and ask for impossible stuff or things companies won't sign into. Then the sides go back and forth to make the legalese agreeable.
I posted quotes above from the document. I would not agree to those terms either, for exactly these reasons.
That you don't think something could go the way you think isn't enough to make a company sign on to a legally binding contract.
There's zillions of little defense contractors. I've dealt with many, many 2-man shops even (many of which failed).
One of many ways this happens is they supply the prime contractors. Another way is through programs like SBIR, which has ~7500 to 10,000 awards per year to companies max size 500 (but most much smaller). https://ssti.org/blog/useful-stats-2020-sbirsttr-awards-stat...
Any one of these companies may become a supplier. I worked ~20 yrs for a 50ish person company that was a supplier the entire time. As such, and doing SBIR pitches, I competed with many tiny firms, many of which were also suppliers.
So yes, they can go out of business, from the 2-person shop to the 10,000+ person shop, just like any one else.
Simple answer: the people doing the buying aren't the people that are using.
Slightly less simple answer: the amount of red tape around getting contacts is obscene, so the DOD has severely limited the number of places it can go to buy many bits of kit. There's a lot of incestuous relationships between the military and the companies that supply it as well.
On the one hand, that's not strictly a bad thing. A former soldier knows rather well what it's like to be in the field, and supporting veteran run businesses is a good thing to do.
On the other hand, what's more often the case is desk jockeys move into lobbying positions and / or join the large corporations after they put in some time and the network effect takes over in a rather invirtious cycle.
There are literally consulting companies that exist to help you navigate the red tape to get contacts, because doing it on your own means losing to the big names (often for whom the very contacts themselves are tailored to).
> Simple answer: the people doing the buying aren't the people that are using.
This doesn't work at all. The logistics desk jockeys also benefit financially from right to repair. The rest of your post doesn't really have anything to do with the user/buyer divide, at least not the way we usually think of it.
The rest of the post absolutely does, in that it explains why the people doing the buying aren't considering the needs of the people doing the using. It goes further to explain why their interests actively work against the kind of competition that might be inclined to offer right to repair as a selling point.
I also highly doubt anyone doing the buying are having either their performance or their budget impacted by the cost of repairs. Those are certainly separate budgets, and the DOD has never passed a financial audit; for the last six years, it hasn't been able to provide auditors with enough information about its $4 trillion in assets to even form a qualified opinion.
Did you know medicare is unable to negotiate drug prices and usually pays through the nose to pharma companies on behalf of medicare beneficiaries? The Biden admin managed to negotiate down less than 20 drugs and this was hailed as a progressive victory which just highlights how broken it is.
This for me is the strongest argument against single payer healthcare in America. As long as bribery is considered free speech, nothing where the government is the single payer (like the DOD is for military equipment and goods) can ever work without extensive graft. Repeat for things like roads, geneal infrastructure, the list goes on.
With Warren on this proposed legislation whatever the pain for vendors. Lock-in on service might be acceptable during peace but not at all in combat. Slightly ironic that this should apply with equal force to code.
Pretty sure they mean what they said. "Lock-in" in this context typically refers to "vendor lock-in" which is a common practice among unethical corporations selling products or services. They will often use underhanded tactics and "dark patterns" to psychologically or physically (through hardware means) to lock an "end user" into the forced usage of that vendor's product, while making it as painful / inconvenient as possible to switch to any possible competitor.
For some time, a contract winning strategy has been to underbid on the hardware and make most of the profit on the long-tail service contract. Eliminating that business model will raise prices a little bit on hardware, but net savings would likely be significant.
Slightly tangential, but I would love to see a scifi scenario of (fictional) USA vs something like Russia, where the premise is that the "rugged, lower economic power" enemy beats the US because complacency that lead to buerocratic mess, such as army of lawyer the size of the military, no right to repair, privatized medical care for military and heavy lobbying & private media propaganda creating a political gridlock.
I think there's many underdog scifi stories of the guerilla freedom fighter vs big (inflexible) government, but most of them from the pov of the underdog.
I'd love to see a from the view of a corporate middleman seeing the house of card crumbling, not because military but because buerocratic mess, and they would've won the war decades ago if the army of lawyers wasn't there
You might get something similar from reading accounts of the Chinese intervention in the Korean war. They were actively winning territory against the UN/US forces.
The (CCP) Chinese were a "rugged, lower economic power" opponent and the UN/US had much better tech, including nukes.
A lot of the Chinese ruggedness came in the form of being willing to tolerate immense casualties and having strong internal media control. Sad but effective solutions to the healthcare and propaganda issues.
I think that's a common scenario in historical fiction depicting conflicts between upright barbarians and decadent empires. The empire could easily crush the barbarians, but it's too preoccupied with internal politics and power struggles to do so.
> "I hope the Military is allowed to repair their equipment. In a war, that ability is mandatory."
Even more than the right to repair, a lot of stuff designed for use in war should be designed right from day one with easy repairability (and if necessary "Jerry-rigging" it) in the field first and foremost in mind during the design process (as often was the case at some point in the past). Anything less risks human lives.
>Without that money, the US economy would collapse over night.
But that money would just get spent by other government agencies, or the taxpayers, right? And if the military vendors aren't efficiently using that money, then society would end up better off if they (the military vendors) weren't spending it.
Depends on how the money was disseminated. Money only goes into the economy if it’s spent. If you give 1 person 2x as much money they don’t buy 2x as many cars, pairs of shoes, and iPhones. Wealthy people tend to save their money.
Imagine if Boeing, Northrop, Lockheed, Raytheon, general Dynamics (I could keep going) all shut down. Ignoring the what, million+ people out of jobs, the second and 3rd order effects would be astronomical. Vendors of contractors, vendors of vendors of contractors, internationally, all lose their revenue streams.
There would be no time to recover. Phase it out over 10 years, I mean maybe then it wouldn’t be a complete collapse, but fuck would
It be ugly. Oh and at year like… 8, the USA gets okie-doke’d and in 3 generations everyone is speaking !english.
How is this legal in the USA today? With a debt of $34 trillion, and military being the primary financial burden?
Get all the way out of here with this. Any company that is lobbying against right to repair should have to pay a fine per item that breaks. After a certain breakage percentage, their ability to obtain future government contracts is revoked for a period of 1 year, and for repeated infractions revocation is 5 years.
The Military is actually the ~5th biggest contributor to the current national deficit, behind social security, interest on the debt, and various health programs.
The largest contributors to the debt over the last couple decades have been stimulus packages and tax cuts.
Interestingly, you're both right, but most people don't understand how government spending works. There's two main categories of spending - discretionary and mandatory. Discretionary spending is the budget submitted by Congress where they allocate money to various things. Mandatory spending is compulsory and done without a vote or manual appropriations. Things like social security, pensions, medicare, and so on are mandatory. Discretionary is military, education, housing, transportation, and so on. And, of this spending, military is, by far, the lion's share of it all. So each dollar spent on a bomb half-way around the world is one less dollar that could have been spent on e.g. education, infrastructure, or housing - which are predominantly discretionary.
And notably, discretionary budgets are relatively small, contrasted against the overall budget. In 2024 the entire discretionary budget was "only" $1.8 trillion. So things like "just" a hundred billion might seem fairly small, but are in reality a substantial chunk of all our discretionary allocations. Then there's the military, which eats up nearly a trillion dollars of this spending. In 2024 it was $886 billion, which does not include the spending on various wars around the world.
I think the naming on the split is a little disingenuous. It's "mandatory", but it's still just laws. I get that the funding is decided differently, and I'm not making any claim one way or the other regarding whether Medicare, ss, etc should be changed, but it isn't like there's some law of nature we can't adjust if we wanted.
If you think of the government like a business, Social Security and Medicare are like pensions. Should companies be allowed to include pensions in their operations budget, or should pension planning be entirely separate?
I can guarantee you that if companies were able to include the pension fund in their operations budget there would be a massive increase in pension shortfalls as their reserves get raided for operations expenses. The whole strategy of including "entitlement" spending in the budget conversation is a part of a conservative plot to get rid of Social Security and Medicare. That's why we shouldn't include it as part of the budget.
This is ridiculous. Imagine you're in the middle of a battle and you need to get an okay to fix something outside of an approved/certified repair outfit?
That would be a physical DDOS attack with severe consequences.
I hope, one can hope, the brass, despite any consequence to their kickbacks, care a little about the grunts on the ground who would be exposed to the consequences of this nonsense and quash this unpatriotic grift.
This is mercenary attitude --which if you're dealing with mercenaries, you can expect, but your own people and companies? That's... insane.
No need to imagine. It happens. There are plenty of stories from GWOT where field reps evaced to Dubai while the parent company negotiated new terms.
Its a complete disgrace.
Simple solution: Only let contracts where verifiably senior company technical employees are to accompany equipment in war and peace, and to have all technical data in their possession, verified unencrypted.
After they're all dead, the president signs an executive order confiscating all on-site data and equipment, and authorizing military to repair. This would also be spelled out in the contract.
Admiral Rickover's solution for the U.S. Navy submarine program was to write into the contract having company executives on the boat for its first dive.
All that means is that you buy stuff from people who cannot properly assess risk and everyone dies from stupid, predictable, known issues, like with OceanGate.
What ACTUALLY fixed the submarine program was SUBSAFE, a quality assurance program that mostly generates paperwork and instructs you to check things over and over.
My understanding was that SUBSAFE was put in place first, but executives insisted on just pencil-whipping the requirements --- until the requirement that they went down on the first dive was put in place --- at that point things were taken a bit more seriously.
I’m not sure why anyone would want to handle field repairs where a rocket can blow up your entire operation at any time. Or maybe have some other type of repair in mind. In for a penny, in for a pound, bros.
I didn't expect someone else to say this, but that is my first thought. If I became supreme leader overnight, I would place a lot of people behind bars, and these guys would be among the first. It's pretty outrageous how much society tolerates the leadership class.
I vote ravenstine for "Supreme Overlord of Earth" 2024! (Be awfully hard to really do much worse than the "leaders" we've currently got in charge or on offer to choose from, yeah?)
Whoever s/he is, ravenstine couldn't possibly be worse than the world's current crop of leaders. It's not a bad idea; perhaps just make it a limited 5-year (or 10-year, or whatever) term, so that if the power goes to his/her head, the damage will be limited.
> - ravenstine: "If I became supreme leader overnight, I would place a lot of people behind bars, and these guys would be among the first. It's pretty outrageous how much society tolerates the leadership class."
> "Nah! I think the CEOs should be the first ones sent into the combat front line zones."
At least then they'd be able to (somewhat) justify their insane "pay packages", "golden parachute" and "bonuses". CEO: "I risked my life for that money!"
[saying without prejudice, just using real example to illustrate the power of tech company, or even a single person like in this case, behind locked-in tech]
Back then Elon Musk refused to turn the Starlink on on the Black Sea and the Ukrainian drones weren't able to perform the planned attack on the Russian Navy ships there (the situation later was rectified by Pentagon itself directly contracting some of the Startlink terminals or something along these lines)
In general the modern weaponry is very complicated and Western tanks and artillery systems would be transported to Poland from Ukraine for service and repair. I think recently they tried to establish a repair base in Ukraine, yet i'm wondering whether the growing complexity of the hardware may make the "right-to-repair" issue closer to moot in larger part. I mean the right-to-repair in civilian case allows independent companies to provide repairs, while i don't see any practical way for such independent companies in the military case.
The way things go there would be almost no people in the field, just drones of all kinds and occasional stormtrooper teams in extremely expensive stealth cloaks. Basically no human would be able to exist in the environment with several thousand drones per kilometer. And I don’t think much of these drones are going to be repaired , more like smartphones - nobody repairs them.
By the way, extremely important part, becoming even bigger and more important - the massive scale battlefield data intelligence gathering, including from all those drones, processing and targeting is done in Ukraine by Palantir in major part by their people deployed there. There is no real right-to-repair or ability to repair in the field when it comes to such software (or to communication networks like Starlink). With that background it is really small peanuts, which will take all the attention away from important things, whether soldiers can replace on their own an RFID-ed DRM-ed valve in the howitzer blowback hydraulics.
Elizabeth Warren being in the DoD’s corner on basic serviceability of equipment critical to the sustained warfighting capability of our military against an industry flexing DRM was not on my late capitalism bingo card.
For those who believe in the politics circus, wouldn't this be a much better female president candidate compared to Hillary Clinton (first declare independence from Britain then go back to kings and queens?), or Kamala Harris?
I suspect the parent is referring to a distressing trend of mean reversion: we’re really running the motor on all cylinders to elect people to high office based on what family they hail from, a phenomenon that dates at least as far back as 2000 (and there were the Kennedy family, and before that…).
It has precedent for about 10 thousand years before that, but we were moving in the right direction on it and we’ve reversed course.
Yeah, I also suspect(ed) it's something like that. But then it's pretty weird of Dr Chemicals-as-food to single out Mrs Clinton like he did. The Bushes are a much more blatant example.
I think that of everyone notionally on the taxpayer’s payroll that Lina Khan is the most effective, tenacious, old-school pg “relentlessly resourceful” badass in practice in public life in the United States.
I have no idea if her being a woman is anything to do with it, but if we put someone like her in high(er) office we’d get a woman and a hero as president in one stroke.
Elizabeth Warren is quite an effective advocate for the people herself as well.
It's very much in character for her. She's been supportive of consumer rights and protections for long time. She's got a long history of being anti-DRM and pro-right to repair.
It feels like the military is well into pushing back in a lot of ways. "Modular Open Systems Architectures" ((M)OSA) is a buzzword you can't go ten pages through a proposal or strategy doc without running into, after years of the military enduring the same locked down IP shit the rest of the world has been mixed in for decades now. And the military seems to be one of the few places opening up expectations that this unevolvable hell isn't good enough.
One particular write up that really got me was just a brief part of the extremely long & sad ProPublica write-up on the Litoral Combat Ship (LCS). The part about the sailors not even having physical access to a computing center was off the wall madness to me, really epitomized & made real to me a certain despairing level of madness that unregulated capitalism tries to steer humanity into.
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-navy-spent-billions-l...
It's not entirely clear how much remedy we're getting from this (M)OSA kumbaya, what are the bigger successes & failures or what technically it looks like (would so love to be able to see how the Arsenal of Democracy is coping with the corporate raiders within), but there's at least strong lip service to change, mutual recognition that systems need to be flexible & reconfigurable & adjustable & modular, which is something.
>>>> that unregulated capitalism tries to steer humanity into.
What part of this economy seems unregulated to you? What a ridiculous notion talking about military contracts no less.
You couldn’t be more far off from finding the source of problem then just mindlessly throwing in a dig at capitalism, the way the government awards contract is anything but competitive or capitalistic
