Minnesota governor OKs broad right-to-repair tech law Minnesota Governor Tim Walz on Wednesday signed a bill that ensures the right-to-repair most electronic products in the US state. The omnibus bill (SF 2774) signed into law contains a "digital fair repair" section that covers all digital electronic products, with the exception of motor vehicles, agricultural and construction …
The loophhole will be bigger than that. Many critical parts are manufactured on a limited time run. After a few years parts become unavailble, even to the equipment manufacturer. I was given the job of locating parts to support 10 years of repair of a unit on the verge of being phased out.Critical control chips etc were discontinued years previously. Result, no 10 year support.
How about banning deliberate handicapping of products? An experience I had with my $1000 LG Gram 13Z, which I've had for ~5 years now: I bought a new SSD to install a Linux distrib on a non-shared disk - no Windows this time - and the Gram responded by locking me out of BIOS. The BIOS prompt show a "hint", for which there exists a secret algorithm to determine the correct password, but as my warranty is finished it would cost $500! It turns out many other people over a variety of products have had the same experience. That's conspiracy to commit crime.
Sounds an awful lot like an InsydeH2O BIOS. There are master password generators online that take in that "hint" and calculate a password.
Examples include:
bios-pw.org
https://github.com/dogbert/bios-pwgen/blob/master/pwgen-insyde.py
https://github.com/let-def/insydious
Of course, failing everything, you can always read the SPI ROM containing the "BIOS" (a misnomer) then wipe the password region and flash it again. All that with a $10 SPI ROM reader clip off AliExpress or Amazon.
It is unfortunate that agricultural equipment is exempt from the bill. When a tractor, planter, combine, etc breaks-down, time is critical. A farmer can't just wait a week or two to get an authorized dealer's repair technician to start fixing. If the planting time window is lost, there is no crop. Sometimes, an alternate crop with a shorter time to maturity might be able to be planted. I'm so glad I am not a farmer having to deal with that with my tools of the trade.
People wonder why many farmers stick with old, less efficient tools: because they work, and they can be repaired when they break. Even local equipment slingers may stick with older equipment in their fleet because of that very fact.
New shiny with lots of power but stupidly complex and expensive to purchase and maintain, or older workhorses with simple parts, features, and operation? It's sad that we even have to make this distinction.
Hopefully the growing popularity and success of right to repair bills across the world will continue to put pressure on the corpos, and things might eventually get better.
As a funny anecdote, I was reading the 500 page service manual for an old TeleVideo 970, a VT100 compatible terminal, to figure out how the keyboard worked and if I could refit it for modern use (answer: not without a custom PCB or maybe firmware for the existing chipset), and not only did it contain detailed schematics for every part, but it had replacement part numbers for quite literally every single part in the entire unit. You can check out the documentation here.
Imagine if you had the same for a John Deere, farmers would be spoiled and Deere would still be making money (though probably significantly less than their repair cabal) off of spare part sales.
Well, they got the initial law passed, and by exempting agricultural equipment they avoided a huge lobbying blitz by Deere. Now a few years later as R-to-R gets established in other states and civilization doesn't collapse from it, they'll have ammunition to push back when they amend the law to cover agricultural equipment as well. Or Deere and the other tractor OEMs will see this is a Prisoner's Dilemma and one or more will defect and open their stuff, for the PR and sales benefits; they must see that the writing is on the wall.
Military equipment?!? The military write their own specifications in tender documents, so it's not that they get caught by this by accident. And if it's in the tender documents it's because someone is now richer than before....
You should have the right to repair anything you own. You may DIY or hire whomever you wish to do so, be it the OEM or the local Mr.Fixit. There should be simple language stating any shenanigans by OEMs in design or process to inhibit this is illegal. Anything less smells of kowtowing to special interests.
So, they specifically exclude the handfull of industries where government regulation severely restricts competition and consumers modifying the device to be repairable is actually illegal (allegedly for safety and pollution control reasons).
And then slap extra burdens on other sectors where repairable devices already exist in the market and consumers have decided they don't care enough to bother supporting them...
When will people realise that passing a law can't get you something for nothing? Repairable models of things are currently larger, less optimized, and more expensive. Consumers have already decided that's not a worthwhile tradeoff. Meanwhile the requirements of the law place a bigger burden on small manufacturers, thus giving even more advantage to the big guys, and yet are still so easy to bypass that the actual effective change in repairability is likely to be nil. And if it's not, then be prepared for your devices to be larger, less optimized, and more expensive... Which most people have already decided isn't worth it.
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