Of course when talking about designs, that’s about the future. After a design has been implemented, it’s too late. You can change a past design but it would only be for a future production because a design has already served its purpose after implementation. Apart from that, you would need a time machine.

But the right to repair in the EU is not just about designs. Design is only a small part of it. If a dishwasher were to end production 1 year before the right to repair law is enacted, that last dishwasher is already under a statutory warranty for another year, and likely under a commercial warranty for a year or three more. So spare parts would already be in production just to satisfy warranty obligations. There would be nothing radical about extending that since it would not have stopped production anyway. It would be foolish not to take that opportunity. And with manuals… who loses manuals? Consumers do, but not likely producers. Mandating that literature be made available for old appliances would be reasonable, at least in electronic form. The EU would be foolish not to make literature disclosure retroactive. Some EU countries will even enact retroactive taxation. If they will do that, anything is possible.

Emulation is an extremely CPU intensive activity particularly when you are emulating a different instruction set at the hardware level. If you are emulating a gaming system rather than just running that gaming system, you’re doing it wrong (from a permacomputing PoV). The simple physics answer is to pick up an snes at a yard sale for $5 and save it from the landfill, instead of blowing a wad of cash on new hardware you don’t need. Then hack that snes to do whatever you need, such as to attach a copy console. I hacked a Wii to act as a media server, so it can not only play the old wii games but also play AVI movies from the LAN via samba.

Your take is like saying: I want to simulate a nuclear fission reaction in my livingroom… these old PCs suck and should be tossed. Of course if you select an obscure and heavy task you are limited in the hardware you can deploy for that.

It has not been established on when the law will take effect. If it takes effect the day before the last sale of a dishwasher, then they could have a ten year obligation starting instantly. Or not. Those points have not been pinned down in anything I’ve seen. This law has been discussed in the EU for the past 10 years now. It could be retroactive, if lawmakers decide to do that. If the last dishwasher was sold 5 years ago, they could have a sudden obligation to provide parts for the next 5 years forward.

Right to repair means the parts can’t be drm’d to legally prevent you from repair, not that all out of warranty products must be cheap to repair.

You may be confusing US variations of right to repair, or perhaps you are just judging by the “right to repair” title. US states are ahead of the EU and have different motivations. The EU goes much further than mere new design requirements. It is not doing this to be nice to consumers. It’s part of the “green transition”. If parts prices are priced out of the market, it defeats the purpose of the right to repair. The EU is actively trying to reduce unsustainable consumption of new products and prevention of e-waste.

Here is a jan.2022 clip from the EU Parliament briefing:

In its resolution of 4 July 2017 on a longer lifetime for products, Parliament proposed a number of actions to promote product reparability, including: measures to make repair attractive to consumers; requiring products to be designed for easy and less expensive repair; extending the guarantee if repair takes more than a month; discouraging the fixing-in of essential components such as batteries; urging manufacturers to provide maintenance guides at the time of purchase; developing the standardisation of spare parts and tools necessary for repair; encouraging manufacturers to develop battery technology to ensure that the battery’s lifespan better matches the expected lifespan of the product or, alternatively, to make battery replacement more accessible at a price that is proportionate to the price of the product.

Parliament raised the level of ambition in the current term by adopting two resolutions that call on the Commission to establish a consumer’s right to repair, with a view to making repairs systematic, Right to repair cost-efficient and attractive. Its resolution of 25 November 2020 on a more sustainable single market for business and consumers and its resolution of 10 February 2021 on the new circular economy action plan both called for the adoption of a set of measures, including: mandatory labelling on the estimated lifetime and reparability of products, such as a repair score and usage meter for certain product categories, and ensuring that consumers are provided with the information on availability of spare parts, repair services and software updates at the time of purchase; giving the repair industry, ‘including independent repairers, and consumers’ free access to repair and maintenance information; encouraging standardisation of spare parts; setting a mandatory minimum period for the provision of spare parts that reflects the product’s estimated lifespan, and reasonable maximum delivery times; and ensuring that the price of spare parts is reasonable, and that independent and authorised repairers, as well as consumers, have access to the necessary spare parts without unfair hindrances.

The projector manufacturer doesn’t control those costs. The Dcd isn’t drm’d. It’s not covered by right to repair.

The Right to Repair is not limited to DRM issues. From the briefing:

New implementing acts on servers and data storage products, washing machines, dishwashers, fridges, electronic displays (televisions and monitors) and lamps require manufacturers, for instance, to ensure that spare parts are available for a certain number of years after the last item has been placed on the market (e.g. ten years for washing machines and seven years for fridges); to deliver the ordered parts within 15 days; and to make maintenance information, including manuals, available to professional repairers.

I have yet to see a DRMd washing machine.

Of course manufactures can control the costs by shifting the cost onto the purchase price. If they must offer reasonably priced spare parts for ten years, then they might have to factor that cost into the sales pricing. And fair enough, because consumers should be discouraged from buying new stuff anyway.

I am writing this from a 2008 machine.

Bad software forces people into the market for new hardware. I can run the most recent version of Debian on this old hardware with 4gb RAM just fine. I will never for the rest of my life have to buy a PC or laptop because I keep finding abandoned PCs and laptops that are faster than what I have (faster than what I need). Microsoft will exploit these consumers for decades to come. Glad I am not feeding the ecocide.

The infrastructure established by the right to repair laws will not likely be that sharply keen to deny rights on old products because there is a cost in making that separation.

Think about why Dell computers snap apart easily. The EU forced Dell under environmental law to make their PCs come apart easily for disposal. Dell resisted at first but did not want to give up the EU market. So they complied. Dell also decided that it costs more to have a separate infrastructure for US consumers, so Dell made all their PCs snap apart wherever sold globally. So rights will manifest unintended benefits.

I’ve already accidentally exploited this. I /thought/ a right to repair law was already enacted, so I requested replacement rubber o-rings citing the not-yet-enacted right to repair law. They sent me the rubber rings (which cannot be bought in stores) at no cost.

I think France has subsidised some repair shops and incentivised consumers using them instead of buying replacements. So if some particular manufacturer tries to get persnickety about the timeline, 3rd party repair shops may be willing to step in.

I bought a DJ mixer, which turned out to be dead. I popped it open and could not see any obvious issue, thus fixing is beyond my expertise. So I plan to get out of warranty repair at a reasonable price.

I bought a projector and the DCD chip turned out to be bad. DCD chips are about as costly as a whole projector. So I expect the right to repair law to force the replacement part to be reasonably priced. I have the same expectation for the boiler mentioned in my other comment.

I have 2 vaccums with broken proprietary nossle/hose and one has a broken plastic part. Both manufacturers ignored my request to tell me of a local parts reseller. I doubt they will be able to ignore that request after the right to repair law passes.

I found a vaccum with missing proprietary floor rolling attachment (so it only functions as a hand-held vaccuum). No idea if the part I need is separately sold or if the price is reasonable. But the right to repair should ensure that repair becomes viable if it’s not already.

There are a lot of things I bought 2nd hand for which the manuals are either on tor-hostile websites, or jailed in various enshitified 3rd party manual repos. I hope the right to repair can be used to force the manufacturer to send me a paper manual that avoids the enshitified web. Not sure if that will be a reality as we get more and more to a point where people have lost the right to be offline through legislation that assumes everyone is happily online with no issues.

The right to repair (at least in the EU) is being written to facilitate both people who have the ability to repair and those who do not. If you do not have the ability to repair, the law will entitle you have the device repaired outside of the warranty for a reasonable price.

If you have the ability to repair, the law entitles you to manuals and parts, and the parts must be at a reasonable price.

I had a proprietary valve fail in a boiler. The valve should be under $10, but because the manufacturer bundles the valve with many other fittings people are forced to buy a kit that’s no less than $100. That’s one thing the right to repair should solve.

Indeed those are good ideas. In fact it would be possible to solve the enshitification problem at the same time. If someone copy-pastes a whole article into their Lemmy post, then it solves the problem of getting the article out of Cloudflare jail (or other varieties of prisons and barriers).

There is a university that has its own small in-house archive. I forgot which uni. But the idea was that any papers or articles produced by students or profs at that university would naturally refer to outside docs. Of course it’s a problem when those outside references are unreachable. So the university archives everything referenced by in-house papers to ensure the integrity of the sources. Outsiders do not have the power to add a page to the archive… only to browse the archives made by insiders. Every university should be doing this.

All this only covers articles though. There are lots of web resources that need to be archived. Ideally it should be integrated into the browser. Instead of fetching and throwing it away, browsers could keep a local archive. From there, it’s a matter of getting the browsers talking to each other over Tor. Perhaps using IPFS (something I’ve been putting off looking into but seems to be part of the answer).

archive.is is in a walled-garden of its own. For a while the best way to reach NY times content was on their onion host:

https://www.nytimesn7cgmftshazwhfgzm37qxb44r64ytbb2dj3x62d2lljsciiyd.onion/

but now they have enshitified the onion. Normally archive.org is the free world way to reach jailed content. But today archive.org is under attack.

The next best port of call is normally 12ft.io, but NYT has managed to sabotage them too. At this point the only just, egalitarian and inclusive way to discuss NYT content is to either copy the NY Times text into your post, or don’t share that content at all.

What do you mean by “good”? I see a constant stream of articles about EVs being enshitified with cloud-attached surveillance tech and vulnerable to unwelcome remote hacking. To privacy advocates and tech rights proponents this means the ones designed as EVs are worse.

If you mean efficient, I’d be tempted to say the difference would be negligible in the big scheme of things. Factory produced EVs are not only surveillance systems on wheels, they are more hackable by threat agents than they are by their owners. Whereas a converted EV is likely more conducive to a /right to repair/.

The best scenario I could envision is this:

You bring your car to shop of expert converters. You watch over their shoulder as they convert it. This serves as training to know your own car. And as well to know how the power generator is built. You drive away with an open source EV that you can fix yourself, pulling behind it a trailor with a power generator, which is then connected to the charging inlet of the EV.

Okay, that last sentence was a joke, to be clear… Some Teslas have been spotted pulling a power generator on a trailer which then plugged into the car. I hope that practice of towing a generator is not actually a serious trend.

I had one of those great Iiyama CRTs – and still do, in storage. I heard when LCDs emerged that LCDs cannot achieve the refresh speeds and color richness of CRTs and that CRTs were still the best for gaming. Not sure if that still holds true. But as a kid, I embraced the Iiyama.

Anyway, I do not imagine desk space can be a reason people are tossing out LCDs.

IMO if something is particularly inefficient, it’s better off not being used if there’s a substantially more efficient alternative to do the same thing.

It’s hard to get a clear-cut measurement and compare the different kinds of eco impacts like that.

But also consider this: the avg. age of a car bought in Africa at the time of purchase is 21 years old. All these people buying EVs think they are taking a gas-burner off the road, but who destroys their car? They sell it. Then it goes to Africa where it continues to pollute for decades more.

If you dump your e-waste in a reckless manner, it ends up in a landfill where the toxins pollute ground water. Or it goes to a trash heap in a poverty-stricken part of India where someone salvages it.

If you dump your e-waste in a responsible manner, the chain of handlers will repair if needed, and ultimately get the working products on the shelves of charity-operated 2nd-hand shops.

In my particular case, I have no TV and don’t watch TV. If I salvage a TV, I would likely watch it occasionally. So I think it’s clear cut in my situation the usage harm would be shadowed by production harm. But note as well my ethical values are not limited to ecology. There is an enshitification of products and digital rights at hand as well. Buying a new electronic appliance supports the makers of shitty cloud-dependent “smart” devices that have supercharged designed obsolecence. So even in neglecting the environment, it’s an injustice to support the makers of electronic goods today.

When you host a neighborhood party and give neighbors access to your house, they will all feel right at home.

All my furniture is salvaged from neighbor’s curbs. So I think if I hosted a local event everyone would find something that was theirs.

That’s interesting indeed because only the 1st bullet would impede me from rescuing one. I avoid buying new electronics to large extent to mitigate excessive production and then disposal of e-waste.

I would say roughly ~40% of the TVs I see are visibly damaged, and I wonder if kids had destructive fun with it after it was set on the curb. If it’s damaged but the backlight works, one option might be to remove the LCD and leave the light diffuser in place, then use it as a light table (e.g. for stained glass work).

A portable testbed sounds like a good idea. Since you found a good one, I get the impression it might make sense for me to go grab battery + invertor and a laptop and test it before carrying it.

What disgusts me about this is the digital markets act names all the tech giants except Cloudflare as gatekeepers. The single most harmful bully on the block is Cloudflare. I can (and am) boycotting Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Amazon. It’s difficult for most civilians but possible.

But if you want to be free from Cloudflare, it’s impossible because Cloudflare has even MitMd public services. You cannot get public information from government sources operating on public money without Cloudflare. Because I choose to boycott Cloudflare, I have had to give up my voting rights. I cannot vote in elections because of Cloudflare. So indeed it’s disgusting that Cloudflare is not even on the radar when it should be at the top.

BTV can cause abortion, in animals? WTF? I guess they must mean miscarriages. AFAIK non-human animals don’t do abortions.

Again, I would say that should depend on statistics.

Certainly that is a recipe for marginalizing minorities. In the US there is a principle that people are innocent until proven guilty. We could flip that and say guilty until proven innocent, but we don’t because we rightfully prioritize the well being of non-criminals above prosecution of criminals. It is unacceptible to say we can harm some non-criminals in pursuit of making it more convenient for cops to do their job. It’s better to overlook 10 criminals than to harm 1 innocent person. It’s not okay to sacrifice non-criminals for the sake of law enforcement.

Isn’t that the case for many preventive security measures? I mean the baggage checks at the airport are time consuming and restrict everyone on bringing liquids, large batteries, forks, knives etc. into the plane.

Passengers are rightfully allowed to bring knives and guns onto a plane, so long as it is in their checked luggage. This does not materially hinder people’s options. You don’t need a weapon when all potential attackers are also disarmed. But you still have a right to take your weapon to your destination, and rightfully so.

To equate a FedEx cash search with shipping batteries in a dangerous way with a precious payload (human lives) is an absurdity. If someone wants to commit suicide there are many better ways to do so than to carry a battery 10,000 feet up and then have it set fire on your vessel. You are not really materially hindering someone’s personal way of life by taking away the option kill themselves and others during a flight.

The passengers who share the plane with someone who wants to transport dangerous materials that compromise their safety directly mutually benefit from safety checks.

At the same time, if the person flying next to me carries a bit of cocaine, then no I do not benefit from a cocaine search and oppose it because it’s a violation of 4th amendment rights (if carried out by TSA). Such a search is looking for a crime against the state, not a crime against the person who sits next to a cocaine user. It’s extra perverse when non-criminals lives are hindered in an effort to enforce crimes against the state and victimless crimes.

Same with routine controls at a border or on the highway. It’s annoying for many people due to delays just to catch some few smugglers, overloaded trucks etc.

This is a good example of harm coming to non-criminals in the hunt for criminals. They violate everyone’s 4th amendment rights to go on a fishing expedition because the cops are too lazy to get a warrant and properly do a targeted search of suspects.

A security camera in a bank will film thousands of regular customers before it ever (if at all) gets to see a robbery.

That’s private sector. I give less of a shit about that because a bank has a right to secure their premises however they see appropriate in their business model, and as a consumer I have a choice whether or not to use a bank. If I don’t like the way they operate, I can opt-out, (unlike Europe where you now have forced banking).

Law enforcement by definition deals with suspects not convicted criminals.

No we are not dealing with suspects. Indiana is performing a general search without a suspect and without a warrant. If Indiana were to say to FedEx “we have a warrant to search pkgs to and from Bill Harvey at address X, please set aside those packages for us to search”, and then the sniffer dogs were used only on Bill Harvey’s payloads, that would be dealing with suspects and I would not object to seizing those pkgs. But still likely dubious for the police to simply pocket the money, rather than tag it and put it in the evidence room.

But wouldn’t the alternative be even worse for you from a privacy perspective? They keep the practice of scanning packages but rather than seizing the money, they send investigators after the intended recipient. That wouldn’t only dramatically increase the costs of law enforcement but also lead to innocents being supervised.

First of all, whether or not to inform the customer that their pkg was flagged is not obviated by the decision to not confiscate. Some TSA workers will search a bag and insert a tag. When you arrive at your destination you might open up your luggage and see a tag that essentially says “TSA was here”. Apart from whether the search was appropriate in the first place, the transparency is proper when the target is vindicated. They found nothing, but they owe it to the subject to be transparent.

Non-criminals rightfully have an expectation of privacy under the 4th amendment. Criminals do not, as it is 4th amendment compliant to search when there is just cause to do so. They should not be searching pkgs of non-suspects in the first place, but if they do and they find no actionable evidence of crime they absolutely should be doing what TSA does and they should do so without keeping the person’s possessions. If it’s a business transaction that includes indications of taxability, and they can also see no history of tax declarations that exceed electronic revenue (or whatever clues are justifiable as cause for action such as past offenses), then the police should be competent in their trade, which is to get convictions, which implies not tipping off the criminal suspect.

Under the status quo, the police are both tipping off criminals and also creating victims out of non-criminals.

Not all money transfers are taxable income. So if police knows that you received 10,000 in a box last year but didn’t declare it that doesn’t automatically mean you invaded taxes.

Of course. If the metadata (sender & recipient + their criminal records) and other items in the package do not suggest that it’s a taxable transaction, they have no cause to treat the pkg as suspect. In this case, they should not have searched it in the first place but on top of that there is no cause for further action either.

Furthermore, the recipient on the label may not be real person.

This would be cause for suspicion of a crime. But Indiana is not limiting their action to pkgs that give cause for suspicion.

In a drug case, indeed you cannot assume the parties on the pkg are accurate. Someone once received a package of mj. Police staked out the house, saw him accept the pkg, waited breifly, then stormed into the house. The pkg was left inside the door, unopened. The recipient argued that he was not expecting the pkg and did not know what was in it. He rightfully won that case. The mistake the cops made was to raid before he opened it. He needed time to open it and then react by calling the police.

Confiscating the evidence before the pkg even reaches the destination is terrible police work. That is not how you enforce crime. It only creates victims from non-criminals.

Regarding all the companies you’ve critized: isn’t that unfortunately the case for many if not most bigger companies?

Yes but not equally so. As an ethical consumer I choose the lesser of evils. Also, this isn’t about me. Consumers have a right to make their own choices. Most do not give a shit about ethics and the masses tend to choose the best financial deal. Some are lazy but ethical. That is, they heard a negative blurb about one supplier and they boycott that one supplier not knowing that it leads them to support a higher detriment.

Cash shipments are officially forbidden as per the FedEx ToS, no matter if the package is insured or not. If money is shipped anyhow it is not covered by the insurance.

Either way, it’s the sender’s choice whether to take the risk as they understand it. And they may not understand the risk. A wise sender would insure the package regardless of the contents. Even if the insurance would not pay out, the mere flag that a pkg has insurance has the effect of deterrance. Staff mostly only steal packages that are uninsured because those do not lead to investigation.

However, after a quick research many of the issues apply to FedEx as well.

I have been boycotting FedEx over a decade for those reasons (but note that I see nothing tying FedEx to the Better than Cash Alliance). But this isn’t about me. A republican would happily support FedEx.

Regarding acceptance of cryptocurrency or other forms of payments, I think that’s similar for sending cash in a box.

Cryptocurrency is as close as you can get in a digital mechanism that respects privacy like cash, but there is still a big difference. CC is a public ledger. Everyone sees every transaction and identities can be discovered and doxxed.

in Germany you’d be having a hard time to find a jeweler or other professional entity that accepts such a form of payment.

Luckily it’s the jeweler’s choice.

First, they won’t want to have discussions if packages are lost or valuables are partly stolen from the package.

Not sure what the point is here. Of course when a package is lost the parties involved both have a mutual interest in a claim being filed. A supplier who does not do their part in filing a claim does not get off the hook for the missing package. They still owe the recipient a package, so it is in their interest to file a claim.

Second, they don’t want to be associated with dubious businesses.

That is exactly the harm that perpetuates when you tie a tool to a stigma. It’s not okay to take away useful tools and options from non-criminals on the basis that criminals use them. We do not ban cars on the basis that they are a tool for drive-by shootings.

Furthermore, there’s a legal limit for cash payments of 10,000€ to avoid money laundering.

That’s shitty indeed because it oppresses non-criminals with a policy of forced banking.

I think to get back to the original topic, it’d be interesting to see some statistics on what percentage of the cases where police seized cash from packages were legal (although against FedEx ToS) and how many were related to criminal activities.

Not really. Marginalizing and oppressing non-criminals is not justified by a hunt for criminals. If your approach to hunting criminals harms non-criminals, you’re doing it wrong.

The case at hand is even more perverse, as the civil forfeiture practice actually hinders enforcement of law. They do the money grab for the money. When you seize cash, you send a clear signal to criminals that they are being investigated. It tips them off with intelligence that helps them adjust their operations. When you seize money from a tax evader a year before they evade tax by filing their fraudulent tax return, you actually sabotage the opportunity to catch them (it’s crime-prevention prevention). You can only catch them by recording the cash and letting it go, then auditing their tax using that information a year or two later.