New York Senate Passes Landmark Right To Repair Bill (ifixit.com) 59
A Right to Repair bill that would give everyone the information, parts, and tools they need to fix their electronic devices passed in the New York State Senate, the first such bill to pass in the country. Kevin Purdy writes via iFixit: At a virtual session, the Senate approved S4104 by a margin of 51 to 12. Normally the next step would be a vote on an identical bill in the state's Assembly. But Thursday is the last day of session for the NY legislature, and the bill has not yet escaped committee, making a vote by the full Assembly unlikely. The battle for fair repair in New York will continue into next year's session, with a strong record of success. But don't get the wrong idea -- this is big. This shows that Right to Repair has real support when the issue gets an actual vote, despite the efforts of tech manufacturers' lobbyists.
Sen. Philip Boyle, a Republican from Bay Shore on Long Island and the bill's original sponsor, said at Thursday's session that the Digital Fair Repair Act both protected consumers from monopolistic companies and curtailed e-waste. Customers can fix their own "smartphones, tablets, and farm equipment," Boyle said. Or, if they have "no technical skills at all, like me," they can turn to local repair shops and reuse programs to avoid simply tossing things out, Boyle said. While time is likely to run out on the Assembly bill, New Yorkers can still tell their representatives to move next year's bill to a vote, and to vote yes. A U.S. PIRG survey found that New Yorkers would save a collective $2.4 billion per year by fixing electronics instead of replacing them. The average family stands to save $330 per year, and help curtail the 655,000 tons of e-waste generated in New York each year.
Sen. Philip Boyle, a Republican from Bay Shore on Long Island and the bill's original sponsor, said at Thursday's session that the Digital Fair Repair Act both protected consumers from monopolistic companies and curtailed e-waste. Customers can fix their own "smartphones, tablets, and farm equipment," Boyle said. Or, if they have "no technical skills at all, like me," they can turn to local repair shops and reuse programs to avoid simply tossing things out, Boyle said. While time is likely to run out on the Assembly bill, New Yorkers can still tell their representatives to move next year's bill to a vote, and to vote yes. A U.S. PIRG survey found that New Yorkers would save a collective $2.4 billion per year by fixing electronics instead of replacing them. The average family stands to save $330 per year, and help curtail the 655,000 tons of e-waste generated in New York each year.
Louis Rossman (Score:5, Informative)
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He's in the pocket of Big Aftermarket!
(jk)
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Kudos indeed!
I subscribed because he deserves it.
Re: Louis Rossman (Score:1)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=... [youtube.com]
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Cheer all you want, the other house hasn't voted on the bill.
There is no new law. This is all for PR.
Louis Rossmann confirms this here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Editors: Please update this story' summary.
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Good now do California (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Good now do California (Score:5, Insightful)
Right to repair isn't about making "repairable" products. It's about manufacturers providing manuals, parts, and tools to repair the devices they sell, and also, stop the bullshit litigiosity from them. They spend millions in lawyers to prevent service people from getting replacement parts. That's just plain bullshit.
And by "tools" I mean things like software tools. For example, if you try to replace the screen or the touch sensor on an iPhone, it will refuse to work. Because you need to "bless" it with an Apple tool that will tell the iPhone that it's ok to run this fingerprint sensor that was retrieved from another iPhone with a broken screen.
It's really got nothing to do with, say, making PCs with RAM slots instead of soldered chips.
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because water-resistant phones need to have their panel gaps sealed with glue
Completely not true. My current phone and my last phone are both water resistant (IP68 Rating) and have screws.
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Doogee S60 is my old phone. My new phone is the Doogie S96 Pro. I opened the S60 to replace the battery and I only needed to make sure the rubber seal went back into it's track.
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Of course they do.. My S60 did 10 meters into concrete and barely got scuffed, It's why I buy them. The seal is small enough that it could be used in a thinner phone.
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It "could" hinder innovation. It could also paint the road yellow. But in actual reality it will not do either. For your phone example, there is no requirement to glue things that is just the usual bogus claims by the industry. There are numerous other ways to make electronic devices water resistant.
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The question is - where does security come into play? Because the primary reason for needing to bless the fingerprint sensor is to prevent replacement. And you want this to preve
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The question is - where does security come into play? Because the primary reason for needing to bless the fingerprint sensor is to prevent replacement. And you want this to prevent bypass - perhaps someone changes out your phone's fingerprint sensor with one that secretly records your fingerprints, so if they want to hack into your phone, they can have the sensor replay the stored fingerprints.
Certainly you'd want to know, and Apple did that by disabling it (and accidentally disabling the OS once). But if the blessing tool is public, well, if I was an FBI agent, I'd make sure to run the blessing tool so my hacked sensor will work just fine on your phone.
It's a valid question. It can't be just an app either - because obviously it would make the tool useless once the device falls out of support.
The right solution to that problem is glaringly obvious. Separate testing from restoring function:
Having a tool, secret or ot
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You see problems where there are none. For the case at hand, the user gets a recovery code and can use that to "bless" new sensors for exactly their own phone. They can select whether Apple keep a backup copy of that code or not, depending on their own security requirements. See, that was not so hard. The trick is to look for a solution to make it possible, not for a problem to keep the old approach.
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Also, 99.999 whatever percent of iPhone users will never in their life have to worry about the FBI (or anyone TBH) secretly replacing their fingerprint sensor with a hacked one.
It's such an extreme edge case that it's irrelevant AND relatively easy to work around. Give the phone the ability to bless new hardware - authenticating with your AppleID/PIN/etc. - so you'll know if something was swapped. If someone knows your password already, then hacking a fingerprint reader to access the devices seems kind of
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that's a huge waste of money since 95 percent of their market has no interest in repairing or modifying anything though. That's why it won't happen.
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And 87.5% of statistics are meaningless or just made up entirely.
LOTS of people have interest in repairing their phones - and many do. Refer to the pretty large aftermarket screen replacement industry. What stops many people is the high cost, difficulty, or both.
Also - I'll argue that many people have 'no interest' in repair because they have a device that makes repair intentionally difficult, not because they prefer to buy another current-generation iPhone when their kids drops it on them.
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Nonsense, most consumers don't electronic devices nor do they want to. That is why there aren't complaints except in geek forums. You have a weird and unnatural view of the world, do you only type at geeks in forums?
Most people don't repair electronic devices, don't have either the tools nor the knowledge to do so, that's what anyone who actually socializes with a variety of people knows.
Re: Good now do California (Score:1)
From my experience of non-geeks over the years, most of them would love to be able to repair a broken phone, partly for environmental reasons, partly because they're attached to it, partly because of the hassle of migrating their data.
The main reasons they don't is the disproportionate cost and the time it takes, particularly if it involves sending it away.
Would right to repair help with this? Capitalist economic theory says yes. Vested interest says no. We'll see how it plays out.
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Right to repair isn't about making "repairable" products.
Not directly, no. At the moment it is about letting 3rd parties or the user repair devices, _if_ they can do that skill-wise. Parts have to be sold at reasonable prices and documentation has to be provided. Basically, if the vendor itself can repair something, others can now too. A classical example is a screen-replacement in an iPhone.
Bit a second step in this (and we will have to have that eventually) is "repairability". This is more difficult because it impacts design. There are approaches to solve this,
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Well, it's MY device and I can do whatever the fuck I want with it.
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Yes and no.
Instead you just design that into the next generation of products. It's not all that difficult compared to the engineering that goes into making a phone in the first place.
It's ALSO about not intentionally digitally locking someone out from repairing or actively preventing the import and resale of replacement parts.
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son, are you dumb?
Re:Not good (Score:4, Insightful)
No it does not.
In absence of this law, virtually all devices you buy today are non-repairable. Your argument is predicated on the notion that consumers actually have had a choice.
All right to repair entails is that it is *possible* for third parties to repair a product and make it work, and that a company does not expressly disallow other parties from making repairs by designing the hardware to disabling features that should otherwise have worked just fine. Right to repair does not mean it will necessary be easy or cheap to repair, only that the company does not take active measures to specifically prevent it from being effective. Scavenging working parts from an identical device, for instance, and replacing non-working components in another should not cause the device to complain that it cannot use certain features of the device (I'm looking at you Apple).
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Yes, there are legitimate specific cases against this, but not a general one.
For example, I don't expect to be able to repair a CPU. That is probably going to cost several million dollars under an electron microscope. Same with most motherboards. I can swap them out.
However, when your AMD Epyc processor becomes locked by using it on a Dell motherboard, and there is no way to reuse it on a cheaper m/b when Dell dies out, is not acceptable:
https://www.servethehome.com/a... [servethehome.com]
Yes, this is real. If you buy an off-
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I don't think you've grasped the full concept of "Right to repair", can I suggest you don't TLDR before commenting.
Usually makes sense.
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The only innovation it stops is innovative new ways to screw the customer over. How does not locking your vendor into a no outside sales clause stop innovation? How does not allowing a replacement OEM part to work without an official blessing from an authorized tech using authorized software and charging an authorized metric assload of money prevent innovation?
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Rolexes are expensive due to markup, not a few seals. There are plenty of waterproof cheap watches including the old and famous Casio line.
Your use of that example means you're no technician and your babble about autos just demonstrated you're no mechanic. (I am, from jet fighters on down for the last four decades.) "Repairable" also means the item can be disassembled into sub-components. It does not require infinite disassembly.
The opinions of non-technical people on tech issues are worthless and they shou
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The opinions of non-technical people on tech issues are worthless
And that is pretty much the problem of all the comments here that claim this is "bad for innovation" or a bad idea for other reasons. They are just being used as "useful idiots" by the tech companies and regurgitate what their PR people have told them. Professional equipment has always been designed to be repairable. (With some notable more recent exceptions, e.g. in some agricultural machinery.) Hence it cannot only be done, it has been done for a long time and there is ample experience and knowledge how t
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> This prevents companies from innovating
[[Citation]]
> Why run to the government for this? This is between you and the company you're buying from.
You DO realize that Companies have to FOLLOW government Laws, right? Why do you think we have the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 [wikipedia.org]? Because companies can and WILL screw over consumers when they can.
> Just because a minority of idiots want all gadgets to be "repairable"
The Law holds people hostage with bullshit DRM and other anti-consumer laws. If it is MY
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Bullshit. It does not.
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Say what?
I bought a waterproof camera and guess what, to chance the battery, hook up the usb, or change the memory card, I have to open a door with a seal on it.
I don't see the problem.
Also, Thinkpads have had liquid catch trays with drains under the keyboards for years to catch coffee spills and save the device.
Apple would never do this since it adds a couple of millimeters to the device.
Basically all Apple needs to do is offer customers a choice of two laptops. One that is spill proof and repairable (but
Like a broken clock... (Score:1)
not quite there yet. (Score:2)
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Indeed, and I subscribed to support him.
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Perhaps the $$$ weren’t flowing as usual. So passing in only one house is a warning to the manufacturers
Thank goodness. (Score:2)
hopefully this goes nation wide (Score:3)
i read a few forums and i notice a few people getting burned by botched repair jobs, and others buying phones that are more than likely being sold because the owner was disappointed in a botched repair job
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Not going to happen. Phones are going to be increasingly impossible to fix. This and laws like it won't change that,
They're becoming increasingly impossible to fix BECAUSE there have been no laws (on the side of the consumer).
Louis says it's almost meaningless (Score:1)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=... [youtube.com]
It's still not a Law (Score:1)
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Good in usa (Score:1)