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by Blinks- 3049 days ago
Increases in complexity up the barrier of entry to any advanced system, but lately it seems like things are made with the intent to make that barrier impossible to overcome within the lifetime of the hardware. The right to repair and open hardware standards are something we need to organize and push for if we want to see improvements. After all it's been demonstrated time and time again that we can't trust black box hardware.
2 comments

I think we are going more and more into the direction of renting almost everything. If you use ebooks like Kindle you don't accumulate a book collection. Same for record collections. Devices become useless once the connected cloud service shuts down. Eventually we'll probably have cars that get obsoleted quickly. I bet the same will happen for household and other robots once they get more powerful. You will have to pay monthly rent to use them.
https://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/

Already happening. But everyone called RMS a kook. He looks funny. He talks funny. He's a socialist. He smells. And here we are. People are praising Apple--Apple--for letting people pay money for closed software that, at the very least, lives on their own device.

That's a low bar.

I think we are going more and more into the direction of renting almost everything.

It sure makes law enforcement's job easier if more peoples' entire phones are subject to the Third Party Doctrine, rather than just what passes over the wire.

I read ebooks on my Kindle and I have quite a book collection. It's easy to download them and strip the DRM.
My entire goal in life is to be able to use a full stack open device. Maybe we'll see it with Purism and the like.