[iuhaegpoinqhpoq]

> In the before-times, [...]

You used to get full schematics along with the electronics you bought.

And by "get", I do NOT mean that you'd have to ask for them.

They'd be shipped WITH the products, on paper. It was a normal part of your purchase, just like the manual.

[0xEF]

This blew my mind as a younger person who took an interest in repairing tube radios from the 30's & 40's. One of the first things I realized was how generally easy it was to find schematics of popular brands and models. Some were even pasted right inside the radio shell!

I also hack and repair modern stuff, and it is so common to open up a product just to end up staring at an epoxy blob. User manuals hold no mention of service tips, but instead are near-useless "quick start" guides that might review functionality, if the manufacturer is feeling generous.

Modern tech seems so remarkably spiteful toward the consumer and consumers themselves just seem to roll with it. Sometimes I hear them use arguments like "Company X doesn't want Company Z making knock-offs" as though these knock-off manufacturers aren't already expert reverse engineers. I feel the locking down of consumer tech is more about forcing the consumer into a state of dependancy on the manufacturer than it is about protecting any intellectual properties. They conflate "repeate business" with customers being forced to return for repairs or replacements instead of willfully returning because they trust the quality and brand.

[bboygravity]

It's all about milking and rent-seeking: greed.

Every device/vehicle/system now needs to be connected to the internet and needs you to download an app.

Is that for the consumer? No. That's for the manufacturer.

For milking be reselling your data and/or spying on you and/or charging extra because they can and/or the capability to turn any device into literal trash by not providing updates or bug fixes to a half-baked alpha software that it shipped with.

Blame your government. There could and should be laws against that or at the very least incentives to prevent it.

[Roark66]

>Blame your government. There could and should be laws against that or at the very least incentives to prevent it.

In a democracy the government is a proxy for the people. I blame the people. If the majority was conscious of their rights (or at least what these rights should be) the governments would have no choice and they'd bring laws that protect these rights. Yes, no democracy is perfect, there are lobbyists, corruption etc, but if the large majority of the population wants something all these lobbying and corruption can only delay it.

The issue with the government(s) is a symptom, not a cause. The cause is that the majority of people have no spine. They'll sell their privacy and rights gladly for a tiny bit of perceived convenience, entertainment or status. It's like this famous saying "people that are willing to sacrifice freedom for safety deserve neither". Substitute privacy/ownership for freedom and convenience/entertainment for safety and it will still be true.

Neither me nor my partner own a smartwatch/health band. Why? Because we literally found no brand that could be used without setting up silly "online accounts" and having our personal details (including health) harvested. The pine watch is an exception, but last time I checked the software was not ready for daily use.

Personally, despite the above, I'm a "long term optimist". I think people eventually will learn to value their privacy, their right to ownership/repair and they will stop buying and using devices and software that infringe on these rights. But not before a generation or two come and go.

Consider other revolutions in human condition. For example the industrial revolution. It brought magnificent benefits, but also (especially initially) it was horrible for many people including children. Eventually the masses started paying attention and worker rights were established, but not a second before the majority was ready to sacrifice a lot to fight for it. It will. Be like this with our "digital revolution".

[2devnull]

“I blame the people.”

Psychology is a science that studies human behavior, and like all sciences it works mostly. As a result, human minds can be easily hacked by those with the motivation to do so. Psychological science can be employed, things like A/B testing are very effective with enough data, which our digital systems easily provide. Ads are the wholesome version of that, because they are overt. We know the ads are trying to change the way we think and act. Corporate news is an example of the less wholesome side of using psychological science against humans. The humans aren’t to blame. Humans are animals and easy to hack, and our economy is largely, mostly I’d say, based on people hacking/behavioral engineering.

[ethbr1]

My takeaway from social psych was that it was far easier and cheaper to convince 2 ignorant people than it was to change 1 educated person's mind.

Which boils majority democracy down to the median level of education.

[ImPostingOnHN]

considering technology is evolving faster than humans, using technology to exploit the unchangeable stupidity of humans seems like the winning move

[jrowen]

> They'll sell their privacy and rights gladly for a tiny bit of perceived convenience, entertainment or status.

How does that mean they have no spine? It sounds like they made a decision on what was more valuable to them. You could argue that they might not have been fully informed. But I think the reality is that they just don't care that much because they don't feel harmed by it. The segment of people that are going to even consider trying to repair a digital device rather than paying to get it fixed or getting a new one is probably vanishingly small (and very over-represented on this site).

I could easily see things going the other way, where the lack of digital privacy becomes even more of an unquestioned norm. These things can hold in a kind of equilibrium as long as the entities that hold the power don't use it to cause perceived harm above a threshold. We have the technology to do a lot more scanning of license plates, facial recognition, automated speeding tickets, etc. I'm kind of an optimist in that I think people will generally maintain this balance (or maybe a pragmatist - it's not really in their interest to upset the apple cart, but they will test the limits sometimes).

[hnwizard]

It's really evil and indeed against the customer, and it applies to pretty much any real product out there nowadays from cars to washing machines to water boilers. It's all designed to fall apart, break and stop working.

What about the incalculable environmental factor for all of this? Nobody cares.

[amelius]

> It's all about milking and rent-seeking: greed.

And greed starts to become an issue when managers think they need a raise.

But to be fair, if you're not an engineer is there much else you can take pride in other than driving up profits by whatever means?

[tstrimple]

It’s weird how people in tech think they are superior to their less-technical colleagues. Everyone outside of software development is a moron and the entire world would be better if programmers ran everything with no oversight. Somehow only engineers are moral and everyone else is purely motivated by profit. But engineers are above that! It’s so ridiculous.

[deafpolygon]

Especially since the engineers are the ones who created this.

[mschuster91]

The entire economic system was different. Even something as basic as a radio, fridge or TV cost serious money, so very few people had them in the first place, they expected it to last and be easily repairable, particularly as shipping took a lot of time and was expensive just as well. Farmers living out in the country had it even worse, for them the ability to repair devices literally in the field can be a question that makes their entire business viable or not.

Today? Everything is cheap, you can fedex something across continents in a matter of a few days. When the TV is broken, fuck it, a new one is a click and a day of waiting time away, free delivery included. Computers? Phones? Just the same.

Building products that last or are repairable just isn't competitive enough any more. Yes, there are niches like Fairphone, Framework and Pine, but that's the point: they are niches for nerds who care and are able and willing to spend the money.

On top of that, technology has gotten ever smaller and smaller. Up until a decade or two ago, most electronics was through-hole stuff that even a complete dunderhead could repair with a soldering iron, a bit of solder and some tweezers. Modern SMT? That needs highly specialized machines and an awful lot of knowledge about stuff like temperature ramps, not to mention passive components being as small as a tiny piece of sand. And if you want to verify signal integrity, some random scope won't cut it either at modern high speed buses.

[bbarn]

How many people cared about those schematics? Most people would say "Gee, instead of this paper of things I don't understand, having a list of the radio stations in this spot would be more useful"

As someone who found computing in general through the joy of taking broken electronic things apart and trying to fix them, it does sadden me too when I see a black blob over a circuit board but most people are just happy they're cheap and easy to replace and toss em away. Most developers I know today can't understand basic electrical circuits, even though they are the very foundation of everything we do. But like my previous analogy, most would rather just see the magic happen when they install something, write a little bit of code, and see results.

Some of us do value privacy, security, and even the underlying things that make stuff work. We're in the minority. The vast majority of people simply don't even care. I've tried explaining it to my wife, or my mother, that some piece of software might track them, know about them, restrict them, whatever, and the opinion I usually get back is "Oh, it doesn't already do that?" People joke about Facebook ads being something they just talked about all the time and it doesn't even phase them that the reality is very near to that.

People simply don't care enough to make a change in the laws that would prevent things like this.

[api]

Privacy loss is like climate change. People don’t care because the really bad things haven’t happened yet. People who keep telling them about the bad stuff that is likely to happen are alarmists, and like with climate change there’s an industry with a vested interest in downplaying the issue.

A sneak peek may be coming with what some states are doing to police travel for abortion. Does the algorithm think you might be pregnant? Congratulations, you may now be stopped on state lines and charged with a crime because you are driving someone one state over. Even if you have no intent of getting an abortion you may have to prove that in court if a prosecutor is feeling particularly self righteous today.

People in the US are not accustomed to totalitarian politics. We have rights. But loss of those rights are one populist demagogue away.

When that happens all that surveillance and remote control will suddenly become as relevant as Antarctica’s Thwaites glacier would become if it fell in the ocean.

(Left wing populist demagoguery and authoritarianism are possible too. I’m just picking on the right wing sort because it’s the kind that has traction most recently. But that too can change.)

[ethbr1]

People don't care because privacy is invisible.

I'm turning to the opinion that if we really want to fix this, we need to have government mandates that "takeout" style exports are provided by every company/service, in a standard machine-readable format.

If you collect and store any personal data about a user, there needs to be a standard way for them to request a usable copy.

Then allow third parties to build tools that work with those to educate users, which is why standard and usable format are key criteria. E.g. "visualize what X knows about you"

It's the details that would motivate people, but the details are precisely what's invisible right now.

(Disclaimer: talking from a US-centric viewpoint, for the majority of states that don't have digital privacy rights)

[em3rgent0rdr]

> How many people cared about those schematics?

That’s the neat thing! For most people, you don’t! Until it breaks and you need to fix it, and the manufacturer is out-of-business. But then you can present that strange schematic to your local electronics repairer who can fix it up with a few spare commodity components.

[b112]

This blew my mind as a younger person who took an interest in repairing tube radios from the 30's & 40's.

My Commodore64 had full motherboard schematics in the manual, and I had a 90s tube TV with schematics inside the back of the case.

This change, lack of docs/schematics has happened over a mere 20 years.

[pwg]

The Atari (400/800, from the Warner Brothers ownership era) also had full schematics /available/ (you had to buy the 'technical reference manual') but they were available. And part of that tech. manual was a printout of the 6502 assembly for the ROM OS.

And if I remember correctly, the tech. manual was something like $20.00 (in circa 1984 dollars, roughly $58 today, and you got about 400 pages of paper, printed on both sides.

So while schematics did not "come with the product in the retail packaging" one could obtain them with only the trouble of ordering a ~$20 (at the time) "book".

[MichaelZuo]

I wouldn't say they are intentionally spiteful, just that modern electronics are complex enough, especially highly integrated stuff like smartphones, that the OEM's suppliers would be unhappy if detailed schematics were released. Since they would not be willing to guarantee on the record that they are correct, nor would they want stuff impinging on actual trade secrets to be revealed.

[washadjeffmad]

That wasn't less true for any other appliance that's ever existed, largely because of the availability of the schematics.

People have a right to know what they're buying. Companies are testing legal and cultural boundaries, silently changing functionality and usability by altering software or access to required services after sale.

It's not "too complex", it'd just be a hassle if people knew.

[tacocataco]

Speaking of access, if you own minecraft with a mojang account you need to migrate it to a Microsoft account by September 19th.

If you don't Microsoft, one of the wealthiest corporations in existence, will steal your copy of minecraft that you purchased elsewhere.

Sorry if this isn't on topic, I'm very salty over the migration.

[Datagenerator]

Microsoft showing it's totalitarian real character again. So happy that Minetest[1] exists and gives that warm Open Source glow, just knowing that your using Microsoft free software and it works fine on Linux too.

[1] https://www.minetest.net/

[jodrellblank]

> "It's not "too complex""

A valve radio had ~50 discrete components[1]. The first semiconductors had triple that number of components in a square millimeter in 1971[2], a modern CPU is in the tens or hundreds of millions of transistors per square millimetre. That's more components than the Encyclopedia Britannica had words in 29 volumes[3]. How are you going to 'know what you're buying' if you don't know anything about the bit which makes up most of the complexity and does most of the work? How are 'people' going to know anything about the CPU by getting lumbered a dozen bookshelves worth of schematics?

[1] One 1960s valve radio schematic found from Google: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Is9qxCCu2S8/VmZ44qHP1nI/AAAAAAABQ...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count#Transistor_co...

[3] https://patricktreardon.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Encyc...

[MostlyStable]

All this means is that you move one level up on what it is you are diagramming and replacing. I don't expect to replace the integrated circuit on my instant pot, but I do expect to be able to replace the control board or the thermal fuse. And instructions on how to do these things would be great! A simple diagram showing how the larger things are connected is all that's necessary. I don't need a map of all the traces, or a list of the surface mount components.

[jodrellblank]

Not to say it wouldn't be useful to someone, somewhere, or save you 10 minutes, but I suspect if you are capable of replacing the control board and thermal fuse, willing and motivated to do so, have the equipment and workspace to do it, willing to spend almost as much on a replacement control board as you would on a new Instant Pot, and don't need a map of all traces or list of components, you can likely find the fuse yourself without much bother.

But that's still a different argument to the one I was responding to which was "People have a right to know what they're buying" - and the claim that products are "not too complex" for that. At the point we turn it to a diagram which says "fuse connects to System-on-Chip blob ground pin 0 and data pin 7. Button board connects to blob ground pin 0 data pin 8" are we any closer to "knowing what we're buying" in a meaningful way?

[MichaelZuo]

Yes the practical aspect of schematics logistics would prevent this even if everything else was in an ideal world.

Even a fairly old ARM based CPU such as in the Pi 4, has billions of transistors. And miles of wiring.

[b112]

Trade secrets are not secret once in the wild, and are immediately invalidated as a result.

Schematics for things sold, are never trade secrets.

[MichaelZuo]

This is false, there are thousands of examples of products 'in the wild' containing trade secrets that are difficult enough to figure out by reverse engineering that they are effectively considered such, even by industry experts.

e.g. Apple's fixed glass trackpads

Also by definition they cannot be 'invalidated' since trade secrets are never 'validated' in the first place, unlike patents, copyrights, or trademarks.

[b112]

This is false, there are thousands of examples of products 'in the wild' containing trade secrets that are difficult enough to figure out by reverse engineering that they are effectively considered such, even by industry experts.

That's not how trade secrets work. If you give me a device, and I figure out how that part of it goes together, the trade secret dies. There is no protection except an attempt at secrecy, and once someone is retail sold hardware, they may do anything they choose with it, thus the idea of trying to maintain a secret, when it is in someone else's hands, is silly.

Also by definition they cannot be 'invalidated' since trade secrets are never 'validated' in the first place, unlike patents, copyrights, or trademarks.

Trade secrets are valid, until they no longer are. Copyright (in many jurisdictions) require no validation either, they're merely valid upon creation.

[MichaelZuo]

There is no validator for the 'validity' of trade secrets, it's simply nonsense to say that they can be 'validated' or 'invalidated'.

You can't dodge this point, which you appear to be doing as I never claimed copyright law is uniform in all jurisdictions worldwide, nor was that implied.

If you don't understand how these things work, it's better to not make bizarre claims.

[throwaway4220]

Both can be true. It may be a happy side effect that you can’t easily repair your device and it’s hard to give schematics

[Hizonner]

Fuck their trade secrets.

[kalleboo]

I took apart an old bakelite phone to replace the cord with an RJ11 one (connected two old phones together with a Cisco SPA adapter, the kids love calling each other) and was surprised when there was a little bit of paper wedged between two components with the full schematic!

edit: went to the trouble of uploading some photos https://kalleboo.com/microblog/posts/111001749605994561.html

[naruhodo]

I remember my father opened up a TV set to fix it in the early 80s. The circuit diagram was affixed to the inside back cover of the set.

[grishka]

Not only schematics, but what amounts to a complete service manual. You were expected to troubleshoot and fix things yourself back then.

[jacquesm]

Including nice and handy little drawings of what your scope (if you had access to one) should show you if you put a probe to a particular test point.

[systems_glitch]

And source code for the customizations (essentially drivers) that the OS needed for your particular hardware!

#1 reason I hack on vintage computers: top to bottom documentation and source, and still small enough to fit in one human's head.

[ume]

I still have the circuit diagram (paper copy) that shipped with my Acorn Atom in, ahem, 1981. Didn’t ask for it!

(Edit: with the help of the circuit diagram we did make a simple mod to one of the output ports of the device)

[guy4261]

Your and others' comments on this thread remind me of a though I had lately. In the "before times", you would buy things that would last. So naturally, the companies that made them could not sell new products.

Planned obsolescence was one natural outcome that we ended up with. An electrical engineers I know told me how designing a CPU that would last a lifetime is relatively easy compared to designing an equipment that will fail only 5 years from now, but not earlier.

I wonder if there was a way we could take the other path. Keep manufacturing solid, long lasting products but also being financially sound. Right now economy, to me, seems like a thing of perpetual growth, but in a cancer-like way.

[wizzwizz4]

> I wonder if there was a way we could take the other path. Keep manufacturing solid, long lasting products but also being financially sound.

Regulation.

Fun fact: this is still possible! It's a little harder – it'll have to be steadily introduced, in multiple countries at once (so we don't break international trade), starting in the areas where it's cheapest to produce lasting equipment (so enforcement doesn't take out entire sectors), and I don't yet know what the regulations would look like, but if it's possible to make lasting things, it's possible to require manufacturers to make things last.

We need to do this, sooner or later, anyway: we simply don't have the raw resources to continue as we are.

[jkestner]

I’m in favor of regulation, but that’s not happening now for the same reason that we have the problem in the first place. We’re all tied up together in capitalism, and anything that slows the acceleration of growth that our retirement funds require is not going to fly. If it’s going to happen, it’s because enough people have been excluded from the rewards of the system (we’re getting there).

Easy to nay-say, though. To me, a solution starts with spreading those values that make it possible for _consumers_ to stop sliding down the growth-over-everything slope. Mittelstands, shinise, Patagonia, yada yada. Can you as an entrepreneur make a sustainable business that isn’t just for well-off conscious consumers? What’s the product where longevity is inextricable from the core feature set, not just a trade-off with cost?

Right-to-repair is a decent example of where regulation has enough support across the ideological spectrum to get a foot in the door. It would be cool if a company who made profit on service now decides it doesn’t want to compete on service and instead takes more profit upfront with a higher-quality product. Forcing USB-C on phones feels like a small thing to me, but if it sets a precedent where interfaces are standardized for sustainability, that could be amazing. (No, I’m not worried about governments slowing progress. Locked ecosystems are doing just fine at that.)

[echelon]

> we simply don't have the raw resources to continue as we are

What runs out, and when does it run out? Are there alternatives? And can we source it from asteroids?

[MarketingJason]

I wonder if gaming consoles had a big hand in this? Going back to Atari pong in the early/mid 70's and I don't recall if any of the major players (Magnavox, Atari, Coleco, Sears) included anything close to schematics.

[api]

It was mostly the mobile revolution. Consoles were always considered something separate from computers. It was phones that normalized not only locked down OSes but surveillance as a normal thing.

I remember in the late 2000s hating everything about the mobile revolution and predicting where it would go. I was mostly right but wow did people ever think I was nuts. Tech groupthink back then was the literal phrase “mobile is the future” repeated like something out of a political talking points memo.

What I got wrong was underestimating how evil social media would become. I never imagined how addictive it could be made or how toxic the content would get, or how it would help re-mainstream a whole raft of horrible ideologies. The addiction factor and brain dead content machine really hit with mobile too, so it’s not unrelated. Something about that little screen that is always there and swiping to scroll seems to facilitate addiction better than a PC or laptop screen.

[andai]

Agree with everything you said, but what bugs me most is that I like computers, and phones are computers but they're designed for people who don't like computers, so they pretend not to be computers. Worse, those same ideas have infected the desktop too.

[pwg]

The Atari 400/800 computers had available as an extra cost purchase (IIRC about $20 in 1984 dollars) a "technical reference manual" that included full schematics for the computers, a printout of the 6502 assembly for the ROM OS, and a lot of narrative describing technical aspects of the computers.

So for at least Atari, and at least with the 400/800 computers, they did release the information. For an extra cost, but it was released.

[carapace]

> Very large-scale integration (VLSI) is the process of creating an integrated circuit (IC) by combining millions or billions of MOS transistors onto a single chip. VLSI began in the 1970s when MOS integrated circuit (Metal Oxide Semiconductor) chips were developed and then widely adopted, enabling complex semiconductor and telecommunication technologies. The microprocessor and memory chips are VLSI devices.

> Before the introduction of VLSI technology, most ICs had a limited set of functions they could perform. An electronic circuit might consist of a CPU, ROM, RAM and other glue logic. VLSI enables IC designers to add all of these into one chip.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLSI

[notsurenymore]

I had an old IBM luggable at one point that had the BIOS source listed in manual.

[passion__desire]

Well things are so complex now that if they provide you with source code, it would be so easy to make 0days.

[wincy]

Don’t you think in the long term this would result in better source code and hardened software, similar to what’s happened with the Linux source code?

Right now the NSA just has all the 0days instead.

[passion__desire]

I agree with you, I am just highlighting companies' thinking why they would wanna protect their source code. security by obscurity. Also having a copy of source could also mean the companies might have cut corners. Many leaks of future products are now guessed from source code. Also it is so easy to copy as well by other companies.

[ben_w]

The relative security of open and closed source operating systems implies not much of a difference in that regard.

[Kim_Bruning]

My first computer was a BBC B. The schematics were IN the manual!

[perihelions]

Indeed they seem to be:

https://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Acorn/Manua... ("BBC Microcomputer Model B +")

There is a circuit block diagram, a PCB layout diagram with all the components' part numbers that I guess you can replace broken ones (?), and circuit diagrams for the power supply and for the keyboard circuit. (starts on page 97) Skimming the text, the manual seems to assume an owner has access to a multimeter, an oscilloscope, and a soldering iron.

[jacquesm]

I have that thing etched into my memory to the point that I probably could still fix a beeb without resorting to looking at the schematic.

[RobotToaster]

I bought a vintage printer (juki 6100) to tinker with recently, I was pretty shocked how the manual included circuit and timing diagrams, and gave instructions on how to construct adapter cables for various machines.

Also the "driver" installation for IBM PC is just instructions on how to manually patch wordstar to work with it.

[smitty1e]

That just has to return to being a market differentiator and sales feature for gear.

[protomolecule]

In Russia it was the case even in the 90s, but all locally produced consumer electronics in ex-USSR quickly got replaced by Japanese and Western devices.

[raverbashing]

That's a lot of time ago in the before times ;)

I've seen a product like this, yes, but I wasn't the one buying it

(got the schematic for some later products, for a fee)