are you still able to see me
yep
not really crazy above
there we go straighten your strings i
know
i know i didn't really plan to wear the
hoodie but here i am i'm in the hoodie
so
we're live great
well welcome everyone to uh the worst in
show
put on by repair coalition and a
coalition
of other public interest groups
including perg and the electronic
frontier foundation and secure repairs
um and we are very happy to welcome you
here to our stream i'm corey doctorow
i'm a journalist a science fiction
novelist
and i'm a special advisor to the
electronic frontier foundation now
entering my 19th year
of affiliation with the organization and
over those many many
years i have had uh much cause to go
to ces in fact i was eff ces
rep the day my first novel came out and
i
spent the day at ces uh dashing away to
find
wi-fi and see how the book was doing and
i love going to ces because i love
gadgets i love technology
i have uh been the kind of person who
slabbered over phones and
mp3 players and laptops since the very
earliest days whenever our daughter gets
too stroppy i turn to my wife and say
you know we could have bought a laptop
and so uh in in
that spirit i want to say that we're not
here because we hate gadgets
but we are here because we understand
that a funny thing happened on the way
to the second decade of the 21st century
which is that you bring a gadget home
only to discover
that it has absolutely ghastly private
privacy defects
or that even the smallest material
failure can't be repaired and it has to
turn into e-waste
or that it is grossly insecure and can
be hijacked to be used against you or
third parties
or that um it has features that can be
field updated so if what you do turns
out not to be in the interest of the
shareholders of the company that made it
they can confiscate the the reason that
you bought the device and um
your only uh option is to complain on
twitter
uh a remedy that tends to generate very
few policy outcomes
so in that spirit we're here to tell you
about the stuff that you can't always
find and and i'm joined by uh
quite an all-star audience here um we
have
uh gay gordon byrne who is the executive
director of repair.org the repair
coalition
we have cindy cohen my boss the
executive director of the electronic
frontier foundation
paul roberts who's from secure repairs
kyle wiens who's from the ifixit
uh company and nathan proctor who's the
us uh
perg national campaign director and uh
it's a pleasure to be on the call with
all of these people they do excellent
work and i follow them closely i hope
you will too
we're gonna start with gay uh presenting
a little bit of uh
uh material about the repair coalition
and the work that it does
uh both in the legislative and public uh
education arenas
uh and then each of our judges is gonna
present a different award
uh a worst in show for privacy for
security for repairability
for environmental impact and then i'm
gonna present two more i'm gonna present
the uh
the community choice we've run a series
of twitter polls to see
who made the worst gadget at ces this
year the answer will surprise you
uh and then um i'm going to award a
worst in show overall who
what is that what is the reason what is
the thing that you should run
don't walk away from when you see it on
your horizon
and so with all that i'd like to welcome
gay to present a little
about the repair coalition hi gay hey
great intro
thank you corey i think you already said
everything i was going to say
so the quick update is the repair
coalition is
all of these people plus hundreds of
others and
a growing a really growing momentum for
the movement that you should be able to
fix your stuff
because it's yours and it doesn't belong
to anybody else after you pay for it so
it's turning into a very big fight if
i'd started this ten years ago knowing
how long this would take i might not
have started
but i am very delighted to be able to
work with this excellent team
and the opportunity to talk about the
junk that's coming
being being sold to us under the guise
of being cool and neat and wonderful
technology is actually really
junk and it's very damaging to our
society it's damaging to our privacy
it's certainly damaging to our wallets
and we'd like to have a lot more
attention paid on
how you keep these things working once
you've bought them
so i think that's probably all i need to
say um let's
let's hear how bad the junk really is
thank you very much and i want to say
you know we're about to hear a bunch of
stuff about things that you can buy or
not buy
but i think that all of the people on
this call and all the work that our
organizations do
recognize that while it's important to
be informed as an individual
that we have lives beyond our lives as
consumers that we're citizens
too and that the problem with the world
isn't just that we're buying the wrong
stuff the problem is the way that our
markets are structured to allow
products that that are dangerous or
harmful to their users or practices
that are unfair to exist in the world
and so
while 98 of our systemic solution might
involve public education in service to
influencing lawmakers regulators and
and other entities that hold the levers
of power at least two percent is down to
what you spend your money on and we're
here to do both of those things today
one of the people who does that very
well and who i learned a lot from is
cindy cohen the executive director of
the electronic frontier foundation
cindy is going to present the worst in
show for privacy today hi cindy
hi yeah um i mean you're totally right
on the one hand
one of the things that i struggle with a
lot in this is that um
too often these decisions get driven
down as if it's your fault
if you picked a bad product um and you
know sometimes that is you can certainly
make a bad choice
but a lot of times you're really set up
so that you don't
understand the implications or you know
you don't have the proper floor
of law or policy or or rules to make
sure that
you know you're offering offered good
choices and
um and that that i think is really
important that
this isn't about blaming the consumer
and we don't want to blame the consumer
and in some ways it may not even be
blaming the developer because they're
stuck in a world in which
you know for instance spying on people
for fun and profit feels like the only
business
model um but we're here to tell you that
it's not
and it doesn't have to be and privacy is
one of those areas and and you know what
we've seen in the
especially in the last 15 years or 15 to
20 years on the internet is this
explosion of of um
you know i think it's called
surveillance capitalism before that i
called it the surveillance business
model and essentially this is giving you
two-faced products right
products who you know that the face to
you is some
convenience or minor thing that happens
um but the secondary face is the one
where they make the money
um and what they really are doing which
is you know spying on you
in order to try to sell you other things
or sell your profile to someone else and
i think that we ought to be
tremendously skeptical of this business
model
it's a really bad idea um but it's
overtaken the world
and um and and i think ces the
the the problem for me in looking at the
worst in show here was trying to decide
which was the worst among a lot of
really really bad
ideas um because the race to the bottom
is real my friends
um i would say though that having looked
at the ones that
we uh we were presented with um
there was kind of a clear worst and to
me
uh that was the linksys uh
uh motion detector the remote uh
the linksys yes there we go the link
says i think it's called a alert monitor
my notes are a little because i wrote oh
my god over my note of what the thing
was so
uh this is a a form of a home wi-fi
router
um that um not only spies on you but
but the reason it wins is that it is um
recruiting all of your other devices to
spy on you too
and to me that's just a level above it's
one thing to have you know
uh to have a tool that that basically
provides um access outside of your house
to what's going on inside your house
um it's quite another thing to be kind
of the zombie
version that's going on and recruiting
others uh
and that's what the linksys aware does
um and so you can see here from this
if you go back to the other slide i
don't know if you can um you can see
it's keeping track of all your other
devices that talk to wi-fi
and turning them into monitors for
movement inside your house so
by turning on this lovely system you can
see whether anybody moves in your house
and um unless you live in a fortress
where you're expecting cary grant to
show up and try to steal the jewels
i'm not sure why you need real time
access to every single movement in your
own house
the only thing that they provided was
this idea that you could tell if grandma
fell
um and it seems to me there's lots of
things that
grandma could do to try to make sure she
doesn't fall and also that you could do
with just a little button where grandma
can push when she falls
it seems like a whole lot of technology
for
at least one use case so um i think that
by virtue of that and
and the second reason that linksys uh
got uh to the top of my list here is
that linksys claims that all this
tracking it's doing
is stored locally um and this is and
and not available to anyone um but at
the same time and in fact i think in the
very next paragraph it talks about how
great it is that you can be all the way
across the country and find out if
grandma fell
so i got some questions for linksys
about how these two things could be true
at once and
and so not only for zombie creating
all of your other devices to be privacy
invasive too
but also the benefit of being too faced
even in promoting the product about how
the product works
um i think linksys the linksys monitor
works and believe me there was some
close
competition uh in here um you know
why do you remotely need to turn on your
vacuum and have it tell you what's going
on inside your house um you know
the pet ai and the the the brainwave
stuff which really is taking phrenology
to the new level this idea that that you
can tell how people feel by
tracking their brain waves um you know
there's some very sophisticated science
that might let you give some tiny little
insights but the idea that you can have
a little helmet in your house that that
tells somebody else what your mood is is
ridiculous you should just tell other
people what your mood is
um and you know uh and a couple other
ones that really
made it pretty you know the sex toys
that are
you know apparently providing um
research to the world about how much sex
we're having during covid
um again you know maybe that was
disclosed somewhere that you were going
to be part of some kind of
random you know non-statistical
convenience data analysis that was going
to be part of a press release
i certainly would uh want very clear
notice if that's what my sex toy was
doing
um but no um they promote this as a good
so
there's so many bad things here in terms
of privacy and you know
all these tools are cool most of them
are well some of them are but most of
them are cool like i i really feel like
we should stand up not for the idea that
you don't buy these products
but that we get products that actually
just serve us
and don't have this secondary agenda
that's what we need to be standing for
like corey
i work at eff we love tech we love our
geekery i want a tech for everything
i just want to be unclear and
unequivocal
that it's serving me and doesn't have
these quiet these secondary
purposes thank you cindy that was great
um we're going to move on next to paul
roberts from secure repairs and he's
going to talk to us about security
and one of the things that comes up a
lot in the context of repair is security
and if you remember
back in the old days of the berlin wall
the former east germany had the position
the reason that they had to put a wall
around their country
was not because they wanted to keep
people in but because all of the people
outside the wall were clamoring to get
in
and today we often hear companies that
don't want
us to be able to fix our own stuff
saying well the the only reason
we don't we shouldn't let you fix your
own car for example as we saw with
massachusetts question one on the ballot
this year
or in the last year's election is that
um we've turned
our devices into such mobile
surveillance platforms that capture
so much sensitive information about you
that if just anyone could look at it
imagine the incredible harms in fact
they said you would be murdered that was
their claim you will be murdered
if people can find out what data your
car has on you um
and you know one of the things that uh
secure repairs has done
is uh is is confused the issue with
relevant facts
something that is off in the mission of
our of our uh public sector
public interest uh uh um organizations
and and to show us that repair and
security are not antithetical that that
um independent repair is is crucial to
securities so paul
you tell us about the least secure
device in the show this year
sure corey thanks for the great
introduction can everyone hear me okay
first of all
yes good okay um so my name is as cory
said i'm paul roberts i'm the founder of
secure repairs i'm really just one of
200 plus members of secure repairs and
we're an
advocacy group representing information
technology and information security
professionals
who support the right to repair uh so
we're really honored to be able to take
part in this event and thanks to
repair.org and ifixit for for pulling it
together i'm really glad to be here
um so just a quick overview of secure
repairs again we were created basically
to give
information technology and information
security communities a voice at the
table
in the conversation about the need for a
legally guaranteed right to repair
digital right to repair auto right to
repair what have you
as technologists we believe that the
right of owners
to repair reuse fix modify
improve the stuff they own is really
central to our identity
as a nation the united states a nation
of inventors and for three centuries
there's been an implicit right to repair
grounded and common law that's been
central to the growth of our country and
develop our
development of our economy and our
nation so in the modern era as well
you know you think about the growth of
silicon valley tinkering and modding
have been core to the growth of the
high-tech industry and
route 128 in silicon valley rtp where
have you
so um this is actually not a niche issue
it's really a central issue
for our country for our society and for
our economy
um and so as nathan's going to tell you
there's an effort
going on across the country right now to
enact right to repair laws digital right
to repair laws and
otherwise at the state level and secure
repairs
is is looking to identify information
technology and information security
professionals
in those states who want to join our
organization and then
help get the ball over the goal line in
those states
uh through testimony written and and
oral
through volunteer work and so on so
before i go into my worst intro for ces
if you're interested check out our
website securerepairs.org you can add
your name to
um become one of our 200 supporters
either publicly listed or not you don't
have to be publicly
supporting the group because some of our
members work in
in companies where they might not be
happy about that um you we also have a
couple newsletters that you can sign up
for and of course you can follow us on
twitter we're
at secure repairs okay so um
for my selection for worst in show um i
think i'm gonna start with
a caveat which is that this year for
obvious reasons assessing something as
nuanced as cyber security
for products at ces was extra difficult
because of the pandemic because we're
not at ces we can't lay hands on
products we can't
uh use them um and even even in a normal
year where you're at ces
you know kind of evaluating something as
as
subtle and complex as the cyber security
of a product
just by holding it over and using it is
difficult
um and you know i think in our ideal
world
ces would have a whole category for
uh the most cyber secure product or
cyber
you know it would have a whole process
of evaluating products for cyber
security
and companies would then compete to make
products that were
joy producing stylish feature rich
easy to use affordable that also model
best practices in things like security
by design security by default security
and deployment the types of
um development product development
methodologies
that have been advocated from everyone
from darpa to
microsoft which really latched on to
that philosophy
more than 20 years ago with trustworthy
computing memo
and we might have trained experts at ces
who
are from academia or underwriter's lab
or consumer reports who would pour over
all the products on the show floor
provided by manufacturers and actually
really assess their their security
features their security posture
how they uh handle data and so on
um that's our ideal world instead uh
we're in this world and in this world
this ces is pretty much like every other
ces
and in that world security is basically
like
emily bronte's mad woman in the attic
sorry charlotte bronte's mad woman in
the attic from jane eyre it's this kind
of
menacing presence that lurks among the
booths and the slick videos and demos
threatening chaos and destruction but
that nobody talks about nobody talks
about security at ces
none of the companies that are
interested in
having you um you know use their
products or
look at a slick video of their products
talk about the security
and how those products um
you know protect the data that they
collect uh or are secure
in the environments whether it's your
home your office
uh the public uh you know the in in the
public you know smart city and smart
town that they deploy
um so for my you know part of this
um i was looking at looked over many
many different products
um and the materials rather materials
that were presented with them to try and
assess
you know which was the least secure
which is a hard thing to do
i did encounter many many red flags um
first of all
you know as as we're going to hear from
other people this kind of
um you know uh
fetish for smart and connected products
um is is really a trend uh and i saw a
lot of red flags about this
um you know always on internet
connectivity
voice recognition features artificial
intelligence and machine learning
applied to the data
that these devices connect two-way
connections to companion mobile
applications and to the cloud
these types of features are sprinkled
like bacobits over
pretty much every manner of product
at the show from baby bassinets to
bathroom fixtures
and i found few if any references in the
product literature
uh or in the demo videos about
how those uh how how that all that
information and data that's collected
is secure um it's just that they just
don't talk about it
um and when they do talk about it i
found often
there there's just a lot of hand waving
um you know we use it
we take you know we use industry best
practices to secure our products
i saw at least one rep reference to we
use military-grade encryption which any
cyber security expert will tell you is a
really freighted phrase that really
doesn't mean
or offer any assurance that your data is
protected
and unreachable from malign actors um so
there was a lot of hand waving and and
kind of passing references um uh
cindy cindy talked about the uh
kid said he talked about the sex toys
and actually one of the sex toys i saw
was
was the lioness vibrator that actually
had some of the best
information about the cyber security of
the product of
any uh not that it was convincing but it
was detailed and uh they clearly
uh did more than than just kind of give
a passing reference to it
um but at the end of the day the one the
the product that i picked that was the
least secure
was was actually not a product but
actually a whole company which is tcl
and that is a um chinese smart
electronics maker that makes a wide
range of devices at this show they had a
whole range of and i'm going to pick
their smart television sets
tcl smart tvs and the reason is this
tcl has basically spent the last three
or four months batting down
reports including by security ledger
which is publication i i do
about vulnerabilities in their android
smart tvs these are
these were tvs that were publicly some
of them publicly accessible from the
internet browseable from the internet or
from people on adjacent networks
they had um you know back you know uh
vulnerable applications uh you could
browse
the photos and even harvest credentials
from these devices
it's bad stuff um the problem is that
tcl
really it turned out didn't have a
security program
or a security team set up to respond to
these types of
um discoveries by researchers and
address the problems they were able to
kind of
they were able to kind of stand that up
and make the fixes they needed to
but i really felt like ces coming a few
months afterwards
was a few months after this was an
opportunity for tcl to say hey
we care about security security is a
feature that matters
and we're going to actually at this show
unveil
our commitment to security not that they
can make their products secure in that
short a time
but they can send a message to consumers
and to other manufacturers that security
is a feature that mattered
and they didn't there's nothing in their
literature about security there's no
reference to the security problems they
had or what they're going to do to
address them
it just gets swept under the rug i don't
think that's that different from other
smart tv manufacturers but i think that
the bar was set higher for them at this
show given what's happened in the last
three months and i feel like they
dropped the ball on that and that's why
i'm selecting them as the worst security
product
at the show thank you very much paul
that was uh
an excellent presentation we are running
slightly late so
uh i'm going to uh um put uh both
uh kyle and nathan on the spot and ask
them to uh
to take their uh very important and
useful information
and uh present it in the most compact
manner possible
uh because we wanna make sure we got
time for some questions at the end here
uh so uh kyle is the co-founder of
ifixit i fix it for those of you who
don't know
is the powerhouse of independent repair
they've got the tools they've got the
manuals they will help you seize the
means of computation
wherever you are and uh kyle is going to
talk to us today about
what cannot be repaired the worst in
show at the show
thanks corey uh this is really fun it's
it's interesting to see
i mean we see this cavalcade of new
products that come out and i'm always
asking the question
like do we really need that should we
really have that is this is this uh
substantively making our lives better
in many cases the answer is yes in other
cases uh it sets us back or or it could
be
you know one step forward and two steps
back
so i fix it rates products on
repairability uh generally when you see
a new teardown we take things apart
we rate it based on how easy or hard it
is to take apart uh
our repairability award this year uh had
to be evaluated in isolation because we
couldn't get our hands physically on the
products that were
talked about and tested at ces um that's
not
to stop us in the past i've been known
to wander around ces with screwdrivers
and and ask vendors hey that's a really
cool gizmo can i take it apart real
quick
and the marketing folks love that uh but
uh today's uh winner is a product that's
too big to take apart just with a
screwdriver
john deere has been touting their brand
new uh
set of you know robotic assisted uh
tractors
they have a whole line of farm equipment
that is computerized
and and many of the advances in
precision agriculture are really
exciting
they allow farmers to get more yield per
acre there's a lot of
incredible sophistication in these tools
unfortunately when you add electronics
to products you have to
you have to innovate alongside them in
repairability you have to create
standard
tooling and software for farmers so that
they can they can diagnose
they can diagnose problems that happen
on their tractors and instead john deere
is taking the opportunity to pivot and
and
become a little bit like apple they've
taken a lot of playbooks
uh out of apple's uh so repertoire
where apple's notorious for error 53
would brick your phone when you plugged
it into itunes
well john deere tractors now will throw
up an error code farmers don't have
access to the error code
and uh this is a huge problem so this is
uh i and by the way i am a i'm a john
deere fan i actually i own a john deere
1965 john deere bulldozer it's amazing i
broke the cylinder on it the other day
john deere doesn't make parts for their
55 year old bulldozer anymore
that's perfectly acceptable they
shouldn't have to uh but they're after
market parts so i was able to buy a new
cylinder and install it
without any any fancy skinny parts it's
a really really well made product john
deere did a great job
this product that you see here is john
deere's new x9 combine
this is a million dollar machine for
harvesting wheat and other
products at large scale it's it's high
capacity farmers are really excited
about the
the technical capabilities of this
tractor uh the challenge is
that uh they are they're making some
some changes along the way so as they're
as they're adding electronics and
everything
what we're looking at here this is the
front of the combine that's called the
header
and and attractors and combines are are
power
platforms that you can attach all kinds
of other products to so you can think of
it almost like
the kitchen mixer that you have where
you can have different attachments or
like your laptop where you have a
standard usb interface and you can plug
different things into it
tractors and combines have standard
interfaces and there's an entire
ecosystem of companies
like honeybee and mcdonald and others
that make aftermarket attachments so you
could have
the green power hub at the center the
green combine at the center and then you
could have
a rather a yellow attachment on the
front of it well john deere's new x9
combine
has a proprietary interface on the front
of it they went from a standard
analog mechanical connector to something
that's proprietary they're not sharing
the interface
and so this is an opportunity for john
deere to monopolize the market
of attachments for combines and so for
that reason for the
the desire to uh and this is a a
monopolistic corporate desire to bring
all accessories in-house uh we're giving
john deere the worst in show award for
repairability
fantastic so uh i've i uh
started hearing about perg when i was
just a baby activist
um everywhere i went i met pergies and
and perg refugees people who had started
at perg
and moved to other orgs or started their
own orgs it's one of those origin nodes
for the idea that um we should be in
control of our lives and our stuff and
that
felony contempt of business model is no
crime and um
nathan is one of my favorite followers
follows on twitter especially on repair
issues
uh and nathan is here to talk about the
environmental
impact of all of this uh future e-waste
that we see in our virtual trade show
this year
thank you corey i appreciate that uh and
proctor
um so yes u.s public interest research
group or us perg as national nonprofit
which stands up for the public interest
um
and yeah one of the threads that our
work has been grappling with is the fact
that we've kind of crossed this point
where
especially as americans we're like more
is better right now
the more stuff we have the more problems
right so and the real key is
how we can have better without more and
every day we're making a thousand year
choices right we have the capacity to
build things
that will be with future generations
whether that's plastic in the ocean or
electronic waste and all the toxic
chemicals involved in it
um yeah and so like to echo some of the
other comments right we really actually
do
need innovation we do need new tech but
we
we don't need new tech that just cooks
up new and silly ways to push people to
consume more
which brings me to my selection for the
worst in class for the environment
uh an app powered lipstick printer
the ysl rouge sir measure powered by
perso which is also the name is also
no not awesome so it really
it has everything you hate about home
printers
applied to makeup which is i'm sure
something you're asking yourself for
it's 299 lipstick
mixing device with an accompanying
smartphone app it mixes colors from
those three pods to form
custom shades i'm dispensing like
squirting out the amount you need for
application
it's a complicated electronic
replacement for a simple device right
but because it's electronic the lipstick
mixer is now using rare earth materials
it also those pods are also disposable
and they're a hundred dollars to replace
um it it seems like since the incredible
success of the karaoke cake up
coffee machine like everyone is trying
to figure out
a way to offer like a marginally better
user experience that's powered by
an electronic device that uses some kind
of proprietary pod refills
and lipstick squirter just represents it
the newest of these
but this is beyond food and drink now
we're getting into all kinds of other
beauty and wellness products which is
really troubling right
it's not a practical or useful product
right
it's less convenient and more expensive
than just buying some
random range of lipstick shades um but
honestly it would be worse for the
environment if it was a better product
um every year kerug sells billions of
those k-cups
we put enough of those into landfills
each year to circle the earth a dozen or
more times
and additionally the machines are
notoriously
difficult to repair broken and so
they're part of a growing
tide of electronic waste but the most
concerning thing
um about you know but well sorry
despite the the environmental record for
the k-cup machine like
everybody wants a new electronic
platform with these kind of reusable
pods now for their things at last year
ces
there was like a olive oil press pod
machine and a cake baking pod machine
and a
pod powered bartender but now now we're
seeing this kind of break into
makeup which is why um the invasion of
the pod people into beauty
has is is why i'm saying ysl rouge
sir measure powered by perso is the
worst in show
for any environment very good nathan
well now it falls to me to present the
final two awards um and i'm gonna move
this along quick so that we can go
straight to
uh questions from our streaming audience
and the press
and the first award i'm gonna present is
our popular choice award this is the
award for the worst product is chosen by
people who filled in highly scientific
and representative twitter polls
uh designed and overseen by a team of
crack statisticians who took a break
from doing ai phrenology to detect the
facial correlates
of being a republican or a democrat to
to
aim that analytical laser at uh at uh
product design
and uh they have awarded their people's
choice award for best in show
to the cold snap machine this is a pod
based ice cream machine
that comes from a company called sigma
phase now naming things is hard and bad
names are not always disqualifying we do
live in a world where there is a
premium kitchenware brand called smeg
but at the same time
sigma phase seems to be uniquely well
named because it refers to quote the
intermolecular stage that causes metals
to lose their ductility toughness
stability and corrosion resistance
and that is what this ice cream maker
can do for you
as you heard from nathan the world is
heartily sick
of food in pods we understand
that packaging your packaging and more
packaging than sticking it in an amazon
box and
burning a bunch of fossil fuel to get it
to you
is not the way that we will inherit a uh
or leave a good earth for our children
to inherit
uh this is a product for people who look
forward to a day when their descendants
scavenge through piles of rubble with
long poles looking for canned goods
while uh drinking their own urine so
that is that is the uh
the cold snap presented to you on behalf
of the the people of uh
twitter um and it falls to me finally to
present the
worst in show overall and uh i will uh
leave it to you to imagine an imaginary
drum roll and tell you
that the worst product in this show is
the product that has reinvented tenant
farming for the 21st century
a one million dollar device that proves
that even if
you uh pay for the product you are still
very much the product
this is the uh the john deere x9
combine harvester hooray
[Music]
all right so with that i uh i um now
throw it open to questions um we
uh we have some questions i believe in
our live stream
oh here we go i've just had some paste
it into my little chat here
so the first question this is a this is
a good one
uh it's one that we touched on during
the the panel itself
what should regular consumers do is
avoiding these products especially
products with security and privacy
issues the only course of action
so tell us panelists what can you do if
you're an ordinary person
so i i want to get my answer to this
because i like this question
you can organize and take collective
action which is the most important thing
you need to do because yeah you can
you can buy a phone that you think you
know
honors your right to repair or you can
organize people to take on the companies
that make hundreds of millions of phones
and so i i really do i really do hope
people will check out
you know usperg and and eff and and um
repair.org and get involved in these
campaigns
yeah i would echo that as well i mean i
think that um
you know i'm skeptical of the sort of
you know we can we can use consumption
patterns to
change uh policy i think you know you
need to
lobby policy makers and impose political
uh penalties for people who promote you
know
anti-social policies like these and so
yeah no i don't
i don't think consumers can shape
uh electronic product security just by
buying secure devices
it would really help if there were
labeling laws you know in states or at
the federal level that
address cyber security and and so at
least consumers could make informed
decisions of you know i'm going to save
five bucks but
this thing is a piece of crap and i may
get hacked um but again that's something
that needs to happen at the policy level
and i would just point out that we have
three branches of government so
uh uh administrative regulatory and
judicial
um i'm sorry legislative administrative
institutions jeez louise
um uh it's friday people but um i do
think that uh
uh it's important if you are actually
really injured
by one of these things which can happen
in security and can happen in some of
these
you know we need better laws to give you
more ability to get relief but
the chances are you might not be the
only one and
um there are still attempts
that work to use litigation to get
remedies for people and sometimes the
remedies you get might be very very
small
but the collective import of those kinds
of things can help push
uh push the company to make better
choices and
that's something that especially in the
privacy area we have a lot of work to
shore up the law to make that work
but in security you know eff was able to
um make some pretty big changes uh
uh when we sued sony for installing a
rootkit on your
uh phone on your on your device by
because you happen to buy a cd
so um it it is something to think about
again
um and it's another way to think about
collective action is to
to to band together with other people
who've been basically screwed by this
company
um and uh release some law on them
and gay you had something to add oh yeah
um
this is exactly i get to ask this
question all the time
um what can a consumer do and
legislators ask well why don't you just
buy a different product and i said
because the choice is no longer there
there aren't any good guy cell phones
there aren't any good guy tvs
we've lost the option of a good
competitive marketplace as
manufacturers have systematically moved
to a monopolistic
model and also the the consumption model
that nathan has been talking about
we don't have a lot of choices and we
need
the laws to keep up laws are not
protecting consumers from
being losing their options for repair
and that's why the repair association
has got so many bills moving in states
because states can control what a
business must do
in order to do business in that state so
hopefully that giant behemoth
monopolized green thing
will become repairable through state
legislation
um i think there's a lot of people that
are watching this that are configured
like holy cow i thought we were talking
about consumer electronics
so it's exactly the same problem kyle
did you want to add anything or
shall i rack it up well i just say
there's a lot of farmers that have
invested a huge amount of money in john
deere equipment
and the the answer to this is really
simple it's give the farmers access to
the same software tool that the
dealership has
it's not buy new equipment it's done
deer doesn't have to redesign their
products
they just need to to publish the
standards for their for their repair in
their faces it's it's really something
amen and and you know i i'm so glad to
hear the m word uh monopoly
be used in there you know the origins of
the consumer movement which perg was a
huge part of
were about a time in which there was a
lot more choice and so the choice that
you made carried a lot more weight
but in a world where the web has five
giant websites filled with screenshots
of text from the other four
where you know the choices that you make
about buying something that's repairable
don't mean anything because all the
repair shops are shuttered because
nothing else is repairable
or when the security that you take such
care to engage in
is completely nullified because everyone
else that you talk to is on a device
designed for surveillance and so their
end of the conversation leaks
your personal choices carry a lot less
weight than they did once upon a time
it's one of the reasons eff has picked
up a competition uh
work area as part of its overall work is
that
it's not that consumers you know your
role as a consumer in society
is nothing it's just that your role as a
consumer in society
rests on a pluralistic marketplace where
consumption choices matter
it's been a long time since we had that
market so um
uh where can i get a list of products or
companies or products that are
considered secure
anyone who want to answer that one paul
you're muted so so um
there are there are organizations that
do security ratings and products
consumer reports is one of them they
they have added cyber security rankings
to
their product reviews that's a
subscription service but
but you can you can get evaluations
there from their
engineers and experts and they do they
do excellent work
um underwriters lab as well also
certifies products for cyber security
although that is
uh that's a model in which the oems
basically have to go to ul to get the
certification so they don't do it for
pro for companies who aren't their
customers basically
um so i mean you know they the
information
is out there but it's not nearly
comprehensive enough
and um it's not necessarily independent
in the sense of in the public interest
either
um so um you know unfortunately
most of us are flying blind on the cyber
security of our home routers and
you know robotic vacuum cleaners and
other things
this is another area where a lot can
help us and it's it's a good thing is
that you ought to be able to
you know one of the problems that
security researchers have all the time
is that it's actually not
easy to get a hold of the information
you need to do the evaluation
and often you can be legally threatened
right i mean we've seen so we've
represented a lot of security
uh people who have been threatened by
the computer fraud and abuse act or the
digital millennium copyright actor
these click wraps that say you can't
reverse engineer or benchmark
um our system so there's some legal work
that we could do to free that
up and um and and we need to do it now
we've been okay you know
there's um there's work we can do in the
courts but there's also really good work
that the legislature can do to try to
get us to the place where you could
actually make a list that people could
trust we need to take those obstacles
because people like paul
and other folks are there and they will
do it for us if we make if we can clear
the way but
you know we live in a time where the
claims of trade secrets and contracts to
prevent people from having access to
their very own devices
are huge barriers and that's an area
where
we need to clear the way for people to
do the work so that you the consumers
can have the list
that you need yeah and i'll add that you
know one area that i think is really
underappreciated
is that in a world where we have smart
devices and laws that prohibit modifying
them if the manufacturer doesn't want
you to
the device that you buy that feels
ethical on day one can be changed
um and that we have lots of examples of
manufacturers pushing out updates
that do things that are are effectively
anti-features you know the printer
companies are obviously the worst ones
for this they're the ones who keep
sending you things that look like
security updates
but are actually to secure their
shareholders and what they do is
is take away your ability to use third
ink and it used to be that was just
inkjets but now we're seeing it in some
laser printers as well
hp has just done this with some of their
laser printers they're they're the
repeat offenders here
but you know in a market that's
dominated by a half dozen firms you'll
find that everywhere
so this is one of those areas where i
think we need to
to have good information but we also
have to have good rules
and good remedies and and enforcement
too i mean i note that
you know the the supreme court has ruled
very clearly that you know inkjet
you know printer makers can't use you
know software to lock out third-party
ink providers and yet they seem to be
doing it um so and and my guess is
because there isn't really a lot of
enforcement of those
of those rulings right i would defer to
cindy on that but
even where there is you know some some
case law and
and seems like it's pretty clear-cut you
still see violations because
it's not top of mind yeah
we can do a whole other thing about
barriers to accountability and why
you know you put something that's
illegal into a contract and somebody
points out that it's illegal and you
just take it out and then you continue
on your merry way right like we reward
people who over
claim on their rights and we uh make it
very hard to create accountability for
people who do that and
i'd be happy to be appointed uh
chairman uh you know head of the senate
and bring
up the bills that are pretty easy to
write that would change that calculus so
that there's accountability for over
claiming your rights in this area yeah
thank you
we've got an another question and this
is um i'm sure the rest of you all have
good answers for this is the kind of
question that i often ask cindy because
in my other life i write these techno
thrillers and i come up with really cool
hacks for getting around bad laws and i
tell them to cindy and then she's just
like no they'll put you in jail
or they'll they'll put your friends in
jail or they'll put you in jail and make
your friends rat you out and won't let
you out of jail until you do it
so this is this is a question that's
like i it's the question i always ask
and always get cold water thrown on
so this is uh could your farmer neighbor
hack your smart tractor and use it on
their farm and i think the implication
is
and therefore avoid violating any of the
contracts because it's you who clicked i
agree
and your neighbor is the one who breaks
into your yard in the middle of the
night and hacks your tractor
are they now completely in the clear and
i don't know if anyone wants to take a
crack at that i know cindy will have a
good answer for it
yeah i'm happy to take a crack at this
you can see how fun it is to be
uh cory's boss um uh i think that uh
yeah um the answer is it probably won't
work um it probably won't work for
you and it definitely won't work for
your neighbor um and the reason it won't
work for
uh your neighbor is because it's not
just the contract
that is prohibiting them from doing this
there are these laws there's the
computer
computer fraud and abuse act and the
digital millennium copyright act which
don't require you to have agreed to
something before
uh you're in trouble for violating the
terms
and so um the the the problem is
there is that the contract isn't the
only thing that binds
uh you and it is definitely not it does
even if it doesn't find your neighbor
other laws will um and the second thing
is that your neighbor will get you in
trouble
right you can't you know uh um
you can't br you can't pretend like
you're not breaching a contract by
having somebody else do the breach like
the law knows about that pro
that trick um and you know if you could
breach a contract any contract you have
by just you know making your neighbor do
it
instead of you we have a very different
legal system and so
you can't you can't conspire with
somebody else
to to have your have a contact broken
anymore then you can
break it yourself again um this is not a
new problem it's not a digital problem
it's about how contracts work and
um that's old so um so sorry that hack
won't work
um now there might be some questions
about whether you get caught
um that are interesting but i suspect
that one of the things john deere does
and kyle could correct me is they do a
lot of tracking about what you're doing
with that tractor and they're going to
know that somebody's using it even if
it's not you
yeah absolutely could you do this yes
yes you could
could you take control of something over
the internet and drive an autonomous
tractor
i would think so uh but yes there is a
lot of tracking
and a lot of data uh john john deere is
streaming the data that farmers do
on their fields off to john used servers
uh without your permission
uh or consent necessarily i'm not sure
that it's possible to turn off that data
collection
right they put the track in tractor um
there's a there's a good question here
how can everyone help get
right to repair laws passed and how many
states are considering them i know that
some of the folks in this call worked
really hard i'm like gay
yes i'm just going crazy on that thank
you
it's real simple we have a tool on our
website repair.org
it's called advocacy and
you follow the instructions on the tool
that says write your legislator you put
in your address
we it automatically looks up your
representative and your senator
tees up a form letter and off you go um
and those are the most powerful things
that we've
got in our arsenal to get support so
it's it's a real grassroots effort it's
free it takes about a minute
if you're slow typing less if you're not
and when we're able to get hundreds of
letters in front of legislators they do
listen
and it's hundreds it's not millions
so please very good um
nathan someone wants to know how we stop
the invasion of the pod people
[Laughter]
that's that's a really good question um
i feel like the science fiction author
here would probably have a better answer
than me
but yeah i
how do we prevent this model it's like
of
replacing all of our devices with some
kind of rent seeking platform
uh i think we got to wise up as you know
like we talked a little about consumers
i think we got to wise up about this
but then i also think that there are
waste uh
laws that could come into play that that
you know the companies that produce
these
systems should be accountable for the
way ways in which they're
you know endangering endangering the
planet which will make it less
attractive to have something like a
you know a pod coffee machine
yeah i mean i think a rule that that
cause this is not the sexy science
fiction
answer but a rule that that forces
companies to re-internalize their
external costs
is a big one the other thing is that
like even if we stop this tomorrow
there'll be a lot of them in the field
and you know one of the things that's
exciting about
what happened as these pod machines
spread around is that people started
making refillable pods
they started making their own repair
kits they started doing all kinds of
stuff and actually like
one of the things about interoperability
that is so great and that differentiates
digital technology from earlier
technologies from say the railroad where
you know in australia they have the
multi-gauge model where different rails
are at different widths depending on
where in the country you are because the
rail barons were all fighting with each
other
and in the end like the only answer they
had was not designing cars that like
had retractable wheels and that could
drop another set of wheels in the end
they just tore up tracks right
unlike with computers we just write
software that acts as an interface layer
and the cool thing about about uh
interoperability when we unleash it
is it turns these wild gardens into
feedlots right into places where all of
your potential customers
have been neatly lined up you know a
brother or hp or whoever have gone out
and done the hard work
of selling these devices to people who
are now hungry for something that
doesn't rip them off
and so your alternative consumables your
refillable kits your
uh new software updates your new
operating systems all of that stuff
it presents a it has a ready-made market
and so some of what we need to do is
just get interoperability back into the
mix
take away the laws that big tech has has
bought and paid for over the last 15 20
years
that make the old common practices of
making new
things that plug into old things illegal
so next question and i think it's going
to be our last one here is what were
some notably bad trends
at ces this year what are the runners-up
i mean i think just as i said i i think
the the fetish
for um you know connectivity
always on connectivity mass data
aggregation and i guess maybe the new
thing this year that you just see more
of is you know machine learning and
artificial intelligence you know not
only harvesting your data but we're
actually really throwing algorithms at
you know slicing and dicing it and and
finding ways to monetize it um or
you know tell you some weird discrete
observation about your lived experience
that you know
seemingly i don't know is meaningful or
valuable
um so i i'd say that was probably new
just the references to ml and ai
and you know whatever whatever that
means
yeah i've been i've been watching
buzzword compliance at ces since the 90s
so
i guess that's nothing new anyone else
have any uh any trends or final words
is it possible to buy a tv that doesn't
come with an internet connection
basically not you know similar with
automobiles really you know can
can you get a non internet connected car
can you get a non-internet connected tv
i think almost every tv sold today is a
smart tv
and um as we're seeing these are
basically surveillance devices with
microphones and cameras on them that sit
in the midst of your house
and generally security is not a design
priority and you know i i live with uh
a recovering uh esports pioneer my wife
played quake for england in the 90s
and uh we when we bought a house and we
moved from england to los
angeles we bought a house my wife wanted
to get a very large tv and we ended up
buying a computer monitor
because there were no tvs that weren't
smart yeah
and if if you don't plug it into the
internet then it still has a bunch of
wireless stuff it has nfc and bluetooth
and all that other stuff
and you're no longer getting patches for
it so that that is like the worst of all
worlds and so we've just got a computer
monitor now i would
i would say go on you know go on
facebook marketplace or something
somebody's unloading a big crt
tv on their curb for free that doesn't
have internet connectivity and will do
the job
yeah i think that would overwhelm our
solar go ahead cindy i think that's fine
but again i think
we need to not slide into the oh i have
to just accept stuff that sucks
um mentality as a consumer and say
like we want we want internet you know
if it's going to connect to the internet
it should connect to the internet in a
way that i understand that is completely
secure and that i can control
right like i want a backup i want apple
to back up the stuff that's on my phone
i just want it encrypted at their end
and me to have the key right like i just
i feel like we need to stand up
not for we need to stand up for tools
that give us all the cool stuff
and just serve us instead of taking the
position that if the stuff doesn't serve
you you shouldn't just buy it
like that's certainly true and i make
those choices all the time but like
there's a better world we need to we
need to fix
the future not stay in the past
our our dear friend michael weinberger
from uh who used to be a public
knowledge wrote a white paper
about 3d printing patents and copyright
and the title of it is so good that i
want it on my tombstone and it's
this will all be so great if we don't
screw it up
all right folks well thank you all for
for joining us thanks for the folks
watching the live stream and commenting
over there on uh
on on youtube and other streaming
platforms thanks uh to my
co-panelists thanks to the repair
coalition where
sonya wants to know where i joined the
repair association that would be
repair.org repair.org eff.org usperg.org
uh securerepairs.org uh we're we're
one of these things is not like the
other
but but we're we're all happy to have
your support
and um we're all happy to have you folks
in the fight this is a fight we win
together
um and uh everyone stay safe
uh don't go to any eyeball licking
parties get vaccinated wear your mask
uh and um we'll see you on the other
side of the virus