• 4 Posts
  • 411 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • It is like paying to unlock satellite TV reception (even though we are receiving the signals the whole time).

    It’s reasonable to charge for this because the value is in copyrighted content and a service that costs the provider money to operate. The same would apply for satellite radio in a car or an internet-based streaming service. It is not reasonable to charge for access to the adaptive suspension or seat warmers that are already in a car a customer bought. That breaks the traditional model of ownership.

    An interesting middle ground might be to allow the owner to install arbitrary software on the car, and charge for the OEM adaptive suspension app. I think I would like a world where things work like that; OEMs would whine about security to no end.

    I think it should be legal to attempt to decrypt satellite signals without paying; if the satellite service is designed well, it won’t be possible. All the anticircumvention laws should be repealed.


  • It’s an electronic parking brake. Those are common now because a small switch takes up less interior space than a lever for a cable-actuated parking brake, and the computer can disengage the parking brake if it detects that the driver is attempting to drive with it activated. The computer is involved in brake pad replacement to tell the parking brake motor to open to its widest position to accept new pads, and calibrate itself to their thickness.

    This requires a special adapter and software subscription rather than a button on the infotainment screen because Hyundai is engaging in rent-seeking and perhaps trying to direct business to its dealers.








  • The amount of time the battery spends at higher voltage definitely affects its capacity over time. There’s plenty of research on Li-ion battery service life characteristics done with greater scientific rigor than is possible with batteries installed in phones.

    It can take longer than the few months these tests required to see the effect. A phone that’s usually stored at 60% will eventually show a big capacity advantage over one that’s stored at 100%. That’s probably mostly true at 80% as well.

    For some anecdata, my Pixel 4a has spent most of the past five years limited to 60%. It reports 1152 cycles and 91% capacity.








  • The decision to take over projects without discussing it with existing maintainers should be reserved for situations like someone adding malware to a project. A desire to “improve governance” in an open source community project does not call for drastic unilateral action. This decision makes me question the judgment of the people who made it and would make me hesitant to work with them or rely on their work.

    It looks like Matz, the creator of Ruby is now overseeing things. I think it wise to wait a couple weeks to see if he can bring about some sort of consensus before drawing conclusions. Rumor has it, he’s nice.

    DHH doesn’t seem nice. I’d be happy about a change to Rails governance.


  • The who has supplied them part is the critical point here.

    I’ll give an example outside of digital technology. If Ford sells a car with Michelin tires on it, Ford has some responsibility for those tires even though I can also buy them from Joe’s Tire Shop and put them on any car with the right size wheels. I can also buy Continental tires from Joe’s Tire Shop and put them on my Ford car. Ford has no responsibilities in relation to Continental Tires or Joe’s Tire Shop.

    If Samsung preloads WhatsApp and Android on a phone, Samsung has to know where it got WhatsApp and Android. If I download Signal from https://signal.org/android/apk/ and install it on a Samsung phone running Google Android, neither Samsung nor Google is a party to that.

    The CRA, including the parts you’re quoting does not impose any obligation on anyone with respect to a product or component they never touch.


  • The OS or a phone both fit that definition.

    Yes it does, and it means someone making and selling either has to have a certain level of knowledge about it supply chain.

    An app fits the definition of a component.

    If it’s bundled with the OS, it probably does. In that case, the OS vendor is a manufacturer and has a variety of obligations relative to the app detailed in article 13.

    If the user is obtaining it directly from the developer and installing themselves, it doesn’t really matter if it’s a component or a product because the OS vendor is not distributing or manufacturing anything. If the app/OS combination were to be treated as a system of which the app is a component, it is the user who has manufactured that product by combining the two. If the user is not selling that system, they have no obligations under the CRA.


  • Apps definitely qualify as products with digital elements. The term that determines whether Google has obligations is this scenario is ‘economic operator’ Here’s the definition for that:

    ‘economic operator’ means the manufacturer, the authorised representative, the importer, the distributor, or other natural or legal person who is subject to obligations in relation to the manufacture of products with digital elements or to the making available of products with digital elements on the market in accordance with this Regulation

    When Google distributes apps via the Play Store, it is very obviously the distributor, which is defined:

    ‘distributor’ means a natural or legal person in the supply chain, other than the manufacturer or the importer, that makes a product with digital elements available on the Union market without affecting its properties

    If someone else distributes apps using other infrastructure that happen to run on an OS that Google made, Google is not the distributor and does not incur any obligations that apply to distributors. (For completeness, Google is obviously not the manufacturer, authorised representative, or importer either.)