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Trent Waddington

@JessTheUnstill if you were going to set up a foundation to enact this policy, what would you call it? Would you walk the sign-ups and logos path or the legislative path?

7 comments
Jess👾

@quantumg
I am just a bitch who rants on the internet, not a public policy expert. I suspect that it would end up needing some sort of legislation solution because device manufacturers both don't want their old recycled devices continuing to work, and thus, meaning their users can continue to use them longer without replacing them. Also, they might insist on having some waivers of liability after they EOL so users don't come suing them for support or whatever.

Trent Waddington

@JessTheUnstill I too am a bitch on the Internet. 🤣 There's one called Human-I-T that was clearly named by someone's nerdy Dad, that is mostly focused on recycling computers, tablets and phones. Then there's Good Ol' Games and competitors that are all about keeping cultural artifacts available for future generations. Most IoT junk feels like it never should have been made in the first place.. but I love cheap crap.

Jess👾

@quantumg
Yeah, but even most IoT crap, it's gonna probably have some SOC that runs an embedded Linux or BSD that maybe you could do SOMETHING interesting with it.

Trent Waddington

@JessTheUnstill big public database with repurposing cookbooks would be great. I bet there's 12 of them in varying states of decay. Put 'em all together and call it Amalgamated Abandonware.

Roger Moore

@JessTheUnstill @quantumg
The waiver of liability is a nice incentive for companies to participate. You might need to require some minimum notice before EOL to avoid companies suddenly dropping products as soon as they discover a flaw that might trigger lawsuits. There should probably be some kind of notice requirement anyway to protect customers from buying something that has an unreasonably short supported lifetime.

Trent Waddington

@VATVSLPR @JessTheUnstill reasonable 😆 If every tech product had to have a declared support schedule (written on the box, as it were) you could imagine service-oriented junk winning, but also consumers who will only buy zero-service products.

Andreas, DJ3EI, he/him

I very much like this idea of a law forcing manufacturers to provide unlock facilities for devices with built-in computing power upon end of support.

🤔

"Waiver of liability" is clearly needed.

But that translates to "the unlock facilities don't work".

This will be nontrivial to codify...

@JessTheUnstill @quantumg

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