Opinion

Right to repair is important, but we should be designing for repair instead

Post published:February 3, 2020
Post author:philip

We live in a world today that more and more items we buy are either intended to be disposable, or we are culturally influenced to make them disposable. In years past it was much more common to get your shoes repaired instead of buying new ones. When was the last time you went to a cobbler? I suspect many people wouldn't even know where to find one. Readers of a certain age are probably looking up the definition of cobbler (hint: not the pie). We buy electronics that work for a couple of years and then get tossed, sometimes ending up in African e-waste dumps, where at the risk to their health locals strip the electronics of precious metals, and burn insulated wires to get to the copper inside, released toxic fumes. Just think how many charging cables you've thrown out because they were worn out or just simply stopped working. Burning sheathed cables to recover copper at the Agbogbloshie e-waste landfill near the center of Accra, Ghana's capital city (Wikimedia Commons) Just this week the European Parliament voted to have the EU Commission establish a single charger standard (i.e. not Apple's Lightning) for all mobile devices. One argument they…

Who watches the watchmen? Apple vs. The FBI

Post published:February 23, 2016
Post author:philip

The confrontation between the FBI and Apple over decrypting an Apple iPhone 5C used by Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the San Bernardino terrorists, who murdered fourteen and injured twenty two more on December 2, 2015, is a very interesting story. At first blush the story seems quite simple. The FBI clearly wants to know what is on Farook's phone, as it could potentially tell them if the terrorists had accomplices, as well as if they were in touch with other potential terrorists before the attack. Everyone involved (other than perhaps their accomplices if they exist) wants the FBI to get the information on the phone. In fact, Apple assisted the FBI in getting all the information backed up to iCloud, and offered advice on how to retrieve the data from the locked iPhone. That advice was simply to plug in the phone in the presence of a known WiFi network, which might have triggered an automatic backup to iCloud of the more recent data. This would not have been affective if Farook had disabled backups, but otherwise would have sent a backup to iCloud that Apple would have been able to provide the FBI. The reason this method didn't…