On Friday morning, six right-to-repair advocates came together to present Repair.org’s second annual Worst Showcase Awards, a selection from “The Least Private, Least Safe, Least Repairable, and Least Sustainable at CES” gadgets”.
exist a speech Played on YouTube, author and activist Cory Doctorow hosted the condemnation session. He said he’s been at CES for decades, and vendors are happy to cite the supposed benefits of their products.
“But none of these people will tell you how it will fail,” Doctorow said. “That’s what we’re doing here today, talking about the hidden or possibly not-so-hidden and fully predictable failure modes of these gadgets.”
Kyle Wiens, Co-Founder i fix it, awarded to the new Mercedes EQS EV as the least maintainable product. He showed the driver a slideshow of the warning screen the car was showing the driver, saying: “You can’t open the hood of the car. It’s locked, and if you open the hood, it gives an accident warning, an injury warning. May Said’s point was, ‘Hey, this is an electric car, and the owner doesn’t need to do anything under the hood of this car.'”
worst in the show #CES2022 Serviceability is the Mercedes EQS EV, which warns you not to open the hood of your own car. https://t.co/JtPQc8HllR pic.twitter.com/Sxer4T5VuK
— Kyle Wiens (@kwiens) January 7, 2022
Wiens said this is not the first time Mercedes has gone this route, pointing to the company a few years ago Remove the dipstick From their C-Class vehicles, it is believed that only an authorized technician should change the oil.
“So that’s all about the future,” he said.
Cindy Cohen, Executive Director Electronic Frontier Foundation, awarded the Worst Privacy Award to Sengled Smart Health Monitoring Light.
“It’s a light bulb that’s supposed to monitor your health, but it’s actually monitoring the people in the room,” Cohen explained.
The idea, she said, is that the device can track your sleep, heart rate, body temperature, and if multiple units are used, it can do it across the house.
“These are one of those…some people will say, ‘We can do this now, let’s find the need for it,’ and then I think need it in case grandma falls,” she said. “Of course, grandma has various other ways to tell you she fell. It’s really just monitoring her, she can control it, not this, which is out of grandma’s control.”
The idea that you need your lightbulb to monitor your heart rate is just creepy, weird and unnecessary, Cohen said. What’s more, she added, it’s unclear what happens to the data collected by the devices, where it’s stored and who can access it.
Price of NFTs
Nathan Proctor, National Campaign Director, Public Interest Nonprofit USPIRG, dismissing Samsung’s new NFT aggregation platform.
“One of the great things about the digital age is that the marginal cost of sharing and copying things is very close to zero,” he explained.
“But some people have a hard time accepting that kind of sharing. So we’re so used to valuing things that stem from scarcity that we have to inject scarcity into a digital world where it’s totally unnecessary and there’s no Other uses. To create uniqueness, for things that are not actually unique.
If you don’t know what an NFT is, I’m really jealous of your life
“That made me pick the worst class in terms of circumstances,” Proctor continued. “Samsung’s new TV NFT aggregation platform, a way to buy, sell and display NFT artwork from giant OLED Samsung TVs.”
“If you don’t know what an NFT is, I’m really jealous of your life,” he said. “But let me explain it badly because there’s no way to really explain it without boring you. It stands for non-fungible token, it’s a digital medium with some kind of permanent, non-transferable mark attached to it, It kind of confirms it, you know, is attributed to you in some way. It’s basically a way of creating scarcity for digital images that they wouldn’t otherwise have as part of their existence.
NFTs are marketed as if they were collectibles, Proctor said, “kind of like the crypto bros’ Beanie Baby craze — if the Beanie Babies needed to continue to consume massive amounts of energy on a warming planet to stay physical.”
They are bought and sold using ethereum, he said, noting that a researcher recently calculated that an artist sold two works of art using 176 MWh of electricity, produces greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 21 years of energy use by the average American household.
Paul Roberts, Founder SafeRepair.org, warns that his award is speculative as he has not personally experienced the products he considered. Still, he chose industrial equipment maker John Deere’s fully automatic 8R tractor, not because of known vulnerabilities, but because of the way the company works with the safety community and the inevitable bugs in the software that manages such a complex machine. .
“Any company that makes any kind of software, let alone a multi-ton robotic device with … millions of lines of code, has security issues,” he explained. “Cybersecurity issues and vulnerabilities are just a byproduct of how much code you write. So, like every other device maker, Deere will have security issues and vulnerabilities, some of them serious.”
Roberts’ problem is Deere’s corporate safety culture, which he believes has underreacted to the research community.He pointed to the disclosures made last April Vulnerability This enables security researchers to hack into the company’s corporate website and operations center website.
“There’s been a lack of response from Deere. It really comes down to what I think is a security wash. They started a bug bounty program with HackerOne, they sent their CISO to a press conference and talked about how seriously they take security,” He said.
“But in reality, there’s very little to prove. Bug bounty programs exempt hardware from the types of things that researchers are invited to review. They’ve had 100 reports since launch, but only 40 have been resolved, so they” There are 60 open issues in the queue. “
Gay Gordon-Byrne, Executive Director repair.org, the poll that revealed Community Choice’s worst performer also went to John Deere, noting that her group is fighting the company in every state legislature to make its products easier to repair.
“It’s great to see that the general public is receiving the message that allowing a union-busting, profit-taking greedy agritech company to monopolize the market for how we get our food and then letting them do as they please may not be our path to a better future. The road ahead,” Doctorow observed before presenting his pick for the overall worst performer: Lenovo’s new smart clock, Essential with Alexa.
“It’s a device you put next to your bed, and if you make random incomprehensible sounds, it turns on and starts listening to everything you say,” Doctorow said, pointing to the work of security researchers who study The data captured by Amazon’s smart speaker systems and the company uses contractors to review the captured audio to ensure transcription quality. “In my opinion, it’s just one of the things we should be able to find outside the gate, not something we want at home.”
“We’re long overdue for a federal privacy law in this country with a private right to sue, and this kind of thing could bind one of these companies, you know, here we are…that’s an example of why we need companies to go beyond regulation and be governed by Regulated by democratically accountable legislators who consider the public interest.” ®
