[HN Gopher] Companies Lobby Against Giving the Military the Righ...
___________________________________________________________________
Companies Lobby Against Giving the Military the Right to Repair
Author : worik
Score : 63 points
Date : 2024-08-28 19:13 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.404media.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.404media.co)
| robwwilliams wrote:
| With Warren on this proposed legislation whatever the pain for
| vendors. Lock-in on service might be acceptable during peace but
| not at all in combat. Slightly ironic that this should apply with
| equal force to code.
| passwordoops wrote:
| Lock-in on service should never be acceptable under any
| circumstances, war, peace, military, civilian
| crest wrote:
| Lock-on instead of lock-in?
| jmclnx wrote:
| Of course they are :)
|
| Military Vendors lap up Gov. money like a Camel in a desert at an
| oasis. Without that money, the US economy would collapse over
| night.
|
| I hope the Military is allowed to repair their equipment. In a
| war, that ability is mandatory.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > like a Camel in a desert at an oasis
|
| Well the camels stop after 30ish gallons. Military Vendors lap
| up Gov. money like a blackhole laps up pretty much everything
| in it's vicinity.
| floxy wrote:
| >Without that money, the US economy would collapse over night.
|
| But that money would just get spent by other government
| agencies, or the taxpayers, right? And if the military vendors
| aren't efficiently using that money, then society would end up
| better off if they (the military vendors) weren't spending it.
| mc32 wrote:
| This is ridiculous. Imagine you're in the middle of a battle and
| you need to get an okay to fix something outside of an
| approved/certified repair outfit?
|
| That would be a physical DDOS attack with severe consequences.
|
| I hope, one can hope, the brass, despite any consequence to their
| kickbacks, care a little about the grunts on the ground who would
| be exposed to the consequences of this nonsense and quash this
| unpatriotic grift.
|
| This is mercenary attitude --which if you're dealing with
| mercenaries, you can expect, but your own people and companies?
| That's... insane.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| It feels like the military is well into pushing back in a lot of
| ways. "Modular Open Systems Architectures" ((M)OSA) is a buzzword
| you can't go ten pages through a proposal or strategy doc without
| running into, after years of the military enduring the same
| locked down IP shit the rest of the world has been mixed in for
| decades now. And the military seems to be one of the few places
| opening up expectations that this unevolvable hell isn't good
| enough.
|
| One particular write up that really got me was just a brief part
| of the extremely long & sad ProPublica write-up on the Litoral
| Combat Ship (LCS). The part about the sailors not even having
| physical access to a computing center was off the wall madness to
| me, really epitomized & made real to me a certain despairing
| level of madness that unregulated capitalism tries to steer
| humanity into. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-navy-spent-
| billions-l...
|
| It's not entirely clear how much remedy we're getting from this
| (M)OSA kumbaya, what are the bigger successes & failures or what
| technically it looks like (would so love to be able to see how
| the Arsenal of Democracy is coping with the corporate raiders
| within), but there's at least strong lip service to change,
| mutual recognition that systems need to be flexible &
| reconfigurable & adjustable & modular, which is something.
| georgeplusplus wrote:
| >>>> that unregulated capitalism tries to steer humanity into.
|
| What part of this economy seems unregulated to you? What a
| ridiculous notion talking about military contracts no less.
|
| You couldn't be more far off from finding the source of problem
| then just mindlessly throwing in a dig at capitalism, the way
| the government awards contract is anything but competitive or
| capitalistic
| djaouen wrote:
| The CEOs proposing such ideas should be locked up as traitors lol
| ansmithz42 wrote:
| Nah! I think the CEOs should be the first ones sent into the
| combat front line zones.
| ravenstine wrote:
| I didn't expect someone else to say this, but that is my first
| thought. If I became supreme leader overnight, I would place _a
| lot_ of people behind bars, and these guys would be among the
| first. It 's pretty outrageous how much society tolerates the
| leadership class.
| jprd wrote:
| Eisenhower warned us about this kind of eventuality, and I
| personally never thought it could ever get this far. Outrageous.
| krapp wrote:
| If you're referring to the military industrial complex, I don't
| think this is what Eisenhower was warning about.
| blahyawnblah wrote:
| So the companies are going to send repair people all over the
| world, have people that have clearance, and potentially go into
| actively hostile areas?
| ptero wrote:
| That's what companies already do, charging the government a
| pretty penny for being in theater.
| istultus wrote:
| Nice, you've found a pathway to hiring more veterans
| bityard wrote:
| It's not unheard of. The contractors are generally former
| military.
| Doches wrote:
| Palantir has been doing exactly this for more than a decade...
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Contractor tech reps have been doing this already since the
| Cold War.
| trhway wrote:
| [saying without prejudice, just using real example to illustrate
| the power of tech company, or even a single person like in this
| case, behind locked-in tech]
|
| Back then Elon Musk refused to turn the Starlink on on the Black
| Sea and the Ukrainian drones weren't able to perform the planned
| attack on the Russian Navy ships there (the situation later was
| rectified by Pentagon itself directly contracting some of the
| Startlink terminals or something along these lines)
|
| In general the modern weaponry is very complicated and Western
| tanks and artillery systems would be transported to Poland from
| Ukraine for service and repair. I think recently they tried to
| establish a repair base in Ukraine, yet i'm wondering whether the
| growing complexity of the hardware may make the "right-to-repair"
| issue closer to moot in larger part. I mean the right-to-repair
| in civilian case allows independent companies to provide repairs,
| while i don't see any practical way for such independent
| companies in the military case.
| a3n wrote:
| Simple solution: Only let contracts where verifiably senior
| company technical employees are to accompany equipment in war and
| peace, and to have all technical data in their possession,
| verified unencrypted.
|
| After they're all dead, the president signs an executive order
| confiscating all on-site data and equipment, and authorizing
| military to repair. This would also be spelled out in the
| contract.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Admiral Rickover's solution here was to write into the contract
| having company executives on the boat for its first dive.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| If my exmil co-workers have taught me anything its that anything
| and everything can be macgyver'd in a pinch. If jerry rigging was
| a sport these guys would be ranked competitive players.
|
| In this case, your 'threat actor' is servicemen and 'arms race'
| is like, their whole thing. These guys are bored out of their
| mind for 95% of their career and will take anything apart if the
| activity gets them 2 hrs closer to a break.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I bet they cannot macgyver it if it's software locked.
| fragmede wrote:
| because they can't run Ida pro and hack it?
| benreesman wrote:
| Elizabeth Warren being in the DoD's corner on basic
| serviceability of equipment critical to the sustained warfighting
| capability of our military against an industry flexing DRM was
| not on my late capitalism bingo card.
| squarefoot wrote:
| What a bunch of greedy bastards. Not being able to repair an
| appliance/device/tool/whatever in some contexts could make the
| difference between life and death. And not just in combat.
| Imagine if the air filter on the Apollo 13 couldn't be hacked
| with what the astronauts had at hand up there because it was
| driven by closed electronics whose brain was sandwiched in
| multiple layers of DRM, NDAs, stupidity and lawyers: the guys
| would have been doomed.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-08-28 23:00 UTC)