Twitter, Reddit, Unity, Blizzard... who else?

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Literally every company is doing this. There was a time when, for example, Apple could reverse engineer the Word document format and make their own word processor that uses them. This was very common and resulted in things like IBM PC clones that sped up innovation.
Now companies use litigation and corporate buyouts to reduce their competition, then set up ways to extract rents on customers rather than providing a service. Business folks love this because it means a consistent stream of revenue that won't go away. And now you've got carmakers looking to charge by the month for features.
For more details, read Chokepoint Capitalism.
- And now you've got carmakers looking to charge by the month for features.
  When I reach the point at which I am forced to buy a car like that, I'd just find out from where the feature gets controlled and hack in my own controller and a good 'ol switch.
  
  Right now it's your right to do what you want to your car as long as it still passes vehicle inspection, but it appears that car makers want new laws that prevent you from modifying your own car.
  If we just sit on our hands now, well likely move into a future where we will be forced to either pay subscription or take public transit, which requires subscriptions.
  
  The Library of Congress added "software that runs land vehicles" to their copyright exceptions somewhat recently. That's why farmers are legally allowed to use cracked software from Ukrainian grain farmers to run/repair their tractors
  
  Even allowed now I would never ever modify my car firmware due to huge liability in case of any incident. Literally any insurance company figuring out you tempered with car software would try to take all the money paid for damages back from you.
  
  You can inject CAN bus commands if you can sniff what they're sending. No firmware modification necessary. Not saying it's a good idea to do so, but it is possible to do so.
  
  At least public transit is an ongoing service. I'm far less opposed to subscriptions when I'm actually being provided with something for them.
  Car manufacturers trying to charge subscriptions for features in the car you own feels like racketeering. They're not providing an ongoing service, they're asking me to keep paying them to not remove a feature.
  
  You wouldn’t steal a car
- Cory Doctorow’s new book delves into this as well. I’m 2/3 through but it defines the problem very well for laymen and prescribes how to solve it.
  
  How do we solve this shit?
  
  Nukes, a lot of nukes
  
  I think you misread that; it's "nudes, a lot of nudes."
- This was very common and resulted in things like IBM PC clones that sped up innovation.
  i don't think it was due to reverse engineering but bcz of releasing specification by IBM them self due to which other manufacturer where able to make identical clone and can run extracted BIOS from IBM PC without any modification!

226 comments