Technology

59377 readers

4666 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

1008

Paralyzed Jockey Loses Ability to Walk After Manufacturer Refuses to Fix Battery For His $100,000 Exoskeleton (www.404media.co)

submitted 1 month ago by some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org to c/technology@lemmy.world

123 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Apologies for posting a pay walled article. Consider subscribing to 404. They’re a journalist-founded org, so you could do worse for supporting quality journalism.

Trained repair professionals at hospitals are regularly unable to fix medical devices because of manufacturer lockout codes or the inability to obtain repair parts. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, broken ventilators sat unrepaired for weeks or months as manufacturers were overwhelmed with repair requests and independent repair professionals were locked out of them. At the time, I reported that independent repair techs had resorted to creating DIY dongles loaded with jailbroken Ukrainian firmware to fix ventilators without manufacturer permission. Medical device manufacturers also threatened iFixit because it posted ventilator repair manuals on its website. I have also written about people with sleep apnea who have hacked their CPAP machines to improve their basic functionality and to repair them.

PS: he got it repaired.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] linearchaos@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don't think there's any solid argument that precludes people from doing maintenance on their own car. There's always some form of inspection or monitoring that can be done. Brakes in particular are perfectly reasonable. I particularly miss ease of maintaining drum brakes. They were literally designed to be maintained by the end user, you pull the wheel, The drum slides right off and the parts are readily available. If you want to get fancy you could buy a tool to help you remove the spring.

Things should be designed to be maintained by the end user and the end user could choose to go to a mechanic if they wanted to.

Honestly what we're running up against at this point with car maintenance is design to cost. Every part that is maintainable on a car could be designed to be easily maintainable for a cost. Rather than the manufacturer paying that cost, there making us pay the cost at the mechanic. You can literally buy repair parts that are easy and convenient to work with that are improvements over OEM.

In the case we're talking about for this article it's literally a wire on a lithium ion battery pack in a wrist mounted device that failed that they're refusing to replace.

And it's not like he's going to fall out of the sky and land in somebody's backyard.

[–] atrielienz@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

If inspection or monitoring were mandatory you'd have a point. But it isn't mandatory. Not everywhere. Not even most places. Only 19 of the 50 states require vehicle safety inspections periodically. So at most the vast majority of vehicles probably haven't had one since the car was new unless the state where that car is registered requires it. For a country that's very car dependent with car accidents being one of the leading causes of death in the US, that's terrifying.