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

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

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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.

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[–] ivanafterall 15 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Do you have a source on the food supply angle? Sounds interesting and enraging.

[–] [email protected] 91 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Short of it is that John Deere is preventing farmers from repairing their own tractors. How much it threatens the food supply, I'm not sure, but there is an obvious connection.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 2 months ago

I've also read about the John Deere issue as a leading instigator of right-to-repair laws. They weren't able to provide authorized local repair techs when a tractor breaks down, so farmers were stuck waiting 1-2 weeks for someone to show up while crops were rotting in the fields (think of how fast your fresh fruit rots in your kitchen and then imagine dozens of fields of that crop going to waste). And the biggest insult was when the repair tech drove into town for a $5 part that the farmer had already identified but couldn't replace because of manufacturer lockouts.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

This is correct. And the connection is major. I, as a former farmer, can tell you that repairing my own equipments is a matter of life or death (for my crops). Rice for example, required a constant stream of cold(~~riger~~ river temp cold) and fresh water for 6 months straight. Non-stop. If my diesel powered water pump breaks and I can't fix it, I only have a couple of days (if at all) to fix it, otherwise, all that rice is just dead. So, I always had parts available at my house for just in case. I'd also had two diesel water pumps at the river, in case one broke and took a while to fix, so I can fire up the second one. Same thing with my harvesting machine..... the list goes on and on. It's absolutely essential that farmers fix their own equipments. What John Deere is doing should make every human being angry, because this is our food they're messing with.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Yeah, just search up right to repair farm equipment, just linking one or two articles won't give you the scope of the problem the way seeing how much it has been covered, but not changed.

I got family that farms independent, and it's pretty much the single biggest factor in profitability over time. Those machines can cost as much, or more, than a nice house, and you're locked in to inflated service and parts costs.

Enraging doesn't honestly do the problem justice.

This isn't a "google it" thing, it's really about actually seeing the search results first hand. We're talking pages of hits going back decades.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

Here is one video of many he has made about John Deere and how they're being absolute scums of the earth. Louis actually helped the farmers win some cases in several states. A lot of people on the internet love to shit on Rossmann (mostly about his personality), but the man has been tremendous work. He's a fucking fighter.