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DRM To Be Used In Renault Electric Cars
mahiskali writes with this interesting news via the EFF's Deep Links "The new Renault Zoe comes with a 'feature' that absolutely nobody wants. Instead of selling consumers a complete car that they can use, repair, and upgrade as they see fit, Renault has opted to lock purchasers into a rental contract with a battery manufacturer and enforce that contract with digital rights management (DRM) restrictions that can remotely prevent the battery from charging at all. This coming on the heels of the recent Trans-Pacific Partnership IP Rights Chapter leak certainly makes you wonder how much of that device (car?) you really own. Perhaps Merriam-Webster can simply change the definition of ownership."
Ownership: 1. N. "The state or condition of being liable to an early termination fee in the event of returning, selling, or otherwise losing custody of an object."
2. (obsc./archaic) N. "Possessing the right of use or disposition of an object as one sees fit."
This is obnoxious but not entirely new. My 2005 volvo has a 'feature' where the power steering pump can only be changed by volvo as the software 'needs an update' before the car will start again. Can't even have another garage do it, you need the volvo computers.
I guess it is just a way to ensure the dealership garages stay in business.
...I can use medicine longer than is safe (expired) and kill myself and a lot of people....
The 'expired' date on medicines (and food) does NOT give a time after which they are unsafe to use.
Please concentrate, because this is slightly non-intuitive. The manufactures lobbied, not to provide this, but to provide a time UP TO WHICH it had been tested to be safe.
Now, those two times may be very similar for cases where an item spoils quickly - a cake or bread, for instance. But in many cases medicines (or food) can last essentially unchanged for many decades. In those cases a manufacturer will NOT test for several decades and try to find the maximum shelf life, but will test for, say, 5 years. That's a reasonable length of time, and he will be very happy if after 5 years a warehouse has to throw away perfectly good items which would have lasted another 15 years, and buy some new produce from him again.
If you are using something with an outdated shelf-life, consider the chemistry. For instance, a sealed jar of sodium bicarbonate isn't going to go 'off' even if it's 100 years old...
Plenty of good reasons. The real question is: Is closed source software safe? and the clear answer is "We have no idea... since it's closed. But it's probably not"
What I heard is that Renault realized that the cost of the battery is one of the main problems in electric car adoption, both because it is expensive and because it is unclear how its value will depreciate over time. Therefore, instead of letting people buy the car with the battery, they sell the car much cheaper without a battery and the battery can be leased. At least here it is clear the battery is not sold, unlike many products with DRM.
I haven't looked into this further, but a possible reason for refusing to recharge would be if someone stopped paying the lease of the battery but didn't return it. Or if the battery pack got stolen from the person who leased it.
Of course some people don't like the idea of any kind of kill switch existing at all, which I can understand. It is a sign of distrust and it is also a potential mode of failure (both technical and administrative). But making the battery a rental was done for a good reason here, not just out of corporate greed or control freaking.
Here are just a few of the electronic parts in modern cars
Fuel Injection - the computer can monitor O2 and fuel precisely resulting in much better efficiency.
ABS - a computer senses when your car is skidding and rapidly pumps the brakes so you can still steer.
ESC/Traction control - when loss of steering or wheel spin is detected it will automatically start braking to enable steering and stop the skidding
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
And if Renault goes out of business? What happens to the owners of cars and renters of batteries then? What about hackers?
I translated the original article and they don't seem to mention whether it is a deadman/watchdog kind of kill switch that needs to periodically hear from Renault that it is OK to continue to operate, or if it is a specific signal to stop operating that is only issued when that situation is deemed necessary.
If it is a "one-time" signal, then that is possibly open to spoofing/hacking and potentially very disrupting for legitimate owners in good standing if someone figures out how to remotely shut them down. That would be quite the coup for hackers if they could stop the entire fleet.
If it is a deadman kind of thing, one hopes that the company would continue to support sending that signal for as long as even a single car was still on the road and the owner was in good standing.
Either way, I don't think I would buy one of these.
And If you don't want a cell phone with GPS, buy one that doesn't have it.
Welcome to the small picture.
I can use medicine longer than is safe (expired) and kill myself and a lot of people. Do you propose to embed DRM on it? There is no need for remote capabilities for that, just add a timer and disable it after their secure time of life. The problem with this case is not only the remote capabilities, but that they don't sell you a battery, they rent it to you, not a problem they give you an option to buy one or others are able to provide the same rental service and by definition of DRM I am pretty sure this will be something like "only Renault can provide that service"
There is not a single drug that has been proven to become unsafe after it's passed the expiration date - or any other date, for that matter. After expiration a drug may become less effective, i.e. you may not be getting the full dose as labeled, but the medicine isn't going to suddenly start to have different pharmacological effects, dangerous or otherwise, just because of the passage of time. There was at one time a single known case where a drug was thought to possibly degrade into a potentially harmful substance, but it was subsequently proven that the drug in question, tetracycline, remains safe even after expiration, and in any event tetracycline is only sold for veterinary use these days. So no, you won't kill yourself or anybody with expired meds, that's basically an urban myth, although big pharma would no doubt love for everybody to continue to believe it.