2 years ago
4
There's progress on right to repair, but is it enough?
Mountains of old phones, tablets, laptops, smart speakers, headphones, and assorted gadgets are leaching harmful chemicals into soil around dumps worldwide. That is, until they’re ready to get incinerated, at which point they’ll birth plumes of airborne toxins and endanger people in the developing world — all for the sake of a few nuggets of recovered semi-precious metals.
Continue Reading https://www.digitaltrends.com
Join the Discussion
When you pay for a device/machine, I think it's rather steep to have no right to do with it whatever you want, including repairing/upgrading it. It shows how pompous those tech companies are and that it's their justification to overproduce their, mostly, inferior products to the point that they justify also the need to waste and toss away those products in the garbage (when it doesn't comply to their, commercially motivated, new standards).
Agree...Ad blockers won't work,you can't put on another OS,or do anything you said. Why pay the big bucks for something you don't even have any control over? That's why I have put Linux distros on my computers all these years cause I can do whatever I want and pay someone to fix the hardware in said computer as needed.
Or donate to the people who develope all that open source software like VLC, Blender, KDE, Gnome or the EFF or even W3C, since the foundations of the internet (HTML, PHP, MySQL, Javascript) are all readable for everyone and is open for everyone to learn and use as see fit - for free). W3C are the ones who take care of standards, which is good for programmers and users alike. When there are no standards, everything goes wrong, check videoformats for streaming or interactive design (Flash, anyone?). Plugins for using the internet is a form of pushiness for capital gain and exclusion.
I do that.