A new federal rule makes it legal to bypass software locks on commercial food equipment for the purposes of repair.

It is now legal to hack or otherwise bypass technical protection measures on McFlurry machines and other commercial food preparation machines in order to repair them thanks to a new rule issued by the Federal government. After a challenge it has also remained legal to circumvent manufacturer locks that prevent the repair of medical equipment. This is good news in several long-running yet somehow related sagas that has resulted in both a huge number of McDonald’s ice cream machines and a large number of medical devices being broken at any given moment and which often cannot be fixed without the help of their manufacturer due to arbitrary software locks that prevent McDonald’s stores and also hospitals from fixing the devices they own.

  • CancerMancer@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    6·
    4 days ago

    During the pandemic lockdowns, many hospitals were barely able to function as their equipment continued to wear out. Meanwhile they were waiting on the manufacturers to even diagnose the issues, let alone actually solve them.

    We need easily accessible replacement parts, repair guides, software, and legal protection to be able to repair things when stuff goes wrong. We need backup plans for when hospital equipment dies en masse, or people’s implants stop being supported, or when a single production facility gets knocked out and we end up short on IV fluid or baby formula.