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.

  • Cheradenine
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    2 months ago

    Regarding that, it’s been studied

    The ECRI Institute, a nonprofit that conducts medical device evaluations, sifted through 10 years of FDA data and more than two million reported device failures. In only 96 of those failures, or 0.005%, the problem stemmed from maintenance issues or botched repairs—some of which were the result of the manufacturers’ own technicians.

    Article from Massachusetts General Hospital https://protomag.com/policy/who-has-the-right-to-repair-medical-equipment/