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.
The medical device part makes me nervous. Depending on what the device is, a botched repair could lead to serious patient harm.
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/
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.
I hate that they used the word hack.
The exemption that allows for the circumvention of software locks on “a lawfully acquired medical device or system, and related data files, when circumvention is a necessary step to allow the diagnosis, maintenance, or repair of such a device or system
This is particuarly for figuring out just WTF is wrong with the device without having some approved person come diagnose it. It’s just like buying an OBD2 adapter and using it to scan the car for problems. Before it would be illegal to make your own reader, now it’s legal.
That is a weird one. I’m wondering if it’s like the mcflurry machines though, where they don’t get fixed at all because it would be less money for corporate. This is the first time I’ve heard about it.
I hadn’t heard about the medical devices portion, yikes.
