VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION
Louis Rossmann
Forget about Sony and Netflix, there's DRM in public trains now....
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Transcription generated by Skrybot
Hey everybody, how's it going? I hope you're having a lovely Wednesday morning. When I started this channel, it was not my intention to become famous for talking about right to repair or starting to waken people to this collective consciousness that we don't really own things anymore in America, that most companies are trying to take that ability of us to own things away and kind of remove that and erode that from the culture. Similar to that movie Dark City where it took the lead character a while to get people to realize, when was the last time you remember seeing the sun? Do you remember having any long-term memories, like real long-term memories? That's kind of what happened here, and it happened by accident.
This channel started out as man yells at camera about random things, and I really never thought that any of these garbage, poorly produced, poorly presented videos would result in fame or revolution. Sometimes accidents happen, and as the years have gone on, I've talked about a lot more than just restocking fees and branding being evil. I talked about how it is manufacturers make it difficult to repair their product, and I could think of no better example of this breakdown in communication and collaboration between the people that make things and the people that maintain society than I can in this example that comes from Poland with regards to trains.
The absolute TLDR of this, can you imagine if Apple could tell by GPS coordinates that you had your MacBook fixed at my repair shop, and after it was fixed at my repair shop, you tried to log into it, and it just didn't work properly anymore because they were able to tell that you were someplace other than their repair shop. They had me on a blacklist of some sorts, and because they had me on a blacklist of some sorts, your product didn't work properly, even though you bought and paid for it, simply because it had been to my shop. Let's go to this story. I can finally reveal some research I've been involved with over the past year or so. We, Redford, Mr.
TickenEye, have reverse engineered the PLC code of Newegg Impulse EMUs. These trains were locking up for arbitrary reasons after being serviced at third party repair shops. For a manufacturer argued that this was because of malpractice by these workshops, and that they should be serviced by them instead of third parties. We found that the PLC code actually contained logic that would lock up the train with bogus error codes after some date, or if the train wasn't running for a given time. One version of the controller actually contained GPS coordinates to contain the behavior to the third party workshops. It was also possible to unlock the trains by pressing a key combination in the cabin controls. None of this was documented.
The key unlock was deleted in newer PLC versions, but the lock logic remains. After a certain update by Newegg, the cabin controls would also display scary messages about copyright violations if the HMI detected a subset of conditions that should have engaged the lock, but the train was still operational. So the unlock was deleted, but the lock logic remained, meaning it's still gonna lock, it's just harder for you to actually unlock it once I imagine they realized that people were able to unlock it. The trains also had a GSM telemetry unit that was broadcasting lock conditions, and in some cases, appeared to be able to lock the train remotely. Redford and Mr. Tick held an unrecorded talk about this at Oh My Hack in Warsaw.
I unfortunately couldn't make it because of the Munich Shell. For now, this is making the rounds in polar speaking sources, but we do have a talk scheduled about this at 3. 7c3, in which we plan to do a deep dive into this and actually publish our findings. And when you check out the article, there are just a number of very, very surprising points in this particular article. Other surprises were soon discovered. Among them was blocking the train when one of its components is replaced, verified by serial number. Surely that's something you've heard me talk about on this channel before. The product can tell you've replaced the part, and now it doesn't work anymore.
Whether this is because it requires calibration, and the calibration tool was not made available to you by the manufacturer, who knows damn well you're gonna wanna fix what you own, or whether it is actual serialization. It notices the serial number has changed, and even though this part is 100% fine to work, it's just not gonna work. I don't care. To me, it's a distinction without a difference. The manufacturer knows, based on the amount of time that they have been in business and dealing with their customers, that they are going to need to service and replace parts.
And regardless of whether that's serialization or a requirement for calibration that they simply don't make available to you or document in any way, shape, or form, is a debate I'm just not interested in having anymore. I went over it in this video. Oh, it's just, it's a distinction without a difference. Is this something that you're familiar with? The computer reported a compressor failure, although mechanics said that everything was fine with the compressor. Unfortunately, the train still did not lift pantographs. The analysis of the computer code detected a condition forcing a failure that sounded like this.
If the day is greater than or equal to 21, and if the month is greater than or equal to 11, and if the year is greater than or equal to 2021, then report the compressor failure. The situation was ridiculous because the train was scheduled to review in November 2021, one year before the failure, but the condition did not work by coincidence. The train arrived at the service a moment earlier and was not launched again until January, 2022. And the date of the above described sophisticated logical condition no longer met. Probably the lack of ability to construct ifs by the software author meant that the planned failure had to be waited until November 21st, 2022.
Now I know damn well what it's like to fail to produce proper if statements. I'm going through Dennis Ritchie's C Programming Language Book, and I got owned on exercise 123 for almost a week or two. That's the exercise where you need to write a code that can detect comments, but that can also properly detect whether or not you're in a string literal, properly detect whether you're in a multi-line comment or the second line of a multi-line comment, detect a single line set of. . . I'm not a C programmer. I started learning programming for the first time like two months ago. Anyway, this over here is the reason that I make YouTube videos and fix MacBooks rather than geo-fence trains and DRM them for a living.
For the love of God, if you're this bad a programmer like me, please just stick to doing practice exercises rather than DRMing and geo-fencing trains for a living, because this actually negatively affects people in the real world. When information about the successful launch of the impulse went to the media, the trains received a software update that removed this option repair. A code was found on another train ordering to break down. . . It just gets worse and worse and worse. I will link the article down below. I will link the individuals in the Fetaverse that found this down below, and I highly suggest that you follow these people because they are doing amazing work.
At the end of the day, this is one of the best examples that you can find of this, but more importantly, the best example of this not being one of those just don't buy Apple or just don't buy John Deere things, because at the end of the day, everybody will say that this is something where if you just stop buying one or two or three companies' hardware, it goes away, and it doesn't, because it's not something that is ingrained in one company's culture or procedures.
It's something that is ingrained in the corporate culture, dare I say it, internationally at this point, that we have not noticed until it was too late, and we need to push back against this in every way possible before this is the reality of life for everything. I want you to imagine your car no longer functioning properly, because Ford could tell based on the GPS coordinates of where you went that you took it to a mechanic down the street, so now it's just gonna have an error code, and you gotta bring it back to the manufacturer to reset the error code.
I want you to imagine there being statements in there for it to report that your emission system is not working properly, not because it's not actually working properly, simply because of a date that may have been misentered by a software engineer that, again, is as bad at solving programming exercises as I am. I think I actually got it with version 21, by the way. It's kind of a mess, and I wanna make it less of a mess. I did improve the string detection a lot, but I'm still a dude that started programming two months ago who doesn't know what the hell he's doing, but in all seriousness, this is not just one industry anymore. This is not just one type of product anymore.
This is not just one company, and it's not even just one country. This is not simply the excesses of American capitalism gone awry like you'll see argued in many of the comments. This is something that's happening internationally, and it's going to continue unless people push back against it, and if there's anything I hope that this channel inspires, if there's any effect that I hope this channel has on the world, it is the next generation of engineers, of politicians, of consumers, of engineers rejecting this wholesale, rejecting this idea that we are going to rob the consumer of ownership of whatever it is they bought and paid for.
I am sick and tired of reading garbage like this when I go to my videos where people say, like, this, again, I don't want this to be the next generation over here. This is on the video I did where Sony was saying that the content that you had purchased is no longer available. This argument is completely ridiculous. You didn't buy the show, you bought a revocable license to watch the show under specific conditions. Sony, Netflix chose to revoke this license so you're no longer allowed to watch it. If a company doesn't want to sell you something or even doesn't want to sell you something, that doesn't make stealing okay. Theft is okay as long as I don't like the service quality is insane.
If I want to get a MacBook repaired at your shop but the front desk worker calls me a slur and flips me off, can I just drive into the back and grab my computer after it's fixed? No. If you insist that I have to be flipped off and called slurs if I want my computer fixed, then the solution isn't to steal, it's to go somewhere else. My comment over here. A better analogy would be, you paid me for a MacBook repair but I have the right to revoke your device from working at any point in time, even if you paid me 325 for the repair.
I think people are starting to get fed up with the slow walk away from ownership as a part of our culture towards everything as a service, a subscription. Everything is something that can be taken away. I want you to imagine a scenario where you pay me $325 for a repair and after you've paid me that $325, I have the ability to stop your device from working because I feel like it and I don't refund you your money. That's what this person is advocating for. That's the world that there are people out there that will actually advocate for and it's disgusting.
The number of people in this comments, simping for companies that refuse to call it what it is, a rental, they have to call it a purchase. When I say I purchased a rental property, the assumption in that statement in our culture is that I purchased a house that is mine but it's not gonna be taken away from me for the purposes of renting it to others where they will pay a certain amount of money over a certain period of time. When they stop paying, they no longer live there. Yet it's slowly being crept in this idea that you can pay. You purchased something that can be taken away. You purchased content that can be taken away.
You're not renting, you're not subscribing to it. You purchased it but it can be taken away from you. You have purchased a train but if you have it serviced where we don't want it serviced, we will see, we will know, and we will act accordingly so that your train doesn't work. This is a cancer that needs to be rooted out and weeded out before we own nothing. And I've talked about the documentation that would allow us to know where a fuse is and also how some of those companies actually wanted my videos taken down because I dared to show documentation on a screen that showed you where a fuse is and without being authorized.
I've talked about how many companies have not only tried to make it more difficult to repair what you own but also made it so that once you buy something, oh no, no, no, no, you gotta keep paying me if you want it to work.
Whether we're talking about Arlo cameras where they advertise certain features and functionality that are not available once they decided that they wanted this to turn into a subscription or whether we're talking about a $400 baby monitor that advertise certain features being available to you that are now no longer gonna be available to you unless you pay for a subscription or Sony deciding that there is content that you paid for that you, in their words, purchased that no longer is going to be viewable by you and you're not getting your money back.
The idea of ownership is something that has been being eroded for a long time and it's not something that I really noticed until around 2014 when I compared and contrasted what it was like in the broadcast recording world back in the 60s and 70s to what we were doing now. In 2007, I worked at a place called Avatar Studios in Manhattan. It was a top tier recording studio and most of the gear in that studio was from 1951 to 1976. Poltec EQP-1 equalizers, 50s. LA-2A and LA-3A compressors and limiters, 60s. Neve 8088 console, 70s. And we had some stuff like the Studer A800, which is, you know, that's really getting into modern tech. I think that was early 80s.
And the companies that made these products had a strong feeling of collaboration with the people who maintain those products because back then, the people that made things for society collaborated with people that maintained things for society. They wanted people to work on their products. They wanted people to fix their products. They released all the documentation necessary and they would even answer questions. There were letters in the studio going back and forth between the technician that worked there in the early 80s and the company that was in business in the 80s actually answering their questions because they cared about people, whether they were authorized or unauthorized, getting their products to work again. And over the years, this is a level of collaboration that has disappeared.
Apple asked for this video to be taken down and had a lawyer contact me over it because they were mad at what you see on the screen over here. Me showing that a zero ohm resistor was acting as a fuse between the trackpad and a three volt power line that often goes bad and causes your keyboard and trackpad to not work. This is that breakdown in collaboration. The mere fact that I showed you how to service that product, how to fix this so that you don't have to spend 750 at the Apple store on a flat rate repair and lose all of your data when the only problem with your device is a fuse. That was enough to piss them off.
I don't wanna live in a world where we own nothing. And I don't think you do either. I don't even think the simps do either that advocate for this. Let me know what you think in the comments down below. How do we push back against this? What are you doing to push back against this? Or do you think that they've done nothing wrong? It is within their rights to sell you something and hide from the customer that they are going to track you, see where you fixed the device, and potentially stop it from working if you don't have it fixed at their shop. What do you think? Let me know in the comments down below. That's it for today.
And as always, I hope you learned something. .
S K R Y B O T
Skrybot. 2023, Video transcriptions from YouTube
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