… a Ford patent application titled “Systems and Methods to Repossess a Vehicle” was published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Feb. 23, although it was submitted to the agency Aug. 20, 2021.
The document describes using vehicles’ built-in data connections to remotely disable “a functionality of one or more components of the vehicle,” which would serve as warnings if the owner has missed car payments.
We need to break the integration between hardware and software. If a machine can run software, then the software must be owner-auditable and owner-replaceable. If it’s not, then whoever owns the software will own the hardware forever.
We also need safe, reliable, standard software for machines, and we need laws that enforce that machines be compatible with standard software before they can be sold.
It’s a tall order, but I think the only other option is to continue down the path of hardware with corporate-dictated expiration dates and built-in surveillance.
Yeah that makes sense
Make this shit the way it works please
Working on it. Part of the process is talking about it, refining ideas and building a coalition. It’s going to take the combined efforts of software nerds, hardware nerds, econ nerds, and policy / regulatory nerds to get something like this to succeed, and it’s going to take a sustained effort over years.
It also requires the destruction or at least a severe diminishment of the current global technofascist oligopolarchy so it doesn’t get co-opted as a tool for the ruling class, so… yeah, it’ll take a while. But I think it’s worth doing.
That’s not going to happen unless someone important dies because of it.
WIth the terrible safety record of cars, that may be more likely than you think.