#kytch

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The US Copyright Office frees the McFlurry

I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

I have spent a quarter century obsessed with the weirdest corner of the weirdest section of the worst internet law on the US statute books: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 law that makes it a felony to help someone change how their own computer works so it serves them, rather than a distant corporation.

Under DMCA 1201, giving someone a tool to "bypass an access control for a copyrighted work" is a felony punishable by a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine – for a first offense. This law can refer to access controls for traditional copyrighted works, like movies. Under DMCA 1201, if you help someone with photosensitive epilepsy add a plug-in to the Netflix player in their browser that blocks strobing pictures that can trigger seizures, you're a felon:

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-media/2017Jul/0005.html

But software is a copyrighted work, and everything from printer cartridges to car-engine parts have software in them. If the manufacturer puts an "access control" on that software, they can send their customers (and competitors) to prison for passing around tools to help them fix their cars or use third-party ink.

Now, even though the DMCA is a copyright law (that's what the "C" in DMCA stands for, after all); and even though blocking video strobes, using third party ink, and fixing your car are not copyright violations, the DMCA can still send you to prison, for a long-ass time for doing these things, provided the manufacturer designs their product so that using it the way that suits you best involves getting around an "access control."

As you might expect, this is quite a tempting proposition for any manufacturer hoping to enshittify their products, because they know you can't legally disenshittify them. These access controls have metastasized into every kind of device imaginable.

Garage-door openers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

Refrigerators:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/12/digital-feudalism/#filtergate

Dishwashers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/03/cassette-rewinder/#disher-bob

Treadmills:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/22/vapescreen/#jane-get-me-off-this-crazy-thing

Tractors:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john

Cars:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

Printers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/inky-wretches/#epson-salty

And even printer paper:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#dymo-550

DMCA 1201 is the brainchild of Bruce Lehmann, Bill Clinton's Copyright Czar, who was repeatedly warned that cancerous proliferation this was the foreseeable, inevitable outcome of his pet policy. As a sop to his critics, Lehman added a largely ornamental safety valve to his law, ordering the US Copyright Office to invite submissions every three years petitioning for "use exemptions" to the blanket ban on circumventing access-controls.

I call this "ornamental" because if the Copyright Office thinks that, say, it should be legal for you to bypass an access control to use third-party ink in your printer, or a third-party app store in your phone, all they can do under DMCA 1201 is grant you the right to use a circumvention tool. But they can't give you the right to acquire that tool.

I know that sounds confusing, but that's only because it's very, very stupid. How stupid? Well, in 2001, the US Trade Representative arm-twisted the EU into adopting its own version of this law (Article 6 of the EUCD), and in 2003, Norway added the law to its lawbooks. On the eve of that addition, I traveled to Oslo to debate the minister involved:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

The minister praised his law, explaining that it gave blind people the right to bypass access controls on ebooks so that they could feed them to screen readers, Braille printers, and other assistive tools. OK, I said, but how do they get the software that jailbreaks their ebooks so they can make use of this exemption? Am I allowed to give them that tool?

No, the minister said, you're not allowed to do that, that would be a crime.

Is the Norwegian government allowed to give them that tool? No. How about a blind rights advocacy group? No, not them either. A university computer science department? Nope. A commercial vendor? Certainly not.

No, the minister explained, under his law, a blind person would be expected to personally reverse engineer a program like Adobe E-Reader, in hopes of discovering a defect that they could exploit by writing a program to extract the ebook text.

Oh, I said. But if a blind person did manage to do this, could they supply that tool to other blind people?

Well, no, the minister said. Each and every blind person must personally – without any help from anyone else – figure out how to reverse-engineer the ebook program, and then individually author their own alternative reader program that worked with the text of their ebooks.

That is what is meant by a use exemption without a tools exemption. It's useless. A sick joke, even.

The US Copyright Office has been valiantly holding exemptions proceedings every three years since the start of this century, and they've granted many sensible exemptions, including ones to benefit people with disabilities, or to let you jailbreak your phone, or let media professors extract video clips from DVDs, and so on. Tens of thousands of person-hours have been flushed into this pointless exercise, generating a long list of things you are now technically allowed to do, but only if you are a reverse-engineering specialist type of computer programmer who can manage the process from beginning to end in total isolation and secrecy.

But there is one kind of use exception the Copyright Office can grant that is potentially game-changing: an exemption for decoding diagnostic codes.

You see, DMCA 1201 has been a critical weapon for the corporate anti-repair movement. By scrambling error codes in cars, tractors, appliances, insulin pumps, phones and other devices, manufacturers can wage war on independent repair, depriving third-party technicians of the diagnostic information they need to figure out how to fix your stuff and keep it going.

This is bad enough in normal times, but during the acute phase of the covid pandemic, hospitals found themselves unable to maintain their ventilators because of access controls. Nearly all ventilators come from a single med-tech monopolist, Medtronic, which charges hospitals hundreds of dollars to dispatch their own repair technicians to fix its products. But when covid ended nearly all travel, Medtronic could no longer provide on-site calls. Thankfully, an anonymous hacker started building homemade (illegal) circumvention devices to let hospital technicians fix the ventilators themselves, improvising housings for them from old clock radios, guitar pedals and whatever else was to hand, then mailing them anonymously to hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#medtronic-again

Once a manufacturer monopolizes repair in this way, they can force you to use their official service depots, charging you as much as they'd like; requiring you to use their official, expensive replacement parts; and dictating when your gadget is "too broken to fix," forcing you to buy a new one. That's bad enough when we're talking about refusing to fix a phone so you buy a new one – but imagine having a spinal injury and relying on a $100,000 exoskeleton to get from place to place and prevent muscle wasting, clots, and other immobility-related conditions, only to have the manufacturer decide that the gadget is too old to fix and refusing to give you the technical assistance to replace a watch battery so that you can get around again:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24255074/former-jockey-michael-straight-exoskeleton-repair-battery

When the US Copyright Office grants a use exemption for extracting diagnostic codes from a busted device, they empower repair advocates to put that gadget up on a workbench and torture it into giving up those codes. The codes can then be integrated into an unofficial diagnostic tool, one that can make sense of the scrambled, obfuscated error codes that a device sends when it breaks – without having to unscramble them. In other words, only the company that makes the diagnostic tool has to bypass an access control, but the people who use that tool later do not violate DMCA 1201.

This is all relevant this month because the US Copyright Office just released the latest batch of 1201 exemptions, and among them is the right to circumvent access controls "allowing for repair of retail-level food preparation equipment":

https://publicknowledge.org/public-knowledge-ifixit-free-the-mcflurry-win-copyright-office-dmca-exemption-for-ice-cream-machines/

While this covers all kinds of food prep gear, the exemption request – filed by Public Knowledge and Ifixit – was inspired by the bizarre war over the tragically fragile McFlurry machine. These machines – which extrude soft-serve frozen desserts – are notoriously failure-prone, with 5-16% of them broken at any given time. Taylor, the giant kitchen tech company that makes the machines, charges franchisees a fortune to repair them, producing a steady stream of profits for the company.

This sleazy business prompted some ice-cream hackers to found a startup called Kytch, a high-powered automation and diagnostic tool that was hugely popular with McDonald's franchisees (the gadget was partially designed by the legendary hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang!).

In response, Taylor played dirty, making a less-capable clone of the Kytch, trying to buy Kytch out, and teaming up with McDonald's corporate to bombard franchisees with legal scare-stories about the dangers of using a Kytch to keep their soft-serve flowing, thanks to DMCA 1201:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Kytch isn't the only beneficiary of the new exemption: all kinds of industrial kitchen equipment is covered. In upholding the Right to Repair, the Copyright Office overruled objections of some of its closest historical allies, the Entertainment Software Association, Motion Picture Association, and Recording Industry Association of America, who all sided with Taylor and McDonald's and opposed the exemption:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/us-copyright-office-frees-the-mcflurry-allowing-repair-of-ice-cream-machines/

This is literally the only useful kind of DMCA 1201 exemption the Copyright Office can grant, and the fact that they granted it (along with a similar exemption for medical devices) is a welcome bright spot. But make no mistake, the fact that we finally found a narrow way in which DMCA 1201 can be made slightly less stupid does not redeem this outrageous law. It should still be repealed and condemned to the scrapheap of history.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/28/mcbroken/#my-milkshake-brings-all-the-lawyers-to-the-yard

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[youthincare]

"You might compare this to the F-35. It's like, does Lockheed really want to finish this airplane? Or do they want another $100 million contract to fix some component on the old one?" Kytch's O'Sullivan asks.

A McDonald's ice cream machine, of course, is not quite a fighter jet. But somehow, in terms of complexity, bottomless R&D black holes, boondoggle contracts, and—most of all—bitter competition, they do seem more alike all the time."

This lawsuit is 1000 x's crazier than it even leads on to be. Please read the full story of the 900 million dollar lawsuit against McDonald's brought forth by Kytch who claim that they created a product that secretly fixed and detected the purposely malfunctioned code in McDonald's ice cream machines. Taylor, the McDonald's company, forced it's machines into restaurants, as in mandated. Taylor also is the same company that offers the antidote if it ever breaks. The machine breaking scam, profited the company up to millions of dollars a year.

[hackernewsrobot]

McDonald's ice cream machine hackers say they found 'smoking gun'

https://www.wired.com/story/kytch-taylor-mcdonalds-ice-cream-machine-smoking-gun/

[finspirationfun]

McCorruption: The fight for the right to repair McFlurry machines

Tech whizzes and copyright experts have teamed up to reduce the number of people haunted by the words “Ice cream machine’s broken.”

The online repair community iFixit and the DC-based nonprofit Public Knowledge are asking the government to let them fix McDonald’s soft serve dispensers, an act currently prohibited under copyright law. The treat machines are so notorious for breaking down that there’s a website for tracking busted McFlurry-makers in the US (about 12% were offline as of yesterday). The fast-food joint has even joked about its frozen dairy dysfunction.

The ice cream machines have earned a reputation because they shut down and require tending to when they encounter a problem (just like us, fr). It’s a major drain for franchise owners but a boon for the machine’s manufacturer, Taylor Company, which has an exclusive repair contract with McDonald’s.

Every time an $18,000 McD’s ice cream-maker breaks down, franchisees need to call up a Taylor technician. If a non-Taylor handyperson is used, the ice cream machine’s warranty is revoked.

Fixing the complex machinery costs $350 for every 15 minutes of service, according to Ars Technica, so it’s no wonder Taylor has generated 25% of its revenue from maintenance and repair services in recent years, as Inc. reported.

iFixit recently broke down a Taylor ice cream machine and found “easily replaceable parts” gatekept by “cryptic error messages.” A different company called Kytch built an attachable device for ice cream-makers that would help franchisees understand and address these confusing codes…but Kytch has been in a legal battle with McDonald’s and Taylor for more than two years.

So, what do the fixers want?

In addition to seeking a copyright law exemption—which has consistently been granted to permit independent repairers to fix Xboxes and other tech—iFixit and Public Knowledge are asking Congress to pass the Freedom to Repair Act, a stalled 2022 bill that would protect all repair exemptions and the distribution of independently made repair devices, like the Kytch device.

Right-to-repair gains ground: Apple has long opposed letting customers and unaffiliated repair shops fix its tech, but it’s changed its iTune in recent years to allow customers to order self-service repair kits. And just last week, the company came out in support of a California right-to-repair bill.

[parttimedragonslayer]

Who know soft serve was such a high stakes game!!

[wumblr]

hardware, software, vaporware, plasmaware... and sometimes, pseudogap, where a patch is offered by a third party that brings the other wares closer to compliance with what they were advertised as being, the patch is aggressively shut down and litigated against by the company that makes the thing, and the patch makes very little direct impact on the market except as a transitional state that it passed through (i.e. facebook & unfollow everything, mcdonalds & kytch)

[autogynocrat]

listening to an hour long video of a lawyer reading legal documents about a lawsuit kytch v Taylor about mcdonalds ice cream machines

[adtothebone]

At times, he seemed to acknowledge the admittedly low stakes of Kytch's story, the cutthroat battles his tiny startup has fought and continues to fight over such a trivial thing as a fast-food ice cream cone. “We want the world to know this because it’s such a ... I mean, this is about ice cream!” O’Sullivan said at one point with exasperation.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

McDonald's corporate wages war on ice-cream hackers

A new feature by Andy Greenberg for Wired on the bizarre fight over diagnostic/control tools for McDonald's soft-serve machines is a fantastic, fascinating look at the intersection of Right to Repair with hardware hacking, corporatism, and franchising.

https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-makers-started-cold-war/

McDonald's ice-cream machines are notoriously finicky, so much so that people make bots to determine whether your local McD's machines are busted (5-16% of these machines are broken at any time)

https://mcbroken.com/

There's a reason these machines go down all the time: they are absurdly mechanically complex, designed to do overnight repastueruizations on leftover ice-cream mix, unlike less complex machines that have to be drained and cleaned every day, at high labor and wastage costs.

There's a tradeoff: the machines are *much* more complex and finicky. Not only do they fail if the reservoirs are outside of a narrow tolerance, they still have to be disassembled for weekly cleaning, and are *much* harder to reassemble.

Moreover, that maintenance is performed by McDonald's employees, and thanks to low pay and high turnover, those workers are often both very young and very new to the job. Put it all together and it's easy to see why the machines are busted so often.

But that's not the whole story: it turns out that all of this is vastly exacerbated by the repair-hostile design of the machines. When they do break down, they throw cryptic errors, necessitating an expensive service call.

This means that franchisees pay through the nose when their machines break *and* they don't get feedback on what they can do differently to prevent more service-calls in the future. The tale of this user-hostility is the crux of Greenberg's piece.

The machines are made by Taylor, a giant kitchen supply company that also supplies things like grills to McDonald's franchises. Their distributors get paid every time they do a service call, and the franchisees are pretty sure McD's is getting a cut.

That's where Kytch comes in. It's a tech startup that spun out of Frobot, a company that built automated enclosures for Taylor's froyo machines that were supposed to eliminate labor costs by creating fully self-serve systems.

Frobot machines proved to be too complex and unreliable for the field, and in the process of outfitting them with diagnostic tools, Frobot's founders created Kytch, a high-powered automation and diagnostic tool that proved to be hugely popular with McDonald's franchisees.

Kytch gave these restaurateurs the ability to monitor and diagnose their $18,000 Taylor C602 machines without having to learn technicians' secret, obscure codes ("Press the cone icon, then tap the snowflake/milkshake buttons to set the screen to 5, then 2, then 3, then 1").

It was a runaway success: franchisees bought the gadgets and paid activation and recurring fees and were glad of it, reporting major cost savings over paying Taylor's service techs and extra profits because they could sell product rather than apologizing for broken machines.

The gadget itself was superbly engineered, thanks, no doubt, to its pedigree: in commercializing the Kytch, its inventors teamed up with legendary hardware hacker and digital freedom fighter Andrew "bunnie" Huang, whose every device is a perfect marvel.

Huang describes Kytch as a huge leap in the control systems for the Taylor machines, which were mired in the "dark ages" of 50-year-old technology. Adding a Raspberry Pi-based controller took the machines from the late mechanical age to the late digital age in one step.

But this reformation met a counter-reformation. McDonald's and Taylor teamed up to crush Kytch. Taylor engaged in all kinds of skullduggery to acquire a Kytch unit and then rolled out a (less capable, more lucrative, more extractive) competitor.

(The company swears it didn't rip off the Kytch and it's all just a huge coincidence, really.)

But the real muscle came from McDonald's, which owns the land underneath each of its franchisees' restaurants and can take away their restaurants at the stroke of a pen.

McDonald's began to traffick in increasingly unhinged scare-memos, warning that Kytch might steal "confidential data" and that it "creates a potential very serious safety risk for the crew or technician attempting to clean or repair the machine."

The memos conclude that this diagnostic and monitoring device could cause "serious human injury" and "McDonald’s strongly recommends that you remove the Kytch device from all machines and discontinue use."

Kytch's founders confide that this will probably kill their business.

It's quite a tale: a clanking, breakdown-prone Rube Goldberg device that's turned into a money-spinner for a giant corporation that values the service charges more than it rues its disappointed customers.

A pair of scrappy inventors and a legendary hardware wizard who transport this gadget half a century forward in one fell swoop - and who get destroyed by the corporate behemoth through a mix of scare-stories about maimed teenage shake-jockeys and eviction threats.

Image: Gabriela Hasbun/Wired

https://www.gabrielahasbun.com/

[hiredpencil]

I designed Kytch’s armor off the top of my head without references in the middle of the night, please be gentle

[themadmanandhisbox]

Not only is this all true

But a third party company called Kytch, after years of trial and error made a Internet of Things connected solution to reduce downtime. Taylor, the company mcdonalds has contracted with for the ice cream machines and McDonald's engaged in corporate espionage and trade secret violations to steal and reverse engineer Kytch's solution.

Can I get uhhh…

[hackernewsrobot]

Ice Cream Machine Hackers Sue McDonald's for $900M

https://www.wired.com/story/kytch-ice-cream-machine-hackers-sue-mcdonalds-900-million/ Comments

[fortheking16]

A fix for McDonald's soft-serve machines? - CBS News June 5, 2022

A fix for McDonald’s soft-serve machines? – CBS News June 5, 2022

I saw this recently on CBS News – A fix for McDonald’s soft-serve machines?: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kytch-mcdonalds-soft-serve-ice-cream-machines/. Longer article. 6:03 minute long video included. You’ll have no trouble buying burgers at McDonald’s. But ice cream? That’s another story, as correspondent David Pogue discovered at one franchise’s drive-through. “I’m sorry,” he was told, “we…