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  • Cory Doctorowpluralistic@mamot.fr
    Oct 21, 2026, 8:20 PM

    Your stuff is yours. You can put anyone's milk on your cereal, not just milk that Kellogg's endorses. If the milk you choose is sour and you have to pour your cereal down the toilet, that's too bad, but it doesn't mean that Kellogg's should have the right to shame you for having the temerity to choose milk you preferred, and it *certainly* doesn't militate for DMCA-style enforcement to coerce you to use Kellogg's official milk in the name of protecting you from food wastage.

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Replies

  • Cory Doctorowpluralistic@mamot.fr
    Oct 21, 2026, 8:20 PM

    I raise this because there's a live debate over this subject, which is well represented in the latest 404 Media podcast:

    youtube.com/watch?v=UbG1qwxMtU0

    In the podcast, Koebler and his 404 co-founder Joseph Cox express misgivings about various possible uses of "slop interop."

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  • Cory Doctorowpluralistic@mamot.fr
    Oct 21, 2026, 8:20 PM

    Koebler discusses the fact that John Deere sells the same physical tractor at many different price-points, depending on which software a farmer chooses, and raises the possibility that a farmer might vibe-code software that replicates the high-end functionality without paying for it.

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  • Cory Doctorowpluralistic@mamot.fr
    Oct 21, 2026, 8:20 PM

    Koebler discusses two possible downsides to this: first, that the vibe-coded software might be defective and expose the farmer to risk; and second, a question about whether it's fair or just for a farmer to get those additional functions of their tractor without paying for them.

    I think the first objection is entirely legitimate. The software you run on your expensive tractor should be secure, both for your own benefit and for the security of our food supply.

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  • Cory Doctorowpluralistic@mamot.fr
    Oct 21, 2026, 8:21 PM

    But if you provide *yourself* with that functionality, using software *you* procured independently of John Deere, then John Deere has no right to get paid for it, and they certainly shouldn't have the right to stop you.

    That tractor is *yours*. The fact that John Deere manufactured it is irrelevant.

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  • Cory Doctorowpluralistic@mamot.fr
    Oct 21, 2026, 8:22 PM

    If you pay a contractor to build a house for you and later on pay a different contractor to add another bathroom to it, you don't owe the first contractor anything. It's your house (and if that bathroom has a leaky toilet, that's a matter between you and the second contractor, and not a reason to force you to only use your original contractor).

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  • Cory Doctorowpluralistic@mamot.fr
    Oct 21, 2026, 8:22 PM

    The law defines a narrow slice of functions that manufacturers get to control: those ideas that a patent examiner deems "novel, useful and nonobvious." It's legit (and good) for commercial operators to copy and improve the ideas of their rivals and competitors. It's why skilled tradespeople cluster together in the same geographic area.

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  • Cory Doctorowpluralistic@mamot.fr
    Oct 21, 2026, 8:22 PM

    Take Clerkenwell, the neighborhood in London where precision machining was invented by the jewelers and machinists who clustered there during the Longitude rewards. The reason all those competitors sought such close promixity to one another was because they wanted to copy the new techniques their rivals were developing (even if that meant that their rivals would be able to copy them):

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitud

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  • Cory Doctorowpluralistic@mamot.fr
    Oct 21, 2026, 8:23 PM

    If you're old enough to remember the advent of spreadsheets and the rollout of Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel, you'll know that every time a software vendor invented a new spreadsheet feature, all the other ones immediately copied it. This wasn't bad for spreadsheets: it was *good* for spreadsheets, just as copying your competitors was good for precision machining in Clerkenwell.

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  • Cory Doctorowpluralistic@mamot.fr
    Oct 21, 2026, 8:24 PM

    Everything from GNU/Linux (a feature-for-feature clone of AT&T Unix) to SAMBA (a plug-compatible clone of Microsoft's SMB) to iWork (file-compatible, feature compatible clones of MS Office's apps) came about through this "adversarial interoperability."

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  • Cory Doctorowpluralistic@mamot.fr
    Oct 21, 2026, 8:24 PM

    The question of whether vibe-coded software is any good is separate from the question of whether it's good to replace the software in your devices, even if you replace it with software that has features that the manufacturer would normally charge a premium for.

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  • Cory Doctorowpluralistic@mamot.fr
    Oct 21, 2026, 8:24 PM

    You are under no obligation to arrange your commercial affairs to the financial benefit of manufacturers, and anyone who claims to be surprised that someone they sold a device to used it to benefit themselves at the manufacturer's expenses is either disingenuous...or unserious. You bought it, it's yours.

    But just as this vibe-coded adversarial interop has drawn both valid and spurious criticism, it's also drawn excitement that is partially justified and partially overblown.

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  • Cory Doctorowpluralistic@mamot.fr
    Oct 21, 2026, 8:25 PM

    When it comes to reviving bricked devices or rooting out the surveillance and ads from your smart TV, vibe-coded interop tools are genuinely exciting. These are the kinds of enshittification that can truly be remediated with individual jailbreaks.

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  • Cory Doctorowpluralistic@mamot.fr
    Oct 21, 2026, 8:25 PM

    But the real, meaty examples of enshittification can't be addressed on an individual level - they require systemic fixes. If you jailbreak your iPhone so that it can use alternative app stores, that fact is not sufficient to cause those alternative app stores to come into existence. If we want to stop Apple from levying a $100b "app tax" on the digital economy, it's not enough for individuals to vibe-code their own iPhone patches.

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  • Cory Doctorowpluralistic@mamot.fr
    Oct 21, 2026, 8:25 PM

    We need to repeal the law that bans jailbreaking iPhones, so that a would-be alternative app store can raise capital and pay programmers and tech support staff and salespeople to assemble rival catalogs of software and help customers figure out how to get up their phones to use it.

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  • Cory Doctorowpluralistic@mamot.fr
    Oct 21, 2026, 8:25 PM

    The same goes for jailbreaking your printer so it accepts generic ink. Sure, this may work for you if you're up for refilling your own cartridges, and I'm sure that you can find someone on Alibaba who will sell you ink by the gallon. But the mere fact that a few users have secretly and privately jailbroken their inkjets won't conjure up a generic inkjet cartridge manufacturing sector. For that to happen, we need to make jailbreaking printers *legal*, not just *possible*.

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  • Cory Doctorowpluralistic@mamot.fr
    Oct 21, 2026, 8:25 PM

    Indeed, if we want to improve the quality of all that jailbreaking code the chatbots are writing and circulating, we need to be able to put those jailbreaks in public repositories for public inspection and public critique. It's possible for some of the code produced by an LLM to be slop, and for other code to be fine, and for yet a third tranche of code to be *remediable* slop that can be made robust and reliable through auditing and refactoring.

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  • Cory Doctorowpluralistic@mamot.fr
    Oct 21, 2026, 8:26 PM

    You can't figure out which is which if you have to keep that vibe code a secret on pain of a long sentence.

    I think there's good cause to be excited at the prospect of getting your devices working better, or working at all. I think that even if the code stops working after a while, that's still fine - either you got more use out of your device than you would have without the new code, or maybe you just make *more* code that runs for a while for you, and then you do it again.

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  • Cory Doctorowpluralistic@mamot.fr
    Oct 21, 2026, 8:26 PM

    These individual improvements to your devices and technology are worth celebrating. But they are no substitute for systemic intervention. If we're going to have a new, good internet, a post-American internet that truly disenshittifies America's defective tech exports and replaces them with robust, transparent digital public goods, we need to make reverse-engineering legal again. Once we fix our *policy*, *then* we can fix our *code*:

    pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c

    eof/

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  • kbalkbal@fedia.io
    Oct 21, 2026, 9:38 PM

    jailbreaking your printer so it accepts generic ink

    What did my printer ever do to end up in ink jail, anyway? If you bought, at the store, for money, a printer — and the ink you want to put into it isn't itself made of some kind of contraband devil ink, then you should be allowed to put whatever ink you want into it. If you can figure out how to make it run on ketchup instead of ink, well it's your fucking printer isn't it? Putting normal ink designed to go into printers into it should not be violating any laws. The fantasy that doing so is akin to a prison break — enshrined in law though it may be — is absurd. This was as obvious to to the very few people paying attention to such things when they passed that stupid law thirty years ago as it should be to everyone today. For how long can law so thoroughly opposed to common morality survive?

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  • Cory Doctorowpluralistic@mamot.fr
    Oct 21, 2026, 9:47 PM

    @kbal No, that's the tragedy. The people who enacted this policy were specifically warned about this. Worse, though, are the politicians abroad who were arm-twisted to passing the law more than a decade later, who could *see* how the law was being abused in the US and passed domestic versions in their own country anyway. Inexcusable.

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