[stolio]

I generally agree with the EFF, I'd even say I'm a fan, but I disagree on this one.

TL;DR == "tough"

Regulations can be bad, they can stifle innovation, enforce inequality, maintain awful power structures, etc. But, they can also save lives. In America there are a million things you can't do because they infringe on the safety of others.

At an abstract level, an automobile is 3,000 lbs. of metal holding 10 gallons of gasoline that carries human beings through public spaces at up to ~70mph. It travels through neighborhoods where children live and play at up to 25mph. It's a mixture of chemical, mechanical, computing and electrical systems that an engineer needs about 10 years of study to be able to handle after they get to engineering school. Even then they'll specialize.

Car enthusiasts simply don't have the skills to merit carte blanche access to mess around with cars that drive on public roads. In general, they probably don't even have the skills necessary to evaluate their skills which is what makes this so dangerous.

Tinkering with a mechanical system like your brakes is very different from tinkering with a computing system that through an electrical system is controlling the mechanical system that is your brakes. That's orders of magnitude of new complexity. Do you really think the average car-guy will understand the bugfix, written in optimized C or assembly, that accounts for how a certain transistor behaves above 200 degrees Fahrenheit?

To be clear, these laws aren't to protect anybody from their own stupidity, they protect the rest of us. If you do have the skills to tinker at this level then you're free to use them in race cars that aren't street-legal.

[MichaelGG]

The EFF isn't against regulations on cars. They're against companies using the DMCA to restrict access. There are no regulations - that's precisely the point of the article.

[stolio]

Can we just be honest about this? The EFF hates the DMCA and I think it's clouding their judgement. They need to separate their very good fight against the abuses of copyright law from this ridiculous fight to let people do stupid and dangerous things to their cars.

If they have a better tool than the DMCA to keep the average person from defeating safety features built in to their car, they should say it. But any system strong enough to ensure there's no dangerous code running in any cars on the road will be opposed by the EFF because it would be a whole new level of surveillance.