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The 404 Media Podcast
The End of Windows 10 Support Is an Environmental Disaster (With Nathan Proctor)
01:05:54
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- [00:01]
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- [00:27]
Jason Kepler
Hello and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast. I'm Jason Kepler and this is an another one of our, I think we're going to be doing this every week, starting very soon, interview podcasts, or we're calling them interview podcasts, but I think they'll be more conversation style podcasts. I'm joined today by Nathan Proctor, who is the head of Rights to Repair at US Perg. Nathan, I have known you for an extremely long time. You do incredible work and have really been pushing very strongly for right to repair all over the United States. I would say primarily using a state by state approach. Can you, can you first tell us like a little bit about what your job is before jumping into like the specifics of right to repair?
- [01:16]
Nathan Proctor
Sure. I like to say that I'm a professional citizen and so it's my job every day to try to use the system of American democracy to improve our lives and to address problems that affect everybody. And I've done work on just like a whole range of topics from the way our tax system works to benefit kind of large multinational companies at our expense, or improving access to early childhood education programs. But you know, for the last eight years I've been, you know, focused on, on right to repair.
- [02:01]
Jason Kepler
Yeah, you say focused on right to repair, but I feel like, I feel like you're primarily. Well, not primarily, but you do a lot of like legislation and reports and research. And I guess like right to repair has so many different elements to it. Like there's the software aspects of it, there's the legal aspects of it, there's the parts accessed issue, there's the tooling issue. And I feel like you really attack it kind of from all sides like when, like I've written quite a lot about rights repair over the years, which for people who don't know is, is like broadly the idea that you should be allowed and able to fix the electronics and other devices that you buy and own. So this has a lot to do with like manufacturer monopolies over repair parts and like having to go to the Apple Store to get your iPhone fixed because, you know, your local unauthorized or independent repair person maybe can't get the parts or can't get the tools needed to do so. And I feel like this is a movement that I've been writing about now for over a decade, I would say, and I think you've been a part of it for most of that time. And there's been like tons and tons of progress over the years. And that progress has been on all fronts. Like it's been state level legislation which took many years to pass, but now there are. How many states have right to repair laws? Like a couple dozen?
- [03:33]
Nathan Proctor
No, no, it's. I mean it depends on, it's about, it's about a dozen, but it depends on how you count them. Right. Because there's some that are very, very narrow and then there's some that are much broader. But yeah, it's about a dozen that have passed some version that we support. And you know, it started with, you know, just very narrow. Actually a pretty good bill passed in New York that Governor Hochul cut down to. Its to be really narrow. And then we passed a wheelchair bill just covering power wheelchairs in Colorado. And then we passed a pretty broad bill in Minnesota. And then we've keep, we keep on coming back and improving it and passing stronger and stronger versions. And you know, it's, it's been a really exciting campaign to work on because I think we're just winning the fundamental argument like people should be able to fix the stuff that they own and when they can't, a lot of different problems come about and they're just like, you know, those problems are totally unnecessary and the benefits to a manufacturer for like, you know, controlling who can fix products and when, and when you're forced to upgrade or when you're forced to pay through the. No is to get the manufacturer approved person to touch it. Like that's not a good situation. There's so many downsides to that. And the more and more we talk to people about it, the more, more I think fed up people are with. With those conditions. And yeah, so that's, you know, we, I would say even though the kind of real engine of right to repair is this stuff at the states, these bills at the states which have really driven the changes, there's so much that we've done like in terms of, in the marketplace and you know, we've worked with the Federal Trade Commission, there's been lawsuits filed by individuals which have been based on the research that we've contributed about the specific issues that are going on. So you know, I think of right repair as kind of being like an all fronts kind of issue. And I don't ever Want to be like, I mean, when. When your job every day is to, like, out, you know, kind of like hoodwink giant multinational companies who have as much money as, you know, as is possible. To have to throw at something, you've got to be pretty unpredictable. You've got to keep them guessing, and you've got to be able to dictate the terms of the debate in a way that they can't win it because they basically have every other advantage over us.
- [06:17]
Jason Kepler
Yeah, I mean, I think that all fronts line is sort of the best way of looking at this because, I don't know, it's one of the easier stories to tell over time. It's like a lot of right to repair is rooted in this idea of, like, American tinkering, like, people fixing their tractors for generations, people, you know, modding their cars and repairing their cars and things like that. And for a very long time.
- [06:45]
Nathan Proctor
We.
- [06:45]
Jason Kepler
Were used to in the United States, like, being able to fix the things that we own and having things that last a really long time and maybe taking pride in being able to fix things. And then I would say, like, early 2000s, we start to see the introduction of software into everything. And with that came a lot of technological protection measures and DRM and things like that, where not only do you need to know how to fix a device, but you also sort of see the rise of really cheap electronics. Electronics manufacturers trying to make things really thin and so they're, like, hard to open, and they have, like, proprietary screws and a lot of glue in them. And it's just like you see the end of replaceable batteries, things like this. And then I just feel like over, I don't know, like the last few 15 years, you say to someone, like, oh, like, when's the last time you got anything fixed? And for a lot of people, the answer is never. It's like something breaks and you go and buy a new one, and that's sort of like by design from the manufacturers. And I feel like over the last five, six years, specifically, you and the right to repair movement have called bullshit on this state of affairs. And I feel like we're starting to see a lot of progress in the opposite direction where people say people are, like, fed up with buying a smart dishwasher that lasts, like, you know, 18 months and then fails to get software updates, so you need to get a new one or whatever. And I feel like when you raise this now, people, like, actually know what you're talking about. And, like, on that front, it's a.
- [08:28]
Nathan Proctor
Real.
- [08:30]
Jason Kepler
Like public affairs campaign. Like it's not just enough to lobby state legislators. You need to make sure that the public is informed that this is all happening and that they say that know this is not something that, that we like. Like this is something that needs to be fixed. I mean, is that a good way of describing it, you think?
- [08:46]
Nathan Proctor
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the powerful things about right to repair is that it's not like some big mysterious thing, right? It's, it's an experience that people have had that they maybe haven't taken a sec second to reflect on. But then once you actually do stop and think about it, you're like, yeah, you know what this did, this has changed. I have noticed this. And is this something that's good or bad? And then they think about it and they, no, no, it's definitely bad. I think that there's, you know, you identified the rise of software and also the change in copyright law to give like tremendous power to copyright holders, even for basically purely functional software code. You know, it's, it's, that's a really big part of the story. But then I also think there's another part of the story which is kind of like the economy is kind of primarily about absurdities in, at this point in our development as a species. Like most of the stuff we buy we don't actually need. Most of the industry is producing things that are not all that necessary. And mostly innovation in the marketplace is like trying to figure out how to get people to buy stuff that they don't actually need. And planned obsolescence is a feature of that kind of absurdity, right? So it's like, oh shoot, we used to make good high quality products and then everyone bought one and now they all have one. Now we need to figure out a way to get people to buy these products constantly so that we can keep moving in this direction. And I think that there's some real kind of systemic problems that are kind of evidenced by, yeah, we need to push back. I mean we don't really need to have an economy where giant multinational companies come up with absurd and ridiculous and preposterous plans to get us to spend more money so that they can keep this machine going. Like this is, it's not worth it. Like, you know, the stuff that we're seeing now around AI is so, so much of it is driven by this. Like, well, we have to figure out how to create a new monopoly. So you know, maybe we can replace human friendship with chatbots. And it's, you know, you see the things that people are coming up with. And I think right to repair is just one way that we're saying, like now there needs, there's a limit to the usefulness of these things and we should make human centered decisions about the stuff that we have, how it works. And you know, I see it as not just a project to like talk to consumers about what is happening in the marketplace and how we should be able to fix products. And it's really like, let's think about what, what our economy is delivering to us right now and what we actually want and how can we organize it so that we get good stuff that we actually want to use and keep using. So many. So much of the technology that we have now is just kooky.
- [11:58]
Jason Kepler
There's one thing that really crystallized this for me, and it's a lot. It's an old example, but it's. Seven years ago, Amazon released something called the Amazon dash button, which is like literally a button that was connected to your. I think it was connected to Wi Fi or Bluetooth or something like that. And it was a physical button that I think they would send you for free, or maybe it costs like a dollar and they would have like a little label on it like Pop Tarts or like Nerf darts. Like these are the examples I'm seeing now. And like whenever you wanted to order more like laundry detergent, you would just push that button. And these never really took off, but they were a tiny electronic device with a battery in it that was designed to get you to just like buy new stuff whenever you were out of it or maybe even when you weren't out of it. And this was something that was introduced, you know, I think it was only around for a few months. They probably sent out millions of these. Who knows how many. And I went to an E waste center while doing some reporting like a few years ago, and there was this gigantic crate of dash buttons being like recycled there. And I think what people don't know and what I've talked about before, but people still don't know because, you know, not everyone listens to what I say. It's like a lot of this stuff is not actually recyclable. It's like it gets shredded into tiny little pieces and, you know, they do something with it. But basically it was like a circuit board and a battery. And there are like humans who have to disassemble this to make sure, because if you shred out a lithium ion battery, it starts to fire. And so this is like a A shitty electronic that was designed to be e waste from the start, whose only use was to like help you buy more junk. And that, that was like a real radicalizing moment for me was these dash buttons. But you can think of like a million other things that are, that are just like that.
- [13:54]
Nathan Proctor
For me, it's the disposable vapes now that I've connect to Bluetooth and have video game little screens on them. And it's like, it's a disposable, you know, nicotine delivery device, but it's a full fledged piece of electronics. There was some guy that like made an electric bike from all the batteries from, you know, discarded vapes. And you know, it's crazy. Like, you know, we, we've, we, we're doing like this crazy, absurd things, you know, and a lot of these like, and we're also having these conversations about critical minerals and there's like geopolitical, you know, conflict over the access to these materials. And they want to send robots two miles underneath the surface of the ocean to like dig up polymetallic nodules and environments that we know absolutely nothing about and could be doing huge, widespread ecological damage that we don't even know or understand. And then what are they going to do with that? Like make vapes with Tetris on them? And then like, how, how, how is this sensible to anybody? So yeah, I mean, to me, right, to repair is, is about challenging that consumption system, but also like recognizing that this consumption system that we built is totally disempowering to us, the people in the world. It like, requires taking away our agency to function, right? Because like, on our own, we would never, like, act this way. We would never like, just throw everything away. Like, that behavior has to be kind of enforced upon us because it doesn't come naturally. And so that's one of the really rewarding things about organizing on right to repair is that like, it just makes sense. Like at the end of the day, it's just like when something is broken, you fix it. Like that's, that's common sense. And the absurdity is the length of which manufacturers have to go now. And your reporting on John Deere, for example, is one great example of the lengths that manufacturers have to go to take away people's ability to do things with their own equipment.
- [16:20]
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- [16:59]
Jason Kepler
Yeah, another one that comes to mind for me is just like the McDonald's ice cream machine which we talked about many times. But I think people are very used to people who go to McDonald's. Like it's a meme that the McFlurry machine is out of service. And it's crazy because it's like McDonald's is a gigantic corporation, but they are sort of at the, the whim of this manufacturer that creates the ice cream machine and it has embedded software in it. The parts are hard to get to. And it seems like even a lot of companies that we deal with on a day to day basis, it's like they don't always own the equipment that they're using. Like very often they are renting it, leasing it. Like they're subject to these service contracts with the manufacturer. You know, I've written a lot of articles about how hospitals and like medical equipment, they have all these in house technicians who are really good at repairing things. But increasingly they're not able to repair the machinery in the hospital because the manufacturers won't sell it to them, they'll only lease it to them. On with these service contracts that mean that you kind of have to wait for their own technicians to come through and fix things at great cost. It's like driving up the cost of everything across our entire society. And I think the great thing is that with the passage of some of this legislation, we're starting to see some of that change. I think one of the frustrating things for me, and surely way more frustrating for you, is that in some cases it feels like you have to go industry by industry where it's like, well there's an electronics right to repair law or bill, there's an agricultural right to repair bill and legislation. There's wheelchair right to repair. There's been like numerous cases of people who have wheelchairs that break. They can't fix it and then they can't get around and people with prosthetics and things like that. But you know, there's powerful lobbies from all of these industries and they, they seek carve outs to each to the devices that they make. Because they say that, well, we don't necessarily oppose right to repair for a piece of electronics, but if it's medical equipment, like you can't Possibly allow trained technicians who are not employed by us to, to fix these things. Is it, is it annoying to you to go kind of like industry by industry playing whack a mole to inform, you know, legislators and like, no, these exemptions are not necessarily needed. It's kind of the same issue across like all of these different types of devices.
- [19:35]
Nathan Proctor
Honestly, no.
- [19:36]
Jason Kepler
I mean.
- [19:39]
Nathan Proctor
I love the people that fix medical equipment and I love the people that fix consumer electronics. And it's really cool to get to meet and understand these different industries. And you know, obviously, you know, let's just take medical equipment because you can imagine if you're a lawmaker and you file a bill and you say, hey, rights, repair should be for everything. And you know, the fundamental, like, template of the legislation says, you know, the manufacturer has to provide equitable access to the parts, tools and information they use, which means the same materials essentially that they use when they, when they repair them themselves. They have to make that available to the owner of the product and to independent repair technicians, it seems like. I mean, that's just basically what the bill does. And medical device manufacturers will be the first ones that come in and say, yeah, but medical devices are different, right? And therefore, you know, we really need to make sure that not anyone's fixing medical devices. And, and that like, I heard that argument, right, And I was thinking like, okay, well, here I am. I'm here because, you know, I was really frustrated about consumer electronics. Like, as a consumer organization, that's kind of more of what we hear from our members and such. That argument seemed okay to me. Like, I was like, okay, you know, I guess that might be true, I don't know. And then I asked somebody who fixed medical devices and they told me exactly why that's the craziest thing that they ever said. It's like, yeah, of course not just anybody fix medical devices, but we don't deputize the manufacturers to choose who can fix them and who couldn't because then they would just give themselves a monopoly. And by the way, monopolies in healthcare are not, generally speaking, beneficial, they're in fact quite dangerous. And you know, also like the hugest, the biggest problem why American medicine is ridiculously expensive is because there's so much anti competitive, absolute robbery going on in this system. A lot of people that are doing very little work are getting a lot of money and repair is just another example. And so you learn how the repair actually happens, you know, how the system prevents unsafe repairs from happening. The FDA looked at 2.1 million error reports from devices that. To see if their repair was an issue, it wasn't an issue. And, you know, so you have. You check the data, you talk to the experts, and then you end up being like, yeah, you know what? All right, add this to the pile of, you know, industries that I'm now fighting. But it. I haven't found a single case where Right. Repair is kind of not righteous. Right. Like, you should be able to fix stuff. Like, when you can't fix stuff, when the manufacturer decides how stuff gets fixed, they just design the repair programs to benefit their shareholders in ways that harm the rest of us. And there's not a single example where that's a smart or good thing. It's all, you know, it's always, like, causing problems, and it's not just causing cost problems. In the case of, like, medical equipment, like, you have equipment that needs. You absolutely need. Otherwise, you know, somebody's going to, you know, not be able to go into surgery or you're not going to know which medication to prescribe. Because, for example, there's two kinds of strokes. And you could, if you have stroke A, and you take medicine, A, they can save your life. But if you take the medicine for, like, stroke, category B, you die. And the only way that you can really know what kind of stroke it is is if you run a CAT scan. And if your CAT scan machine is broken and the manufacturer is going to take a week, and you have somebody coming in with a stroke, and you have a trained technician in your hospital who's not allowed by the manufacturer to touch that machine, like, that could be somebody that's a life or death situation. And so it's these. These. It's not just, like, about the manufacturers making more money. It's about them, like, creating a system that is totally dependent on them for financial reasons. And then when it fails, like, you end up paying the cost in a lot of different ways.
- [24:03]
Jason Kepler
One of my favorite and, like, most horrifying stories that I did about this was during the initial surge of COVID 19, you know, ventilators were in short supply. And, you know, we had not experienced anything like Covid before. And so it maybe wasn't that big of a deal if a hospital had five ventilators and two of them were broken and it took three weeks to fix them or whatever, because, you know, the manufacturers only have a few different, you know, service technicians. But then during COVID it's like, well, you have this huge surge of needing ventilators all over the country. You have a very limited Number of manufacturer approved technicians. And so you have these like insane wait times and you have people dying of COVID who need access to the ventilators. And so I wrote an article about that problem, but also about a Polish hacker who was selling like software bypasses to the DRM locks that were preventing hospitals from actually fixing this stuff themselves. Because again, they have technicians at hospitals who can fix this stuff. They just are artificially unable to do so because, you know, of the software or the access to parts or whatever. And I mean, that's an example exactly of what you were saying where like during a crisis, same thing with, with tractors, where it's like if your tractor breaks during harvest time, like all your crops go bad because you might need to wait days to, you know, have a John Deere technician come out. Which is, you know, kind of exactly what is happening in a class action lawsuit that we've written about before.
- [25:38]
Nathan Proctor
Right.
- [25:38]
Jason Kepler
I just want to say very quickly, annoying was the wrong term, wrong word to use. I, I guess more like because I find it very interesting myself to learn about all these different industries and the intricacies of them. And you know, the. It's like almost universally any repair person that you talk to or service technician you talk to is like the most interesting person you've ever met. And honestly, my dad has been a mechanic for my entire life, so I'm super interested in it. But I guess it's like, it would be nice if perhaps the wins came like across all industries very easily is maybe what I should have said.
- [26:22]
Nathan Proctor
Yeah, it would be great if my job was super easy. Yeah, it's not super easy. It's actually pretty hard.
- [26:29]
Jason Kepler
Yeah, no, I want to talk about the initiative that you have going on right now. You talked about planned obsolescence earlier and I think we're about to see one of the most egregious examples of planned obsolescence that I can think of. And so it makes sense that you made a big deal out of it. On October 14th, Microsoft is going to end free support for Windows 10. And this is a very bad thing. It's also tied to rights of repair. It may not sound like it, you know, sort of initially it's like, oh, Microsoft is ending Support for Windows 10. Like, what do we care? So that's the question. What do we care? Like, what's going on here and why is it such a huge deal?
- [27:16]
Nathan Proctor
Yeah, it's a huge deal for a couple reasons. The first is that Windows 11 will not run on a lot of computers. Microsoft had decided to put these hardware requirements on Windows 11, which was kind of surprising given that Windows 10 was backwards compatible with almost everything out there that could still run. But when it comes to Windows 11, they're like, no, no, no, no, we need this TPM 2.0. And so you essentially need a newer processor and more RAM to run it than some huge number of computers. And the estimates are up to 400 million computers that are currently running Windows 10 cannot upgrade to Windows 11. So just that fact alone was kind of creating a bit of a stir, right? Like, wait a second, what's going to happen to those 400 million computers, right? And you know, Microsoft says, oh, you might want to consider buying a new computer on the page where they recommend, you know, where they outline the hardware requirements for Windows 11. So that's not great because if you're running, you know, a 7th gen intel processor or computer, you know, that's just fine for pretty much most things that people need computers to do these days, like you can watch YouTube or Netflix, you can do emails, you can use cloud, you know, applications. This is part because, you know, most of our computing these days is done on the cloud. Our computers are actually not processing as much data. There are as big of a share of the data as they used to used to have. You know, really we, we, we don't really need computers that are all that fast anymore to do the things that we typically need to do. So they're cutting off all these computers for support. And that's kind of a crisis for two main reasons. The first is like, if everyone does replace those computers, like that's 400 million computers that are going to enter the waste stream, that's a disaster in terms of just the sheer volume. And of course, we know a lot of people who, maybe older relatives or whatever, most people are probably just going to ignore the warnings and use their computer that's insecure. And so there's going to be some widespread security problem with these older, unsupported, unpatched, no longer getting security updates computers. This is going to be very, very true of places where, you know, people don't have money or, you know, like if, if you, if you're living, you know, if you're kind of on the edge of being online, you know, and, and you have, you're using older laptops and you know, maybe you're in a developing nation or you're somewhere else in the world or, you know, like a lot of rural elderly folks have, you know, kind of older computers and are kind of more on the kind of edge of digital access. They're just going to be targets for, you know, ransomware and other kind of cyber crime. And we're really, really worried about that. Both, both those things are kind of like, it's like two crisis at once, right? You know, billions of pounds of electronic waste and massive security problems. At the same time, to me, it's just crazy that Microsoft isn't extending Support for Windows 10. I mean, they, when it came out, they kind of promised it would be the forever version of Windows, super popular. People like it a lot better than the other versions. And 40% of people are still using it. 40% of Windows users still use it. So to cut support for something that is like legitimately like a flagship product.
- [31:23]
Jason Kepler
Is almost half of their, you know, computer user base. I think people know this, but I'll just like say it. Repairing an old device or keeping an old device for longer is so much better for the environment than buying a new device. I think universally, I mean, there's been multiple studies, maybe you know more about the specific numbers than I do, but anytime you make a new device, that means new raw materials that have to go into it. New like critical minerals, sometimes conflict materials, things like that. So even just like keeping your phone for one extra year. I've done some reporting on studies. It's like it's, it saves ton of carbon emissions of, you know, mining resources, things like that. Not to mention sort of like if you get rid of something early, the kind of environmental cost of disposing of that computer or dishwasher or whatever gadget you might be talking about. So that's like why this is such an important environmental issue or at least one of the reasons that it's such an important environmental issue. Because you're having, as Nathan said, 400 million computers that are going to lose support. And so, you know, you have this, not only this waste crisis of what to do with all of those devices, but then all the devices and the mining and resources that are needed to replace them. Correct?
- [32:58]
Nathan Proctor
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I did a study where I looked at just cell phones and we have a tool, the Environmental Benefits of Repair, which actually outlines this for a lot of different products. But smartphones are particularly pernicious because it's about like 85% of the carbon footprint for a smartphone is the production and shipping of it to the, you know, and then charging it and disposing of it is like 15% or less. So that means if Americans use their smartphones for one year longer on average, it would have the same kind of pollution cutting benefits as taking 636,000 cars off the road. So it's just a massive amount of pollution that's associated with manufacturing electronics. And if we can use them for longer, it's like largely benef. It's hugely beneficial and it is true for almost every product. And some products, maybe they are super resource intensive to run and there might be more efficient newer versions. There might be know like that the time frame where you want to replace them. Like you know, instead of, you know, two years replacing it, maybe you should wait another get 15 years or youth use out of, or whatever to maximize efficiency. But like, you know, it's, it's typically much longer than the actual lifespan, the actual average lifespan of those products. So almost everything we should be using longer for ecological reasons. And then it's also just kind of annoying to have to constantly upgrade things that are working just fine because manufacturers have decided that that's better for them. You know, I don't know if you, I mean I've got aging parents like change when, when like their apps change positions on their like phones.
- [34:50]
Jason Kepler
I have aging friends, I think because a lot of them just got the new iOS update and they're like, oh my God, what did they do? What's going on here? They're really upset about it.
- [35:12]
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- [35:48]
Jason Kepler
So I want to read a couple things from one of your pieces on this. You already mentioned some of this stuff, but 400 million computers are on the verge of losing access to free updates. This is crazy to me. Windows 10 is used by 42.8% of all Windows computer users worldwide, which we talked about. That's crazy. By contrast, when support for Windows 8 ended in January 2016, only 3.7% of Windows users were still using it. Only 2.2% of Windows users were still using Windows 8.1 when support ended in January 2023. So this is not like those other cases, like the, I mean, I guess you could argue that it would have been better if, if Microsoft extended security updates and things like that for Windows 8 and 8.1. But like there were not that many people using it. Yeah.
- [36:47]
Nathan Proctor
And because people could Upgrade to Windows 10 and it ran better, right? It was like, oh, yeah. I mean, so, I mean, for sure, you can't really compare the end of Windows 10 to some of these other things. It's just like, yeah, oh, these older operating systems have basically become obsolete, so we should replace them. That makes a certain kind of sense. Like, no one expects Microsoft to do software updates forever. But when 43, like, it's not obsolete. What is the definition of obsolete where you would allow 43% of your users have an obsolete version? I don't know if you've managed a website. We've managed websites. And so we're like, should we continue to update our website for people who are using like a Palm Pilot or whatever, you know, these conversations you have, you know, when you, you're working on compatibility? Well, we do, we do have 2.8% of people using Internet Explorer 1998 to access our website. We don't want to support that anymore. But if it was 43%, like, you would do the update, you know, you would make sure that.
- [37:58]
Jason Kepler
I mean, I would. If we, if we lost 43% of our traffic because we, you know, stopped supporting specific device or whatever, like, that would be catastrophic for us. But I guess, like, in the, in that case, it's like people would just go to other websites. Whereas, you know, Microsoft is not a monopoly in computing, but it's a duopoly. And so, you know, it's not a good situation. I think the other thing, and you sort of nodded at it, but like, once devices stop getting free security updates, you know, you have the potential that people are just going to continue using them and then they can become subject to, you know, botnet attack or like, leverage into, you know, become botnets, things like that. We saw that with like baby monitors that weren't getting security updates and had vulnerabilities and things like that. But the other thing is, I would imagine there's a lot of businesses that have computers that have Windows 10. There's a lot of, like, institutional buyers, like maybe government buyers, like state and local governments, schools, things like that. And a lot of these schools and governments and like, large purchasers of devices often have rules or laws or legislation that they have to follow where they're not allowed to use devices that aren't getting security updates anymore. And so, you know, they may have to replace these devices simply because they, they have become obsolete, as you say, like, quote, unquote obsolete. And I was wondering if you think that is the case with some of these devices. And then also there was a similar fight over Chromebooks a few years ago and there was like a massive right to repair win there. And I was wondering if you could tell people a little bit about that.
- [39:49]
Nathan Proctor
Yeah, it's funny. So we, you know, we've been, we have an open letter which you can find@perg.org and we've been collecting support from businesses and school districts and elected officials. We now have, well, we delivered 590 of those businesses and elected official signatures to Microsoft earlier this week. But since then we've actually generated a ton more because people continue to be worried about that. And people are writing in on that form like, oh, I'm at a business where we had to replace 1000 computers because we couldn't upgrade our computers and we couldn't have, you know, we couldn't have the security vulnerabilities. Paul Roberts, who is a security journalist and the founder and president of the Secure and Resilient Future foundation, told me that there's 180 million. The researchers have found 180 million obsolete. You know, kind of can't update Windows 10 computers on business networks. So this is. Those companies are either going to have security problems or they're going to have to buy 180 million new computers. And by the way, like, the supply chain is not great right now. Let me just also mention that the timing is actually not ideal.
- [41:13]
Jason Kepler
Not a great time to buy new electronics made overseas and all like essentially all computers are made overseas.
- [41:23]
Nathan Proctor
Yeah. It's actually a question about whether or not they're going to be able to replace them. And I think that one of the reasons why people said, well, you're just never going to be able to convince Microsoft to do the right thing here. And I'm not sure that that's the case. Right. So for example, schools have a low cost $1 update. They can pay for one year of security for $1 and then $2 and then $3. So for a total of $6 they can get three more years. That seems like a pretty good deal. And that was offered to. So we have a connected shareholder advocacy organization called Green Century Capital Management. They filed a shareholder resolution with Microsoft and that was one of the concessions Microsoft made through those negotiations. So we've gotten Microsoft to move a little bit on this issue before. Not quite as, you know, not a totally holistic solution, but certainly progress. And then let's look. But I think what happened with Google and Chromebooks is even better example that gives Me hope that we can win. So during the pandemic, people bought massive quantities of Chromebooks, right? So schools went from having a computer lab with a couple computers in it to, to now having these like one to one policies, as they call them, where they had to buy a Internet capable device for every single student in the whole district. Right? Because they were doing hybrid remote or they were doing fully remote learning. And you know, so schools were turning to Chromebooks as an inexpensive way to, you know, meet these, the needs of their students. Right. Then it turns out that, you know, Chromebooks have this thing called the AUE date, which is like a preset end of support date, which in some cases was just a couple years after the computers were bought brand new. And so there, the, there were, there was this, these photos from the Oakland Unified School District in California of just thousands of working Chromebooks that were headed to the recycler because the AUE date had passed and they weren't getting security updates, which meant that they were ineligible to go into some of the enterprise software that they use, like Google Classroom, and that they didn't have the ability to go to the state testing websites anymore because those sites do a security check. And so they were completely working hardware. And again, like these are Chromebooks. It's not like the newer Chromebooks are like faster like the Chromebooks. They do almost no computing on the device, right? It is, they are just, they're like cloud devices. Yeah, yeah, they're just, it's just a terminal to the cloud. And so they were replacing these by the thousands. And we organized a bunch of these school districts and other people who are like, you know, institutional purchasers of Chromebooks. We put some pressure on Google. They initially kind of resisted what we were doing, but then after just a couple months they just flipped and said, okay, we're gonna have 10 years minimum support timeline for all Chromebook builds from here on out. And that's gonna make a huge difference in the amount of Chromebooks that get killed by their software prematurely. You know, and I mean to be fair, like Microsoft Windows 10 was 10 years, right? So, but you know, even on Microsoft's own materials they say it should be 12 years and then they decided to go with 10.
- [45:13]
Jason Kepler
That is true. But you know, there were, as you said, there were some Chromebooks that were released in 2019 that were going to stop working in 2025. And so, you know, that's a six year time scale. And, and Google went from saying, oh, like these are going to expire after six years. To saying, no, actually we can support it for 10 years. And so, I mean that's a four year change that they sort of did overnight thanks to, you know, pressure from you and groups like you and from schools and groups like that. And so, I mean, it's not crazy to think that Microsoft could keep supporting Windows 10, especially with security updates, at the very least for years to come.
- [46:01]
Nathan Proctor
Yeah. And not only is it, I mean they're going to have to do it anyway, right, because you can pay for these updates. And that's a model also that it doesn't seem to make sense to me because so people will be paying for the security updates. So if you couldn't pay for the security updates, it means you're insecure. But when one person is insecure in your network, that's, you know, like it's, you know, security kind of operates in community with other devices. Right. It's not like, oh, you have all the problems like your car is unlocked, but my car is locked. No, when there's a vulnerability on the network, it, it, you know, it, it infects other devices. It's, it becomes a pathway for hackers to, to buy, to get past security and it, it imperils everybody and, or like I, you know, I mean, like there was, there's been a bunch of examples like WannaCry, you know, for example, which was a vulnerability in like Windows computers. Mostly they were older unpatched computers, but it happened a lot in hospitals, right, where they had computers that were needed to like communicate with large capital equipment, like hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment was programmed to communicate to like other computers using Windows xp. And then they had to keep, like they couldn't replace their mri, they couldn't, you know, so they had to keep using those old computers and then they ended up being caught up in ransomware attacks because of those vulnerabilities. So I think that like it's really important that we not, you know, say you have to pay for security and, or like, you know, you have to jump through these hoops to get security because what's going to happen is somebody's going to make a mistake and then those are negative consequences that can affect all of us. That can bankrupt your local hospital, that can, you know, you know, could, could, could impact local government or local schools or you know, these other systems. It's infrastructure, you know. So to me, the thing that like I don't think Microsoft should walk away from Windows 10 until that 43% is a manageable number. And over time, like These computers are going to be increasingly able to upgrade to Windows 11 and the, you know, those older 10 year old laptops, et cetera, will slowly kind of all peter out. And when it's a, you know, but right now it's just way too many. Which is kind of the kind of basis of my argument on that.
- [48:40]
Jason Kepler
It's like, yeah, I'm going to talk a little bit out of my ass here because I'm not a Windows user. But I mean I can also see why a lot of people wouldn't want to Upgrade to Windows 11 because Microsoft has tried to AI ify everything that it's doing, you know, they were talking about and maybe they ended up releasing it, I haven't been following it, but that, that sort of thing that was taking snapshots of your computer constantly that people were really worried about and I think they stopped having that on by default if I recall. But I mean I think that there's a lot of reasons that someone might want to stay on an older version of a Microsoft product, you know, as like they kind of shove like weird AI and surveillance tech like into Windows 11.
- [49:26]
Nathan Proctor
Yeah. Just side note, if AI is the future, why do these companies need to force feed us these tools when we don't want them? That to me seems like somewhat of an indictment that maybe they know they're not really, we don't actually really want these things. But yeah, no, I mean one of the things, if you do sign up for OneDrive, which is like the cloud backup thing that Microsoft has, they will give you another year of security updates which has really bothered some of the people that I'm working with. Right. Because who feel like, oh, so like I can get security updates if I give all my data to train your AI. You know, it's like a way I've heard that framed and that does seem like a pretty crazy exchange. Right? Like oh, you can only get security if, if you're helping to use your personal information to train our AI systems. Like that seems just we need to get away from that kind of treatment of people. That's not good. And in fact there is a lawsuit that's been filed against Microsoft for the end of 10 by somebody, a class action in California. And they make the accusation in that case that they're only doing it to fuel the, their kind of push to get these AI tools on everybody. I don't know if that's a particularly strong argument in a legal sense. I know that there's definitely people who will make that argument and it's kind of irrelevant to me. It's just the wrong thing to do. It's going to cause huge problems. The other thing that's funny to me about Microsoft's position is that they've pledged to be net carbon negative and a zero waste company by 2030. And meanwhile we calculated that the end of Windows 10 would create £1.6 billion of electronic waste. And if you want to look at how much energy and carbon emissions are associated with that number of devices, you know, it's like it's, it's astronomical. Right. It's like you might as well set up 15 new coal plants. It's, it's huge.
- [51:53]
Jason Kepler
And so yeah, good luck with that. On with all the data centers and AI processing that.
- [51:59]
Nathan Proctor
I mean maybe these companies have just given up on those, on, on, on those goals which you know, I mean, frankly I never really thought that we were going to solve the crisis, the environmental crisis that we have by you know, shareholder backed companies voluntarily doing it. I think that that can certainly be a thing that helps us. But like we, you know, because this is, this is, this is the reality, right? Like they, their job is to deliver value to their shareholders and they're not the ones that are coming to save us at the end. We have to use our democracy and the voice of the public to accomplish that. Otherwise what'll happen is something else will come along that makes more money for the company and it'll be too hard to say no to. I think there's certainly an element to what we're seeing now. I obviously don't have a way to know what Microsoft is actually thinking or what their real motivation to change their approach so drastically between Windows 10 and 11 was. But I kind of still believe like the better angels who created like this backwards compatible, super useful operating system are still there and still care about the things that, that, that kind of help them to do that make that incredibly useful operating system in the first place. And I'm hoping we can appeal to them to keep it going because the consequences of them not doing so are pretty extreme.
- [53:41]
Jason Kepler
Yeah. So if people are as mad about this as, as we are, how can they support this effort? Like what is the best thing for them to do?
- [53:51]
Nathan Proctor
Yeah, yeah. So I mean we have a petition and an open letter if they're, if you're part of an organization or a business or you know, you have some other kind of official officialness to you which we've linked, we've linked@perg.org, if you, you can check that out. If you go to perg.org repair, you can kind of see all of our right to repair content. But, you know, I think, you know, definitely just kind of raising awareness about this issue and, you know, sharing this podcast or I have a little video explainer which is doing well for me on YouTube, so people can check those out and share those and help us get the word out. We're also doing a really fun thing, which is we're collecting these old computers that can't upgrade and we're installing Chrome Ox or Linux Mint on them and donating them to people who might otherwise be on the wrong side of, you know, kind of digital access, like adult literacy programs. So that you should totally ch. I'll post something about, about how to get involved in, in those. But, you know, you could help volunteer and refurbish some old computers and give them to people who could use them, keep them out of the dump, keep them being good computers. And yeah, I mean, I, I do think that this is an also a moment to, to remember that, like, one of the things that's pretty cool about PCs is that even though Microsoft is like a dominant market force, you can actually, you don't have to use Windows to run your computer. Like, it doesn't stop you from installing another operating system. And that's actually something that's kind of great. And we'd love if that same, if we had that same right, you know, for other devices we had. I wish that, you know, if my fridge, like Samsung is now. I don't know if you saw this story or if you covered this, Jason, but people have bought like these $1,500 fridges now. They're ads coming up on them.
- [56:01]
Jason Kepler
Yeah, we've written about stuff like that over the years. It's insane.
- [56:05]
Nathan Proctor
It's totally nuts. Like, the fact is, if your laptop did that, you could just install Linux on it for free. We should have Linux. I bet that the Samsung thing is Linux anyway. But you should be able to install whatever software you want on the products that you own. And in fact, your laptop is probably the most liberated device that you own in terms of what software you can put on it. We would love that same right to everything else, but I think people need to use those rights. So one of the things that we're doing is trying to keep computers out of the dump by, you know, installing alternative operating systems on it. So people should, should reach out to us if they have access to computers they don't need or they want to volunteer to those events. And all that stuff will be@perg.org.
- [56:51]
Jason Kepler
Sweet. Sweet. I've kept you a long time. We were going to talk about military right to repair as well. Can you do a quick overview of that before I let you go?
- [57:02]
Nathan Proctor
Yeah, I'll just do it quick. Yeah. So, you know, like, like we talking about with medical. Actually, I learned about military right repair. One of the ways I learned about military right to repair was from the biomedical technicians that I was working with in hospitals. Turns out that the military trains a large portion of the field of clinical engineers, people who work in hospitals to fix medical equipment or work for, you know, work for different service organizations that service medical equipment. And about, you know, being in, like, field hospitals in Afghanistan and being unable. Being blocked by the manufacturer from fixing equipment in the middle of, like, you know, people coming in wounded from IUDs and IEDs. Not IUDs. Oh, that's not.
- [57:53]
Jason Kepler
Not IUDs.
- [57:57]
Nathan Proctor
It's been a long day.
- [57:58]
Jason Kepler
If you're, if you're watching this on YouTube, my, my camera keeps overheating. This a.
- [58:02]
Nathan Proctor
It's.
- [58:03]
Jason Kepler
It's like I live in Southern California and it's like hottest now in October as it's been the entire year. And so the sun directly hits my, my camera. There's. There's nothing I can do about it. So I'm going to be a black screen for the rest of this. But I am here. Continue.
- [58:19]
Nathan Proctor
Yeah, well, it's a, it's a good thing that I figured out my, my 4K streaming so that people can just look at me in amazing detail. Yeah. So. But it turns out that, like, you know, right to repair for the military is a big, big deal. The first time we saw this kind of really blown up in a big way was when there were two Marine logistics officers that wrote an op ed in the New York Times in 2019 about having, you know, equipment in a war zone that they couldn't fix. And it wasn't even like, tanks.
- [58:53]
Jason Kepler
Right.
- [58:53]
Nathan Proctor
It was generators, stuff that, you know, there's no reason a diesel mechanic should not be able to work on a field generator like in the demilitarized zone in Korea. But they were blocked by the manufacturer and they had to ship these, this equipment all the way to San Diego or something. And then we started hearing these stories from kind of basically from everywhere in the service. And I did a report called I think It's Just Military Right to Repair. And, you know, we had a story about a drone operator and they had to pay $16,000 to the main. To the Manufacturer of these drones. Every single time the drones would fail, and they'd often fail after landing. And it turns out that they had a little cable connector within the drone that just would pop out. And they would have to ship it all the way across the ocean and get some technician from the manufacturer to pop it back in for $16,000. And they finally got approval, like, you know, in violation of the. Of the contract or whatever to do. Do this work themselves. And they would just put a drop of hot glue on it, too, so that wouldn't pop out again, you know, for pennies. And it's just. It's just another example of how manufacturer restrictions are just preposterous. They cost an insane amount of money to the government. They undermine troops readiness. There was a story that was reported by one reporter on this, raised by the Secretary of the Navy, where there was a battleship, and most of the ovens in the battleship stopped working. And they weren't allowed to fix them because the manufacturer's contract stipulated that only the manufacturers. They were in the South China Sea with a group of several hundred hungry sailors, and they couldn't. They weren't allowed to fix the ovens. I mean, that's just preposterous and absurd. So there's a bill, you know, in Congress which has been adopted, adopted into the kind of base text of the National Defense Authorization act, which would guarantee that the military has the right to repair its equipment. And it actually has attracted the support of the Secretary of the army, the White House. And so we're pretty confident that we can get the military's right to repair. And it's a great issue to go in and talk to a lot of different congressional offices which have maybe been, you know, lobbied extremely hard by John Deere and the car manufacturers and the others. That, you know, right to repair is a terrible, terrible idea. It's very difficult for them to. To hear these stories about the military and to then side with the manufacturers. Like, it's been a very good way for us to kind of continue to broaden the support in Congress on these topics. And that's a good thing because, like, we should have right to repair for everything. And so stay tuned on what's next on the military right to repair. It was also kind of funny, that story you wrote, Jason, about how after the military started talking about getting right to repair, like, ahem, like these appliance manufacturers and John Deere and all these other, like, equipment dealers and etc. Started wing ADVA MED, the medical device people weighed in to Block the military's right to fix its equipment.
- [62:03]
Jason Kepler
Yeah, I remember. Yeah. The refrigerator companies were like, no way. No chance can the military have this. Yeah. I mean, is it good? Is it good for national security and, you know, Pete Hegseth's warrior culture. If we're fixing, you know, Raytheon missiles with duct tape because they can't get the technicians out there, or, you know, the soldiers are starving at sea because the stoves aren't working. Seems. Seems pretty straightforward to me. And hopefully it does seem like there's a lot of momentum behind this, and I think that's really great. Not just for this issue, but it's great that, you know, there's been a couple attempts at national right to repair legislation, but I think the more that this issue can get in front of national legislators, the better, because, you know, y' all and a lot of your colleagues have focused on states, largely, although there's tons of places where it intersects with federal. I think we had talked about this for, like, three more hours about, like, DNC and exemptions and things like that, but.
- [63:14]
Nathan Proctor
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. I've written how many? I've written, like, 18 reports on right to repair. You know, so it's like I literally. I could talk for a million years about it. But, yeah, I am encouraged by the progress.
- [63:30]
Jason Kepler
Yeah, no, I mean, the progress has been incredible. You know, your work, your tireless work on this has been amazing. And, you know, as well as the work of so many other people who, you know, I often quote and talk to, and maybe we'll have some other folks on about this sometime in the future. But thank you so much for your time. We'll leave it there for now. Nathan Proctor from US Rights for Repair Extraordinaire. Thank you so much for coming on.
- [64:01]
Nathan Proctor
It's great to be here.
- [64:01]
Jason Kepler
Thank you, Jason. Thank you so much for listening. This has been another 404 Media conversation. We'll be back with a regular episode on Tuesday for subscribers and Wednesday for everyone else. I'm Jason Kebler. If you like this show, please tell your friends about it and we'll see you very soon.
- [64:34]
Nathan Proctor
And, Doug, here we have the Limu emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [64:49]
Jason Kepler
Uh, limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
- [64:52]
Nathan Proctor
Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@liberty mutual.com.
- [64:56]
Jason Kepler
Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty Savings Ferry. Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.