DRM in TIG welders

http://boingboing.net/2015/11/17/drm-in-welders.html

by ck2 • 11 years ago

84 84 11 years ago

abusive business practices

How is this abusive? It's market segmentation, and if they didn't do it this way, they'd do it some other way. This just allows them to have one standard set of hardware, and differentiate in software.

judgardner• 11 years ago

Agreed, this is pretty standard. One production run reduces cost and if you want the advanced features you pay more.

steve19• 11 years ago

It's abusive because by law we cannot modify our TIG welders to unlock these features/bypass restrictions.

vvanders• 11 years ago

No different than Agilent locking out features in their oscilloscopes. Software and R&D isn't free.

DannyBee5• 11 years ago

So? By law you also can't grab the higher end tig welder next to it.

Your argument seems to be essentially "if they want to do this, they should have to produce identical models with slightly different firmware and give them different skus and blah blah blah blah blah"

That seems pretty silly.

These are market segmentation restrictions, they would normally just do what i suggested, and produce models with identical insides except for the firmware rom.

Why force them to do that, exactly? IE what grand purpose does it serve?

This is, IMHO, very different from "you've made it illegal for me to play with my phone that i own", because you don't want to put your stuff on it or mess with the hardware using your software, you just want to not pay for the stuff they wrote.

If you want to install your own firmware on the tig welder hardware, that isn't theirs, and you wrote, awesome, that sounds great. I'll support you to death.

asgard10247• 11 years ago

I do find market segmentation to be morally wrong (at least, it's against free market principles, even though I don't agree with those always).

Why shouldn't everyone deserve access to the best tools, and by extension, best things? (Taking the production costs into account.) Best tools save time and make everybody more productive, which should be in everybody's interest.

Imagine you would say something like that in education - that some children do not deserve the best education, simply because they may never use it. How do you know they will not find some use for it?

Yet, when it comes to tools (and stuff in general), it is readily accepted as a principle (that it is OK to intentionally cripple someone else's productivity). Neither the fact that there are business models around market segmentation doesn't make it a good choice.

You will probably now follow with the standard argument about how they need to make profit and recoup their investments and so on. Guess what - the investment was already made, and it can't be undone! And frankly, I am sick of this lazy ass market god which requires investors to get return on profit so they would do something at all. (It's kinda like you're probably not a very good human if you need threat of hell and promise of heaven to make you not bad!) Just like everybody else, an "investor" should get a good salary (for the work done in decision-making) and that's it.

Also, the argument "if they didn't do it this way, they'd do it some other way" is interesting. In this nebulous form, it's often used to justify something morally fishy. Note that you can also use it other way around: Why should there be laws to protect DRM, if people who want to break will find some other way? The correct answer is, of course, the laws and regulations (legal system) are the correct resolution of this argument - we have them to steer people away from "other ways".

nullc2• 11 years ago

it's against free market principles,

What principle is it against? A buyer and a seller make a mutual agreement or they don't.

Due to one time expenses, some kinds of goods cannot exist without discriminatory pricing. (Where the total income from both low volume high price and high volume low price is required to make the good worth producing.)

nickodell• 11 years ago

Why shouldn't everyone deserve access to the best tools, and by extension, best things? (Taking the production costs into account.) Best tools save time and make everybody more productive, which should be in everybody's interest.

I agree with this in principle.

Imagine you would say something like that in education - that some children do not deserve the best education, simply because they may never use it. How do you know they will not find some use for it?

Sure, but the other side of this is that the guy who wrote the education curriculum ought to be paid, in order to encourage the development of further artistic works.

Absent some kind of taxpayer-funded way of compensating artists, how are they supposed to get a reasonable amount of money without denying non-payers access to their works?

Also, the argument "if they didn't do it this way, they'd do it some other way" is interesting. In this nebulous form, it's often used to justify something morally fishy. Note that you can also use it other way around: Why should there be laws to protect DRM, if people who want to break will find some other way? The correct answer is, of course, the laws and regulations (legal system) are the correct resolution of this argument - we have them to steer people away from "other ways".

I agree that it's often used to justify something morally questionable. However, there's a distinction here, because the "other ways" that we're trying to steer manufacturers away from are not a clearly delineated set of behaviors. If you prevent people from crippling their products in software, they'll cripple them in hardware. If you prevent people from crippling their products in hardware, they'll make two different products with different features at two different prices, and costs will be higher all around. If you prevent someone from selling a less-featured version of another of their own products, they'll just make one of the two products, and some competitor will make the other.

That's the argument for not preventing manufacturers from crippling their products in software.

leni536• 11 years ago

I do find market segmentation to be morally wrong

What about student discount at cinemas and other places?

mseebach3• 11 years ago

I think it's morally wrong to demand that people who build things should be expected to share the thing they build in a particular way just because the thing they've build is easy to reproduce.

Market segmentation generally allows producers to expands downwards in to lower market segments without cannibalising their full-price customers.

Crudely speaking, the alternative to a $5,000 full-featured device and the same device with a smaller set of features ("crippled") at $1,500 isn't a full-featured device at $1,500, it's a no device at $1,500.

Gravityloss2• 11 years ago

Nowadays there's a general purpose computer inside every thing, and larger proportions of functionality are done in software.

Also a larger proportion of problems tend to be software problems, not hardware.

Hardware with open software interfaces might be the way of the future here. There could be whole ecosystems with that.

jasode• 11 years ago

and recoup their investments and so on. Guess what - the investment was already made, and it can't be undone!

You've got the sequence of motivations and expectations of investments & revenue backwards.

A more accurate timeline is that before the product is built, the businesses will segment the potential markets. They estimate the various price curves of price-sensitive and price-insensitive customers and then use that to determine how much to allocate to each feature. Some features are valuable to price-insensitive customers. Some features are useful to all customers.

To say the above was "investment already made" is flawed because that perspective depends on reversing the timeline around in a way that businesses don't actually think. Instead of "sunk cost", it's actually a "before-we-build-it calculated investment" based on "future revenue projections".

Likewise, when a pre-med student considers going to medical school, he may envision a future where he provides medical care for free in Africa and at the same time earn a $200k+ salary as a hospital surgeon. Those future market segments affects his current decision to spend (go into debt) $150k+ for his medical degree. When the doctor is 40-something, we, as patients can't say that he should give us medical care for minimum wage because we morally deserve his services and his medical school tuition 10 years ago is a "sunk cost" anyway.

As for how a business delivers that segmentation of product to a customer, that is a separate issue. Some methods are perceived as more distasteful than others. The tig welder with a software config switch causes more outrage than a different physical chassis.

monochromatic4• 11 years ago

I do find market segmentation to be morally wrong (at least, it's against free market principles, even though I don't agree with those always).

I completely disagree. Free market principles allow manufacturers to make whatever separate product lines they choose, and sell them at whatever price they can fetch. I see nothing immoral about this, but maybe you do.

Why shouldn't everyone deserve access to the best tools, and by extension, best things? (Taking the production costs into account.) Best tools save time and make everybody more productive, which should be in everybody's interest.

People deserve what they pay for, what they bargain for. No more and no less.

Imagine you would say something like that in education - that some children do not deserve the best education, simply because they may never use it. How do you know they will not find some use for it?

That's not the question. The analogous question would be, is it ok to allow them to purchase a more rudimentary education for a lower price? I see no reason why not.

Also, the argument "if they didn't do it this way, they'd do it some other way" is interesting. In this nebulous form, it's often used to justify something morally fishy.

I was just responding to the idea that this is an "abusive" business practice. My point was that if the law didn't allow for them to segment the market this way, they'd just sell multiple hardware lines--crippled by physically having lower capabilities, etc. In that situation, no one is better off, and the manufacturer is somewhat worse off. So I have trouble swallowing the idea that this is abusive.

joe_the_user• 11 years ago

"Abusive" might not convey the situation exactly.

But if Homedepot and ever other hardware store suddenly developed a technology that let them sell wood that worked great for many standard construction practices but would suddenly demand more money for artists or anyone doing anything usual with that material, one would could easily feel that one's world had become truncated.

I'd rather call that abuse than not-abuse.

The ability to buy a thing, an object, that you can do whatever the heck you want with (by yourself, in the private of your home), is the antidote for being serf to pay-by-what-we-think-it's-worth-to-you services.

Even you choose to purchase services instead of things, the existence of things keeps the service provider honest and oppositely the non-existence of things makes the serfdom more onerous.

TeMPOraL5• 11 years ago

I think the fact that it's purely in software now only serves to highlight how market segmentation is a shitty practice. It's like planed obsolescence - just because it's standard practice, doesn't mean it's ok.

alephnil• 11 years ago

It is a matter of perspective to some extent.

If what they say is "if you add this extra functionality without our permission, we will sue you", it is not OK. This cripples peoples ability to innovate.

If they on the other hand say "This is the basic functionality, and you can buy this add on package for $400 if you want extra functionality", I have less problems with it. The latter opens up for third party addons, possibly being more innovative than the original addon software. What I find abusive is the attempts to prevent people form innovate using the law.

viraptor• 11 years ago

Unless it's connected to the internet and does some online verification of single use, it seems kind of pointless protection. I expect a dumped mmc card is already available on torrent trackers...

Edit: of course depends on which model it applies to. If it's for the $15k range, then I don't think anyone would care about extra $400. If it's for the $1k range however, it's going to be a lot of skilled, money saving individuals.

rdtsc• 11 years ago

It could work like license keys for software before the internet. In this case it could be made a bit better if tied to a hardware identifier and verification could be done in hardware based on some unique id thing.

The problem then of course is that how much of the actual functionality goes through that "protection module"? They can put some hardened super secure module but if it just connects into the main functionality via a 1/0 wire, then the bypass will just be to cut that wire and install a fix there. (I've seen that in software as well, fancy shamncy public key license check followed by a simple "if not verified, then disable feature" check in main code).

I think the important part here is the legal protection. Sure they know people will bypass it. But they also know that they can no go after some (larger companies) if they need to and sue them because now the law is in their side.

phire• 11 years ago

If they are smart, each SD card will contain a unique file which signs the serial number of that SD card, so copying the contents of an SD card won't work, unless you can also copy the serial number.

smilekzs• 11 years ago

From my speculation, rather than the memory card carrying a binary (e.g. control code) that provides extra functionality, it's far more likely that the welding machine is inherently capable of working at a large range of frequencies, but the control software deliberately disallows these options without the SD card, which likely carries some serial# or decryption key.

A more suitable analogy would be a console game with so-called DLC that is already present on the disc. Or classic Casio fx-82ES => fx-991ES hack (OT: My copy of 82ES happens to be rev. A which is trivially hackable; Casio responded by producing a rev. B that is harder to hack).

I personally believe that at least modification of this sort for own use (i.e. not offering it as a service) should not be prosecuted. That is, if I own this awesome welding machine, it should be totally fine for me to reprogram it, regardless whether I changed only one bit or page in the Flash, or completely wrote code for it from scratch.

silon7• 11 years ago

I don't think this type of DRM (you get what you pay for, it's an appliance) can be fully compared to DRM in a computer which is designed to limit the use of a computer.

cnvogel• 11 years ago

This practice is absolutely standard in oscilloscopes (which is what I'm right now shopping for). Additional options will set you back between a few hundred or maybe a thousand dollars/euros easily.

In the past "options" were actual PCBs to be installed, or swapping out of pricey components/subassemblies.

But software options are typically "only" things like being able to decode i2c/spi/canbus/... from acquired traces or calculating a fourier-transform.

Also on the lower end models (where it doesn't make sense to build additional hardware, because even the relatively cheap amplifiers and ADCs will be able to do a few 100MHz or few GS/s) scope bandwidth might be artificially limited when not purchasing a software option. Some vendor also limiting the amount of used sample memory intentionally.

mseebach3• 11 years ago

You seem to be implying that options sold as "actual PCBs" are/were sold at marginal production cost, and not marked significantly up.

The main difference with software options is that the marginal production cost for the option is $0.

Gravityloss2• 11 years ago

So how is this different to selling a computer and then selling software for it? Obviously the computer would be capable of running the software already pre-installed...

Kliment• 11 years ago

This is like selling a computer where if anyone but you sells software that runs on it, or even makes their own, you can sue them.

IshKebab• 11 years ago

There are two differences:

1. These are generally hardware drivers rather than generic software. If your computer comes without a text editor, anyone can provide your with one for whatever price they decide. If your oscilloscope comes without an I2C decoder, no-one else can add it.

2. Usually the software is used to cripple the device and then you pay to remove it. For example on oscilloscopes they use a software low-pass filter to limit its maximum frequency. You can pay to have it removed.

hatsunearu• 11 years ago

Heck, some scopes cripple their memory capacity which can be unlocked with a software upgrade. Curiously, Rigol, a test equipment company, recently updated their dirt cheap line (DS1052E to DS1054Z). The DS1052E had a notoriously weak software option unlock encryption, so hobbyists bought the 400 dollar scope, punched some code into it generated with some Javascript on some webpage, and bam, you got a 1500 dollar scope.

Funny thing is the DS1054Z has the same exact issue. The crypto on the 1054Z is also crap (http://gotroot.ca/rigol/riglol/ yay!) -- some have even speculated that they do this intentionally because they know corporate people won't hack their scopes, but hobbyists will, furthering their brand in a market filled with American competitors (Keysight formerly Agilent, Tektronics, etc)

tonyarkles• 11 years ago

You know, I bought an R&S 50MHz mixed-signal scope that had the ability to software upgrade to 100MHz. It's more expensive than the Rigol, but the UI is miles ahead of Rigol as well.

Anyway, I was pretty happy with it and used it at 50MHz until one day I needed the extra speed to debug a higher speed glitch. Quick call to my distributor, pay a couple hundred bucks, and I instantly have a faster scope on my bench.

Part of me is grouchy that it was just a product key to type in, but honestly, I have a great tool at a reasonable price point and I didn't have to pay for the extras until I needed them.

Could I have just hacked it? Probably. But I'm making money using the thing, it's a tax writeoff, and I don't mind paying for well-made equipment.

quasse2• 11 years ago

To me this says "we make such huge margins on these welders that we can intentionally cripple them and sell them at a lower price. Someone out there could produce our top end model for the low end price." It logically follows that maybe I should start looking into other manufacturers who sell at closer to manufacturing cost, like Everlast.

I realize that big welding shops aren't going to drop the big two (Lincoln and Miller) overnight, but I think practices like this are really going to hasten the rise of Chinese upstarts making high quality IGBT welders. Once they (or a third party) starts offering good support and warranty guarantees it's going to be hard to compete with them when you employ sales practices like this.

For example, the Miller Syncrowave 210 shown in the video is $2,700, base price. I use one weekly, and it's a decent welder. Alternatively, one could get an Everlast PowerTig 250EX for $1,700 that comes with features missing from the Miller at a price that's $1,000 less. The Chinese manufacturers know their price point, and they're not going to leave out features supported by their hardware because they're hungry for the business. I think the way Miller is behaving is a sign of complacency, and it's going to come back to bite them.

I already find myself using the cheaper IGBT welder day to day because we don't have the SD card upgrade for the Miller and I like features like up-slope and down-slope that have been left out for product segmentation reasons.

raverbashing• 11 years ago

Can you explain why does a welder needs an SD card?

danielbarla2• 11 years ago

I'm guessing it's purely for DRM purposes. In that sense, it's a case of "We'd like to price this physical item at two different price points, and control it in a soft fashion".

Playing devil's advocate, I guess there are certain situations where you could justify this type of thing. Let's say that a product has an additional capability which 90% of the market doesn't need, but required significant research to accomplish. It's a soft-capability, so there's nothing additional that you need to manufacture to enable it. You have a couple of options - you can make two different models (essentially identical underneath, except for the cheaper one disabling the extra capability), but this is inefficient. You can of course have one product, one price. But this is also less than perfect, as you have everyone paying for a feature 10% want, and you can be outcompeted at a cheaper price for the basic product. Another option would be to DRM the product and soft-enable the feature for the 10% who want it, at a higher price.

I mean, it's a bit of a stretch, but it's plausible in some situations.

Vendan2• 11 years ago

It doesn't. The drm needs it as a very simple way to tell the chip inside that you've paid for it. SD cards can be trivially bit-banged from almost any processor, unlike other protocols such as USB.

jcoby• 11 years ago

Have you seen the AHP AlphaTIG 200X? It's a 200A AC/DC tig/stick welder with nearly all the features of the PowerTig for $700. The only real difference I can see is that it only goes to 200Hz on pulse vs 500Hz for the PowerTig. Comes with everything for TIG and stick, including a flex head torch and a ball flow meter and dual 120/240 voltage. Supposedly it uses high quality components internally and it has an American company supporting it. It gets great reviews from everyone who tries it.

I've thought about buying one just to try it. I've only welded TIG on an ancient transformer 400A L-TEC. I really want to see what it's like to use one of these modern inverter machines.

I know someone who just got the Eastwood TIG and it looks like an older version of the AHP without pulse and AC freq adjustment. I'm hoping to try it out soon.

I can see why Miller is getting scared and trying to lock in businesses using DRM with these Chinese coming in at 1/4-1/3 the price and getting cheaper every year. The Chinese welders really got a bad name from Harbor Freight, and for good reason. But these new inverter machines are really starting to hold their own.

quasse2• 11 years ago

I hadn't heard of the AHP, thanks for sharing it. I really like the idea of dual voltage flexibility, which you lose on the higher power Everlast.

compactmani• 11 years ago

I'm not sure how this is really a debate in a place like HN. We have a pretty clear picture of where we stand wrt proprietary DRM software. This doesn't appear any different to me.

why the downvote? Do we not all agree that DRM proprietary software is unethical? Did I miss something here?

6d0debc071• 11 years ago

I wonder what the price of entry is to that market. If they're doing something so obviously flawed and if the price of entry is low, it strikes me it'd be relatively easy to make something decent that isn't crippled and sell it with all the bells and whistles.

dfox• 11 years ago

It's not too complex or expensive to manufacture or even design welders. But the problem is that the market is mostly B2B and thus dominated by "nobody got fired for buying XYZ" mentality of practically price-insensitive customers.

Asbostos4• 11 years ago

Don't forget Tesla did this with some of their earlier Model S's. Preventing use of the full battery capacity on cheaper versions. It's obviously standard practice in all commercial software too. The whole idea of selling software depends on restricting how people use it - at the very least - not allowing them to copy it and give it away. The marginal cost of producing software is zero so you can't make money only charging for that. Probably the marginal cost of producing a welder is lower than they total cost too, so they need to recover it somehow.

Of course when you buy a Miller welder, you're paying for the brand name so you're not too concerned about price. Get any cheap Chinese one instead and you'll get the features are a "fair" price but without feeling so good about yourself.

tareqak• 11 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIG_Welder for those who don't know what these things are.

oneJob• 11 years ago

One of the most important issues raised by this article is that of enforcement. That the US Government is employed to enforce DRM is non trivial. Imagine you left a magnificent gold brick on your porch on the way out to work. You reason, it'd be illegal for anyone to move or take the brick without your permission, let alone enter your yard. You come home to find the brick gone and hold the US Government responsible. You tell the the Gov't, "When you leave a brick on your porch tomorrow, it better be there when you return home, or else (no campaign funds and you'll move you're $27 bank account off shore )."

The next day, there is a squad car and 4 cops sitting outside your gate. Not only that, the Gov't ensures you laws are being drafted to stiffen the penalty for anyone that might steal your brick or even enter your yard without permission, and Gov't prosecutors are standing by ready to prosecute with the threat of jail time (, but don't worry they'll pick up the legal and prison fees).

Without such Gov't activities you wouldn't be able to afford to continue leaving gold bricks on your porch.

geggam• 11 years ago

you know... once i own something i own it... if you want to tell me what to do with it after i own it... buy it back from me

property rights are a fundamental tenet of this nation

DRM in TIG welders

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