Source: The American Prospect
by David Dayen
“Let me tell you about the McFlurry machines. The ice cream makers at McDonald’s are so notoriously unreliable that a website called McBroken tracks which ones are functioning across the country. One company, Taylor Commercial Foodservice LLC, manufactures the machines, and they were effectively requiring all repairs on the equipment to go through them, by wiring them with software error codes that couldn’t be bypassed or even understood by franchisees. A company named Kytch created a work-around, translating the error codes into simple repair instructions. But Taylor and McDonald’s teamed up to crush that option. Three years ago, in one of Lina Khan’s first acts as chair, the Federal Trade Commission initiated an investigation into the broken McFlurry machines. And two organizations, Public Knowledge and iFixit, petitioned for an exemption from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, to allow franchisees to override the software error codes.” (11/04/24)
https://prospect.org/economy/2024-11-04-end-whole-of-government-approach/