> Meanwhile, Canada is in the final stages of considering legislation that would fix the Canadian version of the DMCA, a bill called C-244 that is in its third reading in the Senate and expected to move before the end of the month. If Canada legalized circumventing technological protection measures for the purposes of repair, we might just have to head north to find the tools we need to do repairs.
That's good news, I didn't know about that bill. It looks like it was voted for unanimously in parliament. It's nice when you hear about our government doing something good for once.
Does anyone else thinks this is actually a great incidental marketing campaign for McDonald's? Not only the free reach but also tons of people discussing the "problems" with a big co and how to "fix" them as they are an essential part of society, and this case ice-creams.
Sure we focus on the big brain things like copyright, business malpractice and MBA lore but with it comes McDonald's embedded.
I know this might sound a bit snobby, but just don't play the game, ignore them. If there is criminal activity let who gets paid deal with it, otherwise just move on and stop "fixing" problems that are not of your concern, let alone "fixing" them for free.
Not if they don't now fix their machines, no. Then it's just "despite now being legal, McDonalds still refuses to fix their machine". Because remember: McDonalds is make of so much money that they could have trivially forced this though literal decades ago if they'd actually cared. Which they didn't. They could have even flat out bought the company that makes their machines. They didn't.
All of this was unnecessary on the old ice cream machines. The downside was they had to be cleaned and sanitized every night and that meant you needed one more person on the closing team. It was all about saving labor costs.
Eh. Taylor doesn't fix the machines. You actually get a contract with an independent certified technician - quite often provided through the reseller who sold the machine.
> It's also all about Taylor's exclusivity on repairing the machines.
In context, it doesn’t matter whether Taylor is getting paid or Santa Claus is. The problem is that McDonald’s franchises were not able to fix them due to software locks.
What is a franchising fee or other franchising requirements? The shop is paying them money for the ability to get money for the repairs. Don't be intellectually dishonest.
The DMCA, though a mostly terrible law, actually doesn't prohibit any of what the ice cream machine people want to do, at least according to the CAFC.
Chamberlain v. Skylink, final court of appeals for the federal circuit opinion, page 39:
"Underlying Chamberlain’s argument on appeal that it has not granted such authorization lies the necessary assumption that Chamberlain is entitled to prohibit legitimate purchasers of its embedded software from “accessing” the software by using it.
Such an entitlement, however, would go far beyond the idea that the DMCA allows copyright owner to prohibit “fair uses . . . as well as foul.” Reimerdes, 111 F. Supp. 2d at 304.
Chamberlain’s proposed construction would allow copyright owners to prohibit exclusively fair uses even in the absence of any feared foul use.
It would therefore allow any copyright owner, through a combination of contractual terms and technological measures, to repeal the fair use doctrine with respect to an individual copyrighted work—or even selected copies of that copyrighted work. Again, this implication contradicts § 1201(c)(1) directly. Copyright law itself authorizes the public to make certain uses of copyrighted materials. Consumers who purchase a product containing a copy of embedded software have the inherent legal right to use that copy of the software. What the law authorizes, Chamberlain cannot revoke." (Emphasis mine)
I think they're going to stop selling ice cream period as a company. If it was important to their bottom line McDonalds would have done something as a collective rather than having individuals enter this fight for back-channel repair options.
At some point they'll probably have their main contracts expire and stop dealing with the mess altogether.
TL;DW: there are some perverse incentives to keep them broken. Basically the owner operators are forced to use a particular brand by corporate. Corporate McDonalds has a deal with a particular ice cream machine company. That particular company is the only company owner operators are allowed to buy from, and the only company allowed to service the machines. And it's no skin off of McDonald's back for these machines to always be broken, the cost falls on the owner-operators.
I don't understand the last sentence. If the machines are frequently broken, that damages the Macdonald's brand in the consumer's eyes. And if the franchisee's are paying unnecessary costs, making a Macdonald's franchise less lucrative for the owner-operator, that will lead to fewer franchises renewals and new franchises in the future.
Been a while since I first watched the video. I would imagine the ice cream machines are a relatively small part of the McDonald's business. As evidenced by the fact that McDonalds ice cream has been an issue for quite a while. I would imagine franchises of a similar caliber to McD's also exploit their owner-operators on a similar scale because they can, we just don't necessarily hear about it because McDonalds is the largest.
McDonald's isn't known for its quality anyway. I've had my fair share of sketchy McDonalds experiences. McDs is as large as it is because it is cheap, convenient, and ubiquitous. McDonalds has no qualms with cutting corners on quality, as evidenced by its entire menu.
I'd suggest the quality of McDonald's ingredients is superior than the vast majority of restaurants that rely on Sysco or US Foods. Just my opinion, I know it's not going to convince anyone whose mind is already made up about McDonald's.
aww man dont tell people about sysco. Once you learn to spot unmodified sysco foods it's impossible to stop and the illusion of sitdown restaurants is tarnished forever.
But it’s still just as poor quality, if not worse than before. Last time I ate there I bit down on something in my burger so hard I thought I broke a tooth. I’ll never eat it again.
I like how the answers include both "they've done the math and it's worth it" and "they're idiots who don't know what they're doing". I don't think anybody cares what's really going on, as long as they can say McDonald's is bad.
There's an uncertain future cost (basically an externality that impacts McDonald corporate) but in return they get a nice premium now and immediate uncertainty for franchisees. It's possible it's overall a net negative for MD corporate, but it's also possible it's an overall economically profitable trade (even though it's clearly immoral).
I'm sure corporate has done the math and concluded that whatever money the machine provider pays them is higher than any expected losses in franchise revenue due to franchise owners quitting due to poor ice cream sales.
Modern capitalism isn't particularly rational. Money in the pocket is more tangible than minor brand damage.
If you want to be really cynical, you can assume that somebody at McDonald's and Taylor have crunched the numbers they know exactly how much they can squeeze their franchisees and the customer to effectively make money out of nothing. So many businesses operate this way now.
> I don't understand the last sentence. If the machines are frequently broken, that damages the Macdonald's brand in the consumer's eyes.
Try to quantify that to the MBA bean counters, good luck.
No one cares about ice cream from Mc f..ing Donald's, given that most employees in fast food stores are high school kids and I got the runs more than once from that shit, I don't trust them anyway to follow up with the stringent hygiene requirements that serving ice cream demands. Burger patties at least are grilled/fried.
> No one cares about ice cream from Mc f..ing Donald's
People care enough that there's a website mapping working McDonalds icecream machines across several countries, that has been up for years, and was referenced in the linked article:
Most importantly, McDonalds has a strong incentive to avoid headlines like "37 people hospitalized after shit-bacteria in improperly maintained ice cream machine", which is why the machines self-monitor and shut down at the slightest excursion from some specified norm.
And McD wants the machines maintained by the official technician, because they'd rather screw their franchisees a bit than risk someone ripping out the offending sensor.
IMO, the perverse incentives come on top of this (Taylor has no motivation to make the machines more transparent since they profit from the call-outs, McD either doesn't care or may even prefer this since it could reduce the risk of "creative" solutions like an employee holding an ice cube next to a sensor), but the "McD would rather have 50% of the ice cream machines 'broken' than have a single one serve E.Coli to its customers" is what kicked this whole thing off.
The Wendy's frosty machine doesn't have the same automatic cleaning cycle and pasteurization feature that the McDonald's ice cream machine has. Thus Wendy's employees need to tear the machine down and clean it by hand, a long and tedious process.
The whole reason McDonald's wanted this machine was to reduce training costs and labour. However, the machine does need to be operated correctly or it simply shuts down.
Similarly Instagram started adding tracking querystrings (igshid or something like that), and for a good few weeks any Instagram link with it was completely broken for me (few loops, errors, and throwing me to the home page), I had to manually remove that part of the url.
Implicit here is the assumption that (a) when evaluating many franchises McD is still attractive for new owner operators despite the obvious flaw, or (b) switching costs are high for existing McD owner operator victims, and the issue wasn't known or believed to be this bad when they started.
> Integral to the Court’s decision was the conclusion that Section 1201’s ban on circumvention of access restrictions is a regulation of “conduct” rather than “speech.”
I've heard plenty of stories about the MCD ice cream machines, but it doesn't add up for me. Can someone who has more insight shed some light into this?
- Are the machines listed as "broken" on https://mcbroken.com/ actually broken? Or is that more of a meme, with many just undergoing routine cleaning, etc.?
- Why does this seemingly happen only in US? In European McDonald's it's pretty much unheard of.
- Why would McDonald's Corp. be happy with the status quo? Is it some kind of tactic to squeeze more revenue from the franchises? If so, why not address it in the franchise agreement and just let restaurants sell more ice cream?
In UK McDo often have broken ice-cream machines too, at least where I've been. It seems to be higher incidence than other fastfood outlets (Burger King, KFC), but that might be observer bias.
I just figure margins must be low on their ice-creams, so when it's broken they sell more fountain drinks and make more money than they would if the ice-cream machine was fixed.
The short version is that the machines' sensors are extremely picky (because the stuff that goes into soft serve is just begging for massive bacterial growth if not handled correctly), and McDonald's corporate requires (I'm pretty sure by franchisee contract, not just by the copyright restrictions the article is about) that their specific chosen vendor handles it, even for minor issues.
A lot of people like to treat this as a conspiracy, but I think it's much more likely it's the corporate people being paranoid about local franchisees overriding the machines, and that leading to listeria outbreaks happening in the only non-sealed food item that isn't heated to safe temperatures shortly before it's handed off to customers.
I don't know about the contrast with Europe, but it might just be geographical size causing time delays for individual techs showing up. McDonald's franchisees are everywhere, and the U.S. is gigantic.
More than 120 people were sickened after eating ice cream at their local McDonald's. The health department says the restaurant's dairy mixture somehow was contaminated with staphylococcus, and a mechanical malfunction in the soft serve machine allowed the bacteria to grow. So many people became so ill, so quickly, the director of the local emergency room told me he at first thought there was some kind of bioterrorism incident in the town.... Nancy Smith says she had taken her grandchildren for an outing, and stopped at McDonald's to buy them a treat. Her grandson Darien had a milkshake, and she says he was violently ill an hour later. He became limp and listless, Smith says, and they rushed him to the hospital, scared to death. Then she got sick. She says she had just three sips of Darien's shake, but it was enough to make her very ill. She told us she was vomiting so violently, she thought she was going to have a heart attack. She's now suing McDonald's, as are many of the other people who got sick in that incident.
Nice, the politicians were able to get some brownie points on a hot button issue without actually doing anything! Good for them, I bet they feel proud, they deserve some of the ice cream they so valiantly saved.
The US Copyright Office isn't elected, and the woman running it was appointed by a non-political appointee herself.
I have a pretty negative view of politics, too, but it doesn't mean we can't be happy when something good happens – no matter how small. The government doesn't pay well, and while we know the names of a dozen or so shitty self-serving jerks in Congress, most people in the government are genuine people doing it to help others.
If you can raed tihs, you hvae voilated the DCMA and cmomitted a fleony.
The oirginal palin txet of tihs msesage was put trhough a porprietary ecnryption aglorithm I cerated, and waht you see hree is the rseulting cpyher txet. It is illegal for you to rveerse my porprietary ecnryption aglorithm.
They aren't; they're motivated to ensure ice-cream machines are only fixable by them. Still a perverse incentive. It makes zero sense for a company to be motivated to have their own product... not... work.
It correlates with demand. These things go down quickly during peak demand because they can't maintain cold temps. You'll often see this during summer heatwaves as people flock to drive-thrus to grab some ice cream!
Under no circumstances should we need an exemption from the copyright office just to be able to repair an ice cream machine. It's not even a permanent exemption! The DMCA causes many weird problems.
It's still weird to me that we ended up in a world in which every bit of information can now be copied at zero cost and instead of heralding and building upon that technological achievement we've somehow decided that instead we're going to make laws to protect and enforce rent seeking instead. I assume it's one of those things where a few corpos just outplayed 99% of the population; just like universal health care, or public education.
This seems like a very one-sided take. Just look at all the artists (actors, painters, musicians, etc.) that are fighting tooth and nail against AI, and for good reason. While there are plenty of issues with copyright, I don't agree at all that just because the marginal cost of copying is 0 that if someone puts a ton of time and effort in creating a piece of work that I should just get to copy it for free.
I don't understand this. Copyright law does not prevent people from sharing their information freely. It gives the option for "rent seekers" to do their thing. Enforcing your rights for return is optional for people that don't want to do it. I'm not talking about right-to-repair here, but the idea of copyright in general.
A lot of information is generated by taking some financial risk with the hopes of creating something of value and recouping that investment + some profit. Copyright makes that kind of venture possible. It doesn't prevent altruistic souls from putting in the same effort without any expectation of return. We always had this, by default. Copyright framework allows pursuit, generation and dissemination of huge swaths of valuable information that would otherwise not exist.
I assume it's one of those things where a few corpos just outplayed 99% of the population
"The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites"
It’s an anti-consumer stance to force copyright to nearly 100 years and allow no format swapping under a hilariously broad set of normal transmission and format-swapping techniques.
There's definitely tiers of copyright to consider, which is part of the divisiveness on the issue. You wanting to protect your creation and get compensated for its IP for 10-20 years (so, a good portion of your life career) is very different from Disney wanting to delay Mickey mouse going into public domain. an IP its creator and studio already reaped trillions from over the century.
No one should have to. If we're talking about putting/maintaining restrictions on people, the onus should be on the proponents to put forth a good argument why we need it.
Not when you are the one trying to change the status quo. Regardless of what you believe, if you want to change the default you need to explain to people why it should change. A self-righteous stance like yours will change nothing.
Does everyone believe that we need copyright to be the exact way that it is though?
I'm pretty sure that the reason that copyright laws are the way they are is because certain industries in the US lobby the government to strong arm other countries into adopting onerous copyright restrictions as part of free trade agreements.
Whatever you feel about the merits of intellectual property laws the idea that they're wrapped up as 'free trade' when they in fact make things that would otherwise be free cost money is downright Orwellian.
Maybe countries that don't really have a film or tv industry don't want to see copyright on those products and why would they? Why would they want to see their citizens paying American countries for something that would otherwise be free?
I'm fine going back to the old 14+14 rules copyright originally. having your creation for an entire generation seems appropriate. But opinions are all across the spectrum on this issue.
I think the primary reason the "spirit" of current copyright broke down is because it's been reduced to hoarding over protecting. the idea is that I can license out an idea if I really want to make use of it. So creations flow and the company makes their own cut out of it.
But I can't just walk up to Disney and pay 100 dollars ,1000, maybe even 1 million to grab Mickey Mouse and work with something. Depending on their products, they may not want anyone using Mickey period, even if there is no mickey product cycle. You basically need to be EA or Mattel or Warner Bros. to even begin being considered for such a thing.
That's their right but it spoils the social contract. When everything by default is locked down, there is no creation flowing. Just broken dreams for abandoned franchises everyone else would love to make use of.
Uhh, it's because information can be easily copied that the laws were put in place. If anyone can "steal" your work then it would be a deterrent to invention.
If I'm a business that can make money on the service contract I can sell the unit at a lower price. Now I'm forced to make the unit cost higher.
I’m not a lawyer, but I think it’s pretty clear that piracy is not illegal because of the DMCA; it’s illegal because it violates normal copyright laws. Repealing the DMCA would not change the legal status of piracy.
Repealing the DMCA also wouldn’t make DRM illegal, but DRM would still be exactly as (in)effective as it has already proven to be countless times. DRM has done nothing to restrict piracy, as far as I can tell.
Repealing the DMCA would simply allow people to more freely break DRM in pursuit of lawful purposes, which are currently restricted unfairly, including activities that would fall strictly under Fair Use. I would argue the DMCA is infringing my legal rights for no benefit to society.
Distributing copies of copyrighted content without authorization was unlawful long before the DMCA, outside of Fair Use scenarios.
It’s a simple question. I know it’s illegal. Should regular people face consequences or not? The status quo is “no,” which is the first step to understanding why making consequences for circumventing DRM is a bitter compromise that is maybe the best option.
(not op) I think DMCA specifically should be repealed. We can still have DRM/Copyright/etc if enough people want it, we could look at other systems, but DMCA itself is awful. Repealing it doesn't make any statement about piracy.
Sure, but the anti-circumvention provisions in particular just inconvenience everyone. It's not like DVDs being "protected" prevented them from being ripped.
Bad headline. No, they can't. They are now allowed to, but they don't have the actual ability to do so.
Clickbait of the weirdest kind - the totally unnecessary one. They could have gone with more truthful "We're now allowed to" with the same amount of impact... right?
Yeah this was weird. You usually expect this from a newspaper where the editor chooses an inaccurate headline, but this is iFixit? The actual text of the article points out that just about every McDonalds franchise will be unaffected and have equally broken ice cream machines, which is why it's so weird that they contradict that in the headline.
> Meanwhile, Canada is in the final stages of considering legislation that would fix the Canadian version of the DMCA, a bill called C-244 that is in its third reading in the Senate and expected to move before the end of the month. If Canada legalized circumventing technological protection measures for the purposes of repair, we might just have to head north to find the tools we need to do repairs.
That's good news, I didn't know about that bill. It looks like it was voted for unanimously in parliament. It's nice when you hear about our government doing something good for once.
Does anyone else thinks this is actually a great incidental marketing campaign for McDonald's? Not only the free reach but also tons of people discussing the "problems" with a big co and how to "fix" them as they are an essential part of society, and this case ice-creams.
Sure we focus on the big brain things like copyright, business malpractice and MBA lore but with it comes McDonald's embedded.
I know this might sound a bit snobby, but just don't play the game, ignore them. If there is criminal activity let who gets paid deal with it, otherwise just move on and stop "fixing" problems that are not of your concern, let alone "fixing" them for free.
Not if they don't now fix their machines, no. Then it's just "despite now being legal, McDonalds still refuses to fix their machine". Because remember: McDonalds is make of so much money that they could have trivially forced this though literal decades ago if they'd actually cared. Which they didn't. They could have even flat out bought the company that makes their machines. They didn't.
Related. Others?
McDonald's ice cream machines are always broken and now the feds are involved - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40832988 - June 2024 (2 comments)
FTC and DOJ want to free McDonald's ice cream machines from DMCA repair rules - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39717558 - March 2024 (177 comments)
McDonald's ice cream machine hackers say they found 'smoking gun' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38657192 - Dec 2023 (230 comments)
The Real Reason McDonald's Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38232983 - Nov 2023 (2 comments)
iFixit tears down a McDonald’s ice cream machine, demands DMCA exemption for it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37325200 - Aug 2023 (6 comments)
Why McDonald's Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken and How to Fix Them - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37319841 - Aug 2023 (3 comments)
iFixit Petitions Government for Right to Hack McDonald's Ice Cream Machine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37311239 - Aug 2023 (301 comments)
Ice cream machine hackers sue McDonald's - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30527939 - March 2022 (154 comments)
New emails released in the McDonald’s ice cream machine lawsuit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29325507 - Nov 2021 (138 comments)
Ask HN: Are McFlurries suddenly back now that lawsuit is pending? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28581906 - Sept 2021 (14 comments)
McDonald’s unreliable ice cream machines reportedly under FTC investigation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28407525 - Sept 2021 (41 comments)
Investigating why McDonald's ice cream machines are often broken [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26936774 - April 2021 (234 comments)
The Reason McDonalds Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26932344 - April 2021 (3 comments)
They Hacked McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines–and Started a Cold War - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26874436 - April 2021 (4 comments)
I reverse engineered McDonalds’ internal API - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24861623 - Oct 2020 (420 comments)
All of this was unnecessary on the old ice cream machines. The downside was they had to be cleaned and sanitized every night and that meant you needed one more person on the closing team. It was all about saving labor costs.
It's also all about Taylor's exclusivity on repairing the machines.
Eh. Taylor doesn't fix the machines. You actually get a contract with an independent certified technician - quite often provided through the reseller who sold the machine.
Certified by a Taylor-accredited organization. The money all goes the same way. A distinction without a difference.
Taylor doesn't get paid for the vast majority of repairs. The money goes to the independent technician.
They make some money for replacement parts, but that's rarely more than the occasional o-ring.
> It's also all about Taylor's exclusivity on repairing the machines.
In context, it doesn’t matter whether Taylor is getting paid or Santa Claus is. The problem is that McDonald’s franchises were not able to fix them due to software locks.
Which means sometimes you buy replacement machines from Taylor
What is a franchising fee or other franchising requirements? The shop is paying them money for the ability to get money for the repairs. Don't be intellectually dishonest.
The DMCA, though a mostly terrible law, actually doesn't prohibit any of what the ice cream machine people want to do, at least according to the CAFC.
Chamberlain v. Skylink, final court of appeals for the federal circuit opinion, page 39:
"Underlying Chamberlain’s argument on appeal that it has not granted such authorization lies the necessary assumption that Chamberlain is entitled to prohibit legitimate purchasers of its embedded software from “accessing” the software by using it.
Such an entitlement, however, would go far beyond the idea that the DMCA allows copyright owner to prohibit “fair uses . . . as well as foul.” Reimerdes, 111 F. Supp. 2d at 304.
Chamberlain’s proposed construction would allow copyright owners to prohibit exclusively fair uses even in the absence of any feared foul use.
It would therefore allow any copyright owner, through a combination of contractual terms and technological measures, to repeal the fair use doctrine with respect to an individual copyrighted work—or even selected copies of that copyrighted work. Again, this implication contradicts § 1201(c)(1) directly. Copyright law itself authorizes the public to make certain uses of copyrighted materials. Consumers who purchase a product containing a copy of embedded software have the inherent legal right to use that copy of the software. What the law authorizes, Chamberlain cannot revoke." (Emphasis mine)
Note this part:
> This time, the FTC and DOJ even weighed in to support our petition.
See also:
https://www.ifixit.com/News/92942/the-ftc-and-doj-call-for-i...
Elections matter.
Yep. Try to imagine a GOP-run FTC & DoJ supporting stuff like this. I certainly can't.
Prepare to have your mind blown: https://www.techdirt.com/2018/07/11/shocker-dojs-computer-cr...
Guess how the majority of farmers and rural folk wanting to fix their own equipment are leaning politically. Also the automotive aftermarket.
Assuming the people vote for the party that would help them the most would be unwise.
First great write up and second kudos to iFixit for fighting this fight.
What's the over/under on how many franchises will now resume selling ice cream?
I think they're going to stop selling ice cream period as a company. If it was important to their bottom line McDonalds would have done something as a collective rather than having individuals enter this fight for back-channel repair options.
At some point they'll probably have their main contracts expire and stop dealing with the mess altogether.
Here's a great YT video on why McDonald's ice cream machines are always broken: https://youtu.be/SrDEtSlqJC4
TL;DW: there are some perverse incentives to keep them broken. Basically the owner operators are forced to use a particular brand by corporate. Corporate McDonalds has a deal with a particular ice cream machine company. That particular company is the only company owner operators are allowed to buy from, and the only company allowed to service the machines. And it's no skin off of McDonald's back for these machines to always be broken, the cost falls on the owner-operators.
I don't understand the last sentence. If the machines are frequently broken, that damages the Macdonald's brand in the consumer's eyes. And if the franchisee's are paying unnecessary costs, making a Macdonald's franchise less lucrative for the owner-operator, that will lead to fewer franchises renewals and new franchises in the future.
Been a while since I first watched the video. I would imagine the ice cream machines are a relatively small part of the McDonald's business. As evidenced by the fact that McDonalds ice cream has been an issue for quite a while. I would imagine franchises of a similar caliber to McD's also exploit their owner-operators on a similar scale because they can, we just don't necessarily hear about it because McDonalds is the largest.
McDonald's isn't known for its quality anyway. I've had my fair share of sketchy McDonalds experiences. McDs is as large as it is because it is cheap, convenient, and ubiquitous. McDonalds has no qualms with cutting corners on quality, as evidenced by its entire menu.
I'd suggest the quality of McDonald's ingredients is superior than the vast majority of restaurants that rely on Sysco or US Foods. Just my opinion, I know it's not going to convince anyone whose mind is already made up about McDonald's.
aww man dont tell people about sysco. Once you learn to spot unmodified sysco foods it's impossible to stop and the illusion of sitdown restaurants is tarnished forever.
The days of cheap McDonald’s is long gone. I can get a meal served at a sit down cafe for about the same price now days.
But it’s still just as poor quality, if not worse than before. Last time I ate there I bit down on something in my burger so hard I thought I broke a tooth. I’ll never eat it again.
McDonald’s pricing is complicated. You can still get cheap McDonald’s, but it requires giving them something in return (e.g. information about you).
Indeed, you can practically eat for free regularly at McD's if you use the app.
I like how the answers include both "they've done the math and it's worth it" and "they're idiots who don't know what they're doing". I don't think anybody cares what's really going on, as long as they can say McDonald's is bad.
There's an uncertain future cost (basically an externality that impacts McDonald corporate) but in return they get a nice premium now and immediate uncertainty for franchisees. It's possible it's overall a net negative for MD corporate, but it's also possible it's an overall economically profitable trade (even though it's clearly immoral).
> If the machines are frequently broken, that damages the Macdonald's brand in the consumer's eyes.
They are and it doesn't matter. You don't go to McD for the ice cream. It's been a running joke for decades how they're always broken.
> You don't go to McD for the ice cream.
Yeah. 'cause they don't have any 'cause the machine's broken.
I'm sure corporate has done the math and concluded that whatever money the machine provider pays them is higher than any expected losses in franchise revenue due to franchise owners quitting due to poor ice cream sales.
Modern capitalism isn't particularly rational. Money in the pocket is more tangible than minor brand damage.
If you want to be really cynical, you can assume that somebody at McDonald's and Taylor have crunched the numbers they know exactly how much they can squeeze their franchisees and the customer to effectively make money out of nothing. So many businesses operate this way now.
> I don't understand the last sentence. If the machines are frequently broken, that damages the Macdonald's brand in the consumer's eyes.
Try to quantify that to the MBA bean counters, good luck.
No one cares about ice cream from Mc f..ing Donald's, given that most employees in fast food stores are high school kids and I got the runs more than once from that shit, I don't trust them anyway to follow up with the stringent hygiene requirements that serving ice cream demands. Burger patties at least are grilled/fried.
> No one cares about ice cream from Mc f..ing Donald's
People care enough that there's a website mapping working McDonalds icecream machines across several countries, that has been up for years, and was referenced in the linked article:
https://mcbroken.com/
Quite a few places where softserve ice cream is not that widespread, McDonalds is one of the most reliable places to be able to find it.
Most importantly, McDonalds has a strong incentive to avoid headlines like "37 people hospitalized after shit-bacteria in improperly maintained ice cream machine", which is why the machines self-monitor and shut down at the slightest excursion from some specified norm.
And McD wants the machines maintained by the official technician, because they'd rather screw their franchisees a bit than risk someone ripping out the offending sensor.
IMO, the perverse incentives come on top of this (Taylor has no motivation to make the machines more transparent since they profit from the call-outs, McD either doesn't care or may even prefer this since it could reduce the risk of "creative" solutions like an employee holding an ice cube next to a sensor), but the "McD would rather have 50% of the ice cream machines 'broken' than have a single one serve E.Coli to its customers" is what kicked this whole thing off.
then why is it that its only the ice cream machines that have problems not not things like the soda fountain any other food production tool?
Perhaps because the environment the ice cream machines create are the most friendly to bacteria and other things that cause the most issues?
Then why does the Frosty machine always work at Wendy's? That's made by Taylor too.
The Wendy's frosty machine doesn't have the same automatic cleaning cycle and pasteurization feature that the McDonald's ice cream machine has. Thus Wendy's employees need to tear the machine down and clean it by hand, a long and tedious process.
The whole reason McDonald's wanted this machine was to reduce training costs and labour. However, the machine does need to be operated correctly or it simply shuts down.
As someone who has cleaned a soft serve machine, its not really long or tedious.
soda is syrup and carbonated water, neither becomes a breeding pool at room temperature
> Here's a great YT video on why McDonald's ice cream machines are always broken: https://youtu.be/SrDEtSlqJC4?si=IK1S-Yx9Zq4nEVrr
As habit or policy, can we all agree to get rid of the tracking information in Youtube links?
* https://youtu.be/SrDEtSlqJC4
Similarly Instagram started adding tracking querystrings (igshid or something like that), and for a good few weeks any Instagram link with it was completely broken for me (few loops, errors, and throwing me to the home page), I had to manually remove that part of the url.
My bad! Fixed. Didn't even realize the YT links had tracking info on them!
FYI, it's the "si" query parameter; It identifies the account that clicked the share button
US franchises have been able to buy machines from Carpigiani instead of Taylor for ~7 years.
Stories and comments about that video:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
List of related threads:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41949811
Implicit here is the assumption that (a) when evaluating many franchises McD is still attractive for new owner operators despite the obvious flaw, or (b) switching costs are high for existing McD owner operator victims, and the issue wasn't known or believed to be this bad when they started.
Well that or they have the option to buy the real Italian machine not the Taylor piece of crap. It’s just super expensive and comes from Italy
Very weird, here in Canada I don't think I've ever been to a McDonald's without working ice cream machines.
Great, They made its so defeating the lock isn't illegal. Too bad selling the tool to do it is.
So don't sell. Open an account on GitHub and post the procedure there
from the article:
> The ruling doesn’t change the underlying statute making it illegal to share or sell tools that bypass software locks.
I think this also includes sharing code.
Is it trite to ask if this is blocking free speech?
This has recently been challenged in courts and rejected: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/08/federal-appeals-court-...
> Integral to the Court’s decision was the conclusion that Section 1201’s ban on circumvention of access restrictions is a regulation of “conduct” rather than “speech.”
I've heard plenty of stories about the MCD ice cream machines, but it doesn't add up for me. Can someone who has more insight shed some light into this?
- Are the machines listed as "broken" on https://mcbroken.com/ actually broken? Or is that more of a meme, with many just undergoing routine cleaning, etc.?
- Why does this seemingly happen only in US? In European McDonald's it's pretty much unheard of.
- Why would McDonald's Corp. be happy with the status quo? Is it some kind of tactic to squeeze more revenue from the franchises? If so, why not address it in the franchise agreement and just let restaurants sell more ice cream?
i can confirm that the mcbroken website does indeed show machines as broken which are have simply been disassembled for cleaning.
In UK McDo often have broken ice-cream machines too, at least where I've been. It seems to be higher incidence than other fastfood outlets (Burger King, KFC), but that might be observer bias.
I just figure margins must be low on their ice-creams, so when it's broken they sell more fountain drinks and make more money than they would if the ice-cream machine was fixed.
How can they be low? Here it's nearly 3 euros for a thimble of ice cream lol
The short version is that the machines' sensors are extremely picky (because the stuff that goes into soft serve is just begging for massive bacterial growth if not handled correctly), and McDonald's corporate requires (I'm pretty sure by franchisee contract, not just by the copyright restrictions the article is about) that their specific chosen vendor handles it, even for minor issues.
A lot of people like to treat this as a conspiracy, but I think it's much more likely it's the corporate people being paranoid about local franchisees overriding the machines, and that leading to listeria outbreaks happening in the only non-sealed food item that isn't heated to safe temperatures shortly before it's handed off to customers.
I don't know about the contrast with Europe, but it might just be geographical size causing time delays for individual techs showing up. McDonald's franchisees are everywhere, and the U.S. is gigantic.
I suspect its a probably a combination of abundance of caution based on past bad experiences/lawsuits as well as also being good for margins:
The Surprising Reasons Soft-Serve Ice Cream Can Be Dangerous To Eat
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/surprising-reasons-soft-serv...
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7149927
From 2005:
More than 120 people were sickened after eating ice cream at their local McDonald's. The health department says the restaurant's dairy mixture somehow was contaminated with staphylococcus, and a mechanical malfunction in the soft serve machine allowed the bacteria to grow. So many people became so ill, so quickly, the director of the local emergency room told me he at first thought there was some kind of bioterrorism incident in the town.... Nancy Smith says she had taken her grandchildren for an outing, and stopped at McDonald's to buy them a treat. Her grandson Darien had a milkshake, and she says he was violently ill an hour later. He became limp and listless, Smith says, and they rushed him to the hospital, scared to death. Then she got sick. She says she had just three sips of Darien's shake, but it was enough to make her very ill. She told us she was vomiting so violently, she thought she was going to have a heart attack. She's now suing McDonald's, as are many of the other people who got sick in that incident.
> - Why does this seemingly happen only in US? In European McDonald's it's pretty much unheard of.
Because only in the US, employees fill it up above max line.
Nice, the politicians were able to get some brownie points on a hot button issue without actually doing anything! Good for them, I bet they feel proud, they deserve some of the ice cream they so valiantly saved.
The US Copyright Office isn't elected, and the woman running it was appointed by a non-political appointee herself.
I have a pretty negative view of politics, too, but it doesn't mean we can't be happy when something good happens – no matter how small. The government doesn't pay well, and while we know the names of a dozen or so shitty self-serving jerks in Congress, most people in the government are genuine people doing it to help others.
If you can raed tihs, you hvae voilated the DCMA and cmomitted a fleony.
The oirginal palin txet of tihs msesage was put trhough a porprietary ecnryption aglorithm I cerated, and waht you see hree is the rseulting cpyher txet. It is illegal for you to rveerse my porprietary ecnryption aglorithm.
I wnat tihs on a TS-hirt.
What the fuuck
Groups being motivated to ensure ice-cream machines are inoperable is a perfect example of a perverse incentive.
They aren't; they're motivated to ensure ice-cream machines are only fixable by them. Still a perverse incentive. It makes zero sense for a company to be motivated to have their own product... not... work.
Your last sentence goes a bit too far. There are products that are "loss leaders" that the company does not want to actually sell
A loss leader is working if it's increasing customer traffic. Nobody is going to McD's because they have amazing/cheap/highly-available ice cream.
I have definitely gone to McD specifically to get a shake on a hot day and driven away when told the ice cream machine was down.
the loss leader is the ice cream machine
The coffee is pretty good, though.
15%?!
Is this a uniquely American thing because I can’t remember ever having a “sorry our machine is down” in Ontario.
It correlates with demand. These things go down quickly during peak demand because they can't maintain cold temps. You'll often see this during summer heatwaves as people flock to drive-thrus to grab some ice cream!
Certainly not a uniquely American thing, 15% sounds low for the places in Europe where I tried...
I wish we would just repeal the DMCA.
Under no circumstances should we need an exemption from the copyright office just to be able to repair an ice cream machine. It's not even a permanent exemption! The DMCA causes many weird problems.
It's still weird to me that we ended up in a world in which every bit of information can now be copied at zero cost and instead of heralding and building upon that technological achievement we've somehow decided that instead we're going to make laws to protect and enforce rent seeking instead. I assume it's one of those things where a few corpos just outplayed 99% of the population; just like universal health care, or public education.
This seems like a very one-sided take. Just look at all the artists (actors, painters, musicians, etc.) that are fighting tooth and nail against AI, and for good reason. While there are plenty of issues with copyright, I don't agree at all that just because the marginal cost of copying is 0 that if someone puts a ton of time and effort in creating a piece of work that I should just get to copy it for free.
I don't understand this. Copyright law does not prevent people from sharing their information freely. It gives the option for "rent seekers" to do their thing. Enforcing your rights for return is optional for people that don't want to do it. I'm not talking about right-to-repair here, but the idea of copyright in general.
A lot of information is generated by taking some financial risk with the hopes of creating something of value and recouping that investment + some profit. Copyright makes that kind of venture possible. It doesn't prevent altruistic souls from putting in the same effort without any expectation of return. We always had this, by default. Copyright framework allows pursuit, generation and dissemination of huge swaths of valuable information that would otherwise not exist.
-Chomsky
Everyone believe they need copyright, therefore it is the status quo.
It’s a reasonable stance to want copyright.
It’s an anti-consumer stance to force copyright to nearly 100 years and allow no format swapping under a hilariously broad set of normal transmission and format-swapping techniques.
No one has put forth a good argument about why I don't need copyright.
There's definitely tiers of copyright to consider, which is part of the divisiveness on the issue. You wanting to protect your creation and get compensated for its IP for 10-20 years (so, a good portion of your life career) is very different from Disney wanting to delay Mickey mouse going into public domain. an IP its creator and studio already reaped trillions from over the century.
No one should have to. If we're talking about putting/maintaining restrictions on people, the onus should be on the proponents to put forth a good argument why we need it.
Not when you are the one trying to change the status quo. Regardless of what you believe, if you want to change the default you need to explain to people why it should change. A self-righteous stance like yours will change nothing.
Does everyone believe that we need copyright to be the exact way that it is though?
I'm pretty sure that the reason that copyright laws are the way they are is because certain industries in the US lobby the government to strong arm other countries into adopting onerous copyright restrictions as part of free trade agreements.
Whatever you feel about the merits of intellectual property laws the idea that they're wrapped up as 'free trade' when they in fact make things that would otherwise be free cost money is downright Orwellian.
Maybe countries that don't really have a film or tv industry don't want to see copyright on those products and why would they? Why would they want to see their citizens paying American countries for something that would otherwise be free?
I'm fine going back to the old 14+14 rules copyright originally. having your creation for an entire generation seems appropriate. But opinions are all across the spectrum on this issue.
I think the primary reason the "spirit" of current copyright broke down is because it's been reduced to hoarding over protecting. the idea is that I can license out an idea if I really want to make use of it. So creations flow and the company makes their own cut out of it.
But I can't just walk up to Disney and pay 100 dollars ,1000, maybe even 1 million to grab Mickey Mouse and work with something. Depending on their products, they may not want anyone using Mickey period, even if there is no mickey product cycle. You basically need to be EA or Mattel or Warner Bros. to even begin being considered for such a thing.
That's their right but it spoils the social contract. When everything by default is locked down, there is no creation flowing. Just broken dreams for abandoned franchises everyone else would love to make use of.
Uhh, it's because information can be easily copied that the laws were put in place. If anyone can "steal" your work then it would be a deterrent to invention.
If I'm a business that can make money on the service contract I can sell the unit at a lower price. Now I'm forced to make the unit cost higher.
Do you think people should face consequences for piracy? If not, should DRM be legal then?
I’m not a lawyer, but I think it’s pretty clear that piracy is not illegal because of the DMCA; it’s illegal because it violates normal copyright laws. Repealing the DMCA would not change the legal status of piracy.
Repealing the DMCA also wouldn’t make DRM illegal, but DRM would still be exactly as (in)effective as it has already proven to be countless times. DRM has done nothing to restrict piracy, as far as I can tell.
Repealing the DMCA would simply allow people to more freely break DRM in pursuit of lawful purposes, which are currently restricted unfairly, including activities that would fall strictly under Fair Use. I would argue the DMCA is infringing my legal rights for no benefit to society.
Distributing copies of copyrighted content without authorization was unlawful long before the DMCA, outside of Fair Use scenarios.
Piracy was just as Federally illegal prior to the DMCA. Think back to Streetfighter....
It’s a simple question. I know it’s illegal. Should regular people face consequences or not? The status quo is “no,” which is the first step to understanding why making consequences for circumventing DRM is a bitter compromise that is maybe the best option.
I'm not sure I follow. In the case where breaking DRM isn't illegal, but piracy still is illegal, what happens that you think is bad?
(not op) I think DMCA specifically should be repealed. We can still have DRM/Copyright/etc if enough people want it, we could look at other systems, but DMCA itself is awful. Repealing it doesn't make any statement about piracy.
Disney was willing to go to the ends of the Earth to protect Mickey mouse...
Sure, but the anti-circumvention provisions in particular just inconvenience everyone. It's not like DVDs being "protected" prevented them from being ripped.
And Paraguay won
Reference for those who didn't see it:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41550417
I really have to wonder if the BoJack Horseman writers knew about this when they wrote the Disney trademark episode.
Well they didn’t literally go to every last square km on planet Earth… so it’s not that surprising.
Bad headline. No, they can't. They are now allowed to, but they don't have the actual ability to do so.
Clickbait of the weirdest kind - the totally unnecessary one. They could have gone with more truthful "We're now allowed to" with the same amount of impact... right?
Yeah this was weird. You usually expect this from a newspaper where the editor chooses an inaccurate headline, but this is iFixit? The actual text of the article points out that just about every McDonalds franchise will be unaffected and have equally broken ice cream machines, which is why it's so weird that they contradict that in the headline.
Yeah, it lowered my confidence in them, to be honest.