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@rysiek@mstdn.socialIf you're wondering how things are going with the famous #DRM'd Polish trains, well, their manufacturer – #Newag – sued the hackers who had un-blocked them:
https://rys.io/en/175.html
But weirdly, after months of implying and suggesting that the locking code was added to the software by the hackers themselves, in the lawsuit the company now insists they did not in fact modify the software installed on the trains.
Why? Because that would not mesh well with the copyright infringement claim. 
1/
A lawyer from Stefan Batory Foundation told me what he thinks of Newag's lawsuit:
> "Based on the media description of the case it seems that we might be talking about a so-called SLAPP"
> "It is in public interest interest that journalists and civil society watch this case closely and verify if it indeed is a case of SLAPP and an attempt to curtail freedom of expression"
During the first hearing, Newag requested that the whole trial be made non-public. The judge rejected that request.
2/
Newag does not offer any convincing explanation of how the locking functionality found its way into Impuls trains used by several different train companies all around Poland – and why only these trains seem to be affected.
“We have 23 different vehicle types and we have only experienced this with these particular trains” – said Piotr Wakuła, director of operations and technical bureau at Koleje Mazowieckie train company, while speaking at a parliamentary meeting in February this year.
3//end
@rysiek Keep the updates flowing. I have a feeling I will be eating a lot of popcorn in the future. 
@emilion yeah, it's very popcorn-worthy. I just wish the Dragon Sector guys did not have to deal with this.
@rysiek Look at the bright side - new consulting and conference speaking opportunities can open.
@rysiek Something I've not seen mentioned explicitly in this case but maybe you, having taken more interest, might know: did the original contract the train operating company signed for these trains specify any obligation to get the maintenance work done by Newag?
I assume not as it should have been mentioned but most of what I've read has been anti-Newag so I'm not sure.
@edavies in the specific case of the trains that were being maintained by SPS and which were the reason to hire the Dragon Sector guys to figure it out, the contract explicitly specified that maintenance *can* be provided by third party yards, and that Newag is supposed to provide all necessary documentation for that.
Newag seems to claim that "software is not documentation" when asked in public hearings about why the documentation provided by them was clearly not enough.
@rysiek Thank you, good to know for sure.
@rysiek Thanks for the update, i was all the time curious about how that evolved
@rysiek The last Polish train I took was Katowice to Kolobrzeg. The train hacked me and made me drunk. That is my excuse and I am sticking to it
@sullybiker that is known to happen, yes.
@rysiek I was in a carriage full of students, I think it's safe to say they tricked me.
@sullybiker how thoughtful of them! 
@rysiek this is still a really bizarre story and I want to thank you for taking the time to make updates available to people who can't read Polish
@KHoos my pleasure, I appreciate you saying that!
@rysiek drm'ed trains is still such an absurd concept in my mind...
@filiplachert Now added @rysiek to my Transport list so as I am more likely to see these posts 
@jon haha, what an honor!
I have to be honest though, I very rarely post about public transport, and I do post often. I would really not want to end up spamming your transport list!
Not saying you should not keep me on it, of course, just making sure it's clear what to expect. 
@jon oh, and fun fact, I quoted from your blogpost in my December piece on this in OKO.press (in Polish):
https://oko.press/kto-unieruchamia-pociagi-impuls-sledztwo-hakerow
Look for the word "sabotaż".
(I probably won't be able to publish an English version of that piece as that was before I negotiated a CC By-SA licensing of my pieces to myself from OKO.press, sadly)
@rysiek Oh your posts about Newag are enough to justify keeping you there. And I think a “Trains-IT" list might be a little too niche
Meanwhile there was a big Newag presence at Innotrans in Berlin, and they aim to get this new electric locomotive approved in Germany. On the IT side that is going to be fun!
@jon hah, yeah.
The utter tragedy of all this for me is that I *want* train manufacturers to succeed, and I *want* Polish companies to succeed. And for a long while Newag was an example of a success story. I loved taking their trains.
Sigh.
@rysiek Yep. Totally with you on that. And - from a customer perspective - even these Impuls EMUs are not bad. And given the headaches Talgo/CAF/Alstom/Škoda have currently, having genuine alternatives from Poland would be very welcome! @filiplachert
@jon @rysiek @filiplachert
Impulses do get even better when your frame of comparison is any flavor of EN57. And the modern EMU market in Poland is pretty much Newag, Pesa and Stadler (and from what I've seen and heard, Pesa has been busy with orders from Czechia lately), making the Impuls a staple in places like Pomerania... And PKPIC has ordered hybrid ones to deal with its diesel loco shortage and expand services off the main routes... You can't overestimate how good of a legacy these things could have as *the* face of the new Polish railway.
@HaTetsu well said.
But the flipside is that once the Impuls trains started locking themselves up, *because* they are so widely used as basic workhorses by a lot of passenger railways, that immediately created a huge, huge problem for the railways, for passenger.s, and for municipalities and the like operating these railways.
I've listened to hours of parliamentary meetings on this with railway operators and passenger interest NGOs talking about this, it really hit hard.
@rysiek Meanwhile if you put your feet on the marks, are you never allowed to leave the spot again at the Newag stand at Innotrans? 
@jon @rysiek @filiplachert
Incidentally, here's the train seat that's left the most lasting impression on me - on a Holy Cross Voivodeship Impuls (operated by Polregio - I probably don't need to tell you the timetable was pretty bad, though!)
@rysiek Public money, public code!!!
the government should only pay for #freeSoftware . If the bill is footed by the taxpayer... the corporation should have no case to "hide" what they are doing in the software.
@nicemicro @rysiek Well, let's say I'm really great at R&D for some niche area. I make great stuff that's pretty easy to maintain and everyone's happy. But it's open source so someone with much less expenses can drop in and replace me easy because it's in maintenance mode. You might say that sounds about right, but this is a niche area and you'll lose me if I can't make a living from it.
So I'd be worried about that, especially with a bunch of hardware prototyping crap needed.
@nicemicro @rysiek I myself agree with that, but I don't think it could stop there. When the government outsources this sort of thing to a company they are outsourcing quite a lot. There's lots of paperwork and crap--hour upon hour of just responding to regulation. It's all very important but it's all also pretty expensive. Government might be better off if it didn't outsource and then there'd be no question. It would have to grow quite a lot though...good or bad.
@crazyeddie @rysiek we
all know these contractors are not selling to the government at fair market value. not even close.
I'm not saying that the corporation should have their stuff out in the open from day one. I'd be totally fine if they were only forced contractually to free up the software *after* they received the government denars.
@crazyeddie @nicemicro @rysiek
Maintainance is not R&D.
@counterinduration @nicemicro @rysiek I was careful not to conflate the two. Thanks though.
@crazyeddie @nicemicro @rysiek
The great part about free software is that any developer can be easily replaced. There really is no value in anyone retaining their position for their own profit.
@nicemicro @rysiek There are some cases where the government buyer does get the source to closed-source systems, but for the ones I knew about, there's no way they ever got fully reviewed by anyone competent enough to discover all the secret sabotage switches. The US government would never pay $200k for prevention when it could dish out $200M for cure instead.
@log @nicemicro @rysiek
I think my new policy on posts that include random gratuitous cynical shots at government will just be to block.
@nicemicro I can't put into words how *devastated* I am over this whole situation. I mean I was going to take an evening nap anyway, but being randomly blocked by a namenumbered rando from mastodon.social added at least 15 seconds on to the end of it. So I could adequately recover.
@log @nicemicro longest fifteen seconds of your life, right
Governments have no raison d'être. Their modus operandi are always the oppression for the benefit of a select few. Supporting governments or in anyway downplaying their inherently immoral nature is a despicable act of cowardice.
If you're not interested in my lived experience of what I have seen the US government (qua the missile defense program) actually do with both custom and COTS software, both closed- and open-source, please disregard my opinion.
@log @nicemicro @rysiek corporate IT isn't really any better, but I'm guessing you knew that
Had the joy of dealing with mandated tool usage where the tool was open source but the boss mandating its use didn't read the source, or how the tool's usage fit the needs of the organization (or didn't,) or much of anything else before declaring "thou shalt use this!" and disappearing
Sometimes feels like all executives excuse laziness as "decisiveness"
@beeoproblem @nicemicro @rysiek Yep. Been there, too. Except years later, when the original project hadn't been maintained, its features had all been obsoleted by libraries included in subsequent versions of the language, and the guy who originally integrated it and the guy who told him to use it were both gone before I even got hired.
@log @nicemicro @rysiek One big advantage of any handover of documentation, source code, white papers, etc, is that it anchors any following discussion, even if you can’t use it for anything else.
If the other party at a later stage claims something, you can compare that to what you have received before. If they claim that a piece of code was included, you can check. If they claim something else than they claimed before, you can deduce that they either lied then or lie now.
@ahltorp @nicemicro @rysiek Also, they can't threaten to cut you off, if you can theoretically rebuild the system from what they already gave you. Instead of the choice being to pay the increased license costs or pay enormous switching costs, there is also the option to stay on the delivered version until a slow migration can be done.
And by handing those fat government contracts to Free Software projects, they can have the projects evolve in directed ways more useful to everyone.
When I was at Tangent Animation, we used #Blender3d as our central animation app, and kicked money to their foundation, in return for which we got a say in what features were given developer time.
Worked great till Netflix murdered us.
@jpaskaruk @rysiek exactly.
#FreeSoftware is optimized for the features users actually need. Proprietary software is optimized for maximum wealth extraction from the user, where features are just side effects.
@jpaskaruk @nicemicro @rysiek tangent is no more??
Since 2021, sadly.
@jpaskaruk @nicemicro @rysiek nooooooooo
In other news, if y'all need an IT or TD hit me up :>
@trantion pretty much, yes. 