The outspoken consumer rights advocate knows the incoming Democrat-heavy Congress has a lot to get done. But he hopes one of those things is letting you fix your own iPhone. I love my old iPhone 14, but I'm starting to face the facts: It's going to die. The battery is about to go; apps take longer to load than they used to. Some of it I can fix. I can go to the Genius Bar and swap the battery. Maybe I could even do it myself; that'd buy me some time. But eventually, Apple won't support this wildly expensive device at all, and there's not much I can do about it. Apple did start offering self-repair services a few years ago, but it involves renting nearly 80 pounds of equipment and requires you to use official parts. When all is said and done, it doesn't save you that much money versus just going to the Apple Store . But if I buy a screen or a camera component from a third party, there's a chance my iPhone is gonna lock me out of certain features because it doesn't recognize it. This problem goes far beyond iPhones. Manufacturers have put similar locks on all kinds of gadgets, from video game consoles to cars to smart home devices, making them hard to modify and even harder to restore after some firmware update renders a certain feature unusable.

The Fulu Foundation, a nonprofit that pays out bounties for removing user-hostile features, is hunting for a way to keep Ring cameras from sending data to Amazon--without breaking the hardware. Usually, when you see a feel-good story about finding a lost dog, you don't immediately react with fear and revulsion. But that was indeed the case in response to a Super Bowl commercial from Amazon-owned security camera company Ring. There's now a group offering to dole out a $10,000 bounty to wrest back control of the user data Ring controls. The ad showed off a new feature from Ring called Search Party.

This year, the right-to-repair movement got a boost from--surprisingly--big tech, tariffs, and economic downturn. It has been a big year for the right to repair, the movement of advocates pushing for people to be able to fix their own electronics and equipment without manufacturer approval. The issue has gathered broad support from technologists, farmers, military leaders, and politicians on both sides of the aisle. It is popular with just about everyone--except the companies who stand to gain if the parts, instructions, and tools necessary to fix their products remain under lock and key. Three US states passed right-to-repair laws this year, including in heavily Republican states like Texas where the measure received a unanimous vote in both the House and Senate.

Fulu sets repair bounties on consumer products that employ sneaky features that limit user control. Just this week, it awarded more than $10,000 to the person who hacked the Molekule air purifier. Companies tend to be rather picky about who gets to poke around inside their products. Manufacturers sometimes even take steps that prevent consumers from repairing their device when it breaks, or modifying it with third-party products. But those unsanctioned device modifications have become the raison d'être of a bounty program set up by a nonprofit called Fulu, or Freedom from Unethical Limitations on Users.