What have they to gain from advocating against it?
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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As to why a Scientology-owned group would care about such a matter, 404 Media suggested that it could have to do with Scientology E-meters, or electropsychometers. The Church of Scientology describes the machines as an "electronic instrument that measures mental state and change of state in individuals and assists the precision and speed of auditing" and that only a Scientology minister or training minister should use. 404 Media noted that some people collect the devices and, oddly enough, you can find E-Meters sold on eBay.
"My hunch is that the Scientologists think granting the hacking community permission to dig into their E-Meter software will expose the whole operation as snake oil. The request is like so many other anti-Right to Repair arguments: Manufacturers are afraid that access to repair materials will expose some of their other dirty secrets," Chamberlain said.
But isn’t their whole operation snake oil? Aliens crashing into a volcano and possessing humans is pretty dumb.
That wasn't always public knowledge. It was a thing you only learned about later on when you were more indoctrinated. Then undercover reporters found out and South Park made it very public.
It was mostly publicized via Usenet by Arnaldo Lerma, Dennis Erlich, Karin Spaink, David Touretzky, and other activists and ex-Scientologists starting in the early 1990s. The South Park episode didn't come out until over ten years later in 2005.
Gotta give them points for snake oil creativity though. Their nonsense is much more entertaining than hearing "invisible sky wizard did it" as the answer to every question for millennia.
Wait, their thing is alien volcano ghosts?
Yes, a long time ago an evil alien enslaved people and crashed into a volcano on Earth where they became ghosts and possessed the primitive humans living there. South Park has a good explanation of this lunacy
I've always wondered if the "THIS IS REAL SCIENTOLOGIST BELIEF" ticker was something planned early on, or if there was a moment of taking the whole thing in and someone went "This is fuckin' South Park. Everyone is going to think we're being extreme. We need to clarify."
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Correct, but they want to keep plausible deniability.
Nobody finds out their religious contraption doesn’t do anything and/or explains to other Scientologists what it actually does
It's a Wheatstone bridge, a very well-known circuit that's used to measure resistance very accurately. That's about it. You can slap one together at home very easily. There's nothing special in this device that would even benefit from right to repair, any halfway decent engineer or hobbyist can figure it out. It's like wanting to repair a desk lamp, you don't need schematics or data sheets to do that.
While they are still essentially measuring galvanic skin response, modern ones have a lot more going on internally.
TIL that I learned about Scientology in EE classes lol
My guess is the machines are a complete fake and don’t do anything outside of having some fancy dials and meters that a select few people are trained on how to ‘trick’ people into making look like they do something.
If people start digging into it then shit will hit the fan.
My guess is they want this stopped or at the least delayed until they can come up with some other bullshit method.
They do do something. They are simple ohmmeters. They measure the body resistance of whoever's holding the probes. They took a common electronics tool and made it a religious artifact.
I thought some of the meditative religions did it first... They're always like "ohm"
blessed be the jewel of the lotus
Make it harder for the free Scientology groups to operate. The groups offering the same services for free and without the accuser and they use second hand e-meters.
It's the methadone to the CoCs opium and the church doesn't like it.
Crazy that a decade ago, scientologists was a creepy ass cult.
But today, of all the crazies, they are the most tamed.
Still a creepy ass cult, but got better at hiding it. Meanwhile, more crazy emerged to compete.
I wouldn't go that far.
Did they stop being a creepy ass cult?
What, you think they're just a regular ass cult now?
If I was in a room with a scientologist, a Nazi, a climate change denier, a Fox News fan and a Maga trumper... Pretty easy to pick. Spoiler: the last ones are near interchangeable.
so between the two people in that room, the scientologist isn’t as bad? well yeah
This is the best summary I could come up with:
From Big Tech to politicians and individuals who don't think product repairability should be government-mandated, it's been a tedious battle for a movement that has seen major wins lately.
The Scientology group's letter seeks to alter exemptions granted for self-repairing some consumer electronics, like video game consoles, laptops, home appliances, and farming tractors.
With those products, the license agreement is "negotiated and agreed to in advance" of purchase and may include restrictions that are critical to "safe and proper" device usage.
"I can imagine manufacturers using the presence of a 'quick start' guide for a product as evidence that their consumers are 'specially trained in use of the device' and thus denying broad access to repair."
Nathan Proctor, US Public Interest Research Group's senior director, told 404 Media that Author Services' requested DMCA changes would prevent people from repairing products with end-user license agreements (EULAs).
Regardless of how an organization representing the works of the creator of Scientology ended up in the Copyright Office's mailbox, right-to-repair advocates say the amendment would harm the movement that would extend past electropsychometers if it were ever implemented.
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