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. The group tries to spotlight the ways companies can slip consumer-unfriendly features into their products, and it offers cash rewards in the thousands of dollars to anyone who can figure out how to disable unpopular features or bring discontinued products back to life.
“We want to be able to show lawmakers, look at all these things that could be out in the world,” says right-to-repair advocate and Fulu cofounder Kevin O’Reilly. “Look at the ways we could be giving device owners control over their stuff.”
Fulu has already awarded bounties for two fixes: One that revives an older generation of Nest Thermostats no longer supported by Google; and just yesterday, it announced a fix that circumvents restrictive digital rights management software on Molekule air purifiers.
Fulu is run by O’Reilly and fellow repair advocate and YouTuber Louis Rossmann, who announced the effort in a video on his channel in June.
The basic concept of Fulu is that it works like a bug bounty, the long running practice in software development where devs will offer prize money to people who find and fix a bug in the operating system. Fulu adopts that model, but the bounty it offers is usually meant to “fix” something the manufacturer considers an intended feature but turns out to be detrimental to the user experience. That can mean a device where the manufacturer has put in restrictions to prevent users from repairing their device, blocked the use of third-party replacement parts, or ended software support entirely.
“Innovation used to mean going from black and white to color,” Rossmann says. “Now innovation means we have the ability to put DRM in an air filter.”
Fulu offers up a bounty of $10,000 to the first person to prove they have a fix of the offending feature of a device. Donors can also pool money in to help incentivize tinkerers to fix a particular product, which Fulu will match up to another $10,000. The pot grows as donations roll in.