Bio: Paul F. Roberts is President and Co-Founder of the Secure Resilient Future Foundation and Editor in Chief of The Security Ledger. A cybersecurity journalist and right-to-repair advocate, he founded Secure Repairs and works to advance secure, transparent, resilient, and sustainable technology ecosystems for connected devices. 

Abstract: As Internet-connected devices spread through homes, businesses, and critical infrastructure, manufacturers are increasingly abandoning functional products through “end of support” and “end of life” designations. This presentation examines the cybersecurity, privacy, ownership, and waste implications of unsupported IoT devices, warning that the Internet of Things risks becoming an “Internet of Trash.” Drawing on developments in Canada and the United States, Paul Roberts will discuss emerging laws, repair rights, software support disclosure, and broader efforts to empower device owners to maintain, secure, and extend the life of connected products. 

Bio: Lachlan Urquhart is Senior Lecturer in Technology Law and Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Edinburgh. He is Founder and Director of the Regulation and Design Lab and works across law, computing, design, ethics, privacy, and emerging technologies. His research includes IoT governance, accountable design, autonomous systems, and right-to-repair issues, including the EPSRC-funded “Fixing the Future” project. 

Abstract: I will share insights from the UK Fixing the Future interdisciplinary project which I led for 2.5 years. This project explored how to realise the right to repair for the consumer Internet of Things with a team of university researchers at Edinburgh, Lancaster, Edinburgh and Napier Universities from Human-Computer Interaction, Technology Law, and Design backgrounds. We were researching the challenges posed by current IoT design practices and how to re-envision better futures of longlasting, repairable, sustainable, equitable IoT. The project took an expansive view of what a right to repair requires due to the interdependencies inherent in IoT across software, hardware, data and AI infrastructures. Regulation of repair requires looking at mandates for more sustainable design, and access to spare parts, but also cybersecurity regulation, data protection rights, and consumer protection, as ways of challenging routes to redundancy. This talk will share highlights from the project, such as developing the Right to Repair cards that translated 25 laws into a deck of cards used in creative workshops, share reflections on a series of workshops conducted with repair communities around Scotland, and consider the impact of the ever shifting EU regulatory landscape for IoT design now and in the future. 

Bio: Denver is a software right-to-repair and standards activist who is currently Director of Compliance at Software Freedom Conservancy, where he enforces software right-to-repair licenses such as the GPL, and is also a director of the worker co-operative that runs JMP.chat, a FOSS phone number (texting/calling) service.  Denver writes free software in his spare time: his patches have been accepted into Wine, wdiff, and Linux.

Abstract: In the past, repairing our technology was done by observing the device's functionality, whether that be a hammer or plow or wheel, and then deriving the best way to repair or improve it.  Today, observability is not a given, and we must adapt our policies and norms to ensure that observability and access remains, so we can continue to have personal autonomy and agency in the technologies that we all use.  Box Theory defines the reasonable boundaries of a company's control over hardware or software that they distribute, by describing how and why we should retain this crucial observability.