alt Hacker NewsFor people outside the US (maybe?), CarFax has no meaning, so the analogy is a bit confusing.
The whole thing make no sense. They plan to store the report on the SSD (but not just any SSD, an HP SSD), so that the telemetry is retained between operating system install. I'll give them points for doing on device data collection, but what if I replace the SSD? Maybe they don't plan on making that user replaceable, but that would work against what they are trying to do here.
Honestly if HP cared they would make the device more easily serviceable by the end users, and upgradable. Even that doesn't matter a great deal, beyond having companies slow down their upgrade cycle slightly, there's no real gain. Right now I'm looking at used laptops, but the local refurb place have apparently scraped all their laptops that are unable to run Windows 11. Without the software companies putting in a bigger effort to keep old devices viable for longer I don't really see who's suppose to buy all these old HP computers.
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This is likely just something that corporate users would care about. Companies often lease PCs from IT service providers rather than own and maintain their own hardware. The owner of the hardware now has a metric they can point to for how "usable" a machine is after the initial lease. As a customer, I may not want to rent laptops that have been through who knows what sort of wear and tear no matter how cheap but if the owner can now show me actual data saying how used the laptop is, I may feel more comfortable paying less for used. It's like the odometer on a car, I'd never buy a used car that didn't have an odometer (even if such a thing existed). But with an odometer, I can get a general idea of how much use a car has had despite the age. Only a year old with 30k miles? Hell no. Three years old with only 10k? That car might as well be new.
I'm assuming since it writes to a vendor-reserved sector, replacing it would make the whole thing moot. The rental company wants to retain that data because it makes a used PC more valuable. Since the corporate renter doesn't own the PC, they would only be allowed to wipe the SSD (excluding this section), not remove and destroy it.
> but what if I replace the SSD?
Also many companies want to destroy the SSD on selling old laptops. Paranoid about security and thinking they need Pentagon level security theatre. But companies should delete potential liabilities.
But I'd never allow an enterprise SSD to be reformatted. If some old data leaked from the business and the business was taken to court, the prosecution might argue it leaked from SSDs and you couldn't prove otherwise.
Cars in the US are cheaper so in some countries they are shipped, fixed, and sold. People pay to see the CarFax to see how bad the accident was. There's a big market for it outside the U.S. surprisingly. U.S. cars can be easily identified by their yellow indicator lights. You'll see the term "clean CarFax" a lot in online dealerships outside the U.S. Although I feel for PCs it's a bit silly
I heard about Carfax in a comedy skit, but that was the only case I saw this word in many years.
This reminds me of an old story about Hertz and Ford Mustangs.
Goes something like this:
- Ford makes the original Mustang (which everyone loves)
- Ford makes different versions of the Mustang (some more powerful than others e.g. the Shelby)
- Hertz had a special custom Shelby model made for them
- You could rent that special model from Hertz
- So, people would buy a lower end Mustang, rent the higher end Mustang from Hertz, swap out the engines and return the Hertz Mustang
There is actually a lot of extra detail in this article if people are interested: https://www.motorcities.org/story-of-the-week/2024/rememberi...