Abstract
Compared to 51% of US Adults in 2016, only 36% of US adults followed the news consistently in 2017. This indicates that the habit of reading news is fading among the general population. A major contributing factor to this is that current news aggregators do not accurately capture the younger generation’s attention. According to a 2015 study, users aged 18 to 29 are 76% more likely to consume news from social media (Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, etc.) than any other age group, mainly because social media and other messaging platforms are more versatile than newspapers and articles. Yet, social media platforms do not provide news regularly and have been shown to predict working memory disruption. The following technical report describes NewsDash, an AI-powered SMS news delivery service that will regularly send a subscribed user texts containing news articles and an engaging message to hook the user into exploring further.
Transitioning to a different but significant topic, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) have started to implement a practice known as Parts Pairing, which uses embedded software to “lock” hardware to a certain device (usually by serializing individual components or using proprietary authentication methods) so that it may only be replaced by “OEM-authorized” technicians. Once a device is configured in this manner, authority over that device’s lifecycle shifts from the customer to the OEM, effectively limiting consumer ownership rights. However, the social and legislative movement known as Right to Repair is combating this effort by pushing for effective legislation to empower customers in repairing their products independently and decreasing repair costs as a result. The following STS research paper investigates the tension between customers and OEMs, exploring how Part Pairing and Right to Repair legislation interact to reshape digital ownership.
Focusing on the technical topic, NewsDash allows users to input topics in plain English on which they wish to receive news. After selecting a message frequency and adding a phone number during account setup, the user will have fully registered for NewsDash and will receive news from their interested topics on a preset basis. When the NewsDash backend searches for articles, it first collects relevant articles using news aggregator APIs from NewsAPI, Bing News, and more. Then, embeddings are generated for both user-selected topics and retrieved articles and compared with each other using Cosine Similarity. During testing, we found that Cosine Similarity was a passable but ineffective and limiting metric, highly dependent on the complexity of a chosen user topic. Messages are created by an LLM and sent to users via Twilio. Additionally, an automated test suite consisting of 73 tests was created to cover deterministic aspects of the news ingestion and delivery pipelines, such as topic and article selection. While all of these tests passed without issue, Twilio’s free trial limits the message length to 160 characters. Combining the engaging hook and article links exceeds the 160-character limit. The team determined that we should invest in the premium tier only after we have validated the other features of NewsDash. In its current stage, NewsDash is a proper prototype system appropriately scoped for the current stage of development. Future development aims to clear the SMS and article similarity limitations mentioned earlier.
The Right to Repair movement addresses a growing conflict between consumers and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) over digital ownership, centering on the practice of Parts Pairing. Evidence from the FTC's 2021 report to Congress, titled Nixing the Fix, was analyzed to identify recurring themes discussed, including Technical, Economic/Social, Environmental, and Legislative categories. In addition to serialization, replacing components such as LiDAR modules on an iPhone 15 disables FaceID, illustrating how proprietary technical restrictions discourage independent repair. Economically, repair restrictions contributed to a 7.2% rise in auto insurance premiums between 2016 and 2017. Honda's patent approvals for non-technical repair parts (hoods, fenders, etc.) surged by 360 in that same period, suggesting that OEMs effectively sought to consolidate control over consumers and eliminate 3rd-party independent service organizations. From an environmental standpoint, improperly labeled lithium-ion batteries can lead to toxic gas and fires when accidentally mismatched during third-party repairs. These findings collectively demonstrate that Parts Pairing imposes real financial burdens on consumers, stifles competition in the repair market, and creates tangible safety risks. In response, recent California and Rhode Island legislation from Right to Repair initiatives now requires OEMs to provide replacement parts and service literature for three to seven years. New rulemaking has also been proposed under the FTC Act, showing how federal and state legislation is supporting consumers, 3rd party markets, and cheaper repair initiatives. While this signals meaningful progress toward consumer empowerment and a more competitive repair ecosystem, continued research is essential as OEMs develop new methods to maintain dominance over the products consumers purchase.
