Asshole Design and Crappy Design

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This community covers both asshole designs and crappy designs.

Discuss manifestations of asshole designs whereby the design is deliberately anti-consumer. Manifestations of crappy designs are also welcome in this forum, which reflect poor designs that are not borne out of deliberate contempt for the consumer.

Use of these prefixes is encouraged:

[a/d] ← you are confident that the design is an Asshole Design

[c/d] ← you are confident that the design is a Crappy Design

[ObD] ← Obsolescence by Design (a specific variety of a/d).

Unprefixed titles are useful if you’re uncertain whether the design is deliberate.

Rules:

Please avoid posting web-related designs. Instead, post those in:

!assholedesign_web@infosec.pub

Related communities

!crappydesign@discuss.tchncs.de

Existence Rationale:

There are other communities for Asshole Designs and Crappy Designs, but all of the communities at the time of our founding exist only on centralized instances. We are currently the sole decentralized community of this kind. (update: another crappy design forum was recently found in the free-world-- see related communities above)

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

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[c/d] 🫕📱GE: Wi-Fi required to roast food in your high-end $3,600 oven (www.consumerreports.org)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.org to c/asshole_crappy_design@slrpnk.net

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The guy could not use “Convection Roast” mode in his oven unless he connects to wi-fi and registers personal data. Apparently because this was a cook mode that was added after the oven was marketed.

Sure, it is useful to be able to get new features and upgrades after the thing is produced. But because of that, it’s as if they are making the store version deliberately excessively basic in order to twist people’s arms to run their proprietary closed-source spyware.

I was originally going to tag this as [a/d] (for asshole design), but opted to call it crappy design because upgradability is still a good thing. What’s crappy is the fact that:

it’s not FOSS
GE’s server is needlessly in the loop for everything
ppl must register on GE’s platform and give copious personal info which is then certain to be abused

To avoid both c/d and a/d, I would insist:

the app must be FOSS
the app and appliance both must have no cloud dependency and talk to each other in an off-grid LAN-only scenario
upgrades must be fetchable over Tor without registration, and side-loadable; users must be able to connect over Tor from a public cafe/library to fetch upgrades

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[–] icerunner_origin@startrek.website 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I don't usually take my oven to the library though /s 😉

[–] evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I think I might oppose the appliance getting an upgrade directly from the cloud. Is that what’s happening? I assumed (and hope) the app is getting the upgrade and then the app is pushing it to the appliance. But I also have some doubt that it’s working that way because the appliances are apparently spewing data directly to the cloud -- so the updates could indeed also be bypassing the apps.

Does anyone know?