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

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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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[–] ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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.

This is true but it’s also misleading. Based on the article he went to use a feature already present on the UI on the oven. The way the above is written it implies he wanted to purely download an update. But if you look at the tweet and the description he navigated to a mode already available in the ui and was then met with a screen that told him “oh wait you actually gotta register and WiFi up for this”.

I guess they either had the feature like 80-90% done at launch and put the screen in the UI expecting by the time units were shipped and installed they’d have pushed the update with it already, or (more malicious) they purposely held back the feature even though it was done and immediately pushed a day 1 update with that screen in the UI to entice you to farm your data.

Both are unacceptable. A firmware upgrade option is a good thing on an appliance and I would even argue that wireless connectivity is good as well (though a usb port as a failsafe is probably not a terrible idea). I don’t need my oven to be on the internet, I frankly don’t want it to be, but I wouldn’t mind it being on the intranet. Being able to start preheating and ensure it’s off from my phone or whatever is handy, I’m sure.

But the core issue is ultimately that we need to be able to go back to downloading a hex file from a manufacturer website without entering an email and then flash that firmware manually. Make an automatic WiFi internet flash for novices, sure, but there should always be an option for local flashing and control. This should be a heavily enforced regulation.

Musk is a scumbag piece of shit but I agreed with him here. 10,000 iot things in your house is begging for inevitable security flaws and botnet bullshit. The easiest solution is to take the Internet out of the equation. How many people actually remotely control their lighting anyway? And if you do desperately need that, let the hub (home assistant, Siri/homekit, Alexa, Google) be what connects to the internet, not all 500 mix and matched random no name “smart” lightbulbs from some company that only existed on amazon for 5 months called “goyigbee” or “dnnneisn” in your house