Smartphone Required 📱(digital exclusion of people without smartphones)

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evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.org

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

submitted 1 week ago by evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.org to c/smartphone_required@lemmy.sdf.org

11 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/47171718

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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[–] bluGill@fedia.io 2 points 1 week ago

I think anything with internet access should have a lifetime warranty on security. If there is even one of these still in use 60 years from now and a zero-day exploit is discovered they need to fix it at no cost. Perhaps they should be liable for whatever damage was done from the exploit as well. (I'm not sure how to demand this, but I know insurance is very good at figuring out how much money needs to be set aside for things like this: require it before the first device is sold)