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imakenosensetopeople t1_j9z6ccv wrote

Reply to comment by femmestem in A platform for products with no planned obsolescence by shanoshamanizum

Agreed. Last time I posed this question I got a hundred people telling me about light bulbs but not one single person could cite another example. A lot of folks misunderstand how products are engineered and how much the relentless pursuit of Shareholder Value forces design compromises, but the intent is never to make something fail; simply to last through the warranty period as cheaply as possible.

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PublicFurryAccount t1_ja00hgn wrote

There wasn't any such thing.

The issue was that, a decade ago, companies were adding smart features without really grokking the implications of a sensor which can halt operation. This led to lots of products becoming useless because the sensor had failed.

This can be counteracted in some systems with a hard reset. The machine will sometimes have code to mark a sensor as bad when it runs the first-run diagnostic and will ignore the sensor thereafter. Other times the issue was just a routine that wanted the user to perform some maintenance task years later, long after they'd lost the manual, and they would not know how to reset the flag. (E.g., by powering on the coffee maker while holding the brew button or whatever.)

Unfortunately, I'm going to have to be your source for the cause. I work in IOT and this sort of stuff was among the war stories told by coworkers from the early days of the market.

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imakenosensetopeople t1_ja0c3q7 wrote

Thank you - that was informative! Seems that no matter the actual explanation; whenever a product doesn’t work perfectly forever, people just jump right to “planned obsolescence.”

In your opinion, if you don’t mind me asking, is security getting any better in relation to IOT? My layman’s understanding was a lot of early IOT was just “set up and abandon” and stuff just went online without getting security patches, or only got patches for a short period of time.

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PublicFurryAccount t1_ja0d6oj wrote

Analytically, security is vastly improved. Higher standards all around.

Constructively? I don’t know. There are more devices and more users, which means a larger attack surface and more targets.

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