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this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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Do people not know what "bricking" means? This article is about HP disabling features if the printer runs out of ink.
If they bricked it, it would be unrecoverably broken, never to function again.
A more accurate term would be that they ransom the functionality of the product they sold until you pay the ransom.
Or maybe they engineered a "multifunction" device with shitty error handling: if any subsystem has an error, all functions fail, even those that don't depend on that subsystem.
A junior engineer filed a bug report about it and submitted a patch that allows subsystem errors to gray-out only certain functions in the UI.
The PM didn't consider the bug launch-critical enough to merit an engineer's time to review the patch. One senior engineer did briefly look at the patch and said "sorry, we can't alter the UI without brand & design review, i18n, and a lot of shit you don't wanna do."
The system shipped with the bug intact. The PM was rewarded for launching the product on time, and got promoted into a different position.
A year later when the users start fussing, the people on the team say "we never heard of that problem."
(This is hypothetical. Tech companies do be like that sometimes though.)
Just because they accidentally made ransomware doesn't make it not ransomware.
Exactly, yeah. The incentives within the company generate shitty behavior towards users, even if no individual wrote out a design for that shitty behavior.
And if this was in the first version, everybody would understand. If it's still in version 5, it's by design.