5 ms·

If we are talking about a right to software repair, we also need to talk about a right to not have our devices’ performance degraded. A related issue that is s

If we are talking about a right to software repair, we also need to talk about a right to not have our devices’ performance degraded. A related issue that is somewhat the inverse, which has always bothered me, is the seemingly intentional sabotage of performance and hardware by way of software updates, essentially building in incremental sabotage and obsolescence. What I am referring to is that fundamental performance is negatively impacted by OS updates that are usually mandatory, e.g., an iPhone or windows computer cannot load a basic website as fast as it could in the past, a basic function of the device, due to imposed software updates. There should be a legal requirement that the basic functions and performance of a device cannot degrade without justification over time. Imagine if your car required mandatory computer updates or maintenance that resulted in things like losing 100hp over 5 years, or it took longer and longer between hitting the unlock button and the locks actuating, or the brake responsiveness got worse and worse with every update; and then being told you have to buy a new car to get all those features back. I understand that there are certain things that cause preference degradation, but when it is imposed without real choice and there is no incentive for developers to actually prevent degradation, then there is also San incentive to intentionally sabotage customers. If anyone remembers the push and emphasis on performance that Steve Jobs imposed on apple engineers after using an older apple device, it is clearly possible. I clearly recall that when that update went out, it majorly improved the performance and UX of older apple devices.

pabs3 5y ago
A lot of performance degradations are driven by external factors; increase in the prevalence of JavaScript, a larger variety of web features, higher resolution images, higher resolution video, new video codecs, new image formats, advertising etc. Some degradations are driven by fundamental physical things, for example batteries and storage devices have physical degradation. So you have to be careful how you define things.
- frankfrankfrank 5y ago
  I anticipated a response like that and you have a valid point, but it does not explain nearly all the issues. Just as an example, not only why does simple swiping home screens on an iPhone/iPad lag after a few years when nothing has fundamentally changed about that behavior, but an even greater question is why is it permissible that/if other features and expensive computations are added that are impacting performance of such fundamental and core functionality/behavior. There should be no right that barring some major security changes, that core functionality is not only impacted, but that added features impact performance or that a user should have the right to choose performance over features. I reiterate my example, would it be ok with you if your car lost 100 hp or 20 mpg fuel economy over 5 years because there were things added to your car that weigh it down so much or due to a roughshod rebuilding of your engine every time you changed your oil? It is really a clear case of fraud and destruction of property when, e.g., a phone becomes so laggy that it is unusable over 5 years solely due to updates that were imposed and required by manufacturers even if they try to justify it by adding things you did not request or need or want. I am actually surprised that an enterprising technology aware lawfirm has not latched onto this issue. It seems to me to be a rather simple case of proving at the very least the negligence and willful destruction and degradation of others' property. To simplify the concept, e.g., we are constantly told by phone makers that next-phone is N times faster/more powerful; so how is it that the phone I was told is 5 times more powerful than the predecessor, all the sudden lags when swiping between home/app screens or launching a dialer, a core functionality that hasn't changed in years and like it never did before? At best, we are facing an immensely sloppy industry that damages our products and property through forced updates; at best.
- zupreme 5y ago
  Alot. But not all. Every CPU cycle used by software, including an Operating System, depletes a limited pool of immediate resources. If the same device and functionality I enjoy have not changed, then the room for concern arises.
  - wowokay 5y ago
    I don’t know about this take, software updates when it comes to consumer products have never been mandatory, only perceived as mandatory in order to gain some new feature. As a developer, there are times we have to compromise old logic in order to add new logic. In other areas of life we call those changes progress.
    - minimouse 5y ago
      But there's no distinction between a security patch and a feature update. And it's never just an update to only get new features. It's to get bug fixes and better compatibility with new programs (I'm thinking of libraries and dependencies). And there's the case of Windows and Chrome OS, where software updates cannot be opted out of by official means. When I think of planned obsolescence and sorta-unintentional performance regressions on desktop operating systems, I'm instantly brought to YouTube's Polymer website and UWP. Two complicated things but they largely only benefit the developers of the software and have not actually delivered any features. Google is a huge part of the desktop world and they're not so "external" as pabs3 says and to me it's just part of the software right to repair movement.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - skinkestek 5y ago
      I was intent on keeping this iPhone on iOS 14 until Apple released a statement that they had buried their plans to introduce what I see as spyware or the precursor to spyware. Now 14 suddenly isn't an option anymore. Exploits are still found and the only way to patch them seems to be to go to iOS 15. Luckily the latest Nokia clamshell phones have good mobile broadband support and also support Telegram and Signal it seems. With the price difference between a brand new iPhone and a brand new Nokia clamshell I can also buy a really good camera and then I think I got it sorted mostly.
- e40 5y ago
  What about the slowdowns due to the Intel chip bug mitigations? That’s the biggest slowdown I have experienced of on Xeon based computer. It is significant.
  - oneplane 5y ago
    That is something you can and always could disable. I would however not want someone with a buggy system in some of my networks which makes this choice have side-effects in some scenarios.
    - vageli 5y ago
      > That is something you can and always could disable. I would however not want someone with a buggy system in some of my networks which makes this choice have side-effects in some scenarios. Could you expand on this? Why wouldn't you want a machine that's not running spectre mitigations on your network?
      - ghaff 5y ago
        Because they want to maximize performance rather than a security patch that they believe, rightly or not, is a mitigation against something that think is a small risk for their use case.
netizen-936824 5y ago
I would be happy if updates weren't forced on users. Allow the user more granular control of when and what to update
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago
  How do you make all the updates compatible then? If you released 100 updates , which is a very small number for any software, you now have 1267650600228229401496703205376 different versions of the software that the clients can be running for releasing your 101th update.
  - netizen-936824 5y ago
    Of course updates need to be consecutively applied, but we don't have to force them on the user when they're released. We also don't have to force unrelated updates when they only want an update for one specific package (dependencies forgiving, of course) Is this not how things are managed on basically every Linux distro? That's just concerning OS updates but it sounds like you're asking about a piece of software that is something entirely different. From my understanding, a good practice is to have all minor updates be compatible and only break that on a new major release. So don't make evey update a major release, doing that is actively hostile to users.
    - pabs3 5y ago
      Lots of Linux distros are moving towards automatic upgrades by default, since otherwise users won't bother to apply security updates. Of course you can definitely disable that and upgrade manually.
      - netizen-936824 5y ago
        Which distros? This is the first I'm hearing about it
        pabs3 5y ago
oneplane 5y ago
I doubt this is something you can construe as a 'right'. Pretty much everything you list is happening due to side-effects and interconnected ecosystems. What you want would also require significant continuous investments of all other interconnected parts. It would for example mean that your webserver needs to find out if the client has the bandwidth, CPU, memory and GPU resources available for a full site, a self-degrading site or a minimal site. And then users would complain that their experience is different from their friends and family because they have a different device and people will claim segregation or come up with a 'right to be treated the same on the internet' or something like that. Your device is essentially frozen in time as soon as manufacture is complete. The world around it keeps changing. Some of those changes are new insights, such as knowledge that power management needs to be adjusted to prevent brownouts, and hardware-level bugs that need to be mitigated to not break the interconnected world we live in.
- pabs3 5y ago
  If we could make progressive enhancement trendy again, then every site would be usable on ancient devices, but newer devices (or browsers with more features enabled) would get slightly nicer interaction methods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement
  - oneplane 5y ago
    A persistent downside of this is that you cannot give everyone the same experience and the cost of doing this might outweigh the commercial benefit. If you find that less than 5% of your users use crappy devices because they aren't broken enough but out of those 5% only 0.1% generate any revenue, you might simply choose to ignore them so you can focus on that 99.9% of other revenue.
    - pabs3 5y ago
      You cannot give everyone the same experience anyway, because everyone has different devices implementing different sets of web features and different sets of web browser extensions disabling various user hostile things that were added to the web platform over the years.

pabs3 5y ago

A lot of performance degradations are driven by external factors; increase in the prevalence of JavaScript, a larger variety of web features, higher resolution images, higher resolution video, new video codecs, new image formats, advertising etc. Some degradations are driven by fundamental physical things, for example batteries and storage devices have physical degradation. So you have to be careful how you define things.

frankfrankfrank 5y ago
I anticipated a response like that and you have a valid point, but it does not explain nearly all the issues. Just as an example, not only why does simple swiping home screens on an iPhone/iPad lag after a few years when nothing has fundamentally changed about that behavior, but an even greater question is why is it permissible that/if other features and expensive computations are added that are impacting performance of such fundamental and core functionality/behavior. There should be no right that barring some major security changes, that core functionality is not only impacted, but that added features impact performance or that a user should have the right to choose performance over features. I reiterate my example, would it be ok with you if your car lost 100 hp or 20 mpg fuel economy over 5 years because there were things added to your car that weigh it down so much or due to a roughshod rebuilding of your engine every time you changed your oil? It is really a clear case of fraud and destruction of property when, e.g., a phone becomes so laggy that it is unusable over 5 years solely due to updates that were imposed and required by manufacturers even if they try to justify it by adding things you did not request or need or want. I am actually surprised that an enterprising technology aware lawfirm has not latched onto this issue. It seems to me to be a rather simple case of proving at the very least the negligence and willful destruction and degradation of others' property. To simplify the concept, e.g., we are constantly told by phone makers that next-phone is N times faster/more powerful; so how is it that the phone I was told is 5 times more powerful than the predecessor, all the sudden lags when swiping between home/app screens or launching a dialer, a core functionality that hasn't changed in years and like it never did before? At best, we are facing an immensely sloppy industry that damages our products and property through forced updates; at best.
zupreme 5y ago
Alot. But not all. Every CPU cycle used by software, including an Operating System, depletes a limited pool of immediate resources. If the same device and functionality I enjoy have not changed, then the room for concern arises.
- wowokay 5y ago
  I don’t know about this take, software updates when it comes to consumer products have never been mandatory, only perceived as mandatory in order to gain some new feature. As a developer, there are times we have to compromise old logic in order to add new logic. In other areas of life we call those changes progress.
  - minimouse 5y ago
    But there's no distinction between a security patch and a feature update. And it's never just an update to only get new features. It's to get bug fixes and better compatibility with new programs (I'm thinking of libraries and dependencies). And there's the case of Windows and Chrome OS, where software updates cannot be opted out of by official means. When I think of planned obsolescence and sorta-unintentional performance regressions on desktop operating systems, I'm instantly brought to YouTube's Polymer website and UWP. Two complicated things but they largely only benefit the developers of the software and have not actually delivered any features. Google is a huge part of the desktop world and they're not so "external" as pabs3 says and to me it's just part of the software right to repair movement.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    I was intent on keeping this iPhone on iOS 14 until Apple released a statement that they had buried their plans to introduce what I see as spyware or the precursor to spyware. Now 14 suddenly isn't an option anymore. Exploits are still found and the only way to patch them seems to be to go to iOS 15. Luckily the latest Nokia clamshell phones have good mobile broadband support and also support Telegram and Signal it seems. With the price difference between a brand new iPhone and a brand new Nokia clamshell I can also buy a really good camera and then I think I got it sorted mostly.
e40 5y ago
What about the slowdowns due to the Intel chip bug mitigations? That’s the biggest slowdown I have experienced of on Xeon based computer. It is significant.
- oneplane 5y ago
  That is something you can and always could disable. I would however not want someone with a buggy system in some of my networks which makes this choice have side-effects in some scenarios.
  - vageli 5y ago
    > That is something you can and always could disable. I would however not want someone with a buggy system in some of my networks which makes this choice have side-effects in some scenarios. Could you expand on this? Why wouldn't you want a machine that's not running spectre mitigations on your network?
    - ghaff 5y ago
      Because they want to maximize performance rather than a security patch that they believe, rightly or not, is a mitigation against something that think is a small risk for their use case.

netizen-936824 5y ago

I would be happy if updates weren't forced on users. Allow the user more granular control of when and what to update

isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago
How do you make all the updates compatible then? If you released 100 updates , which is a very small number for any software, you now have 1267650600228229401496703205376 different versions of the software that the clients can be running for releasing your 101th update.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  Of course updates need to be consecutively applied, but we don't have to force them on the user when they're released. We also don't have to force unrelated updates when they only want an update for one specific package (dependencies forgiving, of course) Is this not how things are managed on basically every Linux distro? That's just concerning OS updates but it sounds like you're asking about a piece of software that is something entirely different. From my understanding, a good practice is to have all minor updates be compatible and only break that on a new major release. So don't make evey update a major release, doing that is actively hostile to users.
  - pabs3 5y ago
    Lots of Linux distros are moving towards automatic upgrades by default, since otherwise users won't bother to apply security updates. Of course you can definitely disable that and upgrade manually.
    - netizen-936824 5y ago
      Which distros? This is the first I'm hearing about it
      - pabs3 5y ago

oneplane 5y ago

I doubt this is something you can construe as a 'right'. Pretty much everything you list is happening due to side-effects and interconnected ecosystems. What you want would also require significant continuous investments of all other interconnected parts. It would for example mean that your webserver needs to find out if the client has the bandwidth, CPU, memory and GPU resources available for a full site, a self-degrading site or a minimal site. And then users would complain that their experience is different from their friends and family because they have a different device and people will claim segregation or come up with a 'right to be treated the same on the internet' or something like that. Your device is essentially frozen in time as soon as manufacture is complete. The world around it keeps changing. Some of those changes are new insights, such as knowledge that power management needs to be adjusted to prevent brownouts, and hardware-level bugs that need to be mitigated to not break the interconnected world we live in.

pabs3 5y ago
If we could make progressive enhancement trendy again, then every site would be usable on ancient devices, but newer devices (or browsers with more features enabled) would get slightly nicer interaction methods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement
- oneplane 5y ago
  A persistent downside of this is that you cannot give everyone the same experience and the cost of doing this might outweigh the commercial benefit. If you find that less than 5% of your users use crappy devices because they aren't broken enough but out of those 5% only 0.1% generate any revenue, you might simply choose to ignore them so you can focus on that 99.9% of other revenue.
  - pabs3 5y ago
    You cannot give everyone the same experience anyway, because everyone has different devices implementing different sets of web features and different sets of web browser extensions disabling various user hostile things that were added to the web platform over the years.