4 ms·

We need consumer protection laws that protect against functional regressions like this -- if a widget could do X when I bought it, it should keep doing X for th

We need consumer protection laws that protect against functional regressions like this -- if a widget could do X when I bought it, it should keep doing X for the life of the product and I shouldn't have to "agree" to an updated license for it to be able to keep doing X.

bigstrat2003 11mo ago
Or even updates that introduce new, undesired functionality. When I bought my PS4 (at launch), the section of the UI for video apps was pleasant and straightforward. It had the various video apps I had installed and that was it. Fast forward several years, and Sony updated the UI to prioritize showing apps that they wanted you to use (whether you had installed them or not), and even showed ads for movies and such. I don't think it's asking too much to not make my product worse after I buy it, and I think we need legislation to prevent companies from doing that. I'm not sure what that would look like, and the government is bought and paid for by those same companies, so it's unlikely we will see that. But we do need it.
- mrcsharp 11mo ago
  > not make my product worse after I buy it How can such law be written and how can a lawyer litigate that in court? The way you've phrased it is very subjective. What is an objective measure that a court can use to determine the percentage of quality drop in a product against a timeline?
  - anonymouskimmer 11mo ago
    Easy, mandate that any UI changes be revertable for the life of the product, or until the company goes bankrupt.
    - mrcsharp 11mo ago
      How would that work in real life though? Now every change made to any program must be tested against an ever growing combination of enabled and disabled UI changes.
      - anonymouskimmer 11mo ago
        I don't know, but I do know that on my web browser I can add and remove various of the buttons and right-click menu options. And on linux I can skin my desktop environment in a variety of ways (Unity stopped working, I went to Gnome which was glitching, and now have something very much like Unity used to be in XFCE and unlike a commercial product I paid nothing for this.).
        mrcsharp 11mo ago
        Adding and removing buttons from the UI is vastly different compared to maintaining a system where which features are enabled/disabled affect the underlying data and potentially interoperability. Do you want to work on Oracle Database [1]? By the way, I also don't want the software I use to suffer from quality drop due to new forced "features". I just don't think the way suggested here works well. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
      - account42 11mo ago
        Tough. Somehow IKEA is doing fine without being able to break into my house and change the way my furniture works. Devices and software should not be any different.
    - Capricorn2481 11mo ago
      > Easy, mandate that any UI changes be revertable for the life of the product, or until the company goes bankrupt I'm aware people are annoyed with big UI overhauls that seemingly do nothing, but I don't think you understand what it would take to support what you wrote. You're describing something that gets exponentially harder to maintain as a product ages. It's completely prohibitive to small businesses. How many UI changes do you think are made in a year for a young product? One that is constantly getting calls from clients to add this or that? Should a company support 100 different versions of their app? I understand a small handful of companies occasionally allow you to use old UI, but those are cases where the functionality hasn't changed much. If you were to actually mandate this, it would make a lot of UIs worse, not better. As much as people want to act like there's a clear separation, a lot of UI controls are present or absent based on what business logic your server can do. If you are forced to support an old UI that does something the company cannot do anymore, you are forcing broken or insecure functionality. And this would be in the name of something nobody outside of Hackernews would even use. Most people are not aware there is an old.reddit.com.
      - anonymouskimmer 11mo ago
        There are a couple of ways you can do this: 1) Have this law only apply B2C. 2) Stop having rolling feature updates except on an opt-in basis. It used to be that when I bought an operating system or a program it stayed bought, and only updated if I actively went out and bought an update. Rolling security updates are still a good idea, and if they break UI functionality then let the end customer know so that they can make the decision on whether or not to update. For hosted software, such as Google office, is it really that much more difficult to host multiple versions of the office suite? I can see issues if people are collaborating, but if newer file formats can be used in older software with a warning that some features may not be saved or viewable, then the same can be done with a collaborative document vis-a-vis whatever version of the software is opening the document. My wife recently went 0patch and some other programs to cover her Win10 when Microsoft stopped updating it. She still got force updated two updates having to do with patching errors in Windows' ESU feature that blocked people from signing up for the 1-year of ESUs. She let those updates happen without trying to figure out a way to block them as they have no other impact on her operating system, but it would have been nice if Microsoft have been serious about ending the updates when it said it was. I am not a programmer, but come on. This was done in the past with far less computational ability.
  - staticautomatic 11mo ago
    As a lawyer I think this could potentially be litigated as a breach of the implied warranty of merchantability.
    - mrcsharp 11mo ago
      Would the question still be about measuring the drop in quality to prove that the product (the software in this case) is in breach of the law?
      - staticautomatic 11mo ago
        Well, it would probably need to be part of a physical product and not software alone unless the vendor is dumb and forgot to disclaim the warranty (see https://repository.law.uic.edu/jitpl/vol16/iss2/6/ https://repository.law.uic.edu/jitpl/vol16/iss2/6/). Second, it’s not exactly about whether the change constitutes a drop in quality but whether it renders the product unfit for its ordinary purpose. The argument would essentially be that the change is a deliberately introduced defect. It’s a little weird but a plausible claim given the right facts.
- shigawire 11mo ago
  To me it seems crazy to legislate that the UI of software you have licensed cannot change.
  - CamperBob2 11mo ago
    You don't do it that way. As the other poster suggests, you mandate that UI changes can always be rolled back by the user. It should be illegal for you to change a product you sold me in a way that degrades functionality or impairs usability, without offering me the option of either a full refund or a software rollback. If that causes pain and grief for server-based products, oh, well. Bummer. They'll get by somehow.
    - account42 11mo ago
      I would go even further than a full refund - that doesn't really make the user whole who will now to have invest time into finding and learning an alternative product. And even with the ability of rolling back somewhere hidden in the settings, forced UI changes are annoying at best - they should always come at a time chosen by the user (including "never") and not any other time.
Eddy_Viscosity2 11mo ago
Which political party do I vote for to make this happen? In the US, both parties are fully captured by corporate lobbyists. The democrats put on a better show of being more consumer friendly, but when they are in power the sit on their hands. Republicans are full force anti-consumer. Even in the EU, who just passed chat control despite it being wildly unpopular are becoming less and less responsive to what the citizens actually want.

bigstrat2003 11mo ago

Or even updates that introduce new, undesired functionality. When I bought my PS4 (at launch), the section of the UI for video apps was pleasant and straightforward. It had the various video apps I had installed and that was it. Fast forward several years, and Sony updated the UI to prioritize showing apps that they wanted you to use (whether you had installed them or not), and even showed ads for movies and such. I don't think it's asking too much to not make my product worse after I buy it, and I think we need legislation to prevent companies from doing that. I'm not sure what that would look like, and the government is bought and paid for by those same companies, so it's unlikely we will see that. But we do need it.

mrcsharp 11mo ago
> not make my product worse after I buy it How can such law be written and how can a lawyer litigate that in court? The way you've phrased it is very subjective. What is an objective measure that a court can use to determine the percentage of quality drop in a product against a timeline?
- anonymouskimmer 11mo ago
  Easy, mandate that any UI changes be revertable for the life of the product, or until the company goes bankrupt.
  - mrcsharp 11mo ago
    How would that work in real life though? Now every change made to any program must be tested against an ever growing combination of enabled and disabled UI changes.
    - anonymouskimmer 11mo ago
      I don't know, but I do know that on my web browser I can add and remove various of the buttons and right-click menu options. And on linux I can skin my desktop environment in a variety of ways (Unity stopped working, I went to Gnome which was glitching, and now have something very much like Unity used to be in XFCE and unlike a commercial product I paid nothing for this.).
      - mrcsharp 11mo ago
        Adding and removing buttons from the UI is vastly different compared to maintaining a system where which features are enabled/disabled affect the underlying data and potentially interoperability. Do you want to work on Oracle Database [1]? By the way, I also don't want the software I use to suffer from quality drop due to new forced "features". I just don't think the way suggested here works well. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
    - account42 11mo ago
      Tough. Somehow IKEA is doing fine without being able to break into my house and change the way my furniture works. Devices and software should not be any different.
  - Capricorn2481 11mo ago
    > Easy, mandate that any UI changes be revertable for the life of the product, or until the company goes bankrupt I'm aware people are annoyed with big UI overhauls that seemingly do nothing, but I don't think you understand what it would take to support what you wrote. You're describing something that gets exponentially harder to maintain as a product ages. It's completely prohibitive to small businesses. How many UI changes do you think are made in a year for a young product? One that is constantly getting calls from clients to add this or that? Should a company support 100 different versions of their app? I understand a small handful of companies occasionally allow you to use old UI, but those are cases where the functionality hasn't changed much. If you were to actually mandate this, it would make a lot of UIs worse, not better. As much as people want to act like there's a clear separation, a lot of UI controls are present or absent based on what business logic your server can do. If you are forced to support an old UI that does something the company cannot do anymore, you are forcing broken or insecure functionality. And this would be in the name of something nobody outside of Hackernews would even use. Most people are not aware there is an old.reddit.com.
    - anonymouskimmer 11mo ago
      There are a couple of ways you can do this: 1) Have this law only apply B2C. 2) Stop having rolling feature updates except on an opt-in basis. It used to be that when I bought an operating system or a program it stayed bought, and only updated if I actively went out and bought an update. Rolling security updates are still a good idea, and if they break UI functionality then let the end customer know so that they can make the decision on whether or not to update. For hosted software, such as Google office, is it really that much more difficult to host multiple versions of the office suite? I can see issues if people are collaborating, but if newer file formats can be used in older software with a warning that some features may not be saved or viewable, then the same can be done with a collaborative document vis-a-vis whatever version of the software is opening the document. My wife recently went 0patch and some other programs to cover her Win10 when Microsoft stopped updating it. She still got force updated two updates having to do with patching errors in Windows' ESU feature that blocked people from signing up for the 1-year of ESUs. She let those updates happen without trying to figure out a way to block them as they have no other impact on her operating system, but it would have been nice if Microsoft have been serious about ending the updates when it said it was. I am not a programmer, but come on. This was done in the past with far less computational ability.
- staticautomatic 11mo ago
  As a lawyer I think this could potentially be litigated as a breach of the implied warranty of merchantability.
  - mrcsharp 11mo ago
    Would the question still be about measuring the drop in quality to prove that the product (the software in this case) is in breach of the law?
    - staticautomatic 11mo ago
      Well, it would probably need to be part of a physical product and not software alone unless the vendor is dumb and forgot to disclaim the warranty (see https://repository.law.uic.edu/jitpl/vol16/iss2/6/ https://repository.law.uic.edu/jitpl/vol16/iss2/6/). Second, it’s not exactly about whether the change constitutes a drop in quality but whether it renders the product unfit for its ordinary purpose. The argument would essentially be that the change is a deliberately introduced defect. It’s a little weird but a plausible claim given the right facts.
shigawire 11mo ago
To me it seems crazy to legislate that the UI of software you have licensed cannot change.
- CamperBob2 11mo ago
  You don't do it that way. As the other poster suggests, you mandate that UI changes can always be rolled back by the user. It should be illegal for you to change a product you sold me in a way that degrades functionality or impairs usability, without offering me the option of either a full refund or a software rollback. If that causes pain and grief for server-based products, oh, well. Bummer. They'll get by somehow.
  - account42 11mo ago
    I would go even further than a full refund - that doesn't really make the user whole who will now to have invest time into finding and learning an alternative product. And even with the ability of rolling back somewhere hidden in the settings, forced UI changes are annoying at best - they should always come at a time chosen by the user (including "never") and not any other time.

Eddy_Viscosity2 11mo ago

Which political party do I vote for to make this happen? In the US, both parties are fully captured by corporate lobbyists. The democrats put on a better show of being more consumer friendly, but when they are in power the sit on their hands. Republicans are full force anti-consumer. Even in the EU, who just passed chat control despite it being wildly unpopular are becoming less and less responsive to what the citizens actually want.