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It reportedly checks subscription upon putting the vest on and supposedly won’t turn off mid ride.
And if there’s a bug in that code, you’re fucked.
Safety features should work if everything else fails. Their failure mode can’t be “fuck it, it didn’t work”. Which is directly opposite to the failure mode of a subscription based service.
This is why:
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The FTC needs to do its job and start outlawing all these obscene subscription business models for things that are rightfully products, not services. Where’s my goddamned First Sale Doctrine, FTC?!
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Software Engineers working on commercial products need to be professionally licensed, so that proper consequences can be applied for unethical “fail-deadly” designs like this one.
As a software engineer, the thought of my code being responsible for someone’s safety is fucking terrifying. Thankfully I’m not in that kind of position.
From experience though, I can tell you that most of the reasons software is shitty is because of middle or upper management, either forcing idiotic business requirements (like a subscription where it doesn’t fucking belong!) or just not allocating time to button things up. I can guarantee that every engineer that worked on that thing hated it and thought it was fucking stupid.
Licensing would be overkill for most software as it’s not usually life and death. I think in this case since it’s safety equipment it really should have been rejected by NHTSA before it ever hit stores.
I can guarantee that every engineer that worked on that thing hated it and thought it was fucking stupid.
As a software engineer who was also a civil engineer-in-training before switching careers, I think one of the big overlooked benefits of being licensed is that it would give engineers leverage to push back on unethical demands by management.
manager@evil.corp
Dear manager please clarify the specifications for product. From the discussions in the last design meeting i felt the specifications to potentially be ambigious about their compliance with critical safety regulation. Please reply with the clarified specifications.
Management can always just fire the engineering team and hire one overseas. It’s not like it’s even that difficult to do.
I don’t think you understand what being licensed means. It means the state requires that people doing that job hold a license. Offshoring would become illegal.
This is managements fault, not the engineers fault.
We have to implement the requirements we are given. If we don’t, we get fired and they hire someone else who will do it.
If we don’t, we get fired and they hire someone else who will do it.
If we were licensed, any replacement would be similarly ethically bound to refuse and that tactic wouldn’t work.
who’s doing the licensing and do they share my ethics?
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Pop verification neck to continue.
My dad worked for AAA. Once he got a call because a lady’s car errored out and thought she didn’t have her seatbelt buckled mid-drive, so it shut the engine off. On the freeway.
Even without a subscription, failsafes should always fail safe.
Thorium reactors have a cleverly dumb failsafe. If reactor control fails, there’s a plug that melts and drains the contents into a container that’s not fit for runoff neutron generation.
That’s an example of a failsafe that fits its purpose. It’s still possible to fuck it up, but it would take a lot of effort to do so.
And if there’s a bug in that code, you’re fucked.
If there’s a bug in your car’s airbag, you’re also fucked.
The problem is the subscription, not how it was implemented
Yes, but also from an implementation perspective: if I’m making code that might kill somebody if it fails, I want it to be as deterministic and simple as possible. Under no circumstances do I want it:
- checking an external authentication service.
- connected to the internet in any way.
- have multiple services which interact over an API. Hell, even FFIs would be in the “only if I have to” bucket.
If the customer is dead, they definitely can’t renew.
Who wouldn’t tout your service if it saved them?
But also… why the fuck does this require a sub?
But also… why the fuck does this require a sub?
Because “fuck you, we’re rent-seeking and you can’t do anything about it,” that’s why.
The argument the company makes is that it allows them to sell the device for cheaper upfront, which means that more people can afford to have one. They sell them for $400. But also fuck them, nobody ever died from HP disabling printers.
Also, if they genuinely wanted to make it more affordable up front in order to get the safety device in more hands, they could charge a chunk initially and then a regular payment plan for so many months. Not paying in perpetuity or we disable it.
It checks the service when booting up before a ride. After that it doesn’t connect to the internet. If you’ve gone past your grace period of 60 days it won’t boot up at all, and it will alert you that the device isn’t active.
Don’t get me wrong, I hate the idea of the subscription but it’s important to have accurate information. Did you even read the product page?
That information changes none of my issues; if you don’t see the plethora of potential implementation bugs involved, either you don’t code professionally or you shouldn’t be.
I code professionally, specifically I develop very resilient medical software. From a software perspective, as long as the developers are competent I have no issues with the device. There are so many other things you could take issue with when it comes to the vest, but I’m telling you software just isn’t one of them.
I’m sure the developers are competent, but the reason I care about the design decisions is the same reason the electric brakes on cars don’t interface with its infotainment system; the interface inherently creates opportunities for out of spec behaviour and even if the introduced risk is tiny, the consequence is so bad that it’s worth avoiding.
If you have to have an airbag be controlled by software (ideally the mechanism is physical, like a pull tab), it should be an isolated real time device with monitoring your accelerometer and triggering the airbag be it’s only jobs. If it’s also waiting to hear back from another device about whether your subscription ran out before it starts checking, the risk of failure also has to consider that triggering device.
It can be done perfectly, but it’s software so of course it has bugs.
Honestly the fact that it has code that says “under condition X, don’t save the user” is concerning in and of itself. I wouldn’t trust this thing in the first place.
First law of robotics:
Money up front.
Here’s a great vid on airbags for motorcycles
Fun fact the manual ones are better
Edit: He even mentions the one in the post about how it’s a bad idea.
That dude annoys me so much, but his content is usually pretty good. Great points on the different air bag systems.
I feel pretty much the same. I love what he’s doing. He’s doing a great job. But he is annoying.
Wow really? What do you find annoying about him?
I don’t know exactly. His delivery I guess. He seems like someone I would absolutely never want to hang out with. But his videos, the ones I’ve seen over the years, have had solid content.
Wild. I always thought he seemed fine. Pretty self-aware and just Canadian.
Personally it’s not like I hate him or anything I just find the delivery a bit grinding to listen to but overall the channel is solid and I still watch most of his videos. They’re always informative and interesting.
I’m guessing it’s the dry delivery of “bad” jokes don’t click with a lot of people, but yeah it just feels more self aware Canadian to me. 😅
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Here’s a great vid on airbags for motorcycles
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I was hoping that the future would be like Star Trek, a beautiful high tech paradise where we worked our problems out and live in a post-scarcity world. Instead we’re getting Deus Ex, minus the shades and trench coats.
Remember that the star trek era was preceded by a nuclear ww3, and the eugenics wars. We still seem to be on track.
How did we fix the climate crisis and the plastic crisis in Star Trek?
I bet it’s tech developed by environmental conservation labs in the not-defunct Soviet Union.
Well we’re do for the Bell Riots and Irish Reunification this year!
climate crisis
Nuclear winter in the wake of the Eugenics Wars. Cooled us right down. Even in Star Trek, our immediate future is… bleak.
Plastic crisis looks to be possible to fix with bacteria. How disruptive those bacteria end up being is another matter.
It is like Star Trek, but we’re the Ferengi.
Quiet, woman.
We’re Rom
That wouldn’t be a bad thing, he’s a pretty nice guy.
Also an engineering genius!
Came here to say this. Or at least the ferengi are in charge of marketing and product development.
Be the change you want to see in the dark.
This gets posted occasionally and while I agree, the subscription for an airbag is one of the dumbest things ever, it’s not the only way to buy the thing.
It’s available as a one-time purchase instead, which obviously is what everyone here would choose, but it’s a fairly high price, and their argument for offering a subscription model is that they want the price barrier for safety equipment to be lower. There are other ways to do it, but the option of a subscription is fine IMO as long as the one time purchase remains as well.
Thanks for the context but
I feel like price for the one time purchase is set deliberately high because they want people to actually pay for the subscription instead. If their goal really was to make their products more accessible, just allow people to pay in installments and take some recurring interest fees for the financing.
And, in any case, the product should work no matter whether I’m late with the monthly fee or not. That’s just bullshit.
Also, do you need a persistent internet connection at all times so it can check if you’re subscribed at any moment it may need to in case of a crash? In a fast-moving vehicle? What an awful idea.
Yeah, what happens with lag, does it deploy around your corpse or in the ambulance?
If I recall correctly, it checks the status in the background every so often. It’s not going to reach out for the status at the moment of impact.
It checks status when you switch it on before your ride, and warns you with LEDs if it can’t activate.
It won’t ever switch off during your ride unless it runs out of battery.
the option of a subscription is fine IMO
That is bullshit. If they want to lower the price by renting it out, they could perfectly well licencese local dealers to rent it out, who can go after the customer in the same way, like they could for people who rented vehicles and didnt pay/return them.
The subscription based model instead proves that the production costs cannot be that high, that in case of a run out subscription, they’d rather lose the product.
Also the development costs of the subscription and the technical equipment to validate subscriptions, including running the servers etc. are a significant cost factor, without which they could lower the price of the product.
Why would you want computerized airbags? I don’t trust the software to not have bugs
Uhhh… Every single airbag is computerized. There is always some software involved in the evaluation of the acceleration data.
And noone trusts the software to not have bugs. That’s why testing exists on many development levels.
Accelerometer -> Big acceleration -> software(is acceleration >threshold: toggle airbag) is a much easier and reliabel process than:
Accelerometer -> Big acceleration -> software(is there an internet connection? is the subscription verified? is acceleration > threshold: toggle airbag)
Yes. Which is why the latter is not happening.
I’m not defending the subscription model, but that check is very obviously not done during the crash, but during startup, when a couple of seconds delay is not fatal. And if it fails I assume the entire thing just turns off completely.
So you stop for gas in the middle of fucking nowhere, the vest doesn’t get an internet conenction for veryfying your subscription and you are fucked, even as a paying customer.
It still boils down to a complex and much easier failing system, that could deny you critical safety features. I mean this also adds an entirely new dimension of hackability. Someone could hack into the server for the subcription verification and deliberately mess it up, or depending how poorly it is coded, could even access the vests of customers during their ride and disable them.
The system to trigger the airbag should never ever have a remote connection of any sort.
Once it’s activated, it won’t turn off for any reason, except if you turn it off or it runs out of battery.
So you could turn it off by accident, or it runs out of battery, or you stay the night somewhere on a longer road trip and it fails to reactivate in the morning because lack of internet connection. The issue still stands that there is another layer of failure that can also deny the product to paying customers for infrastructure problems that are out of their control.
You gotta make sure you know what you’re criticizing before you criticize it. They give you two months to reactive your subscription, and even then if you happen to be on a ride when the subscription ends, it doesn’t deactivate the airbag. It won’t just stop working in the middle of nowhere because it doesn’t have a connection. The system to trigger the airbag is only connected to the system that checks the subscription in that when you turn the vest on pre-ride, the latter is what turns on the former. After you turn on the vest, it cannot deactivate the airbag until the vest is turned off and back on again.
Subscriptions are still absolutely shit, but you’re making assumptions about this product that aren’t true.
Shit sorry update 3900.12 that introduced buy now pay later at the checkout actually broke that logic. Customer service got reports that it actually does turn off that fail-safe, mostly from relatives of deceased and coroners.
Discussed in sprint meeting this morning and it was agreed the upgrade can’t be rolled back due to agreements with vendors so the bug remains in production. Will be fixed in an upcoming release tbd.
It’s even worse because if you have an issue with the activation, your airbag is useless even though you are a customer.
But a security device should not come with a subscription, period. If you want to make the barrier of entry lower, offer differed payments.
Uhhh… Every single airbag is computerized.
Uhhh… not motorcycle airbags. See the Helite Turtle 2 airbag.
It’s argue it still shouldn’t even be a “subscription”. A payment plan would be a simpler and more safety-conscious implementation. If the buyer fails to keep up with required payments, then you’re focused on collections, not disabling functionality.
The seller could even just not offer payment plans, because plenty of other third parties already specialize in personal loans. They’re just reinventing a stupider wheel.
Nooo don’t bring logic and reasoning here. I’ve got preconceived notions to feel smug about.
If you cannot conceive of why a subscription for a physical device that needs literally norhing extra to function is bad … you are a mindless consumer. Keep consuming, you brainless worm of a walking wallet. You’re the perfect customer.
We can only hope to achieve the level of radical free thinking as you Winston Smith.
What is important to remember is that subscription doesn’t save you money, it delays payment.
Subsceiptions do NOT make things cheaper, they only lower barrier to entry and then allow to drain you even for the cash you don’t have. Similar to how credits changed the world, but way more sinister.
Isn’t that illegal?
I’m pretty sure that “motorcycle airbag vest” is not considered a standard piece of safety equipment by law
If something is supposed to protect the user, it absolutely should be illegal to do this.
Honestly, it’s questionable how much this helps over typical motorcycle safety gear in the first place.
The airbag vests are good. They are worn by the big boys in the moto gp purely because they are so good. Leather saves your skin, pads save you bruises, and with these your soft tissue injuries to the neck and torso are almost mitigated. They are also helpful with joint and bone injuries, as they stiffen certain areas so that your limbs don’t get whiplashed if they grip the pavement when they should slide.
On the controlled surface of a racetrack, these are a godsend. Obviously on the street, nothing is going to save you from some of the hazards around, like vertical surfaces in the shape of mailboxes, street signs, or nearby cars, but overall they are still able to improve your chances.
Oh I didn’t notice that.
It certainly should.
The monthly subscription model leaves me feeling so very conflicted. On one hand, it’s a way to get an important piece of safety equipment for less money up front, which is good—there’s certainly cheaper airbag vests, but there’s more expensive ones, too.
No, no, there’s nothing conflicting here. If you need expensive safety equipment that you can’t afford up front there’s already a solution for that, it’s called financing. There is no upside to this, it’s just unethical, irresponsible, and dumb.
Imagine you are in an accident and the server go off and you get killed while paying for that?
What will be interesting is how a false negative plays out. A vest fails, someone dies yet the subscription is current: how does the lawsuit play out?
See, when a life-saving device can fail due to software bugs, our brains point to malicious negligence when it does fail. It’s no longer a badly packed parachute but a company whose billing department wants to kill poor people.
It’s a subscription service for an airbag vest. They’d rather have you die than not pay for a product you already purchased. I’d say that whether or not there’s a mechanical failure, the billing department does want to kill poor people.
Limited liability. Negotiate with the family of the victim, ideally don’t pay at all if you can get away with it, and move on. Product management and marketing had a great idea to increase user retention, more in the meeting at 11.
You know, if I’m going to spend my entire adult life in a cyberpunk dystopia, I should at least be able to get Kid Stealth legs.
Sure we’ll just have to remove those useless bits of flesh and bone you have at the moment and then you pay $23.84 per km travelled on your fantastic new stealth legs.
Boston Dynamics is cool and all, but I don’t want their legs.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
klim: do you have a subscription for that?
me: guess i’ll die 🤷♂️
More like kil’m, amirite?
Heyoooo
Next up on the capitalism shit train:
Pay us or we fucking kill your family
So what happens if you start your airbag in an area without cell reception (so it can’t verify your subscription)?
I have no idea how it’s designed, but it should put a credential on your phone which it can check via Bluetooth. That credential would presumably have an expiration date and the app should only need to validate it once when the status changes.
If we’re talking “should,” it should default to airbag active when it can’t verify that the subscription hasn’t been paid
It shouldn’t be checking anything during a ride. If it needs to be turned on at the start of the ride, it should do all the checks and give a green light or a red light (or some other clear indicator) before they start riding.
That way, the only way it doesn’t go off if someone wears it while ignoring the “system is not active for safety” warning.
Shouldn’t be a subscription in the first place, but hey, this is just a weird hypothetical.
I have to assume this is a joke because that is quite literally exactly what it does
Or better yet, it’s better to not require credentials to use a life saving device in the first place.
What would happen if you drop your phone on the road and don’t notice until you are beyond BT range?
Sounds like the credential life cycle would be equal to (or smaller than) the grace period: 1 month
I’d guess the airbag doesn’t go off.
deleted by creator
What annoys me about this is that it implicitly says that if you have more money you deserve to be safer.
Y’all trust the activation system?
It - meaning the activator, no comment on subscription - seems par for the course.
Hard to argue it couldn’t be at least marginally safer if remote disabling were impossible, though wonder if that’d be implemented for recall purposes as perhaps it is on modern vehicles? (Anybody know?)
So if I’m reading this right, you buy the air vest, and then either buy or rent a gizmo that tells it when to inflate
I thought buy air vest + buy or pay [in]finite installments (lease, rent, subscribe) for the right & ability to use the vest. Perhaps same as what you said, just semantics.
Someone will buy this thing.
Someone will hack this thing.
And this someone will make it openI would be surprised if you couldn’t just bypass the brain box and wire it to be always on. The heated seat subscription worked the same way.
I don’t know what’s more stupid. Heated seat subscription creators. Or the morons that actually bought such a car and then proceeded to invest more time / money bypassing it.
If you could get the car with all the bells and whistles present but disabled and it was a loss leader for the company, I would argue that it’s a very ethical and socially valuable thing to do (buy the car and bypass the drm I mean). Not only do the dummies get hit where it hurts, you get some bonuses and incentivize other people to punish the dummies.
Love the idea. Probably best to di it once the warranty is over or if you buy second hand though, as I suspect when you buy the heated seat car you have to sign an EULA like Apple products and agree not to tamper with the components or lose warranty and rights.
Quite simply, subscriptions for products have never existed in the history of humanity and shouldn’t exist. You either sell me something or you rent it. If you can afford to give hardware to me for free, as long as it is disabled, someone is taking the piss.
I think the point they’re trying to make is that you shouldn’t support a company or product like this, period.
I also get your point though. I mean, I wouldn’t have bought Skyrim if the modding community wasn’t a thing lol.
I think the point they’re trying to make is that you shouldn’t support a company or product like this, period
As Gaben has said before:
“We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem,”
If the car is easy enough to hack, why wouldn’t people buy the ‘base model’ and get all of the bells and wistles for next to nothing? You would download a car, amirite?
