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The product was for phones that had not been paid off-- if you get a phone on a 2 year contract, you dont "own" the phone until it is paid off
Not usually the case under UK law at any rate.
The author blames this on management pressure and deadline acceleration but it seems to me that they made an incredibly obvious and negligent mistake and is trying to pass the buck.
If you haven't killed some production environment in your career, can you really call yourself a programmer? I kid of course, but I've been there, done that. It's lessons learned the hard way and I became a better developer because of it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you get a phone on contract, you don't actually own it till you pay it off, and the company is entitled to lock it. No. You don't turn off somebody's phone while they're using it. You have no idea what they could be doing. Someone could be literally dying in front of your locked out consumer who is now unable to call for help. This is vital infrastructure and you're denying them access. If somebody dies because…
1) I highly doubt that the app disables emergency calling. 2) Some (rental, probably also lease) vehicles actually do have disablers. They prevent the vehicle from being started, not stop them in the middle of the road. 3) The police don't repo a thing. That's a civil matter and generally outsourced to the lowest bidder with a tow truck. By the way, if someone dies because of it, the only person whose conscience it i…
>By the way, if someone dies because of it, the only person whose conscience it is on is the person who bought a phone they couldn't afford and then didn't pay for it. Just like if someone died because the car got repo'd and they couldn't drive to a hospital.
This is some fucked up reasoning. People run into financial difficulty for various reasons, sometimes out of their control. But even for the serial deadbeats who don't care about financial responsibility saying "yeah, it's fine that somebody or their loved one died because it's their fault"? I can't imagine thinking like that.
kinda unrelated but can someone explain to me how this one korean company has access to infrastructure to lock any phone anywhere in the the world? am I misreading something?
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Why do you assume the users own the phones? There are plenty of business models where the company owns the phones and the user gets to use it by paying a monthly fee. One of the services being provided may well be the use of the phone itself.
Because (pardon my language) fuck that business model, that's why. It's reprehensible on a number of different levels, and specific aspects of that have been made illegal, but companies keep trying to bring back the exploitation. Just because there's a business model doesn't mean that we have to support it, or help it be implemented. We can shame our fellow developers choosing to enable scams and write malware/comput…
There's litterally lines at the atm 2 times a month, pay day. The rest of the time people are day to daying without cash in their pocket.
If you haven't killed some production environment in your career, can you really call yourself a programmer? I kid of course, but I've been there, done that. It's lessons learned the hard way and I became a better developer because of it.
I once ran a query on a live production web site thinking I was doing a SELECT but somehow ran an UPDATE which set all the millions of users' gender to 'M', regardless of their selection. Restoring from backups would have been a nightmare. And telling my supervisor would have been a nightmare. So I used everyone's selected title (Mr, Ms, Mrs etc) to reset their gender setting, and then put the keyboard down and went…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) I highly doubt that the app disables emergency calling. 2) Some (rental, probably also lease) vehicles actually do have disablers. They prevent the vehicle from being started, not stop them in the middle of the road. 3) The police don't repo a thing. That's a civil matter and generally outsourced to the lowest bidder with a tow truck. By the way, if someone dies because of it, the only person whose conscience it i…
1) You don't know that. And there may be emergency situations where you're on the phone with someone other than from the emergency number. 2) How rental cars do it doesn't seem to have anything to do with this. >By the way, if someone dies because of it, the only person whose conscience it is on is the person who bought a phone they couldn't afford and then didn't pay for it. Just like if someone died because the car…
Perhaps you meant to reply to the person I was replying to, rather than me, with your "how rental cars do it doesn't seem to have anything to do with it"? Because the person I was replying to said that repossessors wouldn't disable a car, which is not true.
> This is some fucked up reasoning. People run into financial difficulty for various reasons, sometimes out of their control. But even for the serial deadbeats who don't care about financial responsibility saying "yeah, it's fine that somebody or their loved one died because it's their fault"? I can't imagine thinking like that.
Saying "yeah, someone else SHOULD pay for their non-necessity"? I can't imagine thinking like that.
Just because someone runs into financial difficulty doesn't mean they can just stop paying for things. Nor does it mean that anyone else has an obligation to provide them with something for free. Particularly when that something is a luxury. Heck, if they're so short on money they could've sold their expensive Samsung phone and replaced it with a cheap one.
And again, I highly doubt that any of this is even a possibility. And you can say I "don't know" that it doesn't disable emergency calling (never said I did), but the fact of the matter is, it's virtually impossible to disable emergency calling on any phone, thanks to both regulation and technical standards.
People presumably bought a phone, and because of some nonsense "business" plan, there is a recurring charge they are still liable for, and the manufacturer can arbitrarily lock and disable the phone?
I know there are a bunch of "explainers" here on HN, happy to jump in and say that the phones were subsidised, consumers wouldn't get access to the phones if not for this scheme, and so on. But please stop that and take a step back. We've perverted the traditional expectation of any commercial transaction to own the item to instead be a permanent debt for regular consumers.
You will own nothing, and you will be happy -- indeed.
kinda unrelated but can someone explain to me how this one korean company has access to infrastructure to lock any phone anywhere in the the world? am I misreading something?