It reportedly checks subscription upon putting the vest on and supposedly won’t turn off mid ride.
this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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What annoys me about this is that it implicitly says that if you have more money you deserve to be safer.
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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.
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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.
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klim: do you have a subscription for that?
me: guess i'll die 🤷♂️
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.
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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
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How often does it check... If you're out in the middle of nowhere and it can't get a wifi signal is it going to let you die?
This is 100% speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised if it checks the length of the subscription when connected to a network, then tracks that with a built in clock. There's also incentive to frequently connect it to a network since the company constantly "updates the algorithm" it uses to detect crashes and deploy.
I suspect it would stop working once you hit the end of whatever period it knows you're "paid up" for.
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?)
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Someone will buy this thing.
Someone will hack this thing.
And this someone will make it open
I 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.
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How about a smoke alarm subscription? Or even better, handbrake subscription!
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