Unsustainable and short-lived goods

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This is the complement of the BifL (buy it for life) communites. Here we call out products (tech and non-tech) that:

are designed to fail early
feature anti-repair tactics (booby traps, self-destruction mechanisms, circuit boards submerged in silicon or plastic, denied documentation access)
are designed to make you needlessly dependant on an unsustainable proprietary service (typically in the cloud), which risks:
① remote kill switches where a supplier pulls the plug on singled-out individuals (e.g. Amazon sabotaging service to your thermostat, doorbell, vaccuum, etc whenever you have a billing dispute),
② the company disappearing, or ③ the company deciding to decommission a server and boot everyone who depends on it.

Related communities:

!buyitforlife@slrpnk.net - Buy stuff that lasts a long time, if you must buy something
!buyitforlife@discuss.tchncs.de - Buy stuff that lasts a long time, if you must buy something
!fixing@slrpnk.net - fix it, don’t replace it
!fixit@disflux.org
!righttorepair@midwest.social - exercise your right to fix stuff
!right2repair@discuss.tchncs.de - exercise your right to fix stuff
!sustainabletech@lemmy.sdf.org - sustainable technology
!permacomputing@lemmy.sdf.org - To discuss computing that’s not resource intensive
!permacomputing@slrpnk.net - To discuss computing that’s not resource intensive
!zerowaste@slrpnk.net - To discuss waste avoidance
!anticonsumption@sopuli.xyz
!asshole_crappy_design@slrpnk.net
!crappydesign@discuss.tchncs.de
!forced_obsolescence@slrpnk.net

founded 2 weeks ago

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activistPnk@slrpnk.net

Sony Ericsson / Xperia (proprietary s/w “phones home”… and nobody home; refuses to operate) (slrpnk.net)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by activistPnk@slrpnk.net to c/unsustainable_products@slrpnk.net

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Smartphones are a shit-show so I bought some old Sony Ericsson feature phones from a flea market, expecting Gammu¹ to work as reported. It worked on one phone but not others (despite all of them reportedly working with Gammu).

Some msgs arrived and got trapped on the phone, which happened to have a dysfunctional screen. And gammu failed to access the phone (though it works on some phones). So I needed to run Sony’s proprietary garbage (“PC Companion”) on a Windows machine to get the msgs.

Sony’s PC Companion is designed to phone-home. The software launches but immediately goes to the cloud to check for updates so it can update itself. So obviously offline people are inherently fucked -- they can never sync their desktop and phone without the cloud.

But worse: Sony has taken down their server. Thus rendering all Sony phone syncing software installations useless. This thread is to document the big “Fuck you” from Sony to their customers.

¹ Gammu is free software syncs to old feature phones. You can send and receive SMS using the commandline this way.

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