It's not a feature, it's a bug

May 24, 2008 4:52 PM

It's not a feature, it's a bug or why do they impair my equipment when not asked to?

We have all read about Microsoft's backdoor key. Fortunately, I use a Mac but Steve Jobs, out of the goodness of his heart, has hampered my Mac by only allowing me to play DVDs from one region and not others. As far as I can determine, neither of these "features" was mandated by the authorities.

Can the Hivemind come up with other electronic devices/services where the manufacturer/service provider a) deliberately impaired the functioning, even though not required to do so by law; b) where this offered no benefit to the manufacturer/service provider; c) where the consumer either did not like this or, had s/he known of its existence, would not have liked this?

I am excluding such examples as P2P throttling by ISPs which, nominally, reduce the ISP's traffic and therefore benefit the ISP and where the benefits might be for good reasons, such as safety or environmental reasons, even if not mandated.

I am not interested in moral discussions about the Microsoft/Mac decisions nor the fact that there is some doubt about what Microsoft actually does.

posted by TheRaven to computers & internet (28 comments total)

DVD region locks are specified by the consortium that holds the patents on DVD decoding technology. If you want to support DVD playback you have to put in region locks. Otherwise you don't get a license to use the patent. Presumably DVD players will all be region free when the patents expire in another 10 year or whenever.

Not every restriction is imposed by governments - patent holders have rights too.
posted by GuyZero at 5:01 PM on May 24, 2008

We have all read about Microsoft's backdoor key.

Have we? I don't think there has been any confirmation that COFFEE can do anything that you can't do with other tools. Microsoft specifically denies that it uses backdoors to do its thing.

As far as I can determine, neither of these "features" was mandated by the authorities.

The DVD specification allegedly requires that DVD players honor the region restrictions. So it may have been mandated in law by contract rather than statute.
posted by grouse at 5:03 PM on May 24, 2008

I think there's a bad assumption in the guts of your question. I don't think Jobs would have imposed region-restricted playback on his customer base without a solid commercial reason for doing so; hence, this action fails your condition (b). The solid commercial reason in this case is that manufacturing a device that plays back DVDs involves licensing intellectual property from a whole bunch of companies, and buried somewhere in that tangled nest of licences is a requirement to support region coding.
posted by flabdablet at 5:17 PM on May 24, 2008

Sony's Rootkits on their CDs. Put the CD in your system, bonus rootkit installed for no extra cost.
posted by filmgeek at 5:34 PM on May 24, 2008

"... Can the Hivemind come up with other electronic devices/services where the manufacturer/service provider a) deliberately impaired the functioning, even though not required to do so by law; b) where this offered no benefit to the manufacturer/service provider; c) where the consumer either did not like this or, had s/he known of its existence, would not have liked this? ..."

Despite the reference in this linked page to "FCC limitations" (there weren't any direct FCC limits on throughput) 56K modems in the U.S. were an example of a device that meets your description.
posted by paulsc at 5:35 PM on May 24, 2008

A multi-national computer company I used to work for sold hard drives with capacity n megabytes and 2*n megabytes. This was long enough ago that drive capacity was measured in megabytes. The drives were exactly the same except for a jumper setting and, of course, the price the customer paid.
posted by rdr at 5:54 PM on May 24, 2008

Well, any sort of DRM, would, I imagine qualify. Also, all locked cellphones
posted by delmoi at 5:56 PM on May 24, 2008

The correct answer is that there is that there is no answer.

The only (sane) reason for a business to cripple its product is because it confers some other benefit. Even where that reason might not be immediately apparent to outsiders, bet that (at least in the company's opinion) there was a very good reason to limit the product.
posted by toomuchpete at 6:24 PM on May 24, 2008

ipods and DRM obviously.

With regards to (b), do you consider that cut-down firmware applies? (eg consumer electronics like cameras, recorders, phones, CPUs, etc, where a low-end version is made by taking an existing product and disabling features of that product, so that it can be sold at a normal mark-up without cutting into the market for the non-crippled device, which is the same thing but sold at a premium mark-up. Thus people who can't afford the premium can buy the crippled device, increasing overall revenue, but the people who want it non-crippled still have to pay top dollar. On an item to item basis it works with (b), but as an overall business strategy, in the big picture the company is definitely getting something out of doing this.
posted by -harlequin- at 7:06 PM on May 24, 2008

The DVD is most likely region-limited by the firmware, not the operating system. Firmware is the software that is burned into the logic chips that control the DVD player. As GuyZero said, this is mandated by the consortium of DVD producers and is part of the condition for licensing the patent to decode DVDs. So it is nothing at all to do with the Apple OS - it is a hardware/firmware standard. For older DVD drives, you can override the region selection, but for newer ones, it is more closely integrated into the hardware and you can't override it with software.
A case where the manufacturer deliberately impaired the functioning is the range of Intel 486 microprocessors. Different models of microprocessor were sold with or without a math sub-processor on the chip, which permitted graphics and math-intensive programs to run much faster. I heard that the microprocessors were identical, but the ones "without" the math sub-processor had that function disabled. In that case, I believe that Intel actually had to do more work to make the cheaper model: they had to sever a connection to the math sub-processor.
posted by Susurration at 7:50 PM on May 24, 2008

A multi-national computer company I used to work for sold hard drives with capacity n megabytes and 2*n megabytes.

Allegedly IBM mainframes used to be sold like this. When you upgraded a technician came out and removed a board and *poof* you had the next model up.

per toomuchpete, the benefit was the IBM had one assembly line for an entire range of products. The alternative would have been only selling the most expensive model so the customer did get a benefit - the availability of a lower priced computer.
posted by GuyZero at 7:54 PM on May 24, 2008

Theres tons of products. A few that come to mind are...

Apple iBooks G4's, monitor spanning was deliberately disabled.
OS X - used to have to install patchburn to burn CDs/DVDs on non Apple approved hardware.
BMW engines detuned for marketing purposes. (eg. the 2005 330i and 325i have the same engine)
posted by wongcorgi at 8:15 PM on May 24, 2008

Apple iBooks G4's, monitor spanning was deliberately disabled.

To be fair, there are also a lot of reports that if you run an iBook with spanning hacked in, and with the laptop closed, it'll overheat. But yeah, it's a pretty bad case of crippling tech for an upsell, and I'm glad they've discontinued the practice on the Macbooks.

Also re: Apple, the iPod's DRM is exactly the same situation as its DVD player - the record labels insisted on DRM if Apple wanted to sell music, so the presence of DRM isn't Apple choosing to cripple your hardware - just agreeing to the RIAA's conditions. The iPod still plays non-DRM'd stuff just fine.
posted by Tomorrowful at 8:32 PM on May 24, 2008

BMW engines detuned for marketing purposes

Even that fails (b), since there's a solid commercial reason for doing that: it persuades some people to pay far more for the same engine.
posted by flabdablet at 8:52 PM on May 24, 2008

Tomorrowful: "The iPod still plays non-DRM'd stuff just fine."

No, ipods are also crippled and designed to restrict user options for even DRM-free MP3's that the user owns. It's not just the DRMed files you buy through apple that have restrictions - they just have more restrictions.
posted by -harlequin- at 8:57 PM on May 24, 2008

Although region encoding was required by the DVD people, computers are allowed to shift regions -- after all, people do move countries.

What Apple (and of course other companies) did was, they restricted the total number of region changes. I think it's five, for Macs? That seems pretty low to a lot of people, and that low number wasn't specifically requested by the DVD authorities.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 10:52 PM on May 24, 2008

The five region changes thing is built into the stock firmware for every commodity DVD drive on the market, as far as I know. It's not an Apple thing.
posted by flabdablet at 11:06 PM on May 24, 2008

that low number wasn't specifically requested by the DVD authorities.

Then why does it work that way on every IBM, HP and Apple I've ever used?

Also: skim milk has less than half the calories of whole milk BUT IT COMES FROM THE SAME COW.

Macrovision was essentially analog DRM and certainly consumers didn't like it but the alternative was having VCR manufacturers sued into non-existence by the MPAA.

One thing that sort of meets your criteria is DC power adapters - why so many different plug sizes? Why so many voltages when you could convert 9V or 12V DC into anything with a couple of resistors? Why is there a standard for everything except DC power connectors?
posted by GuyZero at 12:12 AM on May 25, 2008

No, ipods are also crippled and designed to restrict user options for even DRM-free MP3's that the user owns. It's not just the DRMed files you buy through apple that have restrictions - they just have more restrictions.

I've had an iPod of some description since the first-gen 5gig model was released. I've yet to encounter a valid mp3 file that wouldn't play on an iPod.

Back to the original question, the 'Grab' utility, for capturing images on the screen, won't work whilst DVD player is running. It's deliberately hobbled so that if you try you get a message: 'Screen grabs are unavailable during DVD playback. Please quit DVD player first.'
posted by veedubya at 4:29 AM on May 25, 2008

No, ipods are also crippled and designed to restrict user options for even DRM-free MP3's that the user owns.

Details? What restrictions does Apple place on iPod playback of mp3 files?
posted by Thorzdad at 4:35 AM on May 25, 2008

To be fair, the FCC didn't have a rule saying "modems can only be 53K" but they did have a rule governing power output, which was effectively the same thing.
posted by gjc at 4:55 AM on May 25, 2008

But I don't think any company would knowingly do something that fulfills your three conditions. Plenty of crippling going on, but there is always going to be some stated or imagined benefit.
posted by gjc at 5:00 AM on May 25, 2008

Details? What restrictions does Apple place on iPod playback of mp3 files?

Even basic functions like moving your mp3 files around - from the ipod to another computer for example. The ipod needed to be hacked (via either 3rd party replacement gatekeeper software, or full-on firmware replacement) before even this most trivial function of uncrippled mp3 players could be done. It makes no difference if you created and own the mp3 file, it still attempts to limit your behaviour.
posted by -harlequin- at 8:10 AM on May 25, 2008

b) where this offered no benefit to the manufacturer/service provider
Not one of the answers offered so far meets this criteria. Manufacturers do things, in general, for reasons that benefit them. I can't think of a single example of somebody "crippling" a product in a way that didn't benefit them in some kind.
posted by bonaldi at 10:34 AM on May 25, 2008

from the ipod to another computer for example
Sorry, been doing that with iTunes since I got my first iPod. Maybe what's limiting you is your knowledge of the product.
posted by forrest at 7:45 PM on May 25, 2008

Forrest: Pretending there are no restrictions on doing this doesn't make it so. We both know there are some circumstances in which it deigns to allow you - the problem is that those circumstances are (intentionally) restricted, as you well know. The difference is clear as day when compared to uncrippled media players. You are being disingenuous.
posted by -harlequin- at 2:27 PM on May 26, 2008

"We both know there are some circumstances in which it deigns to allow you - the problem is that those circumstances are (intentionally) restricted, as you well know."

I'm not sure what you do or don't know about forrest's knowledge here, but it would be helpful to the discussion if you would elaborate instead of winking and nodding and making insinuations. What circumstances are there in which a non-DRMed MP3 cannot be removed from the iPod?
posted by toomuchpete at 4:13 PM on May 26, 2008

As far as I'm aware, the only designed-in way to get playable music onto an iPod is to use iTunes. iTunes requires a 1:1 association between a given iPod and the music library on a single PC. Making such an association wipes out any music that may previously have been loaded on the iPod, regardless of whether such music is DRMed or not.

This is in stark contrast to generic MP3 players, which expose a filesystem when connected to a computer and can play any MP3 file you copy to that filesystem by any means.

My knowledge of the product certainly is limited, because I would never choose to own such a crippled piece of engineering myself. However, I've been annoyed by this issue on many occasions when working with customer iPods whose associated iTunes PC library has died for whatever reason. I generally have to resort to something like yamiPod to get the job done. If you know of a way to move a song off an iPod to an arbitrary computer using nothing but iTunes and the stock iPod firmware, by all means do share it.

That said: there is certainly a commercial advantage to Apple in restricting (or at least appearing to restrict) its product in this way. It's unlikely that the iTunes music store could have got a start without buy-in from the music publishing industry, and it's unlikely that such buy-in would have occurred if the iPod was widely understood to be easy to use as a music redistribution mechanism.
posted by flabdablet at 7:01 PM on May 26, 2008