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Comment by JacobJans | Hacker News Reader

> If a society operated on the types of practices that are considered "appropriate" in computing, we'd be liable to label them as savages.

There are many industries with similar, parallel, practices that are directly at odds with serving the "user." For example, groceries. A typical grocery store presents a selection of products in a grocery aisle. This presentation is not optimized to give the shopper the best experience, lowest prices, or highest quality products.

The products, and product displays, are optimized to extract the most profit from the shopper, often resulting in inferior products. Grocery stores also collect and analyze reams of data about individual shoppers -- again, not for the purpose of providing better value for the shoppers, but for extracting maximum profit from them. Want that data back? Good luck!

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Your sugar doesn't try to stop you from baking a cake with flour from a different grocery store.

To be fair, if there's a recipe on the sugar packet for a cake, it is very likely to say 'use $sugar_company flour for best results'.

"To be fair"? How does that qualifier change anything? The consumer can still make choices unfettered about using $brand of their choice when baking a cake. Unfettered, operative word here.

A better comparison would be walking to the checkout line with $brand_A sugar and watching the clerk put down $brand_B and start the motions of scanning the barcode forcing you to make the active move of stopping them to say "no, I know what brand I picked out, get out of my way and let me buy $brand_A"

Simply suggesting a what works best on the side of a box can't reasonably be compared to actively halting an operation deliberately initiated by the user.

Your razor does try to stop you from using a blade from a different manufacturer, and your printer tries to stop you from using ink cartridges from a different manufacturer, and your car will often strongly discourage you from getting it serviced by anyone other than an authorized dealer.

> Your razor does try to stop you from using a blade from a different manufacturer

Not very successfully.

> your printer tries to stop you from using ink cartridges from a different manufacturer

I can inject ink into the port, for cheap.

> your car will often strongly discourage you from getting it serviced by anyone other than an authorized dealer.

Only the top-range cars, for rich and upper-middle-class people, who have the ability to buy different but won't because it's a silly status symbol.

It really pisses me off that they use cryptography to make replacing keys so expensive.

My wife lost her purse with (it turns out) the master key to my minivan. The minivan is maybe worth $4k. (I'd have to fix it before I could sell it.) Getting the key replaced is $750. Because that is what Toyota wants to charge and nobody else can do it.

If I had an older car, it would be a cheap visit to the local Home Depot to duplicate the remaining key.

I haven't replaced the key. I don't value the threat model that they theoretically protect me from. I do value the convenience of being able to replace the key. But it isn't worth $750 to me. Instead that is just one of several things that are on my list of "replace if X happens".

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