To unlock drink verification can (2013) | Hacker News Reader

To unlock drink verification can (2013)

gamefaqs.gamespot.com

222 pointscm_silva99 comments

I suppose the significance is that this is the 10-year anniversary (to the month) of this dystopian meme. While we fortunately haven't gotten to that point of corporate enslavement, it does feel like society has shifted increasingly in that direction since 2013.

I literally just saw a BMW advertisement yesterday that says it comes with 8 years of adaptive cruise control/driver assist, which then disables itself after the timer runs out (presumably unless you pay to license it again).

For a while now, the KTM motorcycle company has been selling bikes with a Demo Mode.

For the first 1,500 km, you get access to all of the electronic features of your new bike; then they get disabled and you have to pay to re-enable them.

https://www.revzilla.com/common-tread/ktm-demo-mode

The good news is that no BMW is going to run for 8 years

Even if it does, whoever buys a BMW probably won't keep it for 8 years anyway.

my K75 is older than me!

Or they'll wish they didn't when they encounter a basic repair part that costs $3300

Toyota was trying to jump onto the bandwagon too.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/43329/toyota-made-its-key-fob-...

https://www.thedrive.com/tech/43636/toyota-reviewing-key-fob...

That said GM is dropping Android Auto and Apple Carplay from it's 2024 EVs, I assume to sell their own services. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/03/gm-confirms-its-droppin...

Klim also sells a motorcycle airbag vest that you can optionally purchase as a subscription rather then a one time purchase: https://www.vice.com/en/article/93yyyd/this-motorcycle-airba...

Ford's Commercial Division was talking about some 400,000 customers on it's subscription services though I'm not sure what those look like.

Stellantis hasn't announced anything concrete yet but said it's expecting fairly large profits from it's software division. https://www.carscoops.com/2022/03/stellantis-targets-full-ex...

Like it or not, this is the trend the majority of the car world is going.

> That said GM is dropping Android Auto and Apple Carplay from it's 2024 EVs, I assume to sell their own services.

They think they’re going to tap into a lucrative market, but really they’re just selling trash at that point.

I think I am in a minority group of 1 for thinking that features that are payable extras are a good thing, actually.

I guess people who don't like it see it as losing features, and talk about _owning_ their vehicle, where I see it as the ability to fine-tune the cost of a vehicle depending on what features you do or do not want to license. With any luck, competition should end up giving a market price to each of these features, and you can just pay market price for what you want/need. In addition, the car should be easier to re-sell, as any options you cheaped out on, a secondary buyer can pay for if they want them.

Just to be clear, these features such as heated seats are already in your vehicle.

You are just being charged monthly.. for hardware you already bought.

"Car feature piracy" will be an interesting new world I suppose...

Sure, but this is a pretty well-established model for computers; if it's more economical for the company to install the hardware on every model, but only charge consumers who want to utilize it a premium, then I don't see the problem. Price competition should keep the market price for any feature reasonable.

Can you give some examples of computer hardware that are paywall locked?

I don’t like the idea, but CPUs have long been an example (fused at the factory to disable cores, for example).

Often times though, the cores are fused because they are malfunctioning. If the option is between that and just getting rid of the CPU, I'd rather they do that.

Of the to of my head:

* Intel xeon processors have software defined feature sets that are unlocked by a license.

* Nvidia low hash rate GPUs

* Nvidia vGPU on consumer GPUs (there are hacks to enable it)

* hardware video / audio encoders in mobile processors that require licensing to use.

* Sony cameras have licenses that allow you to unlock extra features

* Cisco do this all the time with their router HW.

Features that are locked off permanently are less scummy. It's a bad way of emulating different production lines, but at least it doesn't let them charge ongoing rent.

If I am not mistaken sometimes this is due to yield rates in chip manufacturing. Iirc there were 3 core pentiums at some point that were basically faulty 4 core chips where one core did not pass QC.

This is extremely common on CPUs and GPUs. gx104 from Nvidia was famously identical to gx100 with cache, cores fused out, probably because they were defective. It's a good way to increase yield for monolithic dies.

It's heavily implemented in Cisco and juniper routers for serious ISP applications. In addition to yearly paid support contracts for operating system updates.

TBF though it seems like large companies love paying through the nose for support contracts so managers can point fingers when things go wrong.

Car feature piracy is already a thing. You can unlock all sorts of things over the OBD2 port.

Even then, car manufacturers are notoriously bad at software, so probably won't be too difficult to pirate any feature.

How is there going to be any competition or market price for "key to unlock BMW seat warmers". Unless you mean among the mechanics that will jailbreak your car and activate that feature.

There’s going to be buying cars where the seat warmer is a different price

This seems less like BMW offering the customer flexibility in pricing and more like BMW trying to find a way to extract cash from the used car market.

The option is they sell you the same car without the hardware that the second-market buyer doesn’t want, and then it’s harder to resell

I don't think any used car buyer will install additional feature in a car. Maybe a new car radio, but even that has become difficult. In our 2nd gen Berlingo the radio is connected to the multimedia "lever" and the digital dashboard ... the aftermarket radio that worked fine in the previous car does not even use the same connectors :-/

IMO the whole purpose of aftermarket radio was going to be multi-cd players, mp3 cd players, or an aux port to connect your own player, but last I went car shopping everything I saw had Android/iPhone bluetooth support that included audio and google maps/waze good enough that I can't imagine anyone wanting to replace it.

Ha ha ha, "market price". As if market forces don't simultaneously collude on prices while blowing smoke up the ass of its customers. Everyone knows that inflated "market price" is the result of a lifetime of commercial brainwashing done on buyers. There will never be a fair "market price" as long as everyone keeps raising their prices because reasons.

I don’t think there’s a convincing argument that car manufacturers are current running a price cartel, sorry

Why not? Your floor is the base cost of the BOM. Since they absolutely and pathetically have to prioritize shareholder value there is strong impetus to drive prices up or extract additional value some other way. Remember if you're not showing cancerous levels of growth you are dying, if not worthless!

The only time prices ever come down is when one tries to undercut the other, or they feel they can make more money by lowering them. This rarely happens in any permanent or consistent fashion, barring exceptional circumstances or a collapse in demand.

Add in inflationary pressure, and exec's pathetic desire to be cool and copy what their competitors are doing (who cares why? AcmeCo has it, we need to have it to!!!) and you don't even need a price cartel because everyone is making the same sad little moves independently.

The conspiracy aspect is absolutely a red herring. Nobody is that smart, thankfully. This is all supposedly rational actors acting in supposedly rational self-interest. AKA "Market forces"

> Your floor is the base cost of the BOM

Plus R&D, licensing and other vital expenses.

Which are all somewhat nebulous and open to interpretation.

I disagree. This is only about value extraction.

Let's walk down this slippery slope for a bit.

It's 8am, your alarm clock doesn't wake you up. You've run out of alarm credits again. They're cheap, but you have to refill them every month because the refill site wants to show you ads first.

You wake up late at 9:15, you're glad for the extra rest, but you won't make as much money today because you will get in late. On the other hand, you avoided the worst of the surge pricing for your shower.

You're finally ready to leave. You order your autonomous taxi and are given a choice of which navigation engine to use. You don't pay for UberPremium, so it's an extra $5 to unlock the Waze Ultra traffic avoidance system for the ride. Yesterday you chanced it with the free nav, and got stuck in traffic for an extra hour.

On the ride you pull out your laptop and connect to the in-car wifi. Within a couple minutes your free DNS requests are used up. You can either watch an ad to continue, or buy more dnscredits. It's only $5 for a thousand more credits, that should last you through Thursday.

In this example the alarm clock was free, the taxi was cheaper if you didn’t care how fast you got there, and yes, most people pay a subscription for mobile data already

Things that are not free.

- My time. - My cognitive load.

The above sounds like a nightmare to me, but you do you.

Ha! Strong Libertarian Police Department [1] vibes.

Ironically, the New Yorker website has an illegal-in-the-EU cookies modal, then a delay and a manufactured-urgency "flash sale!" pop-up that turns into a "you're on your last article" banner.

[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...

You’re not fine tuning the cost. Your paying full price and a reoccurring monthly price. That full price will never go down. It won’t be less expensive than last year’s new car without a subscription model.

This is a suckers game. There are zero upsides to the consumer.

All those features significantly increase repair costs because of the parts and calibration required. Should I have to incur those costs so the manufacturer can extract value from a second owner?

I promise the car will be harder to resell once the warranty runs out. No one wants an old car that’s super expensive to repair, especially if they’re paying to repair things related to features they can’t even use.

yeah, but the extra features don't cost extra money for the manufacturer. For example, BMW sells a subscription for heated seats. But... EVERY BMW has the hardwere in place, seat heaters and everything installed on the car, even if you don't have the subscription. it's not some cost savings passed on to you, it's cheaper for them to put seat heaters in every car!!! They're just going to charge you more to unlock it. Hence, subscription services are not value added, they are value extracted, and understanding that difference is what drives the outrage here.

It’s cheapest for them to not put it in any car though, which is what makes it a value-add

It’s a little worrying that your anti-lock brake subscription might be cancelled due to credit card fraud, but what can you do? That’s I always prepay my DocWagon account.

If it's relying on something like detailed maps or something that need to be updated I could understand that; it costs money to rescan and keep that data up to date. If it's just the basic vision/radar adaptive cruise that's terrible like their heated seats.

I bet it's the worse of those two things, knowing BMW.

To provide some historical context for this meme, the Xbox One had recently been unveiled and at the time was going to have a mandatory Kinect. It was rumored that the camera would be un-disableable and on at all times.

Pretty sure it was "say McDonald's to end commercial" from https://patents.google.com/patent/US8246454B2/en

I remember them being both around the same time. Was looking like we were on the verge of some absurd tech dystopia. Which was partially true, but it wasn't as weird as always on kinect and the mcdonalds patent.

The McDonalds one ended up happening, just as variants of "retweet for a 10% discount".

The Kinect Azure is pretty badass. I see why they would say that and it is very funny. I work in computer vision and NUI R&D and it's really hard to understate the accomplishment that is Kniect. I get why most people don't want to play dance games and don't like the machine looking at them but it is REALLY hard to package up solid solutions for the problem the Kinect solves and the Azure and surprisingly it's cross platform SDK are IMO one of the most beautiful tools every produced by humans.

/i need one to record myself a la matrix https://vimeo.com/58286717

https://github.com/Rezmason/matrix/

Then you'll love this project. The Holographic demo supports the Looking Glass display and I'm pretty sure natively supports the Kinect Azure but also works with a webcam.

That is great. Now I need to buy a 65" Looking Glass display just to play this all day.

I have been trying to hook a client on a useful demo to get someone who is not me to spring for that big display. Lol. The portrait is like $300 though and it looks good on that.

The "User attempting to steal online gameplay" bit came from Cliff Blezinski et al saying that splitscreen multiplayer and co-op was a mistake, because half the people who played didn't pay for the game. In the past ten years we have seen local multiplayer evaporate.

EDIT: The Kinnect had a microphone in it too

> In the past ten years we have seen local multiplayer evaporate.

Split screen multiplayer evaporated for many reasons. Besides business it's also technology.

I'm not sure you'll find a single indie split screen multiplayer game that uses a modern, queued graphics pipeline (Unity HDRP or Unreal 4+). Even among big commercial games, Fortnite notably supports 2 player split screen, but Rocket League, Borderlands and Gears of War are all Unreal 3 I think.

It takes two was GOTY.

I think it’s more that split screen is almost exclusively the domain of ‘party’ games these days.

Me and my son love couch co-op games, but yeah, doing split-screen can be hard to get right, especially around text and UI elements.

And then they got burned by Sony at E3 and the whole sharing policies got rewritten.

Local multiplayer is back thanks to Steam and their "Remote Play Together" feature. Remote players connect to the hosts screen share. It is excellent. No extra licenses required.

I believe this to be at least a screenshot of the original version: <https://imgur.com/dgGvgKF>

Ironically when I try to open this page I'm IP blocked for using an ad blocker (actually I thought that was the joke at first):

Blocked IP Address Your current IP address has been blocked due to bad behavior, which generally means one of the following:

You have been using Opera or Brave as a browser, or have installed the Ghostery add-on, and are unaware that these programs are hijacking your Internet connection for their own purposes

Note I'm just using plain old Chrome + Ublock Origin

good time to post other ones like:

http://bash.org/?244321

Man I first encountered that one in the Runescape days. Blast from the past.

Weird all I see is

username: solarwinds

password: *****

If we're sharing bash.org links... http://bash.org/?795779

I still say "I put on my robe and wizard hat"[0] to people, although I don't think people get it.

0. http://bash.org/?104383

Can I ask something as an Old Guy(tm)?

I thought games were supposed to be fun and entertaining. If the developer makes it un-fun, then why keep playing? why not finding something else fun to do? e.g. play another game? learn a new skill? do something IRL? etc.

Serious q, please don't bash.

It doesn't have to be fun if it's addicting enough

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber

"Okay, but couldn't we at least make the game fun anyway?"

"No! It has to be just barely fun. If the game was TOO FUN then there would be no reason to MICROPAY in order to make it MORE FUN!"

When it comes to anti-consumer actions taken by companies, many times one can take a blind eye to it as long as they can still play the game. The problem is that’s it’s like a frog in boiling water. At some point you realize that you need to give your email, phone number, credit card info, money, advertising attention, and more just so you have the privilege of downloading their special launcher that is the only one that can run their game, which of course also requires you to install a root kit in your system for “anti-cheat”. Only for you to open the game, which requires you to have internet, just to be able to play a single-player game mode.

The game’s fun though. And it only takes 5 seconds to actually load it up once you’ve downloaded everything and installed it. So it’s fine, right?

Consider it just like other software like Microsoft Windows. “It’s supposed to make your life easier, so if it doesn’t, why not just stop using it?” Because it still does make it easier, even with all of the crap that Microsoft does that we can rightfully complain about.

Perhaps also consider it like Twitter. Why stay if it’s so toxic? Because everyone is on there, and if you aren’t, then you’ll never talk to your friends, since it’s not like they’d move platforms just for your sake.

You have to first define what makes a game “fun”.

The theory outlined in Glued to Games (Ryan & Rigby, 2011) suggests that games we perceive as “fun” are actually satisfying our basic needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness.

If you satisfy your need for competency by playing video games and don’t get that need met anywhere else, then you’ll keep coming back, despite the developers trying to squeeze money out of you every time you log on.

> If you satisfy your need for competency by playing video games and don’t get that need met anywhere else, then you’ll keep coming back,

A different way to look at it is that my selfless dedication to video game KDR is helping to save other players from addiction, by eliminating their feelings of competency.

This is besides your point on anti-consumer practices, but games aren't solely for "fun".

Art is about experiencing something, a sad documentary, a tragic movie, a horror movie aren't "fun" in the candy and rollercoaster sense, games are the same.

One that speaks to me, I really enjoy factorio, but I wouldn't call it "fun".

For the core of your point though, getting locked into something because it's how you socialise, (whether directly with friends, or indirectly with a community), or via abusing addictive characteristics in consumers, games can still retain a base even without providing value like my other examples.

One big difference between now and back in the day is the prominence of professional gaming leagues. It's not just about stomping noobs for bragging rights; it can be a genuine dream for people like becoming an NBA star.

I know a guy who destroyed several friendships because he believed he could go pro in League of Legends.

Going to festivals is fun but requires long journeys carrying lots of heavy things and those generally are not very fun, especially on the way home.

The point of the meme is to mock the gates and hurdles you encounter in trying to get to the fun, not the fun itself.

For example, Microsoft potentially requiring people to have an always-on camera pointed isn't something that anyone wants, but they might tolerate it to play FortNite/whatever.

Meta: this needs "(2013)" in the title.

From the timestamps, I guess that this blurb[0] dates from the tail end of the DRM wars[1]. It's fascinating how the enshittification of various online services have led to a resurgence of that era's anti-establishment attitudes.

[0] possibly copy-pasted from an earlier 4chan post? The language style certainly seems to match.

[1] https://xkcd.com/86/ and https://xkcd.com/488/ and https://xkcd.com/546/

I'm almost certain it's a 4chan "greentext" originally, yes.

It's from the time around the introduction of the Xbox One, which, as one of many policies for the console that were unpopular and ultimately rolled back before release, was going to require the Kinect camera to be plugged in for the console to function.

By this time there was already a well-known Black Mirror episode out involving computer vision tracking to ensure people really watched ads, so these ideas were floating around in the culture. As well as Sony's "say McDonald's to end the ad" patent surfacing around that time.

The xkcd comics you link to would have been quite a few years earlier... the reference to Sony then probably more for the controversy with the rootkit on their CDs, as well as their efforts to lock down Blu-ray discs.

>By this time there was already a well-known Black Mirror episode out involving computer vision tracking to ensure people really watched ads, so these ideas were floating around in the culture. As well as Sony's "say McDonald's to end the ad" patent surfacing around that time.

In addition, Microsoft actually filed a patent for a system that would use the Kinect to track how many people were in the room when watching rented movies, and upcharge you if you exceeded a certain number of people.

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/26574/microsoft_patent_could_...

This might just be fiction, but what would let the server know that the can has been drank?

Unique unlock code at the bottom of each can? Some kind of scannable QR code or NFC system? They do not care if you dump the ooze into the toilet, so long as it has been purchased.

You could even region lock the cans! Make sure nobody is trying to cheat you by purchasing wholesale or across the border.

Edit: You could even make them like some kind of Nintendo Amibo action figure. Dedicated holder device with API interface to the game.

The always on camera watches you drink it. The qr code is either on the bottom of the can or in the lid if you buy the deluxe bottle version.

Actually if you dump the can out the window, they'll claim it's piracy.

Real-time blood sugar monitoring, if your customers aren't diabetic yet they could be drinking more. Coming soon to a dystopia near you.

something something we can fill x% of the user's visual field without inducing seizures

Xbox Kinect

The XBox's Kinect camera, which was introduced around the time this was written.

QR code on the bottom of a heat-sensitive can? Or maybe it's transparent, with the QR code printed the same color as the liquid?

Mandatory Urinalysis

Nice try, evil mountain dew marketing executive.

I always hoped this meme would make an appearance in an episode of Black Mirror

It's pretty close to the premise of 15 Million Merits

This manages to be more dystopian even than the door scene in Ubik by Philip K Dick

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7444685-the-door-refused-to... (“The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” ...)

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