1) You don't know that. And there may be emergency situations where you're on the phone with someone other than from the emergency number.
2) How rental cars do it doesn't seem to have anything to do with this.
>By the way, if someone dies because of it, the only person whose conscience it is on is the person who bought a phone they couldn't afford and then didn't pay for it. Just like if someone died because the car got repo'd and they couldn't drive to a hospital.
This is some fucked up reasoning. People run into financial difficulty for various reasons, sometimes out of their control. But even for the serial deadbeats who don't care about financial responsibility saying "yeah, it's fine that somebody or their loved one died because it's their fault"? I can't imagine thinking like that.
> Would you randomly disable somebody's car's engine because they didn't pay? No.
Perhaps you meant to reply to the person I was replying to, rather than me, with your "how rental cars do it doesn't seem to have anything to do with it"? Because the person I was replying to said that repossessors wouldn't disable a car, which is not true.
> This is some fucked up reasoning. People run into financial difficulty for various reasons, sometimes out of their control. But even for the serial deadbeats who don't care about financial responsibility saying "yeah, it's fine that somebody or their loved one died because it's their fault"? I can't imagine thinking like that.
Saying "yeah, someone else SHOULD pay for their non-necessity"? I can't imagine thinking like that.
Just because someone runs into financial difficulty doesn't mean they can just stop paying for things. Nor does it mean that anyone else has an obligation to provide them with something for free. Particularly when that something is a luxury. Heck, if they're so short on money they could've sold their expensive Samsung phone and replaced it with a cheap one.
And again, I highly doubt that any of this is even a possibility. And you can say I "don't know" that it doesn't disable emergency calling (never said I did), but the fact of the matter is, it's virtually impossible to disable emergency calling on any phone, thanks to both regulation and technical standards.
>Saying "yeah, someone else SHOULD pay for their non-necessity"? I can't imagine thinking like that.
>Just because someone runs into financial difficulty doesn't mean they can just stop paying for things. Nor does it mean that anyone else has an obligation to provide them with something for free. Particularly when that something is a luxury. Heck, if they're so short on money they could've sold their expensive Samsung phone and replaced it with a cheap one.
That wasn't remotely what I was saying. I wasn't advocating for anyone to get non-necessities for free nor that difficulties automatically absolves people of responsibility.
I was saying that to dismiss any consideration of life and death situations because any deaths would be on the people not paying is fucked up.
Is not donating malaria nets to poor africans more or less defensible than choosing to sell them phones which deactivate when unpaid?
You seem to be suggesting that it would be fucked up to not donate these phones to the poor people who aren't paying their bills. Does that mean that it's also fucked up to not donate them other things?
Nobody's saying they have to give out phones for free. We're saying that somehow those people ended up with the phones in their possession and the company's right to get paid DOES NOT mean it can lock out emergency functions on the phones. They can go ahead and cut off the normal phone service but if they lock out the dialer app and even one person fails to call an ambulance or police or firemen or whatever because of that lock that's one hundred percent on them. This goes double, triple if the lockout happened by mistake to innocent people.
Honestly, it's bad enough that these companies think it's even acceptable to remotely control computers. Locking out emergency services is just on a whole new level. Didn't get paid? Seek redress in the justice system like everyone else.
Okay. It's right there on the title: "my script killed 10k phones". Do you have any reason to believe "killed" means anything lesser than "rendered completely useless, bricked"? Also, there's the fact the software "would lock the low-level features that allowed you to make calls". There is no reason to believe calls to emergency services were exempted.
I don't really want to comment on the rest of the article. Actually, as one of the "poor sods from places like Peru and Chile" I do have quite a few things to say about the author's gross negligence and his endless rationalizations. I just don't want to get permabanned for saying them. Suffice it to say that negligence of this magnitude is actually a crime where I live.
>By the way, if someone dies because of it, the only person whose conscience it is on is the person who bought a phone they couldn't afford and then didn't pay for it. Just like if someone died because the car got repo'd and they couldn't drive to a hospital.
This is some fucked up reasoning. People run into financial difficulty for various reasons, sometimes out of their control. But even for the serial deadbeats who don't care about financial responsibility saying "yeah, it's fine that somebody or their loved one died because it's their fault"? I can't imagine thinking like that.