Antifeatures

Antifeatures are a way to describe a particular practice made possible by locked down technologies. Antifeatures, as I describe them, are functionality (i.e., "features) that a technology developer will charge users not to include. You can read my short article on the topic published in the FSF bulletin in 2007 for a series of examples and a more in-depth description.

One thing I want to do is put together as large a collection of these antifeatures as possible to use in a talk, a paper, or maybe even a book!

List of Antifeatures

There is a list of antifeatures in comments posted on this this blog post. Many of those have been merged onto this page.

Panasonic Camera Batteries

Panasonic issued a firmware update with an antifeature which disabled any third party batteries.

Printer Cartridges

HP printers have been supplied with cartridges that both report 'empty' when they have 25% ink still remaining, but also have a 'use by date' encoded into the chip, which disables the printer cartridge if it is used after that date (no HP printer will use it).

In general the business model of printer manufacturers has been to lose money on the printer and make it on the printer cartridges. This has caused such antifeatures as:

• Reporting the cartridge as empty when (often substantial) ink remains.
• Microchips that will report the cartridge size by number of uses rather than by amount of ink remaining. These will ignore any refilling of the cartridge.

There are other features of the printer cartridge industry that are anticompetitive (e.g. use of DMCA and patents to protect antifeature code) but do not involve specific software or hardware - i.e. they aren't 'antifeatures' per se.

Phone Books

You need to pay money to have your phone number not listed in a phone book.

You need to specifically ask for companies not to use your phone listing to try to sell you things.

Onetime Use Cameras

Disposable video cameras have a USB port which is standards compliant in terms of protocol but which is obscured to make it so that normal users can't just connect over USB.

Vaio Freshstart

Sony started trying to charge its users to not install software on new computers.

DVDs

DVDs include a whole collection of different antifeatures. These include things like region coding, DVD CSS, other types of DRM, and more. No user asked for any of these and you can pay extra for non-region coded DVDs -- which is just one example.

CDs

Music CDs would be written as multimedia CDs with a data track which contained an autoloader to disable the music part of the CD, or limit access to it, on Windows machines. This culminated in the Sony BMG CD copy protection scandal, where the Sony copy protection software would add special drivers to Windows computers that allowed itself and anything else to hide their files from the operating system. Rootkits and malware were quick to capitalise on this, and the software also disabled or broke other pieces of the operating system. The handling of the whole issue also caused many problems for consumers, with the program supposed to remove the previous copy protection breaking anti-virus software as well as leaving backdoors into consumer systems.

Useragent

"Websites which check User-Agent and refuse to work when it doesn't match a known whitelist, even though if you fake your User-Agent the site works just fine, demonstrating that nothing except their arbitrary check itself stops you from using the site." [1]

Printer Ink

Printer ink cartridges include a counter of the number of pages printing using a particular cartridge. After a certain number they will refuse to function, preventing you from topping them up with 3rd party ink

Apple IPOD

It seems that each new generation of iPods has a new hash algorithm to prevent the music player from playing music which you added from software other than iTunes. Each time the hash changes, it takes time for the free software community to reverse engineer the hash and unbreak the antifeature.

Apple Quicktime

Until late 2007 Apple didn't allow the use of a fullscreen mode in its free Quicktime version.

Unnamed Ye Olde Mainframe from the Bad Old Days of Heavy Metal

The CPU came in two flavours... cheap and slow vs fast and 'spensive.

Most victims (umm, customers), surprise, surprise bought slow and cheap... and found it too slow... and bought the upgrade.

So the field engineer would hove into view carrying a anti-static bag with a board inside saying, "Shutdown... your upgrade has arrived"

He would swap out the board, putting the old board into a spare bag, power up and off to the next vic..err.. customer.

On the way, he'd pull over to the side of the road, haul out the old slow board, flick a switch on the "maus klavier" (dip switch), and on to the next customer. "Tada... your upgrade has arrived..."

This was called a "screwdriver upgrade" -- on the IBM mainframes I saw upgraded the DIP switch was flicked in place and the customer was fully aware of the process. It depends upon the charging model as to if this was a anti-feature. For example, most IBM customers leased the mainframe per-MIPS. Upon requiring more MIPS they much preferred a screwdriver upgrade rather than the multi-year planning required for "forklift upgrade", where the entire machine had to be replaced and sometimes the software rebuilt (eg, the new mainframe hardware may have required a move from MVS/XA to MVS/ESA), with extended downtime and significant risk of deployment failure. Usually contracts for IBM-compatible mainframes explicitly requested the range of MIPS for the hardware, a mainframe with a lesser range being penalised as that implied a major upgrade would be required sooner.

Similar to the above

Server came with two sized hard drives 10 Mg or 30 Mg ( back in early 80's ) Like above engineer arrived and flicked switch to allow the Server to access the other 20 Mg and Bill yes Bill was $10,000

Mains Water

I have a 96 year old neighbour who still remembers when mains water first arrived in our suburb. He said at the time, that the government wouldn't allow people to build water tanks for their houses, because they wanted people to use mains water. Ah the irony...

HDMI

The idea that computer interconnects are designed with encryption to stop the user tampering with the signal, to limit people creating digital copies regardless of intention (legal personal use), how certain devices can not work with it and it can cause other devices to work less optimally (lower resolution output)

In Windows Vista, playing anything that the operating system decided was 'protected content' - the 'ding' of an alert box, for example - would instantly slow your network down to 1% of its full speed and disable various other communications devices for the duration. The theory behind this was to stop you being able to copy the 'protected content' off the machine in real time. This was regardless of whether your monitor or speakers were using HDCP.

Providers charging for ADSL Fastpath

Technically Fastpath is just a flag on the DSLAM, but most providers at least in germany charge you a monthly fee of about 3 EUR per month if you want Fastpath (lower latency vs. higher reliability in interleaved mode).

Add Yours

Feel free to add your own ideas for antifeatures to this page so I can collect them and use them in an upcoming talk, paper, or maybe even a book!

You can use the following template:

=== NAME OF YOUR ANTIFEATURE ===

Change this paragraph so that it includes the details of your Antifeatures and any [http://example.com links].