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).
Phone Books
You need to pay money to have your phone number not listed in a phone book.
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.
Viao Freshstart
Sony started trying to chart 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.
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 it's 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..."
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].
