It reportedly checks subscription upon putting the vest on and supposedly won’t turn off mid ride.
this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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And if there’s a bug in that code, you’re fucked.
Safety features should work if everything else fails. Their failure mode can’t be “fuck it, it didn’t work”. Which is directly opposite to the failure mode of a subscription based service.
Pop verification neck to continue.
And if there’s a bug in that code, you’re fucked.
If there's a bug in your car's airbag, you're also fucked.
Here's a great vid on airbags for motorcycles
Fun fact the manual ones are better
Edit: He even mentions the one in the post about how it's a bad idea.
That dude annoys me so much, but his content is usually pretty good. Great points on the different air bag systems.
What will be interesting is how a false negative plays out. A vest fails, someone dies yet the subscription is current: how does the lawsuit play out?
See, when a life-saving device can fail due to software bugs, our brains point to malicious negligence when it does fail. It's no longer a badly packed parachute but a company whose billing department wants to kill poor people.
It's a subscription service for an airbag vest. They'd rather have you die than not pay for a product you already purchased. I'd say that whether or not there's a mechanical failure, the billing department does want to kill poor people.
What annoys me about this is that it implicitly says that if you have more money you deserve to be safer.
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Isn't that illegal?
I'm pretty sure that "motorcycle airbag vest" is not considered a standard piece of safety equipment by law
Oh I didn't notice that.
klim: do you have a subscription for that?
me: guess i'll die 🤷♂️
More like kil'm, amirite?
Heyoooo
You know, if I'm going to spend my entire adult life in a cyberpunk dystopia, I should at least be able to get Kid Stealth legs.
So what happens if you start your airbag in an area without cell reception (so it can't verify your subscription)?
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Someone will buy this thing.
Someone will hack this thing.
And this someone will make it open
Sorry grandma, you didn't pay for your oxygen tank subscription; we are turning off the taps
Personal safety systems as a service.
What's next? Air as a service? Don't pay and we'll turn off your oxygen?
My mother, an asthmatic, jokes that Air is already a subscription service 🙂
That's gotta be illegal, isn't it LITERALLY EXTORTION to lock a REQUIRED SAFETY FEATURE behind a paywall?
Imagine if the Fire Extinguisher at your workplace had a fucking credit card slot next to it.
How often does it check... If you're out in the middle of nowhere and it can't get a wifi signal is it going to let you die?
This is 100% speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised if it checks the length of the subscription when connected to a network, then tracks that with a built in clock. There's also incentive to frequently connect it to a network since the company constantly "updates the algorithm" it uses to detect crashes and deploy.
I suspect it would stop working once you hit the end of whatever period it knows you're "paid up" for.
"which include unlimited warranty"
Are they expecting people to periodically test the device to verify it's working? This kind of thing is going to be a one shot deal, or at least needing a overhaul after use to be functional again.
Subscribe and 'test' afterevery ride, get new gear for free?
They are reusable, they use replaceable argon cannisters, those cannisters cost 130bucks a pop though.
Klim could save a lot of bad pr by just blowing the airbag anyway and sending a bill for the remaining value of the vest after the fact.
But then you're just financing a vest and that's not a fancy buzzword that makes the c-suite cream their pants.
I use a 350€ manual airbag vest that was tested quite well
I'm not even outraged by this stuff any more. If you're ok with subscription models it's your own fault.
It is outrageous because if a sufficient number of people accept this bullshit, it becomes a viable and profitable business model and every provider moves into it. Basically people like me who run away from subscriptions like the devil end up without a choice.
Exactly. I'm not okay with my car spying on me, but enough people don't know or don't care that I no longer have that option.
I think that you, me and zoidberg from the previous reply should go into business together making retrofit steering wheel airbags for older cars.
If I ever get one of these I'm gonna try hack them to no longer need that stupid subscription
Might be tricky because airbags are single-use. How do you know that your hack worked? If you test it to confirm you lost the air bag, so you'd have to buy at least two, make sure you did the exact same modification on the second one after confirming it worked on the first, and still be unsure if it's actually going to go off when it matters.
Just don't buy it.
airbags are single-use. [...] If you test it to confirm you lost the air bag
Please try to avoid presenting your hypothesis as fact. If your third sentence was phrased as a question it'd be fine. Currently it's misinformation.
Of course it can be tested without destroying it. The actual air bag component could be disconnected from the rest of the device and the connection point monitored for the appropriate voltage/current required for activation.
And then you can never be sure you connected it back properly or if there was some anti tamper mechanism it tripped. Probably not, but wouldn't risk my life with it.