This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
There's already a link to the vid talking about the utter bullshit and corruption surrounding the McD's ice cream machines posted in this thread, but here's a resource I haven't seen posted yet: an online tracker to find out if your local McD's ice cream machine is working or broken right now.
(love the domain name)
How do they get the data?
They reverse engineered the ordering API (that the app uses) and try to add a McSundae to an online order. If the ice cream machine is broken, it won't let you add that item to an order for the specific location. If the McSundae machine is working, it will let you add that item to the order for the designated location.
It updates each location every 30 minutes, so is very up to date.
More details about it here: https://hypebeast.com/2020/10/mcbroken-site-mcdonalds-ice-cream-machines-working-tracker-info
If its the one I know, it sends an online ice cream request through the API, and then cancels the successful ones before they reach the stores. The unsuccessful ones are broken machines, essentially.
Why is there some countries without thoses (e.g. Spain, France, Italy...) ?
Holy hell! Look at UK.
What I don't know is whether the UK has to comply with the same BS exclusive service contracts for their ice cream machines as the US does, or if it's a similar arrangement only with different companies and manufacturers.
The McD closest to my house is almost always unable to sell ice cream products - it's down more often that it's working.
As a result of these shenanigans by Taylor and on their behalf McDonald's itself I haven't considered McDonald's a viable place to go for any kind of ice cream or ice cream-adjacent thing for many years, whereas this was once not the case. I know I'm not the only one either.
I haven't even thought about getting McDonald's ice cream in years just because it seems like they are never able to serve it so I'm not even going to try. When I want ice cream I'll go to the place that make ice cream on a cold slab.
I just stopped considering McDonalds a place that serves ice cream. The menu item just doesn't exist there in my mind.
I wonder how much this actually hurts their business? Probably more than they realize. My daughter loves ice cream, and I am not going to play McDonald's roulette, unless I have to. We just go to Wendy's if we are going to eat fast food, the foods better and cheaper anyway and I have yet to run into a broken machine.
It probably hurts the franchisee more than it hurts McDonalds proper, and they make it back and then some from their deal with Taylor.
Pretty sure they explicitly do not want legislators to think they will "hack" them. Is this article shillin' for Taylor?
You probably already know but hacking originally meant to modify a machine for instance (or furniture as in ikea hacks) but it really is a word one should avoid when speaking with people who aren't part of the communities that use it in its original meaning.
Hacker vs. cracker. Hack isn't a nefarious term, or at least it shouldn't be. Hacking is just using something in an unintended way. The problem is with how DMCA made that am illegal thing to do if there was a digital lock. While intended to mean you can't bypass CSS to rip movies from DVDs, it's been used to block the right to repair and other things completely anti-consumer. But you probably know this.
