I disabled WiFi on the new Samsung fridge
eattherich.club
eattherich.club
I'm thinking something similar to what https://adnauseam.io/ does, but but amplified:
1. Someone reverse engineer what does the device send to which address. 2. Block the particular device to access internet (and make it easy for others too). 3. Constantly send bogus data to the manufacturer so the personal data they get overall loses value or is unusable. Make it easy for a lot of people to do it as well, or even just rent a bot farm.
There's too many legit and good services that end up being turned down due to abuse and DDos, and they don't even bring anything good to the attackers. Why not using these techniques for something actually good to consumers privacy?
I'm all for being able to choose whether or not to disclose that data, but then we'll also have to accept different choices than ours. There's no point in sabotaging others.
Because getting a ton of garbage will positively stimulate them to stop trusting this data. That helps everyone.
Whether that's currently done is up for debate - maybe there are other lower-hanging fruits that are easier to do, but if you've exhausted all your other options and still want even more accurate profiles, I don't see why you wouldn't do it.
Several data brokers still have very, very old copies.. and they still sell them.. and recruiters still buy them.. and still contact me.. and still get met with an email politely telling them off.
But that years old shitty linkedin dataset still gets sold to thousands of people for thousands of dollars a year and nobody bats an eye. The recruiters are too stupid to spot the bad data and the brokers too lazy to care.
We're already being sabotaged, by manufacturers - what else would you call this sometimes hidden, non-disablable connectivity/"telemetry", and the disappearance of dumb options? The only question is if we let them get away with it scot-free.
1) Set up a pihole or ad guard or similar and block the requests the device makes. You can probably find someones list or it may already be in the default one.
2) Put all the IOT's devices into a virtual wifi lan that doesn't by default doesn't allow internet access. Then only add in the few places you want them to be able to get to. In general putting IOT devices on a network separate from your real computers is a good idea for isolation anyway since they are likely to have poor security.
I think most of us aren't worth it, as it would take away from the upfront profit of the machine to add features people aren't told about just to get a few years of "Subject opened left door. Temp 39 degrees. Subject used ice maker." or whatever.
I even saw the newer broadcast TV standard was going to have 2 way communication for ad tech.
In 2 years, a standard fridge will start blinking its inside lights and show 'error' on the temperature display if you don't let it connect.
So - my privacy stays intact as long as I don't link the device ID with my name or personal details (review that warranty card before sending in, does it have unique ID? watermark/non-visible tag) - hmmm, this sounds like a bonus - I get the "smart" features and don't have to worry...
1) Price increases. It's "smart". Pay us more.
2) Planned obsolescence. You have numerous new points of failure in your product + make repairing vastly more difficult.
3) Monetize collected data by selling it to interested parties. The data quality, or lack thereof, is a secondary concern.
Your other two points are broadly correct though. Also data collection is helpful for seeing how customers use products, which genuinely does influence development.
Hard to believe when a printer manufacturer moves a commonly failing part from cartridges to the printer itself, then makes it impossible to repair that specific part without taking apart the whole thing and buying a replacement part for 160 bucks.
> Also data collection is helpful for seeing how customers use products, which genuinely does influence development.
I'll start calling it helpful once it actually improves product quality and usability.
The effect comes from many sources. When the engineering science is new, tech tends to be way overbuilt because the creators don't know what tolerances are. There's also the ratio of product cost to disposable income of the users. And to their wish for devices over time.
In any case, the natural tendency of a profit-optimizing system of competition is to throw away values (eg., repairability) that consumers at-purchase dont value. In this case, no biz is going to spend extra to include long-life features at a loss to competitors who don't.
The remedy here is regulation, which is the mechanism which sets a floor on competition: since consumers at-purchase are at an extreme informational disadvantage, the gov. should require all biz to build in long-life features given consumers do want them, long after purchase.
It's not a conspiracy, more of a market failure. The market doesnt produce optimal outcomes in cases where these extreme information asymmetries are built in, ie., by the time the product is around for 10yr to be reivewed, it's retired. There isn't a way of getting that information to the consumer.
Really now?
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-story-behind-the-story-behind-...
"So they opened the fridge and 15 seconds later closed it again, they might have taken something out, interesting."
What temperature do they set the fridge to? Do they ever change it? How often do they deice the freezer? Do they use the ice maker / filtered water thing / whatever? How often? How long do they leave the door open normally? What are the temperature / power consumption profiles over time?
That's before we even get to any of the smart features (I have no clue what they are).
Sure you're right there is plenty to monitor and collect, it's just not very useful for the majority of people I'd imagine, unless you like other people to tell you when to buy something.
Ease of assembly is often in opposition to ease of repair. Reliability engineering optimizes failure rates during warranty and extended warranty periods. Why would they optimize repairability? It not in their interest.
The defective Apple MacBooks are great example of this effect. Politically powerful design guy prioritizes design over everything else. Keyboard technology is defective and un-repairable. Result: Billion of dollars of warranty claims.
Was that a conspiracy? No. Just the result of poor priorities, resulting in a bad outcome.
Nothing cynical there: you are simply correct. There's overwhelming evidence that companies profit from selling user's data, engage in planned obsolescence and deploy numerous tricks to disrupt the second hand market.
I mean, this has been going on for at least 97 years if you include light bulbs:
“The cartel lowered operational costs and worked to standardize the life expectancy of light bulbs at 1,000 hours (down from 2,500 hours), and raised prices without fear of competition, in what has been described as a "classic example of planned obsolescence". The cartel tested their bulbs and fined manufacturers for bulbs that lasted more than 1,000 hours.”
They could have standardized on a power efficiency metric, but there's an intrinsic inverse relationship of efficiency versus lifetime for tungsten filaments.
Back in the day companies did not try to eat every tiny bit of consumer surplus, so this cartel was a win-win situation.
Phoebus being about efficiency was merely a coincidence.
And at this point who really needs "forever"? We're getting to a point where the average person will at most change their lighbulbs 2-3 times in a home (I doubt the vast majority of the population lives in the same place for more than 20-30 years).
Actually:
> Report Highlights. The average length of homeownership is 16 years, with lower-earning and less educated householders more likely to remain in their homes longer.
https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/average-length-of-h...
So maybe 1 lightbulb set change per home...
Why does that seem fundamentally more reasonable to you then each occupant replacing the walls just once?
Replacing walls is super complicated and messy and uncomfortable.
then they do care about the data, just not the quality of that data. But the fact they are collecting data is definitely of importance or they would not be collecting and selling it.
Just can't remember what it was called.
Should read their site in more detail probably.
A DDoS could cause the company to drop support faster(Like they already always do), and hurt the people who can no longer use the features on their expensive device.
Besides, if DDoSing got popular with average consumers it would never stop, and they'd go after everything that has any privacy risk(AirTag/Tile comes to mind), no matter how critical it is to some people's lives.
Admittedly a bit of a slippery slope argument, but less so in an age where there is a significant minority that would love to undo all tech from the last 70 years.
Instead we could be fighting for laws requiring that that all smart devices use an open and app-capable OS, or that all features exposed via proprietary connection to their server also be exposed via local API.
If you aren't one of those people that can just walk by something and passively remember it's location, IoT is great.
Tile doesn't completely replace constant vigilance and planning, and carefully thinking about every step, but it does help.
requests probably need to be send with valid serials, in which you can't effectively anonymously flood the telemetry by yourself.
given that there is absolutely no way even a small percentage of Samsung fridge (why even buy one?) users will care about this, all it does is reveal the participant's identities and motivations.
And yet...
And the perfect example! If I was choosing between two otherwise-equivalent hot tubs I would /definitely/ pay more for one without the ability to call home. Are there enough people who would also be willing to pay more, and pay enough more to make up the difference in lost advertising revenue? I guess...not?
> There's a hot tub brand who include LTE radios in their hot tubs
Only source I've seen so far for this ridiculous claim is "an executive of Sony said so in an interview". Yeah, a really neutral source of information, indeed.
55" open cell panel costs less than $100 and this is by far the single most expensive component in a TV.
So a $300 Walmart special Roku TV might needed to be subsidized a little, but doing the same on a fancy LG, Samsung or Sony would be purely out of greed.
I read some representative from Nvidia Shield explaining that they were forced to add a Netflix button to their remote in 2019 because Netflix would no longer allow their app to be installed on devices without a dedicated button.
Some smart TVs can milk money from subscription partnerships, but on a per-tv-sold basis it's not really that much.
I mean, I can understand the value of user data from Facebook but a stove or a fridge? What exactly are they selling?
Edit: realized now we're talking about TVs but still, is that data really worth that much?
I'd like to see sources on that.
Amazon's tablet is like $20 cheaper if you buy it with integrated ads. A TV will have a hard time showing so many ads through the day that it'll halve the price.
I just checked a (Swedish) price comparison site and the cheapest 65" 4K TV currently available was literally less than half the price of the cheapest Not Smart TV.
Also with Smart TVs I had a choice of over 200 different models, while with Not Smart TVs I had a choice of 2.
What we do know is that even the least price-sensitive consumers, that buy the most high-end TVs, aren't given the option:
Buying a product knowing it has ads in it is one thing, but users on Reddit and elsewhere are understandably angry about ads suddenly being patched into their devices—especially in cases when these devices are multi-thousand-dollar 4K Sony televisions - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/04/google-pilot-program...
Appliance companies seem to be barely making margins anymore, so it's not like they're robbing you blind, more that a startup would need to create a simple device that is also twice the price of everyone else.
You'd hope that there's be enough of a delta in that "pay more", and enough folks who would do so, to make a market. Shame it seems like there isn't.
See also: US made hand tools. Everyone seems to yearn for the old Craftsman days, but not enough people want to pay that premium. While Harbor Freight seems ever expanding...
I'll probably never buy a television again, since it seems you can't buy a decent non-smart panel without crossing into the enterprise (and adding an order of magnitude in price). And I'm not alone! How is there not a single manufacturer making a single modern non-smart LCD TV? Hell, call it the "HNTV" and expect to sell no more than...20,000? At 200€ in margin that's a 4m€ product line, surely worth throwing off given that the R&D is just removing hardware from an existing model?
Doing it yourself would be way too risky.
But be prepared for the big guys to absolutely bury you once you show any inkling of success.
I think it's a great idea, but I can see why nobody has tried the space. I sure wouldn't.
- Producing and especially shipping and storing huge and/or heavy appliances is expensive AF, which means you need a lot of upfront capital for inventory and warehouses
- Getting onto Amazon is easy, but almost no one buys a fridge on Amazon - which means you have to establish a relationship with brick-and-mortar retail, and that is difficult: the retailers expect free demonstration units for each location or subsidy for advertising, as well as have ridiculously long payment schedules (depending on whose rumors you listen to, some chains want up to 1 year of time from product delivery to payment due date!).
Basically, it boils down to the question on how and where to get money to disrupt an industry that has enormous cash requirements, low margins and an extremely niche target demographic. Your best bet is a benevolent billionaire willing to put up cash for decades.
There is a lot to be said about throwing whole classes of users under the bus (elderly, people with disabilities) when asking them to manage technology mostly because how these things are going to be implemented (e.g. the security vs usability dilemma).
I welcome new legislation in this area but it seems to me that lobbyists are once again screwing over the general consumer by adding anti-features into these legislations. Luckily IOT-vendors are absolutely abysmal at protecting their devices so I doubt we'll see too many devices locked down that weren't already.
one thing:
> Luckily IOT-vendors are absolutely abysmal at protecting their devices so I doubt we'll see too many devices locked down that weren't already.
it is either compliance or no CE stamp (if a product does not meet safety requirements they have to remove connectivity or take it off the shelves). And either they are already scrambling because the cost of this has already sunk in, ... or they are in for a surprise pretty soon because becoming compliant isn't a one-off activity but means restructuring their entire processes (e.g. test automation to maintain that compliance)
> It should be legally required
Absolutely not. But I also don't want that level of company control over everything. I think "government punishing companies" is a much better alternative to "companies punishing people".
> Or, a soldering iron.
In this case, the wireless card could be just detached physically. But what happens when e.g. device requires network access to work, but also has some malicious feature? What if the malicious feature is baked in the hardware, e.g. DRM? Do we just pull out an electron microscope and a disassembler?
> price in externalities
Since we cannot fundamentally eliminate exploitative behavior just yet, seeing as the world is full of suffering and people grow up with all sorts of psychological trauma and cannot help trying to secure themselves at the expense of others, the biggest antagonist of the market that we can tackle is information asymmetry.
In some countries, you can bet that every mention of a regulation intended to tackle a specific instance of information asymmetry abuse (often enabled by advances in technology) will be accompanied by concerns about “government control over everything” and that “the market should fix it”. Unfortunately, that agenda mostly helps the exploitative behavior.
If we don’t do our best to keep the market working by compensating for information asymmetry, command economy will eat it.
> we cannot fundamentally eliminate exploitative behavior just yet
Are you saying that exploitative behavior is exclusive to capitalism? If so, would you elaborate how do other economic systems avoid exploitative behavior - i.e. what makes capitalism so much worse?
My point is that exploitation is inherent property of a huge power difference. It doesn't matter if the system is capitalism, socialism, or whateverotherkindism.
Reminds me of a quote from a very talented mathematician:
Imagine the case of two neighbors, each of whom at the outset owns the same amount of land, but one of whom is more powerful than the other. The powerful one demands a piece of the other’s land. The weak one refuses. The powerful one says, “OK, let’s compromise. Give me half of what I asked.” The weak one has little choice but to give in. Some time later the powerful neighbor demands another piece of land, again there is a compromise, and so forth. By forcing a long series of compromises on the weaker man, the powerful one eventually gets all of his land. > My point is that exploitation is inherent property of a huge power difference.
It doesn't have to be a single company per se - all the companies could hold power over you at the same time.
E.g. if most huge refrigerator companies agree (explicitly or implicitly) to all include "smart" features that violate the customers' privacy, then the refrigerator companies hold power over you - you can't buy a refrigerator without "smart" features, as there aren't any on the market. You can ask for a "dumb" refrigerator, but ultimately you aren't the one making the refrigerators, so you don't make the decisions. Perhaps some other company will join in, and try to fill in the niche of "dumb" refrigerators, but they will either not have the resources/connections of the already-established companies, or their efforts will be undermined by the already-established companies in order to keep their power, or they might even succeed but have their refrigerators so expensive that privacy-seeking people have to pay premium in order to get it.
At which point you'll have to disassemble the damned thing and physically rip out the LTE modem, possibly resulting in the device bricking itself when it can't phone home after a while.
I bet if you're a device manufacturer right now and go to t-mobile enterprise sales and tell them you want 200MB of data per month per IMEI and you're going to have 50,000 units, you'll get a very attractive monthly price per unit.
Mark my words, it'll be commonplace in another 8-10 years.
https://me.me/i/tech-enthusiasts-everything-in-my-house-is-w...
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-...
There are a whole bunch of issues that can occur that a patient may not be aware of because they are asleep. Generally I wish we'd all use some kind of sleep monitoring system or at least we started routine screening for sleep disorders
The benefit of this is that I don't have to rely only on the therapist, I can also read the card myself with tools like OSCAR: https://www.sleepfiles.com/OSCAR/
I would really hate having one that reports via 4G to the therapist only.
Lots of manufacturers probably do it, but I'll name and shame anyway... it's a ResMed AirSense 10.
It turns out I kinda have that already. My 1919 house has plastered walls, some of which have a wire mesh underlay. It blocks wifi signals between rooms beautifully.
On this particular topic, basic software Freedom would be sufficient. But apparently enough people don't even care to make purchasing decisions based on anti-features. Or at the minimum, say hiring a technician to fix your brand new fridge as described in OP.
So, as seems to be the trend, most people are effectively content letting technology take away their agency. A small number of us can swim in the stream of navigating it so we don't get ruled over by it, but once you're doing all that work just to tread water it becomes awfully tempting to use your understanding to subjugate others.
Until it won't be legal to impair Big Brother watching you.
Happy to be proven wrong, wouldn't a Faraday Cage need to be tuned to absorb whatever wavelength you're aiming to block?
In the same way that you can see in to a microwave because the terahertz μm waves can pass through the holes but the microwave mm waves are blocked.
No reading my cards without actually taking them out.
And voiding the warranty for sure.
You can disassemble the interior a bit (usually not too difficult) and disconnect the antenna from the comms module. Depending on the structure of the wiring harness your car uses, it may not be possible to easily do that without also removing GPS/radio functionality. Some models are now integrating WiFi/Bluetooth into the same system.
Alternatively, depending on which manufacturer your car is from, you can "acquire" the manufacturer diagnostic/service software and disable the cellular connection.
I will give a shoutout to Honda for being pretty good about this. The Civic didn't have a cellular connection at least as of the 10th gen (up to 2021). Not sure if the new '22 Civic does. Also, their infotainment systems run Android and you can root/jailbreak it - on the Civic, Accord, HR-V, and others. Again, this may change in current model years so double check before you buy. And (excepting a few years around 2016-2018) Honda also still has physical buttons/knobs for all the important controls, instead of putting everything into a touchscreen like 90% of companies do these days.
BMW has had a cellular connection in their cars for many years, but you can disable the SIM card by programming the TCB through ISTA, even on the current G chassis cars. Not sure if that completely disables Tx. Also not sure how their just released iDrive 8 system handles it though.
Alternatively you could unplug the TCB on the BMWs. That requires dropping the headliner on recent ones (annoying but not hard), and on the really recent ones I don't think you can unplug cellular only (you'll also lose GPS & some other things, potentially including WiFi/BT/NFC, I'm not sure). And it'll show a warning on the dash all the time if you unplug it.
https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=npr...
Seriously as a European I do not know enough about HD+ radio but DAB radio can transmit pictures which until now is mostly used to transfer album covers.
In due time we will see this abused to hammer ads down our throats.
When the service was first implemented, that was a possibility. Now, the most we're likely to take advantage of it is to show you a display ad that matches with the current "over the air" ad that you're hearing. Advertisers aren't interested in selling on top of someone else's advertising, and programming doesn't want their displays messed with outside of commercial breaks.
Plus.. it's a pretty low value service and honestly not worth selling. Advertisers all want demographic driven sales now, so those channels aren't all that useful to us.
RadioDNS opens the door somewhat to this, because it can direct your radio to start a stream instead of listening "over the air." However, there, we're happy to be able to replace the over the air ads with programmatic digital ads and that sales channel really doesn't care about "additional display opportunities" either.
Be happy that radio is slow to implement standards, and usually too far behind the punch to get the expected return out of them. So.. just album art for the foreseeable future.
Maybe people want internet connected TVs to attach to streaming services, but I doubt anyone really wants what we are calling "Smart" TVs
At a minimum.
WTF. Is this a thing? How?
Some cars show nearby points of interest as a feature; this isn't that.
Example: Instead of "Turn left onto Broad Street", it will say, "Turn left after the Wendy's".
It's pretty subtle right now, but I have no doubts that it will get more nefarious in the future.
This sounds exactly like that.
Good thing Apple Maps doesn’t subtly repeat biz names to me until I remember them. If this ever happens, I’ll move back to paper maps.
I don’t care if I have to pull over, it beats this mental manipulation and my mind being an advertisers plaything.
These have improved somewhat
Yes. I have a ~5yro Ford Fiesta with navigation built in and I massively prefer it to using a phone app.
Its standalone (mapping is on an sd card) so I know it will still work if I'm in a remote area with poor network coverage. It also has physical, tactile buttons (no touchscreen) that my muscle memory can learn, and which don't suddenly reposition themselves at the whims of some app ux designer. It can automatically download traffic updates via bluetooth on my phone, but its otherwise "self hosted" on my car.
Basically, it just works the way I expect and doesn't try to distract me. Which is all that I need.
So you'll lose the other things if you put it in a Faraday cage.
A cage is a bad way to do it anyway. It's easier to disconnect the cable between the antenna & the telematics module (which has the SIM and control electronics in it). Or disconnect the power to the telematics module. Etc. Depending on the wiring harness style and design of the car's electronics, that may also let you disconnect just the cellular antenna while leaving the GPS/radio antennas connected.
In the future we might see those components getting integrated together... But you can always physically destroy/remove the antenna.
Unless the device itself becomes the antenna or is reacting passively as is the case in RFID.
If you have an automatic toll transponder (ez-pasz, etc.), those things are read very frequently even when you're not going through a toll meter. There's info on this online.
TPMS sensors also transmit a serial number. I wouldn't put it past the NSA to have sensors embedded in certain roads to track that.
And of course, dragnet automatic license plate scanning / tracking is already ubiquitous and there's really not anything you can do about it. Use a bicycle instead, I guess...
Even the coming road taxes are all about constant tracking. How far / which road did you drive? They'll demand the answer. And you put a faraday cage to stop this? Suspicious. The default assumption is going to be fraud. Criminal behavior.
All the EVs will soon enough have some variety of tracking sooner or later. So thats basically all new vehicles. The alternatives will also, whatever they are. Hydrogen?
Transport privacy is likely dead already.
I hate this coming Orwellian future.
That said, they do need to be monitored at all time; abusing that location data for different usage is only one piece of legislation away. Which is why it's probably best to not gather this information in the first place.
To invoke Godwin's Law, iirc you are no longer required to fill in your religion anywhere, because the nazi's used records like that to track down Jewish people and others they were after.
This is why these privacy laws are so important, and why the right to be forgotten should be sacred; you should be able to disappear if the governments turn against you.
An GDPR relevancy outside the EU is just a paper promise.
The right to be forgotten is the wrong place to push for privacy, it should be the "right to never be known".
As to the "EU directives are all above board and documented" you know what they say about the road to hell, and good intentions right?
Oh, you mean you want to be able to have your devices send requests to other people's devices and have them respond, but at the same time, you want there to be no record that your device ever did this? Good luck with that.
https://ec.europa.eu/justice/article-29/documentation/opinio...
https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/general-discu...
It is mandatory to have it installed for new cars, but it looks like it can be disabled if the owner prefers to be left alone while dying, instead of calling an ambulance :D
Nobody prefers to die. It's the part where it's capable of being active all the time that's worrying.
You also can't control the mandatory microphone. How long until someone abuses that (if it hasn't happened already)?
Abuses can always happen, and we should put reasonable checks in place to avoid them. Is the current regulation good enough to minimize the risk of having them? I hope so.
Via IMEI tracking the cell providers have your location data, willingly or not. If you want to travel anonymously you'd better have an oldtimer. I know of lawyers who only visit clients with an old car.
Devices that allow tracking when no accident occurred, violate the current regulation. This is stressed multiple times. "not connected to the mobile phone networks until a serious accident happens" -- https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/redirection/document/5963
"it is not permanently connected to mobile networks" -- https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/fr/MEMO_1...
"not connected to the mobile phone networks until a serious accident happens" -- https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/redirection/document/5963
There is even a technical test to check if the device is compliant with the privacy regulations: "Procedure for verifying the lack of traceability of an eCall in-vehicle system", where the "Failure to establish the connection can be attributed to the 112-based eCall in-vehicle system not being registered on the network" -- https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:32...
Registering the SIM on the network before an accident occurred could be considered a violation indeed.
Note that the linked document applies only to eCall In Vehicle System. Nothing prevent manufacturer to install a second system, using the same or separate modem, and track user's location and actions continuously. If the law requires you to install a GPS receiver and a modem, it would be uncapitalistic not to try to gain some profits from the data.
My previous car sometimes came up with a warning that eCall currently is not available. I'd attribute that to bad reception which means that connection at least has been tried.
Your previous car could have had a non-compliant implementation, but it could be that the system run a passive network scanning from time to time, without trying any connection, just because it would be way faster to connect to a network and send a message if there is an up-to-date list of the compatible available operators. Having a better understanding about the specifics of the various implementation would be interesting. The devil is in the details :)
The discourse 5-10 years ago was that this was the price you pay for free (as in beer) consumer services. In reality, no such principles exist, and everything is instead a numbers game. Do enough people complain? Does it factor into their purchase decisions?
Unfortunately, average people seem to not value their attention, even as everyone else is fighting tooth and nail for a share of it.
I don’t really need any of those with my phone in the car.
Can't find the reference but don't they use this for generating precise topological data?
That means it will fail the bi-annual mandatory check.
My expectation is the online tracking/advertising is about to hit an incredible hard legislative period. The change that is coming is big, and the fallout it going to seriously badly hit some business models and corporations.
However, you are completely right, they will try anything and everything to continue.
I can't seem to find the relevant part of GDPR that would even attempt to cover that - beyond any tracking data sent back to the manufacturer.
France doesn't even have WiFi in schools for this reason. Hard to imagine they would allow something like this in a vehicle.
Also, use of your home internet modem to transmit a ISP-only open wifi is also legal according to many EU laws.
Say you are Samsung, you have a fridge with a camera on it that keeps track of what’s in the fridge “for the user”, so they can see inside their fridge even when not at home. Now add in some image recognition, automatically tracking exactly what’s in the fridge, how often it’s used, when it’s running low. Now you have some of the most valuable consumer data possible to sell to data brokers. That is defiantly covered by GDPR.
I can't count how many times my friends and family said "I don't care" when I tried to educate them on how their devices or software spy on them.
People who really care about privacy enough not to buy stuff that spies on them are rare, and becoming rarer every year as more and more kids grow up in a world where being spied upon is normal.
Judging by the new CSAM legislation being pushed by EU bureaucrats, your fridge won't report to its maker but to EU commission and maybe to your own government.
Especially given the ridiculous price difference between a corporate and a common data plan.
Of course, it's probably a bunch of effort (eg electrical compliance, RF compliance, etc).
Kind of thinking it might be suitable for crowd sourcing. :)
3g definetly was bad for the, maybe lte is not scaling well enough for having each bulb in the house connected to the network without wifi ;D
I wish the guy best luck with his unplug solution. I recently did something comparable and was first lucky to discover when unplugging antennas from the board the device seemingly went on unaffected just to find out that it behaved erratic: Input was terribly lagging up to the point of being unusable to interoperate with. Reluctantly and in defeat I had to re-attach the antenna. I doubt it was designed to behave like this on purpose, but the CPU being tripped for operating out of regular parameters.
However intentionally bricking the device when it can't phone home is a very likely future.
Right to Disconnect? I want my Right to Disconnect.
When these backhaul comms go in this hardware, that "purchase" doesn't convey ownership. I would describe it as a rental in ownership's clothing.
It's not about 'learn the new tech' - it's 'learn when the company decides you don't need a feature or just decides to no longer support it' and remotely disables
One is learning new tech, the other is loosing your rights
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-user_license_agreement#Enf...
s/learn/adapt
When exactly did this smart device thing turn bad? Maybe it's been bad all along? I refused to use a smartphone until 2014 or so. My first Android got Cyanogen within about a month. When I shopped for my first Roomba (recently RIP), I specifically avoided the WiFi models.
Nowadays the "smart" devices are almost unavoidable, so on my LAN, each one gets its own set of firewall rules (usually to block them from the Internet completely). If it can't work that way - it gets returned. I've also set up a host-based blocklist for ads/trackers, for the entire LAN.
It should not be this hard to protect your privacy, but the current trend is to make this impossible even for the power users. Right to Disconnect should be a thing.
I imagine our leaders won't start thinking about this until we already have ubiquitous 5G / IoT .
I almost would say there is a better chance of a law that says you can't disconnect.
If the manufacturer can observe the device remotely, can control the device, can add or remove functionality, decide to stop selling you spare parts so you have to buy a new one, or brick it at any time - meanwhile you cant get the device to do what you want, or even to stop showing you ads?
You are not an owner, you are just sucker paying the bill. John deer agrees, in their submission to the court the argued that the farmer is not the owner of the tractor they bought.
This is worse than taxes, at least there you get a vote
Just wait until someone deliberately buys such a "smart" appliance, tears the SIM card out (or does some free-style rewiring of the PCB), and starts prodding around what they can reach on the other side. They might even be so kind as to take a look at the analytics/remote-control protocol, maybe pull some credentials out of the SoC and provide a free fuzz testing service to the manufacturer.
Oh, I think it will be sooner than that, and beyond that, it won't even be your appliance. You'll be renting it for only $49.95/month, and for only $4.99/month more you can have the RecipePlus(tm) subscription and see what all your friends are cooking, comes with ExtraCare repair and monitoring service too! Even more discounts when you rent the entire kitchen appliance suite.
That is the final barrier. Right now, they can't financially justify an always-on "hard" link.
Any ball park idea what this price might be? $10/year/device? Less?
You can't find the touch-buttons in the dark, say when you want to make coffee in the wee morn, so you're forced to turn on lights. When you finally find a button, it takes forever to turn it to max. You have to fiddle around to turn it back down again, first click the button for the corresponding plate you want, then click a separate button to actually power it down. Again, it takes forever.
It's also impossible to train tactile memory for it, becuase the buttons are too close and too hard to discern on the dark-on-dark top, so if you try doing it blind, you'll just end up fiddling forever to find the damn thing.
If you spill something over the touch area, it'll start beeping and complaining before it turns itself off. Meanwhile the corresponding pot might have already boiled over, and you can't react in time, because the touch panel is covered in boiling liquid.
Also, honestly, I think it's actually harder to keep the ceramic top clean than a regular top. Reason: It smudges real easy, and you're never sure how much pressure or abrasives you can use without making scratches. On the old tops, you just didn't have to worry. It could withstand a sledgehammer amount of abuse before scratching or chipping.
And don't even get me started on the microwave installed here... I brought my own two-knob micro despite there already being one installed here. That should give you a clue.
That said capacitive touch has no place in the kitchen.
An example that comes to mind is Continuously Variable Transmissions (CVT). Most types of motorsports avoid CVTs for reasons of weight, unreliability and decreased repairability. However, for normal road cars, CVTs are very widespread and they do the job just fine (until they don't, but that's another story!)
Speaking of beeping, why is it so hard to completely disable the "I'm finished" beep on household devices?
My microwave beeps, incessantly.
My dishwasher beeps, four times, when it's finished. Especially nice when this happens after midnight when everyone is sleeping.
My washing machine beeps, for the best part of 10 mins, when it's finished. Also nice when this happens in the wee small hours.
My tumble dryer - praise the Lord - has a function to disable its beeping. The beeping got disabled within minutes of it being installed.
Of course, the best way is to make it configurable, but surely.
Plug through the device and when it's done, shout at Mycroft (or other spyware DA) to power it off.
My washing machine loudly plays a lengthy fecking song when it's finished!
I do wish that, at the least, there was a way to reduce the volume of all these beeping things...
Had no idea it was about a trout of all things, or indeed why they chose such a song?!
Let me guess... one of the big Korean manufacturers? Seems to be popular over there for some reason.
Fortunately, on my LG, you can turn it off - but there's no middle ground: it's either a 30 second tune or complete silence.
My Instant Pot does the same thing, but I only use it in the evening, so not so much of a big deal as the microwave oven.
[1] Before: https://i.imgur.com/xuyQJwL.jpg
[2] After: https://i.imgur.com/ZwX8zWs.jpg
Sound Off: When in Standby, press and hold − button until display indicates SOFF [1]
But most of all, it is being cheap and using a piezeoelectric buzzer driven on/off instead of a speaker driven by a small routine that would produce a pleasant sound.
Microwave ovens used to sound a bell when they were done, back when timers were mechanical.
When my old microwave (which emitted 4 long beeps when finished) broken down, I specifically looked for an unit with:
- knobs, ie. no buttons (and especially no touch buttons!)
- shortest possible 'cooking finished' bell
I managed to find one that I like but it wasn't easy.
My microwave beeps for a solid 10 seconds every minute after a run. In this condition, it is perfectly safe no matter what.
My oven beeps exactly 1 time when preheated, similar to how FedEx and UPS notify upon package delivery. In this condition, it could burn my house down if left unattended. There are no subsequent beeps.
Really? I have a hard time imagining how heating elements in a steel box is going to burn your house down.
I've also had an electric oven where the element was damaged and started melting/deforming. Not sure how far this would have gone if left alone.
You’re pre-heating your oven, so it’s empty. There are no realistic circumstances where an empty oven could burn your house down simply by being on at a preset temperature.
This is a big assumption. A lot of people, myself included, store pots and pans in the oven when it's not in use. I frequently forget to remove them before preheating.
In my case the pan that I keep in there is made of cast iron, so there really isn't anything that can go wrong. But I would bet good money that there are people out there who keep wooden handled pots and pans in the oven. Is it a bad idea? Absolutely. But it's a realistic scenario.
Although I guess if it's not a safety thing, the cost of the extra design might be more than I'd expect to save on my electric bill from the once a year or less I leave it on overnight by mistake.
It will beep FOREVER untill you turn it off. This should be a crime.
I need this! Ours beeps when it's done, then starts up again for a couple of minutes, beeps again... repeat ad nauseam. Yes, I KNOW YOU'RE FINISHED!
For dishwashers, we now have one that just opens by itself when it is done (to dry) - no beeping or anything. Maybe a bit hyperbolic, but it was quite a life changer!
Hmmm? So it annoys you if it beeps at those times, but not when it RUNS at those times? I'm confused...
Utility room is a long way from the bedroom, and the utility room door fits well.
As long as you don't select a high-speed spin cycle the washing machine is more or less inaudible from the bedroom.
The beeper, however, isn't inaudible, especially at night.
Great design choice to make the beeper the loudest part of the device ... and then make it unmuteable. Yes, we did once ask the Siemens repair guy during a service visit.
This should be illegal.
I really miss the induction hob. Cleaning the rangemaster is a complete nightmare, it’s full of places where dirt can accumulate, there’s even holes down the back and gaps in the side where food falls down that are unrecoverable. The gas rings sometimes don’t light up and gas leaks out while you’re cooking and don’t realise, it’s much more dangerous for children and I’ve left it on without realising a few times now.
The buttons on the induction hob sucked, yes, but the user experience was so much better, literally wipe clean and done, safe and powerful. Maybe if I had a cleaner I’d prefer the rangemaster…
Delighted that my new place just has knobs!
And my mom is afraid to let anything drip on it, because they told her she needs special cleaner or it'll ruin the finish. And my parents are not gullible people.
Look forward to more of this shit, too: CA just outlawed gas appliances in new houses. But in an area stricken by permanent drought, do they do something sensible like requiring greywater recovery systems in new construction? NOPE.
>The only profitable division of the company is its Complaints Department, which, according to the series, takes up the major landmasses on three planets. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines its marketing division as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes," and an edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica that had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came."
Like fan (convection) ovens, is this just something that Europe is used to and is alien to people in the USA?
Personally, I love that the entire surface of the hob (including buttons) is a flat piece of glass. It makes cleaning trivial.
Before: turn the knob to max and wait a moment.
Today: long-press the on/off button to turn the stove top on, press another button to select plate, adjust power by hitting the plus button ten times to get it to the max setting. Then wait a moment.
That's the worst damn user interface you can think of for using a physical machine that begs for tactile controls.
Kettles on stoves are weird to us.
But for the vast majority of us it's electric.
I'm not sure the etymology of "put the kettle on" has been strictly about a stove-top for a very long time. To me it's a method-independent phrase, and a reference to setting the kettle to boil, not its physical placement.
When cast-iron stoves were common and possibly the primary source of heat for many homes, I am pretty sure that for most of the cold parts of the year, they would be fired-up and kept hot most of the day and night for warmth.
So - it wasn't a big production to boil water, you would just put it on the already hot stove.
(And also - I did not know this until recently but kettle can mean just a large cauldron/pot - although typically it would also have a wire handle and a lip/spout for easy pouring. Hmmm they were also used to hang above campfires, so my stove theory might go even further back...)
[1] - https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/home-entertainment/i-s...
However I made it myself with an ESP8266 and some Dallas sensors. So it only works for me. Not for anyone else.
Do you have a recommendation on how to start an ESP8266 project? Which board/power supply/??? Did you buy to do this for example
I personally buy whatever esp32 is on Amazon and use whatever usb power bricks I have laying around.
The ESP32 also has bluetooth which the 8266 doesn't. But WiFi and BT can't be used at the same time, you can turn them both on but they have to share the 'airtime' meaning more airtime for BT is more packet loss for wifi. If I need both I will usually just use 2 for this reason :)
For programming I used https://ESPHome.io which is perfect for Home Assistant and you can program it right from the Home Assistant interface, just by declaring a few variables. I even have a $2 OLED display hooked up to it (SSD1306 1-color typical aliexpress thingy), works perfectly.
It's highly recommended, let me know if you have more questions.
And yeah like the other person said, power supply for these boards is irrelevant, any USB supply will do. They're not fussy because they don't use a lot of power unlike a pi.
Simplicity lasts longer.
The smartest stove of them all - does one thing and does it well.
My 80-something grandmother uses a garlic press and several sizes of vegetable holders for slicing veggies. I guess she's just so uncool.
We've got several knives and several pans, because different versions of the same thing are useful for slightly different purposes. We've got separate pans for pancakes and that works very well for us, because they're lighter and you can actually flip them.
I wish recipes would stop using these vague terms. Just give me the exact number of grams or whatever and I'll gladly measure it on my food scale.
Our new Samsung has more space, less noise, way less heat generation and power consumption, and has no additional bells and whistles.
Like or not, appliances age, and their performance drops.
Same with dishwashers. With the looming water crisis ahead, every drop of savings is a plus.
Arcelik/Beko group uses 1000LT fresh water per year. The rest is recycled in the plant. This is less than monthly consumption of a single household.
Agreed.
What's worrying though is the amount of water wasted in the delivery network. Really annoying when people trying to save a litre here or there and then millions are just going straight in to the ground. https://www.thameswater.co.uk/about-us/performance/leakage-p...
> Every day we supply 2.6 billion litres of water, but not all of that gets to our customers. At the moment, we leak almost 24% of the water we supply.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bykcfJgye2M
The gist of the story is, because of the unmaintained leaky pipes of a decorative water installation, the city of Marburg wasted 20 million liters per year. A comedy show on state television is making fun of them.
There's a lot to be said with focusing on the right outcomes. We should do everything we can to reduce unnecessary waste and inputs. But, we also need to embrace water reclamation, water recycling. We currently reclaim ~86% of the water in my country. It's not great - but it's a good place to start.
That is far less than I expected. But does it account for the water use in their supply chain? I think that should also be counted.
That said, fridges and washing machines use enormous amounts of power and water, so savings there count for a lot. Far more than in many other household appliances.
A general rule of thumb: avoid machines with a large display.
The only reviews that matter are the long-term ones, which are rare, and by the time a long time has passed, the original model is no longer made (or worse, a cheaper process is used to make something under the same name).
The only approach I can see is to trust in a brand. But companies making commodified products like household appliances seem happy to have burned all their brand good will in exchange for short term profits, meaning I no longer trust any of them.
I ended up buying an entry level 8 kg Miele - just washes with no smart features & extremely well built. FYI: the 7 kg entry level models now come with a plastic wash tub, you need to buy the 8 kg model for the traditional metal wash tub.
The comparison is the water and energy embodied in the solar panel/turbine/inverter.
If you live in a desert, water is relevant
Living on tank, you have free water unless you run out, when it is hideously expensive to truck it in.
But as long as you have your consumption under control, you are your own water company and you may choose not to bother with appliances that focus on water efficiency.
You wash your clothes in grey water?
Does the cost of the electricity and water an old machine uses equal or exceed the cost of the electricity and water involved in having to make a brand new appliance instead of using an already-made one?
Where exactly that point is, I don't know. I'm generally in favour of repairing old devices, but from what I understand, washing machines have a limited lifespan, and a lot has been improved about their efficiency in the past 20 years.
<laughs in Scottish>
In Sweden, almost all of my electrical bill is heating anyway and water is practically free.
My dishwasher's default program requires 4—5 hours. In the 90s, this was <1h I think?
The same is true for energy efficient washing machines by the way, they often do not reach the temperature a program states and compensate with longer washing times. This may be problematic for hygienic reasons at times but has a noticeable impact on energy use.
> It's not as if the dishwasher hoards very much water for a load.
Apologies if I misread this but dishwashers absolutely _do_ hoard and reuse water. My dishwasher claims to use about 12l of water for a full wash, which really isn't much at all.
And also that using already-hot water gets it closer to the desired temperature at least, meaning less work for the heating element. If you're using a conventional water heater that's just pointlessly keeping your water hot all day, I figure you might as well use it. But of course, there's still a net loss of hot water that must be replaced using energy, so at best.... (you know what's coming)...
It's a wash.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rBO8neWw04
TLDwatch: eco programs use only one batch of water, others use two and that results in cleaner dishes with the added benefit of a faster program.
I feel like I read that in the manual that comes with my dishwasher. It was worded a bit differently, but it essentially said to use auto mode to get cleaner dishes, not eco which saves money but doesn't clean as well.
https://www.sgu.se/grundvatten/grundvattennivaer/aktuella-gr...
The water savings with eco-programs compared to "normal" programs is in the range of 10 seconds to 1 minute worth of shower time, if I remember correctly. If you want to conserve water use, there are a lot better ways to do so than running a dishwasher in eco mode. (Washing dishes by hand uses more water on average than even an old dishwasher).
Then, the terminology of "waste" is a bit problematic I think. The dishwater will usually output the spent water into some kind of sewer system in most places, and at some point this water usually gets cleaned and put back into circulation pretty much straight away. If not, it usually reaches nature again eventually. It's not like it became so toxic it needs to be stored safely for millennia.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't be mindful, of course, especially when there are current (regional) shortages.
Energy consumption (mainly to heat water) is a different matter. Energy consumption is the real environmental cost, not water consumption, as water is basically renewable, but energy is often produced from non-renewable sources and has secondary effects such as carbon emissions, which in turn effect climate change and in turn regional water availability. But even then again, reducing shower time by a minute, or water temperature, will have a greater impact on energy consumption than running a dishwasher in eco mode (on average).
If we had good sources of energy (nuclear, or solar+batteries) we wouldn't even need to worry about that. Water as well, water simply cannot get "wasted", you just need to clean it, which requires energy.
The fact is, these "modern" "green" appliances are simply worse, sure they use less energy but waste much more time (because colder water -> longer wash cycle). You can get more (useful) energy, but you can never get more time.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31008275#31009009
"" Better oven ergonomics leads to less cooking fatigue, which leads to less accidents and therefore less downtime. Sometimes it actually pays off to have a higher maintenance workload, especially since most of it is planned downtime, or features that don't have fixed urgently. And sometimes this idea of radical simplicity only shifts maintenance workload from one component to another. One example that gets a lot of pushback in US cooking is gas connections. ""
We get charged ridiculous amounts for repairs. The repair industry has sort of decided that there should be a high minimum regardless of the problem.
What OP said was about repairing stuff to avoid smart appliances. From an environmental perspective using old stuff is often much worse than getting new (fridge, car, ...).
[1]https://www.nationalgrideso.com/electricity-explained/electr...
EPA has some US-specific numbers (https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths#Myt...), which indicate that manufacturing remains a tiny part of the lifecycle of the car.
The only significant addition I see in somewhat recent models is auto-turning off, and I'm pretty sure it will help save the house from burning down at some point, so I'm all for it.
Many recent stoves (induction or regular) have figured that, when interacting with them, no one will have wet hands nor need to adjust them repeatedly, they could go ahead and save a few pennies by using shared tactile controls.
My stove need me to press a button corresponding to the plate I want to change, then press a common +/- button to turn it up or down. If my finger is wet, it will have a hard time registering and reach a timeout, whereupon I have to again select the plate. This is hands down the worst UX for an appliance I've had in my life.
The fun part was when you try to light it up but for whatever reasons it doesn't catch, so you're filling the room with propane and the second it might actually light up you're toast. Then if you turned it down too much it would die out, but you'd have to look below the pan to realize there's no flame anymore.
Oh, and the toxicity of course.
My IH plate also has common + and - buttons, but compared to the above I'm pretty happy with it. It also has a timer, and I'm ok giving up having 4 knobs for buttons that actually work and can be cleaned in one swoop, and having a single place where I can see the status of all the heating elements.
That's it. That's literally all you need.
The most difficult thing about it, is that it doesn't have a start button. It just starts automatically a second after you've set the timer.
This small "smart" feature is actually a problem for visitors who doesn't know the machine, because they'll try to jam in the two knobs in order to "start" the thing. But otherwise I love it, and I use it all the time over the fancy schmansy pre-installed one. Because when I use the fancy one, I'm afraid that if I push the wrong button I'll start a nuclear war...
2) surely the fact that it has WiFi was known at purchase time? Despite what the internet would lead you to believe, there is still a lot of fridges without WiFi and "smart" features out there, why not buy one of those rather than mess with this?
Edit: point 2 was addressed in the article, sorry I missed it
Related HN question from years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25275350
Thankfully it's only an US feature.
Like many other 'smart' appliances, it creates it's own AP so allow you to set it up. So anyone within range could attach it to their network, and then do whatever they like with it.
> surely the fact that it has WiFi was known at purchase time?
It came with the place they're living in. Someone else made that decision.
It is irrelevant anyway. Buying something with the intent of modding it is not that unreasonable.
Considering the security risk of smart devices generally working like this, I feel like the industry ought to standardize on something more sensible. Maybe some kind of NFC pairing?
I haven't ever needed or wanted to try to use the NFC method, I would disable it on any equipment I installed until I had a need for it. And even then I would do some research to see how badly the Wi-Fi Alliance fucked it up before making a judgement about whether I would feel comfortable enabling it.
Some router manufacturers fixed the issue by removing WPS pin, others “fixed” it by rate limiting WPS pin connection attempts, but that will just delay the attack.
So we are left with WPS Push button (if that’s available because as stated above, consumer routers may only allow disabling WPS completely rather than just disable WPS pin). But thats a bit of a pain for items like Shellys that are designed to be put behind fixtures.
But yeah, in the case of a fridge and most other consumer grade equipment putting a push button somewhere for WPS Push Button should be easy to factor in.
https://www.wi-fi.org/discover-wi-fi/wi-fi-easy-connect
By the same geniuses that brought you WEP, WPA (TKIP) and WPS PIN... now we finally have QR codes and NFC mixed in.
I'll be turning this off so I can avoid the inevitable security flaws.
I do have a Samsung TV, and no matter what I do, I can't turn off the Wifi/Bluetooth radios in it - and several of my neighbours keep trying to connect to it.
The Google Chromecasts continually broadcast their AP when not fully set up.
A neighbour has a bluetooth/wifi speaker that pushed some kind of "Do you want to set up your X brand speaker now?" prompt to my phone.
There's a few other smart devices near me that are also broadcasting open APs that never seem to go away.
for now. That’s not true anymore for example for TVs.
Wi-Fi for fridges is available, but no one seems that bothered by it.
It is also quite possible that these come with cellular connectivity in the future as well…
Just need to know where one can purchase said cellular jammer...
That being said, jamming is relatively easy, just saturate the channel you want to jam with noise. That will also probably kill your cellular connection though.
It says right there in the article:
these appliances came with the new place so i’ll be stuck with these i imagine for some time
Obviously neither should have any actual controls over Wi-Fi, but getting a notification about open fridge door, being able to check if stove or oven is on while away from home, or getting report when something (is about to) breaks would be neat.
Well, this isn't it. Only the corporations receive your data.
I bought all new appliances last year, and none of them were smart. I don't even remember seeing any smart ones at the shop. Granted, this was an appliance store in a town of about 8000 people... but it seems to me they're more gimmicks for people with too much money than a part of most peoples every day life.
I have a couple of IoT VLANs that devices gets sorted into by my level of percieved trust. Things like AppleTV and Sonos goes into the trusted one, things like Printers, various chinese IoT like Aquara sensors, Eufy cameras and more are put into the untrusted one. Trusted devices have static DHCP assigned IPs, as well as printers (for AirPrint and mDNS)
Everything in the untrusted VLAN is blocked by MAC address in the firewall in the outbound direction.
I keep a (surprisingly small) spreadsheet of all my firewall rules, so migrating to a new firewall is a matter of spending 30 minutes setting up the 50 or so lines from the spreadsheet, of which most are rules for allowing inter VLAN traffic, i.e. allow AirPlay reverse connections from AirPlay capabale devices.
I should add that i run Eufy cameras in Homekit mode, so they only need access to talk to a HomeKit bridge/hub (AppleTV/HomePod), and only need internet access for firmware updates.
For security fixes, i usually find out through other channels (here or reddit) about some new 0-day, and i will check for updates after that.
Considering that the devices are not allowed on the internet, and on a very limited network, the risk of a random "drive by shooting" is rather low.
It's either that, or place them in a faraday cage :)
And at some point in the "not too distant future", everything will be running on 5G/6G, and at that point i guess it doesn't matter anymore. I'll revert to the tried and true methods of applying painters tape over cameras/sensors.
Seriously though, i'm also extremely picky with what kinds of IoT stuff i buy. My toothbrush doesn't need WiFi, and neither does a whole bunch of other stuff. I can vote with my wallet, and hope the EU consumer protection takes care of the rest.
I've lost count the amount of times I thought about "I should just do an open-source version of <some home appliance I need and is full of spy/crapware>"
So why are we getting it anyway? We are getting it because it is essential to the smart cities agenda. It is planned that everything be micromanaged by a technocratic elite.
Think of China's social credit score on steroids. Have you used up your allocation of credits? Your fridge/heating/etc can be switched off.
Have you been a bad citizen, posting dissenting comments online? Then you can't travel, will have your bank account frozen/constrained.
A digital pass and smart technology everywhere are required. Then technocrats can have fine-grained control of everything.
This will be done in the name of the environment - in the name of 'saving the earth' most of us will choose digital enslavement and will even force it on others.
^ That's the plan in a nutshell - which is aimed to be in place for 2030.
I imagine a product manager took exactly 100ms to calculate that the answer to that question is "functionally no one" and so there went the $X ethernet connector from the build, for patently obvious reasons.
Hell, I'd love to know Sonos's ethernet adoption rate, since they certainly have that data. I'd bet it's fairly high since Sonos is a bit up-market and sometimes professionally installed, or installed by enthusiasts, but I'm willing to guess it's < 5%, and realistically, < 1%, even if we only obviously limit the sample size to "Sonos devices that are eth capable."
I generally like receiving a notification when the dishwasher is finished with the dishes, but with the current WiFi setup it's always broken and I don't have the energy to fix it. So I would've used it if it were working over Ethernet and I'm not using it now when it can only work over WiFi.
Out of home automation devices Philips Hue works only over Ethernet, though there you have the advantage that you can place the hub anywhere you like.
*buys a wifi-enabled fridge*
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm sure you could if you were renting in e.g. Malibu, LA for >$100,000/wk
RTR should include access to the software running these products, this way people could modify things, brick their appliances if they really want to, turn off "call home" features, etc.
A smart fridge can also be botnetisied like any of these.
I don’t know how fridges with WiFi works. But considering the rumors about connecting to open Wi-Fi connections automatically, let’s start from there.
1) What if a so-called smart fridge keeps a list of items you have stored in your fridge? Maybe there are temperature settings for different zones. Maybe a default is listed as “eggs”.
Ok, now you know that, presumably, your target really likes eggs. So much that he Selects that temperature by default.
Now you know what to look for to make potential physical contact with your target.
1) where is nearest store with eggs?
2) how often does he open and close the fridge? Maybe the data stored keeps that data. From there, you can guess how often your target may run out of eggs if he buys them a dozen at a time and opens the fridge every morning for breakfast.
3) you have three stored within cycling / driving range. You go to one of them to wait for your target.
Next scenario:
You connect to the fridges open Wi-Fi connection automatically. Oh, jackpot! This fridge has a camera in its screen! Now you have access to watch your target through the fridge camera.
Next scenario:
Maybe the fridge keeps a list of other Wi-Fi sourced it tried to access earlier. You can scan those and maybe try to guess passwords to break into those networks.
I could go on.
better off disabling it.
but products can be notorious in the ways they try to make you setup the wifi.
Worse sometimes if you don't setup WiFi they will connect to unprotected networks if the find some and try to use them instead, opening them up to even more attack surface (or networks of wide spread hotspot providers in your country).
I.e. you get annoyed and can't be sure if it doesn't connect to "something" if you don't go that far.
So, if a neighbors party gets too loud you can go an aggressive way and just turn off their lights and lower curtains… or go passive aggressive way and bring their AC waay down so they begin to suffer but may not realise why :D
The whole system runs on some sort of an outdated linux servers, so one day I plan to hack my own home’s access network to get a root finally.
These apps often require ridiculous invasions of privacy - refusing to work if you don't give them full access to location, running in the background, etc. - and work poorly at best.
In 30+ years of using computers, I thought that printer companies were my go-to standard for truly hideous software, but appliances are pushing the bar even lower. If my company interviewed a candidate from one of them who didn't proactively state that they formally protested the shipping of their software, I would in most cases refuse to hire them.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-product-security-and-telecom...
The "full access to location" to that is likely because of Android's broken security model, which made asking for location the only way various apps had to bind to some physical device. It's apparently being fixed[1].
As for running in the background: Isn't that because it needs to poll for and receive the notification?
1. https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/05/19/android-12-apps-won...
Even Facebook Messenger doesn't require the "run in the background" permission, and yet all sorts of cheapest Chinese bidder IoT and Appliance garbage apps check for it and refuse to run if you don't grant it - such as the app for Thinkware dashcams.
Appliance manufacturers are worse than car OEMs in this sense. Making stuff which nobody asked for while screwing it up.
Solution: physically disconnect WiFi.
This pretty much sums up my daily outlook on life.
This approach is used commercially. Our office is in a co-working space and we have a smart fridge in the kitchen. I should point out we also have a normal shared fridge, but this is like a fancy vending machine. You unlock with an app, take what you want and all the items have an RFID tag, so the system knows what you took and charges you. I assume the workspace managers also get stock alerts.
The other end of this is hotel minibars which detect what you take, I guess also using RFID. I know Marriott use these (Berlin for example) to stop people swapping out wine for water or juice. Fun fact, this happened to a friend of mine in managed isolation. The hotel had taken all the booze from the rooms, since alcohol was rationed. You had to order it from room service and they'd leave it outside your door. They swapped it for free, but they weren't surprised. It seems like it happened a lot, but being told at check-in that you can't touch the fridge without risking it charging you seems like penny pinching when you're charging 150+ EUR per night.
Do you have a source? Proof that it is not a security concern?
Have turned off wifi from my device and never turned it on again.
"since this got boosted if anyone happens to know about service manuals for appliances, lmk. i’m textin a buddy about this and now we just wanna kill it instead my backup plan (forever dhcp lease + block IP from pf.conf). even the manuals i can find online from samsung don’t mention the smart features, it seems to be more of a “don’t burn down your house idiot” thing "
It seems their plan was to block it at a network level if they couldn't do this.
The idea is to some day make a per-gadget catalog of all the hostnames and addresses these things want to reach, but hopefully someone beat me to it already and you folks can let me know where to find it.
This is the system Google intends PWAs to be, just quick, snappy, easily accessible websites that behave like they belong on your device. Sadly, most "apps" seem to copy the bloated, heavy, mostly JS-based approach we find in native apps, which is besides the point. Take the Twitter web-app, for example, that's a bloated mess that needs some serious optimisation. The alternative front-end, Nitter.net, does a lot better in almost every aspect. It's fast, accessible, and does just about everything except writing tweets and putting together a wall of followed accounts for you.
I like mastodon but I still prefer a native app over the web UI because it just feels that little bit too "web" for me. The main advantage obviously isn't the UI but the decentralized nature of the platform; a clean UI just helps them be a better alternative for the closed ecosystem of traditional social media.
Everyone is limited to 1 dishwasher session during drought season. Fridges run a few degrees warmer during heat waves to conserve energy.
Or it gets factored into your personal and family ESG score which can be used to discriminate.
Are you doing your part, comrade?
"Comrade", if you source your own water and don't rely on "communism when it's convenient for me", water limits aren't a problem.
Your dig at communism doesn't make sense: This dystopia you describe is being actively built by capitalist companies operating within a market economy and encouraged by democratically elected governments.