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Comment by somat | Hacker News Reader

The real wtf here, I mean once you get past how stupid it is that your oven is now connected to the internet. Is why does it need to check if the internet is available? There are two cases, it can reach it's api endpoint and will work, or it can not reach it's api endpoint and will not work. The availability of several well known domains has no effect on this. The only reason I can think of is so you can have a different error message for "the oven service is down" and "unable to access the oven service". Even then you only need to make that check when the api access fails.

Tangently: I don't quite buy the prewarming use case, the only halfway legitimate use case for a internet connected oven is if you are the type to worry if you left the oven on.

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Checking whether they can connect to google.com, baido.cn, and yandex.ru in order to know whether "the Internet is up" is like me driving to Walmart, Target, and McDonalds to check if the highway system is working. When my actual goal is simply to get home.

> The only reason I can think of is so you can have a different error message for "the oven service is down" and "unable to access the oven service".

To the user, there is no difference, because the user wouldn't take different corrective action for each case. How can the user correct it if the appliance's cloud service is down? Just ping your own cloud service and if it doesn't respond, tell the user "Unable to access the oven service. Check your Internet connection, and if it's fine, please wait a bit more."

Prewarming notification/timer complete is nice especially when I'm gaming/programming and tend forget the world exists.

Also reaching out for NTP and keeping the time updated is useful.

But yea, keeping these internet of shit devices on their own VLAN and monitoring what they are up to leads to a lot of 'um, what is going on' moments.

Ovens with a probe: is my roast at temperature yet?

Of all appliances in my kitchen the oven makes the most sense to have network features. Fridge perhaps a distant second, and that's only because I really wish I knew my compressor had failed and could've rescued the $350+ of groceries that spoiled if something had alerted me to the temp rising while the compressor was still attempting to run.

> the only halfway legitimate use case for a internet connected oven is if you are the type to worry if you left the oven on.

Do they still sell ovens without a timer? Mine (which is quite old) requires setting the time in advance. Forgetting is simply not an option.

Of course, they could start selling ovens without timers to stimulate the sales of internet-connected ones...

Certainly they do, mine has 3 primary modes, either just go indefinitely, go indefinitely but ring a bell after a set time, or go for a set time. The easiest mode to get set up is "go indefinitely", so that's what we use the most. Time isn't a great sopping criteria for most baking anyways, probing the interior is much more reliable.

There are some without timers but I've never seen one with a timer that required the timer to be set.

Not that I'd ever connect an iot device to my wifi/internet, but yes, that only reason is the reason. I absolutely would want to know if it's potentially a problem on my end or their end.

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