That's exactly why it's a bad idea to use IoT on everything! Most companies working on this kind of product doesn't give a shit about security.
It's more likely that someone left a Bluetooth interface open on the service/control interface. Could be even be something used for normal service operations that wasn't properly secured.
Perhaps the BT connection bridged the device to the internet, but we have no indication of that and the internet was used as the vector. It could have been a local wireless software update interface so maintenance doesn't have to open up each pump to apply the patch.
I'm not sure who eats the cost of the theft, but I'm guessing it's the same people that make almost no money from the sale of the fuel. These were not wealthy people; they were working obscene hours and barely scraping by.
They said they get $0.30 per gallon which mostly goes toward the other overhead, leaving $0.07 of profit per gallon.
Things will be "interesting" over the next 10-20 with the switch to electrification - yet another entire sector that may no longer be viable for small/medium independent owners. (but, time marches on - we don't see many people lamenting the "buggy whip manufacturers" from days of old)
Though there is still need for a store close to home where I can get a bit of milk quick, my morning donuts, and all the other things. I hope such stores move closer to where people live - suburban people should experience the big city convenience of walking to such places and when they don't have a hope of competing for drivers they may as well move closer to where people live. (if zoning allows!)
Many places will make the transition but you'll also need to change your interior to dedicate more space to people waiting while charging.
Having a zero-margin product stolen, means that your loss is 100% of the sale price.
Unless you mean "talking through" in the sense of teaching a lesson, because you're not. Your argument does not invalidate what they are saying, or bring any notable information to light. You merely started a waste-of-time tangent. Theft bad, everyone knows that.
It is cowardly and weak to abuse the legal system to compensate for societal problems by shifting blame onto easy targets. I have no interest in entertaining that line of reasoning.
And a manufacturer is not an "easy target" at all. If suing a big manufacturer is easy in some circumstance, it means they screwed up badly.
And yes, it is an easy target, because the goal is to find someone to yell at; nobody cares about winning lawsuits. It's about DAs finding a scapegoat to yell at, to avoid the fact that they have failed to disincentivize crime.
It's not negligence because nobody should be under any obligation to defend their property against theft. It's the job of the state to punish crime.
If you design a dispenser that dispenses at the wrong time, you have some responsibility.
> And yes, it is an easy target, because the goal is to find someone to yell at; nobody cares about winning lawsuits.
If you're not going to win, you lose even more money. Why would you file it?
> It's about DAs finding a scapegoat to yell at,
That has nothing to do with lawsuits.
> to avoid the fact that they have failed to disincentivize crime.
It's not possible to go after every little thing.
> It's not negligence because nobody should be under any obligation to defend their property against theft.
I'd better never have you watch my property, if you think there's no obligation at all to defend things.
Leaving valuable items in the middle of the sidewalk is negligent, even though it's a crime to take it.
Also the correct analogy for the lawsuit would be leaving someone else to unsafe circumstances. Perhaps a vendor that sold the woman pepper spray that didn't spray. Would that vendor be blameless because a crime occurred and only the criminal gets blame?
Edit: Though if you really want an in-depth answer to your question, I would say that just by being an autonomous human being you are self-protecting in a way that meets the bar. Your items can't do the same, so you need to apply protections to them if they're in a place with easy public access.
This is where we are at now, the ultimate luxury, everyone has complete moral immunity for life for absolutely anything they do so long as someone else has more money than them, never mind if they are in the top 10% of the world's wealthy overall.
Something as straightforward as "stealing is wrong" doesn't apply. "Stealing from people I don't like is fine".
I've never seen anyone introduce the idea of "wealth absolutism". From your comment though I'm not sure if you would allow the bottom 10% to feel complete moral immunity.
The first problem is that companies that add wireless/IoT capabilities to devices have nothing to do with their implementation/security beyond writing a cheque. I used to work for a company that created IoT devices for huge brands[0]. They make a toothbrush, a lightbulb or a vacuum cleaner. They're good at that, but they bring in someone else to either "wholesale create an IoT product" or collaborate on its creation where the "IoT pieces" (and their security) were farmed out to us.
Of course, we didn't have much to do with the creation of the product, either. We (frequently) used a white-label Chinese product -- often, but not always, explicitly chosen by the manufacturer. In fact, the large brands often insist on a specific Chinese provider for long-term maintenance/cost savings[1].
We receive a "dev board" and device that consists of an ESP8266/ESP32 bolted onto whatever it's IoT-ing, and a cloud service (hosted in the country of origin; almost always China). The developers involved write a mobile app and some firmware that interacts with the cloud web service -- which we have no control over/cannot work around or suggest additional security layers -- and we integrate it. It creates an impenetrable SEP field[2].
Companies who care about security care about it up to some industry defined standard that has some form of acronym (the names of which escape me these days) which involve, basically, filling out a form or two attesting (truthfully) to the requirements but that serve only to shield those involved in the process from responsibility beyond whatever the acronym-defining organization thinks to ask. It involved passing a lot of those questions off to the third-party who runs the cloud service, who -- surprise, surprise -- know what boxes to check to receive payment.
[0] I love my former employer so I'm leaving the brands off, but at least one product involved was popular enough that my parents received one as a gift for Christmas ... it was fun explaining that some code I had written was running on their phone.
[1] The pattern (one that we didn't advocate) went "hire us to build the initial, user-friendly, polished version of the app" then pass it onto said OEM to maintain/update it between hardware versions. To the extent that the first version could be secured, it is (until it's not). They don't trust the OEM to write the initial version, but once it's out there, augmenting it costs 1/10th the price and that's about all their willing to pay after the initial product is created.
[2] Someone Else's Problem (Douglas Adams -- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).