LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
(after https://twitter.com/meekaale/status/1744807035454079079 )
someone asserted that that is an unreasonable amount of data for a washing machine to generate
i'm pointing out an easy way for a washing machine might generate 2000 times more data than that
the fact that the network interface is possibly insufficient to send the data out is irrelevant to the question of whether the washing machine can or cannot generate it in the first place, which is what was being discussed
however, i will point out that if it's using tcp, unless it opens a new tcp connection for each telemetry message, the tcp stack will batch together many telemetry messages into a single tcp segment, probably about 1500 bytes worth
— ⁂ —
of course you can control a washing machine with an 8051, or an eprom and a register clocked from the power line (see jeff laughton's printing press controller at https://laughtonelectronics.com/Arcana/One-bit%20computer/On...), or for that matter a mechanical timer or, as i've done, by unplugging the power cord and pulling a rubber drain plug when you think the agitator motor has been running for long enough. but more powerful control systems enable new functionality
historically it is true that manufacturers have used low-spec microcontrollers because more powerful ones were too expensive. today digi-key will sell you a 500-megahertz i.mx rt1010 cortex-m7 from philips/nxp, with 128 kilobytes and dc/dc conversion on-chip, for under four dollars, roughly π dollars in fact https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/nxp-usa-inc/MIMXR.... home appliances and motor control are two of the application areas the datasheet claims it's 'specifically useful' for. unlike an 8051, you can program it in micropython and single-step it over a debugging umbilical, and once it's deployed, it can send you surveillance data over the internet. and you can get cheaper and better chips on lcsc if you can read datasheets in chinese
oops, did i say surveillance data
i meant telemetry. telemetry, telemetry, telemetry
for better or worse this unlocks a lot of temptation for manufacturers to put ridiculously powerful cpus in things where they only serve to cause headaches to the consumer
other comments in this thread have even pointed out non-evil ways this could make manufacturers more profitable
freq = 480 megahertz // 480000000 Hz
size = 80 * 1 byte // 80 bytes
cycles_per_write = 400 // 100 to print, 300 to fail
writes_per_sec = freq / cycles_per_write // 120mHz
duration = 24 hr
(writes_per_sec * size * duration) to terabytes // 8.2 tb
btw the units(1) program is useful for things like this
You have: 480 megahertz / 400 * 80 bytes * 1 day
You want: terabytes
* 8.2944
/ 0.12056327Looking at the calendar, this corresponds to days we ran loads vs idle no use days. I'm okay with this level of data usage.
Are people so uncomfortable saying "we don't know" that they use such loose reasoning to "get the answer"?
I'll re-read the article/tweets, maybe I missed something.
The follow-up Tweet is from the same person who reported the initial issue.
This happens a lot: Devices get a new IP address but some tool has an internal database that remembers the old device at that address. It then shows stats for the new device at that IP address but reports it as coming from whatever it was initially recognized as.
Edit: I’m wrong
So you can't use it to track devices between multiple SSIDs including when scanning for networks, but you can use it to persistently identify a device when connected to the same network.
You can go via IP though, pull up your DHCP lease on your phone/laptop/whatever and match it to the same IP in Unifi, then manually name the device.
"It thinks my WiFi dog feeder is a Technoelectrocom 56XR-2000? What the hell is (was) that?"
My PoE one has only ever identified as what Ubiquiti thinks it is, so no idea
The fact that it shows up as using iMessage is the part that I said may be inaccurately reported.
Even now, I am still seeing some suspicious data usage. I’ve started wiresharking it yesterday to track it down.
Most likely that tracking acceptance is buried in some 500 page eula, but thats a separate issue.
Even if you're lazy and uploaded an uncompressed JSON array of objects, that shouldn't be more than a few kB. Way less if you compress it.
A megabyte is a LOT of data.
Or other things measured every ~second, like stuff related to the motor, temperatues, humidity, etc. and other diagnostics.
Seems really easy to generate a megabyte if you consider time series. Even easier if it's in XML or JSON rather than a CSV.
Because of the criticality, it was on high tier reliable SAN storage, replicated to a second site. IIRC, storage was like $80 Gb/mo.
Because it was on prem, the chargeback model was associated with the business unit and not super granular. It got lumped in with another business function because it should be a trivial workload.
I found it when I was doing estimates for a new platform and the app’s growth numbers didn’t add up! Even at $240k, it wasn’t an obvious outlier.
That might make sense during development, but there's no way they do that in a consumer product. If a part breaks they're just going to send out a replacement or the repair guy is gonna get some third party part. Recording that much detail would just be noise.
Even if they had specific parts sensors (doubt it, for costs), they could just process that locally and send up an error code, not the whole log.
I find that all pretty hard to believe, but if anyone has evidence to the contrary, I'd be glad to be proven wrong. I had a LG washing machine bought new a few years ago promising all sorts of bells and whistles and app integrations. But it was super janky and cheaply made, the app integration was terrible, the on board memory would lose its configured settings, the entire LCD broke after a few weeks... it was not what I would consider well-engineered at all. If it was sending a megabyte a day I'd just assume it was yet another bug, not some forward thinking QA.
Is he sure they're sending < 1 MB a day? Yeah.
Is he sure it's plausible it's measuring time series data? Yeah.
Is it plausible they measure vibration patterns? Yeah.
It's not about like "oh we'll send an electrical engineer to fix your specific vibration pattern", it's "we can collect data from the field to make forward-looking decisions": ex. maybe we switch supplier mix for replacement motors, and a data scientist ends up finding 6 months later that something changed in June 2023 where serviced washers in New York report dramatically more intense vibrations and now we know to go talk to the supplier who gained mix.
It's error logs for non-tech. YMMV on individual team quality if they actually follow-up. Conceptually, Big Data(tm) is something CEOs have been hearing regularly since, what, 2014? So definitely plausible.
Then do some sort of a regression to discover what logged parameters are associated with what failure modes/broken parts. If washers that take less time to fill up have higher than normal failure rates for some elbow joint, that probably means that high water pressure causes the elbow joint to fail. If a certain elbow join's failure rate is simply correlated with the number of cycles, that tells you something different. If a certain elbow join has a high failure rate that's not associated with anything, that probably just means it's a shitty part. But you learn something.
By logging everything and running a regression analysis, when you develop next year's model, you know where to improve. Now when you tell an expensive engineer, "This elbow join failed on 1000 units of revision F. Make it fail on 100 or less units of revision G." you can also give them a starting point to work with.
I'm a software guy. If I get 10 crash dumps, and you don't tell me anything, I don't necessarily know what to work with. If you give me those same 10 crash dumps and tell me that 9 of them had the language set to Arabic or Hebrew I know it's probably a BOM bug. Same thing.
Or you just sell the data to ad companies and let them figure out how to get value from it.
Maybe they also just sell it together with your advertising id, why not use washing patterns for deanonimyzation ...
Collecting all that data for analysis would be incredibly valuable, especially considering the wealth of analysis tools today.
Yes indeed, but compression algorithms are not that new.
See, that’s just one lazy engineer writing one telemetry solution. Multiply that by several engineers across several teams, each cobbling together a different telemetry solution for a different product manager’s initiative using a different stack of JavaScript libraries, throw in some poorly-rolled-out infrastructure changes a few years later resulting in some unanticipated retry loops, and I think you can hit that megabyte per day easily enough.
Well it is, but in this Cloud Native world the clueless management and IT engineers have been convinced that single micro service running on 50 kubernetes pods and generating 20 MB trace logs for single transaction is normal.
Now once we have built this inefficiency industry wide nobody is there to wake the management up about huge wastage of resources. They are floating in this lurid dream of "ultra smart" machines generating gigabytes of precious intelligence about customer behavior for target ads
> After 10 minutes (IIRC) in remote start mode without starting the machine goes to sleep. You must use the smartthinq_sensors.wake_up command to wake it up, then the remote_start command to start it.
I don't care if it's a small percentage of my symmetric gigabit fiber, I only care why they supposedly need it and where it ends up.
A phone number or a timestamp is a tiny amount of data.
In the quaint olden days, you had to go out of your way to volunteer to be a part of some study to have any aspect of your activity recorded every few seconds 24/7 to be collected and analysed like that.
It also doesn't matter that my washing machine usage might not seem like sensitive info. It's wrong by default rather than OK by default. You need a compelling need to justify it, not the other way around. It needs to be necessary to prevent one dead baby every day or something, not the other way around. No one needs to produce any convincing example of harm for that kind of collection to be wrong.
But even so, it's easy to point out how literally any data can end up being sensitive. Washing machine usage could lead to all kinds of assumptions like, this person does not actually live where they say they do (which impacts all kinds of things), or this person is running an illegal business, or housing too many people for the rating of the dwelling or allowed by the lease, etc, or just another data point tracking your movements in general. Or even merely to get out of 10% of warranty claims.
It’s touch and go for me. The variables names in washing machine code would likely have be less easily confused.
(yes, you still cannot run a mailserver at home, currently because we live in the age of Internet of Shit).
I'm not convinced though. That would assume that the washing machine was opening an external port on the user's router, which seems unlikely. I looked up a manual for one of the the washers which has the "ThinQ" feature and there's no mention of UPnP.
Those situations strike me as super rare, unlikely, and unrealistic, too.
> delicates, fluff n fold, carnage!
I feel that the current solution to "control from anywhere" is the laziest and most privacy invasive. Also, when XYZ company shuts down there service in 2 years and abandons your product, you might not even be able to use it anymore. What a waste.
More discussion here with even the person who reported it posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38930507
E.g., I recently bought an LG WM3400CW washing machine for $650. On Consumer Reports it is tied for 3rd on the front loader ratings list. The LG 3900 and 4000 are tied for #1 with overall scores of 87, then the 3400, 8900, and 3600 tied for #3 with overall scores of 85.
Nearly every LG has WiFi nowadays, but not the 3400. Consumer Reports says it does but I think they probably got confused because it has LG's "Smart Diagnosis" which lets you get diagnostic information via LG's mobile app.
On models with WiFi Smart Diagnosis does indeed use WiFi.
On models without WiFi it uses sound. The washing machine plays sounds that sound similar to the sounds that acoustic modems made back in the pre-broadband internet days. Their mobile app listens to those and extracts the diagnostics data.
That's actually pretty cool! I think we should use this for more stuff to help usher in the R2-D2 future.
A bit off topic but..
You can probably afford to buy a house in almost every other part of the world though.
It's not like in the past everybody was able to buy a house in the "popular" places.
• You do not have to configure WiFi to just use the device. It can do all the functions that type of device generally does, with a reasonable interface. You can configure WiFi to gain access to extra features, such as sending notifications or a friendlier interface.
• You have to configure WiFi to initially set up the device and/or to change some settings later, but it does not need to use WiFi during normal operation. WiFi can be used during normal operation for extra features.
• It needs WiFi during normal operation. Without WiFi you can only do at most a basic subset of normal operations.
For devices that do need WiFi it is worth distinguishing between devices that need to use the internet (directly or via an app on the local network) to function. There are devices that need WiFi because they use that to talk to a required app, but neither the device nor the app need internet.
This can be important when you have an internet outage. A device that requires WiFi but does not require internet can often continue to work when your internet is down as long as the outage is upstream from your home router.
For people whose reason for not wanting to configure WiFi is that they don't want the device sending their personal information to the device maker, it is not necessarily enough to just leave omit configuring WiFi. Allegedly some devices will look for open WiFi networks and use those if you don't explicitly configure a WiFi network.
As far as LG washing machines go I believe they fall under the first bullet item above.
What about non-techies?! How would they notice and react to such data harvesting behaviors in their homes' appliances, computers, phones, gadgets? I believe there must be a bare minimum of self-awareness to deal with the ever-evolving digital world we live in.
If you buy any hardware that requires an internet connection to work return it as faulty.
Is this washer going to get software updates for it's entirely lifespan?
"It's behind NAT and a firewall".
Well if one of your other devices get infected and it gets infected now what?
"But NAT" you heard of STUN servers? It doesn't need to be in a botnet to be malicious... That's assuming your ISP router from 10 years ago without any updates isn't also vulnerable.
"But I keep an eye on my stuff" what about the 5billion other users in the world?
IOT is insecure garbage you shouldn't be putting in your house and you shouldn't let your family do so either.
And I concider thr UDM to be IOT in and of itself but that is arguably an opinion not objectively true
Okay? I'm not sure how it affects me. Perhaps the people who don't "keep an eye on their stuff" are the ones who shouldn't get IoT devices, it's weird to say that nobody should get them
Easiest way to be a revolutionary is to not do something in this case. The market will self correct if you show them it's wrong. At this point you, an informed technical user, are doing a disservice to the uninformed public by continuing to support products that are arguably evil by design.
1. If you must have an IoT device, favor zigbee.
2. Put your IoT devices on a segmented network that you've throttled. IoT devices neither need nor deserve privileged network access.
3. Probably don't use a consumer grade router if you know how to monitor network traffic.
4. That all being said, it feels unlikely that an IoT device would be exposed on a properly configured router to anything beyond vendor spyware.
1. Z-wave is better, but Wifi can be fine in the right environment. Like, my weather station uses Wifi because it sends a few bytes of data to a server once a minute. No need for an additional protocol going on that interferes with everything else on 2.4GHz anyway. I also use Wifi for a sensor I put in my box that stores 3D printer filament to measure its humidity, so I know when to recharge the desiccant. An ESP32 wakes up every half hour, measures the humidity, and sends it over HTTPS to an InfluxDB instance in "the cloud". Its tiny lithium polymer battery lasts a year. It took me maybe an hour to design the hardware and write the software for it. Why do anything more complicated? Why bother with an esoteric protocol when you just want to use the Internet?
3. Consumer grade routers are great these days. I have a 10G WAN, 10G LAN, and Wifi6e on the router that Verizon provides with my service for free. To buy something like that myself, I'd be spending 700 or 800 dollars so that I can pretend to be a sysadmin on my day off. Why bother?
Make no mistake: consumer grade routers are a massive security risk, and continue to be to this day.
They have no incentive to respond to and mitigate CVEs.
They frequently have hardwired credentials.
They don't have robust networking tools.
They are common targets for hacks for these reasons.
Regarding throughput, yes, 10gb is quite a bit. It'd probably be somewhat troublesome to get a home router with those kinds of physical ports (though CPU throughput would be trivial, see Intel's latest offerings. The n100 range can saturate any reasonable connection, including IPS, which you don't have).
It's just not necessary, though. I am a power user, software engineer, hosting ~50 docker containers, many with custom code on 300mbps. No slowdown. No saturation.
Furthermore, a cheap enterprise AP from eBay, even on wifi 5, is vastly superior to your Verizon AP.
I'm not a networking professional. I installed OpnSense and connected a ruckus AP. Done.
1. If you had a decent AP, zigbee interference wouldn't be an issue, wink emoji.
Anyhow, many devices require network access for useful functionality.
That network is ideally zigbee.
(It's also possible for Bluetooth to make up for some of the lost featureset for non-realtime applications, so I'd favor Bluetooth smart devices over wifi smart devices.)
That being said, a better architected device would probably just use Bluetooth and your smartphone as a controller. I don't think many average home users could tell the difference.
I'm not sure what the better answer is now that I am trying to think of one. Maybe all I really hate is how shitty and lack of control the app is. It requires me to turn on location, and does who the f knows what on the network between the app and brother. I do not want to have to turn on location to use a label printer. No matter the tech excuse about detecting proximity, something has simply gone off the rails at that point.
But using Bluetooth as a local connection, I guess that's OK if the protocol were just open and I could choose the app to use with it.
Devices with web servers have that one big plus, which is that you use your browser, not someone else's browser.
Make the same sort of genericization on bluetooth and that would probably satisfy a good number of use cases.
They've run out of their own washing-machine chips to re-use in their missiles, so they've found a way to hack into washing-machines all over the world and use those millions of chips to guide their missiles instead.
If the device just opened a simple TCP/HTTP server on your network for phone app access, there would be dozens of breathless articles from the typical low-quality technology sites claiming that your washing machine can easily be monitored by hackers. By hitting a specific LG domain and verifying/pinning certs, the vendor can ostensibly secure that central API and easily make updates if issues are found.
It sure seems like it would be much cheaper to have the device simply connect to Wifi and be able to respond to simple TCP packets (TP-LINK smart switches do this) rather than build all this centralized infrastructure that costs money in perpetuity.
It's connected to a power strip with a switch so that it can be turned off when not in use (which BTW would also be a solution for the owner of the LG machine).
Due to the ability to read it out with Python it sends me an Email when the washing is done and I can also track the power consumption in Grafana. It also shows a "finished X minutes ago" message on some HA-like always-on tablet dashboard.
Edit to add: I also just realized I have an LG that does have wifi that I've never used, which may now get used for entirely different reasons...
I buy asus having a math bug or something, it is also possible those are constant retries on something failing. I put a pihole on my parents home network and in a month their roku had some stupid amount of blocked attempts, in the tens of thousands.
There was a post on Ozbargain that had a better automation than what I was previously using and works really well.
- Notifications when done: Nice, but a beeper would work, too.
- Select program via App, based on what I put into the machine: Occasionally useful when I'm not sure. Also, I can put in my wife's cloths and let her pick the correct program (I did that wrong once and we both don't want that to happen anymore).
- The dryer can load the correct settings based on the washing machine's last cycle. Very convenient.
What's planned (primary reason): Our photovoltaic is also networked, so the plan is to eventually start the cycle when we get energy for essentially free. This saves us money and allows us to use more clean energy instead of the grid mix. I guess the non-smart variant also supports this by setting the "finished in x hours".
What I don't like: Our smart home is fully offline, except for these two appliances. I thought there was a local API, but last time I checked I could not find the info anymore. Also, they sometimes lose connectivity to their cloud (not sure why, maybe hick-ups after that archaic 24h disconnect) and need to be restarted to reconnect.
Edit: Ah, mind we did first replace the old, power-wasting dryer with the new one (amortized after ~2y). Later when the old washing machine started failing, we got this one (which is also better suited for our needs, regarding size; and generally uses less water IIRC). I wouldn't have replaced good units for the sake of smartness. Obviously we could have saved some money by getting more basic appliances, but we had good timing on offers.
I'm guessing this was mostly the reason it has any connectivity at all. If they can convince you to run an app they can start getting all kinds of data off your cell phone 24/7 if they wanted to, even if the app requests no permissions at all.
The app transferred 1.56MB of data in 3.5 months. While the could include lots of data that I don't want them to have, at least it's not a massive amount indicating non stop tracking.
Ultimately you're right, and I would love to have the two appliances fully local (the other smart things don't even have Internet access, thanks to awesome projects such as Tasmota or Valetudo), including fancy program selection.
None of which would happen because then "the product" would stop letting the exploitation happen.
It's apparently possible to track a washing machine's progress with a smart switch that monitors power draw; I've got one lying around so might try to implement that soon, to complement my hacky RPi-Ring-doorbell-announcer :)
Yes, it's not hard to set an alarm, except the timing on the washing machine is unreliable (I've lost count of how many times I've set an alarn with a few minutes extra and still had to wait longer.) It would just be nice to have a little notification - making that chore 1% pleasanter. :)
Fast fourier transform on the audio would give you volume for each frequency range. That probably requires some DIY hardware & programming.
But a power metering plug would be a cheap off-the-shelf solution. Find the ones pre-flashed with ESPhome for ~$15-20, find thresholds for ON/OFF with a bit of trial and error, and you're done.
I have one in my kitchen, near the laundry room, and one in my home office. When things beep in that area, the one in the office says "Beep, beep." (I could have it do other stuff, but this was simple.)
It works for laundry. And the dishwasher. And the Instant Pot. And any other beepin' thing. It's just a remote beep detector.
(And if it detects beeping for 2 or more minutes, it notifies my phone, since that presumably means that my house is on fire.)
Can confirm, it's what I do. I can even detect which part of the cycle it is in using plain Home Assistant template sensors.
It's crude but it works. Detecting washing vs not is trivial, but I went the extra mile, looking at the power history and analysed the thing visually to get the general profile of each part, taking into account peaks, throughs, noise to have some unambiguous rules. Some are wrong if taken in isolation but taking the order of priority into account, flattening the result with if/elif in a single state sensor it becomes correct. That strategy is also very easy to debug visually with a entity history list in the dashboard.
I could probably also detect error states (which I had a few, like filter clogged with lint preventing water drain) as in this case the panel stays lit with the error code basically forever VS a normal cycle has it lit but ultimately it shuts down to deeper sleep states once it's done.
I really enjoy making dumb devices smart, it's a nice decoupling too and means I can just change e.g washing machine if it dies, adjust a few values below, and be all the merrier.
(nixos config, but it's a 1:1 to YAML and you get the idea)
services.home-assistant = {
#...
config = {
#...
template = [
# washing machine
# 5-6W: on (idle, panel lit)
# 4-5W: off (sleep after on, panel unlit)
# 0.1-1W: off (deep sleep)
# 2100-2200W: water heating
# noisy 8-100W, trough 10W: washing
# ramp-up 15-500W, plateau 300-500W, noisy 100W: spin dry
# 1300-1500W, trough 40W-150W: tumble dry
# 7.5-8W 240s, peak 95-105W, 20-25W 30s: cooldown
{
sensor = [
{
name = "washing_machine_power";
unit_of_measurement = "W";
state_class = "measurement";
state = "{{ states('sensor.shellyplusplugs_80646fc7bb4c_switch_0_power') }}";
}
{
name = "washing_machine_state";
state = ''
{% if is_state('binary_sensor.washing_machine_heating', 'on') %}
heating
{% elif is_state('binary_sensor.washing_machine_drying', 'on') %}
drying
{% elif is_state('binary_sensor.washing_machine_spinning', 'on') %}
spinning
{% elif is_state('binary_sensor.washing_machine_cooling', 'on') %}
cooling
{% elif is_state('binary_sensor.washing_machine_washing', 'on') %}
washing
{% elif is_state('binary_sensor.washing_machine_idle', 'on') %}
idle
{% elif is_state('binary_sensor.washing_machine_sleeping', 'on') %}
sleeping
{% elif states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | float(default=0) < 0.01 %}
off
{% endif %}
'';
}
];
binary_sensor = [
{
name = "washing_machine_active";
state = ''
{{ states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) > 30 }}
'';
delay_on = { minutes = 2; };
delay_off = { minutes = 2; };
}
{
name = "washing_machine_heating";
state = ''
{{ states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) > 1900 }}
'';
delay_on = { seconds = 5; };
delay_off = { seconds = 10; };
}
{
name = "washing_machine_drying";
state = ''
{{ states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) > 1000 and states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) < 1600 }}
'';
delay_on = { seconds = 5; };
delay_off = { seconds = 120; };
}
{
name = "washing_machine_washing";
state = ''
{{ states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) > 30 and states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) < 150 }}
'';
delay_on = { seconds = 120; };
delay_off = { seconds = 45; };
}
{
name = "washing_machine_spinning";
state = ''
{{ states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) > 150 and states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) < 500 }}
'';
delay_on = { seconds = 5; };
delay_off = { seconds = 5; };
}
{
name = "washing_machine_cooling";
state = ''
{{ states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) > 6 and states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) < 30 }}
'';
delay_on = { seconds = 90; };
delay_off = { seconds = 60; };
}
{
name = "washing_machine_idle";
state = ''
{{ states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) > 1 and states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) < 6 }}
'';
delay_on = { seconds = 1; };
delay_off = { seconds = 1; };
}
{
name = "washing_machine_sleeping";
state = ''
{{ states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | float(default=0) > 0.01 and states('sensor.washing_machine_power') | int(default=0) < 1 }}
'';
delay_on = { seconds = 1; };
delay_off = { seconds = 1; };
}
];
}
];Now is time to add "flamethrower_mode", lock online and send mail offering the regain_access_to_your_precious_cozy_pajamas code for a fair fee, and became the hidden kings of the undieworld with our "pay_per_brief" program. Muahahah!
I guess another use case would be measuring water and energy consumption but I doubt that people paying top dollar for these appliances are the type to keep an eye on such things.
Some people do - to brag in their circles (and to their own consciousness) how green they are. So then you can go flying around the world for fun with a clear consciousness ...
I'd see the internet connected route as useful for anyone in the household to be able to check notification without having to pair all the phones (and then what if you don't want it on a phone), and getting the notification when outside. Now it would better with a home server dealing with the data, but we're so far from that.
In general I see bluetooth as fine for personal wearables (headphones) and not great when a device is shared (bathroom scales, smart plugs, switches etc)
Simple as that, no wireless components required. I simply leave the door open when the machine isn't running.
Siri set a timer for *looks at washer screen* minutes
And having written that out, now I want a notification from my dryer when it’s not making progress as fast as it expects…
You can exfiltrate encryption keys if you can monitor power usage.
https://www.securityweek.com/platypus-hackers-can-obtain-cry...
Someone might be able to do that if they're monitoring power usage directly on the CPU with >microsecond precision for an extended period of time, not with a power metering plug that gives a fairly inaccurate reading at the wall every second or two, after having gone through the power supply transformers, rectifiers, capacitors, and containing noise from every other component in your device.
You can use this to your advantage using a smart switch: start the wash cycle, turn off the power straight after. When you turn the power back on at a scheduled time (using the smart switch), the washing machine will pick up where it left off (at the beginning of the cycle).
Also a lot of them just have a timer built-in anyway.
I was thinking more, turn the switch off within a few seconds of starting the cycle. Usually nothing happens in that time other than the drain pump doing a quick cycle to remove any residual water.
n.b. it's pretty new albeit cheap generic Midea front loader
Therefore, it was very easy for me to put together some laundry loads, and then navigate to that website and see exactly whether I'd be able to go downstairs and start my loads immediately, or how long I'd need to wait until machines were freed up for my purposes.
Then they enshittified it. They took away the central payment kiosk and installed individual card readers on each machine. These card readers had some unholy mix of Bluetooth and WiFi on them and the new app was completely incompatible with the Android tablet I had at the time. Apparently it was mandatory to have both Internet and BT access before you could even start a machine anymore. To add insult to injury, they deprecated the public status website and walled up the status reports inside the app. In fact, you couldn't even get a report until you'd paid to start one of the machines, thus invalidating my old strategy of proactively checking for availability.
Then there was a protracted battle between landlady and CSC whereby there were many malfunctions and accusations about whose responsibility it was. The pandemic struck, and there was some third-party disinfecting service that was supposed to be sanitizing machines, but left huge gobs of lint and detritus behind them all anyway.
Eventually it came to a head, and the landlady severed their contract with CSC and brought in a new service company. They have apps and cash preloading and whatever and you know what? I stopped using the laundry room entirely. Now I bring my clothes to a Wash & Fold service, and have it professionally cleaned, because doing laundry is too strenuous for me anymore. Problem solved!
I'm not so into that, but I know people who buy connected domestic things for that very reason.
As others have said, the notifications are useful, but you can also track the wash/dry cycle and see what it's done so far, what is left and the estimated remaining time.
I like it because the smart features are optional and are genuinely useful.
I had to helo her get it connected to wifi - it would not stay connected. Turns out she was on the same channel as literally all her neighbors.
It doesn't work great, I'd much prefer a direct API to send a notification when the machine says it's actually finished.
“Hey, it’s been a year since you replaced your filters.”
WHY THE FUCK DO I WANT THEM CONNECTED TO MY NETWORK
> In a follow-up post a day after his initial Tweet, Johnie noted “inaccuracy in the ASUS router tool,”
The information you left out:
1. Those were test units, not purchased devices used by customers.
2. For consumer Roomba devices that include a camera: photographic data is not sent to iRobot for processing.
3. The test data for the images you mentioned was leaked by a 3rd party based in Venezuela.
4. These test devices were operated by employees and volunteers in exchange for rewards. They were aware that their image was being taken.
5. The devices also contained additional monitoring hardware attached to the device which is not present in the consumer models.
If anything this fiasco demonstrated:
(i) one of the weaknesses of outsourcing,
(ii) individuals taking part in testing should be mindful of their privacy,
(iii) test units should have user-purgeable test data (if this was not already included)
(iv) the importance of reading beyond a headline
Refs: (1) https://www.businessinsider.com/roomba-photos-recorded-bathr...
Cameras are just the lurid example. Audio is just as bad or even worse. Anything that can hear at all, knows everything that's going on in the whole property and even surrounding area.
And, practically any sensor of any type regardless of nominal intended purpose, can hear. In fact circuit boards with no actual sensors of any kind, can hear.
A light switch with no mobility and no apparent sensors like a camera or mic, not even a light sensor for automatic adjusting, can hear and report if someone is having a fight or having sex 4 rooms and 2 floors away.
600 items of "evidence" that Roomba doesn't misbehave means absolutely nothing.
Meanwhile my washing machine has zero electronics and is completely predictable and obvious in operation.