Reminds me of this meme:<p>Tech enthusiast:"My entire house is smart! Everything is connected to the cloud, automated, and I can control every appliance from my phone!"<p>Tech worker / Software engineer:"The only piece of technology in my house is a printer from 2004, and I keep a loaded gun next to it in case it makes a noise I don't recognize."<p>I hope its just a retry loop and not actually data.
That reminds me of this classic:<p><pre><code> My wife asked me why I was carrying a gun in the kitchen
I said "Rogue AI"
My wife laughed
I laughed
The toaster laughed
I shot the toaster</code></pre>
> Tech enthusiast:"My entire house is smart! Everything is connected to the cloud, automated, and I can control every appliance from my phone!"<p>> Tech worker / Software engineer:"The only piece of technology in my house is a printer from 2004, and I keep a loaded gun next to it in case it makes a noise I don't recognize."<p>You forgot an additional well-known punchline (source: <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/NonPoliticalTwitter/comments/1e8do2d/comment/le7b7a6/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/NonPoliticalTwitter/comments/1e8do2...</a>):<p>> I wouldn't keep the gun next to the printer; it may be able to use it against you
New frontiers in genuine ink cartridge enforcement, I'd suggest patenting that before Canon and HP can
old reddit requires a login :/
Thanks for the information about this change. :-(
I have this installed, and it works reasonably well: <a href="https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect</a>
Reformed Tech Worker : My entire house is agentic
Kind of the same with AI now.
In the Twitter thread linked, the person confirms two things:<p>1. It saturated the local network with 1TB of metadata sniffing scans, <i>not</i> the network uplink to the outside world.<p>2. It does so because, as Keurig notes, it’s collecting data about your household in order to let Keurig sell it to advertisers.
How are they defining "metadata"? 1TB of text in 10 days is........A LOT. Metadata about what exactly? What time you brew your coffee every morning, how many cups you drink per day, whether you like regular coffee or cappuccino? I'm having a hard time understanding how all that can add up to 1TB of data. If it's recording audio or packet sniffing, it becomes a lot easier to understand.
> as Keurig notes, it’s collecting data about your household in order to let Keurig sell it to advertisers.<p>WTF!! When did we land in the middle of a Black Mirror episode?<p>I'm half convinced the first run of the LHC split the timeline and we've landed in the evil one.
> WTF!! When did we land in the middle of a Black Mirror episode?<p>At least a decade ago! The first TVs with Automatic Content Recognition shipped in 2013[0]. There was also a brief panic in 2024 about air fryers spying on people[1].<p>And of course practically every website you visit is doing a full session recording with mouse movements and key presses captured.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_content_recognition" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_content_recognition</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/05/air-fryer-excessive-surveillance-smart-devices-which-watches-speakers-trackers" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/05/air-fryer...</a>
Before that. Around 2005: DVD players that require updating cryptography keys and hence want an internet connection (and consequently can send around data).<p>And the first store clerks at the time that shout that "all people have agreed on that, period, complaints are non appropriate because society decided".<p>A small step for senseless humanity, a giant leap for the beast with big promises (that we are still seeing in development).
Ah the good old days when "we kill people based on metadata"[0] was the conversation and we thought it wouldn't get more invasive. Now we just straight up extract data<p>[0] <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tL8_caB35Pg" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tL8_caB35Pg</a>
See the site this post is about. Only ~1700 trackers, and only an accept all button. Likely at least one is doing this.
> And of course practically every website you visit is doing a full session recording with mouse movements and key presses captured.<p>Well yeah at the very least, that’s Google Analytics and/or similar alternatives.<p>Most individual websites outside of Google/Facebook/Amazon don’t get any data other than what you do on their website, so it doesn’t seem quite as creepy to me as a device on your home network port scanning and sniffing other traffic.<p>Google and Facebook can and do ‘spy’ a lot, of course, but otherwise the browser does protect you from most trivial spying by random sites. Not that that’s reason to feel any safer; the few people actually spying on what you do everywhere on the web are the ones with the most resources. This is all going to get way weirder with AI logs, I’m guessing.
I’ll keep repeating this but I used to be a technical project manager for “advance analytics” for a major media agency and we used this data in our reporting for ad reach effectiveness.<p>I worked at a major media buyer agency “big 5” in advanced analytics; we were a team of 5-10 data scientists. We got a firehose on behalf of our client, a major movie studio, of search of their titles by zip code from “G”.<p>On top of that we had clean roomed audience data from “F” of viewers of the ads/trailers who also viewed ads on their set top boxes. Basically any internet connected device you get is probably doing whatever it can to sniff mac addresses of your network at the least.<p>From a previous comment of mine:<p>> … my Insignia TV (best buy store brand) with fire tv built in is basically unusable. Echoing a previous comment I made too, about “smart tvs” and the “streaming sticks”: Hey, have you ever thought of why even the $149 Black Friday loss-leader no-name-brand TVs all have Amazon Fire, Roku, or are now "Smart" in some way? Certainly isn't because they need to incentivise you to connect it to the internet so it acts as a Nielsen-esq measurement device of all media you view on the screen via digital fingerprints that exist in all commercial media and advertisements. [1][2]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.ispot.tv/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ispot.tv/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.samba.tv/" rel="nofollow">https://www.samba.tv/</a>
> We got a firehose on behalf of our client, a major movie studio, of search of their titles by zip code from “G”.<p>Doesn't Google basically make this kind of data public? I know I've seen maps by state of what people are searching for, this is barely different.<p>Point being, it seems absurd to compare this to snooping on people's private networks by third parties
Let’s not forget about the apps and devices that ask for Bluetooth access when it’s not initially obvious why
Do you remember how a series of crazy coincidences and freak accidents kept preventing the LHC from being turned on? What if the LHC was causing world-ending or life-ending events, and we simply kept surviving only in thinner and thinner slices of amplitude (timelines) where those freak accidents happened, but where also more improbable world conditions took place?
LHC is a pea shooter compared to the absolute ion cannons that are cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere, which are pea shooters compared to acretion disk collisions or particle collisions about a magnetar. Sorry to ruin the fun! :^)
Recreational beliefs are fun if you don't subject them to too much scrutiny.
The center of mass of these natural collisions is a huge Lorentz transformation away from Earth's center of mass, which could explain why some unwanted effects are harmless to us. To put a paranoid person at ease you'd need to go a bit further. It's all covered in detail here: <a href="https://cds.cern.ch/record/1111112?ln=en" rel="nofollow">https://cds.cern.ch/record/1111112?ln=en</a>
Or we're in the timeline that survives because we maintain the LHC the best and it's needed for some crazy future experiment
There’s an SCP story like that.<p>World only survives, in realities where this particular creature in containment is alive. I’ll see if I can dig it up.
It was sophons.
You would see my YouTube feed. I watched a couple of those and now I'm fully convinced.
Sounds a bit like a doomed version of Quantum Immortality<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortalit...</a>
There is a singular patent owned by Sony that stands between you and being required to physically acknowledge ads on your TV: <a href="https://patents.google.com/patent/US8246454B2/en" rel="nofollow">https://patents.google.com/patent/US8246454B2/en</a>
the black mirror please look at the ads patent
The patent exists, but that doesn't mean it stands between anything.<p>People can work around patents, or pay for licensing them etc, if they really want to do something.
ah yes the infamous "please drink a verification can" patent.
Just think of all the advertising telemetry you could hide in the petabytes of LHC output…
No one cares. There’s little serious pushback to privacy invasions by big tech. Flock cameras have been a rare exception. Half the people “have nothing to hide” and half aren’t willing to give up the convenience that the popular app or gadget gives them.
> No one cares. There’s little serious pushback to privacy invasions by big tech.<p>This depends on the country:<p>- In Germany, many people are very suspicious about such privacy invasions.<p>- In Singapore, on the other hand, people seem to very accepting of public surveillance if it serves public safety.<p>- In China, of course, public surveillance is also huge (at least in the big cities). I don't know how Chinese citizens think about that.
> - In China, of course, public surveillance is also huge (at least in the big cities). I don't know how Chinese citizens think about that.<p>And thanks to surveillance, you never will.
That is empirically false as evidenced by the voluntary download rate of Facebook's permission updates on the App and Play Stores.<p>If people didn't care then why do so many companies have to coerce/deceive users into using their product?<p>Convenience my ass - the alternative to "convenience" is not participating in modern society, which isn't a decision at all.
> No one cares.<p>Ahem<p><a href="https://www.gov.uk/data-protection" rel="nofollow">https://www.gov.uk/data-protection</a>
Flock messed up courting local police departments, made it feel too real to people.
there is no way they can't, tho.<p>330M people in the country, you can run that entirely though a remote FBI office.<p>and the people using the data are gonna be the local cops; FBI ain't flying out to chase a couple of basic-ass assault charges or thefts.<p>email snooping, hand full of highway cameras at known bottlenecks, border crossings -- these are abstractions to most people. the flock cameras in their neighborhood are not, and cannot be absractions.
They will feel like they’re doing great as long as they’re getting paid and the cameras are up in more places than they’re not.
I'm convinced this is the state because people don't know the implications and scale of the privacy invasion. The flock camera incident shows that when people can sense, understand and feel the impact they don't like it. If we pose it as they are selling network data, nobody minds, if we pose it as they are selling your identity on the internet people get uncomfortable. But its hard to convince people of the latter. Mostly because nothing big happens due to big data breaches as someone on HN was remarking recently. Additionally, I think people have resigned to the status quo as they think that is the only way they can get their gadgets for cheap. That is just not true, companies can still make a profit without being predatory. Its just that it will not be the maximum profit.
Part of the problem is most people don't have an idea of what's being collected.<p>With just a little bit of interaction with the modern internet, the profiles created are stunningly accurate. Age, gender, political ideology, favorite food, relationship status, how many kids you have.<p>All this stuff gets slowly collected, aggregated and shared amongst data brokers.<p>People would care so much more if they knew just how invasive advertising actually is. All to try and convince you to drink one more coke or grab one more cheeseburger.
The cruel irony of this panopticon is that I don’t even get good ads!
You don't need a new toilet seat? But you just looked at toilet seats and then bought one. Are you sure you don't need another? Don't you like toilet seats?
I hope it’s a sign that I’ve poisoned my online data well enough that I frequently get ads in a language I can’t speak or understand
Is my dishwasher my friend?<p>Maybe I should be port scanning it to make sure?
I see this as a failure of news media. Specially tragic as they don't even recognize this as their duty. Their reporting is almost always single data points. They don't make the overall picture clear when reporting this stuff. Imagine if the financial crisis was reported as individual shares crashing and not a market trend.
You can’t realistically stop this. The industry is international and any interaction being shared across companies allows you to build this profile. It’s impossible to be fully private while having the openness of our internet interactions. You can try to limit the implications but that’s it
It’s going to take a modern war between superpowers to convince nations that appliances shouldn’t be a ubiquitous security vulnerability.
Seriously? Literally every appliance that demands an internet connection and use of an app does this. That's why the cheapest products on the market are designed to need apps and connectivity, the prices are subsidized by the assumption of ad data to sell. Been like this for years.<p>Lovey example: <a href="https://frescocooks.com/platform/marketing-and-engagement" rel="nofollow">https://frescocooks.com/platform/marketing-and-engagement</a><p>Air Fryers selling data: <a href="https://abc7news.com/post/certain-air-fryers-app-connected-appliances-are-harvesting-user-data-experts-say/15712826/" rel="nofollow">https://abc7news.com/post/certain-air-fryers-app-connected-a...</a><p>Student in NZ protesting it: <a href="https://www.consumer.org.nz/consumer-rights-and-campaigns/data-and-privacy/a-student-on-a-mission-the-dark-side-of-smart-appliances" rel="nofollow">https://www.consumer.org.nz/consumer-rights-and-campaigns/da...</a><p>Hope your TV isn't connected to the internet: <a href="https://www.cnet.com/tech/home-entertainment/tv-spying-yes-how-to-fix-it/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnet.com/tech/home-entertainment/tv-spying-yes-h...</a>
> When did we land in the middle of a Black Mirror episode?<p>I'd convergence was about 10 years back. Whenever the David Cameron pig story broke.
It started when people laughed at the EU's efforts for privacy, such as the cookie regulation or GDPR.<p>The first thing that Meta did after Brexit was moving its UK's user data to the US.
A large percentage of Black Mirror episodes have now come true.
> I'm half convinced the first run of the LHC split the timeline and we've landed in the evil one.<p>Sadly the real answer is much less dramatic: we did this entirely to ourselves, voluntarily, purely out of lazily taking the path of least resistance offered us by companies that don't have our best interests in mind.
><i>WTF!! When did we land in the middle of a Black Mirror episode?</i><p>"Smart" devices have been pulling this shit for years. If you're surprised by this you weren't paying attention!
There's robot dogs patrolling apartment complexes.
LHC has nothing to do with it but American masochism can explain a lot of it. If you vote for oppressors what would you expect than oppression?
Well it's completely voluntary since no sane person would ever need a "smart" coffee machine connected to the internet. So IMHO it's more Idiocracy than Black Mirror
No, we’re in a collapsing time bubble caused by an accident involving that weasel that crawled into the LHC.<p>April 29, 2016. It explains so much.
The creators of the Black Mirror already had everything to base its stories on at hand back in 2010s.<p>The majority of people just chose to turn their blind eye towards those developments and dismiss the warnings as conspiracy theories.
Yes burn down LHC!!!
Unauthorized Bread
Wait till you find out what your "Smart TV" does.
The Hitchikers' Guide to the Galaxy had the "agreement to cease to exist".
I like how <i>tech bros</i> are in denial about the evil timeline they designed and coded, that is working exactly how they envisioned
[flagged]
We were living in a "simulated" reality, where tech corporations produced amazing things a ran services practically for free asking very little in return, because it was all being funded by "stimulus" money - effectively the country getting into debt and creating money out of thin air. Once we reached the limit of this we had to face the reality of these companies actually having to pay their own way.
I don’t dispute the purpose of the data collection, but I can’t believe this quantity of data collection is intentional.<p>There’s no way Keurig is has the intention of paying the kind of costs required to collect a terabyte of data every two weeks for millions of people who own their coffee makers.<p>There must be some kind of bug here. I imagine if you unplugged it and plugged it in again the data usage would settle down.
As article says, the coffee machine didn't 'collect' or phone home a TB of data. It just saturated the local network looking for data to collect. This doesn't cost Keurig or any other IoT device company a single cent. It might have been a bug, or maybe not. Without some bad press, like this post; they have no incentive to change anything
Let's saturate every review site with reports of their spying. This definitely deserves to be public knowledge.
Yeah but that can’t even be useful can it? What’s that going to find that <i>only</i> using 500 MB of probes wouldn’t have found?<p>Still seems buggy.
Engineer: How often should our software scan the local network looking for new devices? Once a day? Once an hour?<p>Manager: We might miss something. Since scanning doesn't cost us anything, better do it a thousand times a second!
Oh let's be charitable! A parameter measured in ms is mistakenly thought be measured in s. Hilarity ensues.<p>Real world example: þe Windows registry DWORD time periods seems to invite 10^-3s granularity for totally inappropriate timescales. Perhaps its considered a "best practice" by the dick heads that decide to do these things, who knows? Why bother considering how a sysadmin might actually want to use the knobs and dials and what is an appropriate value for a parameter.<p>I could probably find a better example but this is recent: Smoothwall has an agent (IDEX) that you install on a Windows domain controller and one of its functions can be to harvest DHCP data and pass it onto the firewall so that it can track sessions. The upload period is a registry DWORD value.<p>I fixed a "problem" by stopping IDEX trying to upload data a thousand times per second. I will also point out that switching on this functionality and the periodicity setting is only applied by editing the registry - there is no GUI for this. The dReal world example -ocs are clear that you should initially set 1000 as the period.<p>For me that sort of thing comes under the heading of "you are holding it wrong", potential victim shaming and rubbish engineering.
This is what I suspect. A retry every X milliseconds actually being used against a variable nanoseconds, a broken loop condition that ends up always retrying, something like that.
Not really relevant, but I have to ask: why did you only use letter þ once in your comment?
Not making an accusation, but it reminds me of a chat transcript oddity I saw while using opencode back in August. It replace a syllable of a word with a punctuation mark that has the same pronunciation or HTML entity. It was something like "...the &litude of that waveform..." but I can't remember exactly, nor which model I was using. I just noticed it and thought, that's weird. A few days later I read about text watermarking and figured it may be that.
I wondered about that too, i think they use a compose key and accidentally pressed it
a thorny question to be sure
> Since scanning doesn't cost us anything, better do it a thousand times a second!<p>This works only up to a point. Now it is costing them something.
"you mean one tick is a microsecond?"
I was talking to the guy who used to run our ITSM system at work. He said a team was trying to query the system 10x per second to check for updates, which was causing performance issues. Assuming it was a bug, he went to the team to have them tone it down. He was shocked when they fought with him over it. It was working as designed and they didn't want to check less frequently, despite there being no logical reason to do this.<p>This may be working exactly as designed, as it costs them effectively nothing to constantly scan.
> It was working as designed and they didn't want to check less frequently, despite there being no logical reason to do this.<p>We had a similar thing, the other team wouldn't back down.<p>We ended up implementing a kind of rate limiting internally.<p>If the previous request (from that IP) was more than 4.5 seconds ago we let the check request through as normal.<p>If the previous request (from that IP) was more recent than that we just returned a cached "there is no update" payload that had a TTL of 60 seconds.<p>We told them this and left it up to them, they soon changed their polling frequency.
It's impossible to tell the difference between being malicious and being ignorant.<p>With this particular company, everything else they do is malicious so I won't ever give them the benefit of the doubt.<p>I tried to use a reusable pod in one of their machines the other day and when I shut it the handle broke off leaving me rather confused. Turns out in the closing head of the machine they stuck in 4 big metal spikes to destroy anything put in there. There is absolutely no reason to do this, none, other than being dicks. Had to get out the epoxy and repair the handle of a friends machine.<p>So yea, screw them.
The scanning is malicious.<p>The frequency etc. leading to 1TB is probably ignorance, but that doesn't matter as it is consequence of malicious scanning either way.
The funny part is that the manufactures shitty QA made this a much bigger thing that it could have been. Had the machine done a scan once every week, which is more than enough for their purpose, diffed the result locally and pushed the few kB of data to the internet, then no one would have noticed anything.<p>Yes, it's malicious and completely unnecessary, but incompetence has potentially made it a PR problem.
Exactly. The whole thing is weird and creepy and wrong.<p>I understand why a TV would keep track of what I’m watching so they can sell the data. I think it should be illegal. It’s horrible. My TV isn’t connected. But the reason they would do it fits in my brain. I can see how they got there.<p>How a coffee machine got to running network probes… nothing. It seems like some sort of Internet of Things DEFCON presentation topic made up by putting random words together.<p>So to think that on top of that they were purposefully causing so much traffic on the local network is just a few steps too far for me to think <i>that part</i> was intentional.
I think the reason to use a coffee machine is because it's an innocent device that doesn't require any data whatsoever, so nobody would ever suspect it of something so nefarious.<p>They're explicitly taking advantage of their customers' trust, and deserve to go bankrupt.
The reason is the same though. Probe the shit out of your network and gather data so they can sell it.
It's malicious either way. Question is whether 1TB was intended operation. I don't think it was.
I don't understand giving the benefit of the doubt to a company that is actively spying on its customers, which in some jurisdictions would be illegal.
It uses energy paid for by the homeowner.
They could be sued in small claims court.<p>Here that means no lawyers, no discovery, $100 to file in plain language, and a company employee (not a company lawyer, or a contractor, or a temp employee) must attend or they default.<p>$15k damages.<p>Reasons it could happen? Imagine grandpa has a tech come out 4 times, because his network is super slow. EG, this thing pounding his wifi for its scans.
Than What is the meaning of "used"?
local area network traffic was sent out and received by the device to the tune of 1TB of traffic. not internet data but local area network data which is not ideal for a coffee machine either way you slice it. if it were some kind of local bonjour or whatever the open standard is called service that was just alerting the network of their name it would be understandable but the coffee maker is streaming the equivalent of about 17 high def movies every day to the local network.
I mean, it wasn't clear to me without the explanation (I too thought it used 1TB of public internet data), but it's clear now that it is accurate (it literally used 1 TB of private network data)<p>It might not seem to be anything (people will assume private network traffic is free) but there is a cost - it's capacity that could be used for other purposes, eg. home alarms.
Downthread they indicated the issue went away after they rebooted it, coming to the same conclusion.
Yeah hopefully there is a bug. But negligence causing troubles for users due to useless anti features is not much better.
Probes create much more traffic locally than it takes to backhaul a summary of their results.
Its just like, 1TB of LLDP/Pings/Probes/Whatever<p>Looks like nmap OS detection can use ~90kb per host per attempt.
One thing that confuses me is, well, at this point in the data collection game, is there still value in this 'local' data? I mean, everyone is doing it, collecting the same data - hasn't that decreased the value? Obviously not, but I still wonder.
> everyone is doing it<p>Not in my house. What is even the point of connecting a coffee machine or a washing machine to the internet? I think my washing machine advertised that I could download new washing cycle programs in the app. Who on earth cares?
If there's one thing you can be absolutely certain of it's that every scrap of the data they collect is either making companies money hand over fist or they strongly believe that it will soon. No company is going to bother collecting, storing, (hopefully securing), backing up, and analyzing all this data without a reason, and to them money and power are the only reasons that matter.<p>Right now companies are somewhat limited in how much use they can get out their horde of private and personal information, but AI is changing that rapidly. As long as you don't mind a huge rate of error (and companies don't because it all becomes "good enough" at a large enough scale) it's basically perfect for the task of digging through endless amounts of information and spewing out bullet points.
Ha. I feel like you have never worked for a large company if you think they are making rational decision at all. They may “believe” this will make them money, but there is no guarantee that this isn’t just costing them money hand over fist.
It was revealed that Honda sold data on customers for less than a dollar a piece. It’s not big money at all, but they cannot stop themselves.
I think it's high time for legislatures (US, California, EU, whatever) to make this kind of thing outright illegal. No consent popups. No fine print. Just illegal.<p>Coffee machine scans network? Nope.<p>Coffee machine reports things about your network? Nope.<p>TV does ACR? Nope.<p>TV reports things it incidentally learns about your listening habits? Nope.<p>TV transmits any microphone data or things derived from mic data that aren't explicit user commands? Nope.<p>Companies who collect this data even though it's illegal want to sell it or use it for marketing or transfer it to anyone else? Nope.<p>Company A provides an SDK to company B that does this kind of thing and company B sells the product? A is liable, civilly and criminally, and B is <i>also</i> civilly liable to the extent that they should have and did not exercise due diligence to prevent it.<p>Company A, company B, and/or the end user have some contract shifting liability? Nope. The parties that the law said are liable are liable, cannot use the contract to avoid liability, cannot use the contract to recover money they have paid as a result of this liability, and cannot enforce arbitration provisions.<p>Anyone tries to use a contract that is considered illegal under this law? That party becomes responsible for their opposition's legal fees <i>even if they are ultimately found not liable for some other reason</i>.<p>Police wants to buy this data? Sure, they're welcome to buy what's legally available, except that they, like everyone else, will have a hard time getting the data because it's illegal for anyone to acquire it or sell it.<p>It's high time to get this done. We've got this and the recent evidence of LG doing all kinds of worse crap and it really should be possible to get some legislators on board.
Data makes money. No data makes less money. People who want more money from selling data will sponsor the people who don't support this
I would be a single-issue voter on this. If anyone running for office is doing this, and can get it done, they are getting my vote. I'm so tired of this kind of thing being normal and accepted. It has eroded the public's trust in pretty much all of corporate America, or has at least had a hand in it.<p>With all the hacks going on, I can't imagine why any company would even want to collect anything if they have a business model that works without it. I would think selling coffee makers and coffee pods would easily be a business model that works without data harvesting. Companies made whole businesses out of selling coffee makers alone for decades.
Why would a company integrate bullshit SDKs into a coffee maker? Because coffee maker ACR isn’t worth anything and because there are companies that will pay <i>absolutely freaking crazy</i> amounts of money, possibly in excess of the entire sale price of the machine.<p><a href="https://help.earnapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/38191916327441--What-are-the-EarnApp-rates-How-are-they-calculated" rel="nofollow">https://help.earnapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/38191916327441--W...</a><p>I think Bright Data is similar but I didn’t find their authoritative numbers. It doesn’t help that my ad blocker blocks their entire domain.
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GDPR, CCPA, and such laws absolutely do treat stuff like MAC addresses and network topology as legally protected information.
Why would the individuals that comprise these legislative bodies harm their retirement plan?
My general theory is that the aggregate spent on marketing is largely a function of marketers’ budgets. They’ll spend it in whatever way they think is cost effective, but the <i>amount</i> spent may not vary all that strongly with as the set of available marketing technologies changes.<p>If marketers cannot pay Google, Meta, etc to show their ads to people whom pervasive surveillance indicates are the appropriate targets, then they will pay companies (probably still Google and Meta and very likely still <i>American</i> companies) to show ads to people selected by other means. Everyone’s retirement account will be just fine.<p>For that matter, consider who some of the biggest offenders are right now. LG and Samsung are Korean. Sony is Japanese. (But Vizio is American and seems to be owned by Walmart.) Maybe reducing surveillance capitalism will make it harder for some of these foreign companies to extract money from the US.<p>There’s also the national security aspect. Right now, we <i>expect</i> foreign corporations to extensively spy on us. Sure, a law would not necessarily stop foreign powers from spying on us, but at least if we banned the general practice, then foreign powers who do spy on us might get noticed.
Stop spreading this idea that all politicians are corrupt. You're killing democracy, and watering down revelations of specific proven cases of corruption.<p>I understand your feeling of despair. Of course I do. But you don't have to make other people despair. History has shown us where we end up when enough people despair.
I can understand a buggy device flooding the network. What's harder to justify is why a coffee maker needs to know anything about the other devices in your house in the first place
Why is this allowed? There’s no way to consent to a coffee machine.
If you buy a Keurig machine you've already signalled you're a sucker. (sorry)
This is the most Gilfoyle-coded comment of the day
Laughs in Moccamaster.
Tongue-in-cheek, but my Moccamaster which I bought second-hand is still doing great after 15 years. Two deep cleaning sessions in all that time and just running it with vinegar a couple of times a year seems to be all it needs.<p>The device is dead simple. No advanced electronics. Nothing complex that can break. Just a coffee maker fine-tuned to near perfection.<p>The only flaw it has is the handle for the pot. I've resorted to replacing the plastic handle with a fancy walnut one I made myself. I needed that because we tilt the pot sideways to fill the reservoir with water (because of the placement on the kitchen counter and the cabinets above), and that plastic handle is not designed for sideways stresses.
You shouldn’t fill the reservoir with the coffee pot, unless you’re really washing the pot super clean after each use. Better get a proper jug for filling the reservoir, so you’re not putting coffee residue and oils back into the clean-water system.
The shower head design is a crime against humanity for the cost of that machine.
perfect person to sell to advertisers.<p>Like the people who reply to nigerian emails have already been pre-qualified by 1) ignoring the misspellings and 2) replying.
Presumably during setup and connection to the AP it has a ToS. Doubtful they just unboxed, plugged in, and it connected to the right AP and went.
> Doubtful they just unboxed, plugged in, and it connected to the right AP and went<p>Why not? iirc some of the smart TVs have been shown to find open wifi networks on their own and upload data. (I'm not sure about that though. But it's plausible and undoubtedly will be implemented some day).
I've read this argument dozens of times on HN and on HN only - I'd love to see an example of that actually provably happening anywhere in the real world.
The use WiFi networks as a form of GPS, much like smartphones on first stage of geolocation
Maybe they bought it used?
ToS can't trump the actual law.
The actual law is typically so weak and spineless that the ToS doesn't need to trump it. Particularly when it comes to data security or privacy.
It is one thing to make a law, it is another to enforce a law.
Ok, but it can collect consent
LOL<p>Legislators are cheap to purchase
It's not allowed in the EU. Not without consent.
Maybe that's why I've never heard of the company here in Germany.<p>That, plus nobody in their right mind would buy American (vs French, Italian, German, Dutch...) when it comes to coffee. (yes, Starbucks is a thing here, but I'd argue people who are into _coffee_ don't go there, people go there for other reasons.)
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It's implied consent when you give it access to your WiFi.<p>Why you would give a coffee maker access to your WiFi is the real question,
That's obviously bad and I hate it, but how much value even is there is the data that a spyware coffee machine could collect about your home? What advertisers would buy such data and what would they advertise to me? What is the marginal value of that data?
You can also map a home out depending on signal strength. That gives you approximate size of home which gives you approximate income.<p>It can also correlate it with geolocation data. Google, for eg, sniffs all broadcasted SSIDs with their StreetView cars. If you can pick up on a SSID (or any of the MAC addresses of the other devices), you can buy the data set that includes it which further pinpoints demographics given the neighborhood AMI.<p>You can also build behavioral profiles patterns based on things like, for eg, if a baby monitor model is present or a robot vacuum, if certain devices only connect at certain times, etc.<p>I think the general rule for adtech is that profile guesstimates just need to be around 70%+ fidelity to determine if a sale can be made.<p>Lastly, you can also just sell the data on the gray market. The more datapoints, the higher the price. Most consumer product companies do that since we have little-to-no data privacy laws and the people who seem the most aware of it also are generally very apathetic and disinterested in advocating for them.
Also the social-graph aspect.<p>For example, your aged mother's phone will get pinged within X meters of an urgent-care facility, or she'll do some web-search about "hip pain", and then all the adult children start getting ads about elderly-parent-care.<p>Or perhaps the pervy-panopticon decides some phone-on-wifi events look like adultery, and both suppposed spouses start getting ads for divorce lawyers, private investigators, or track-covering products. (Bonus if certain specialized "adult" toys are detected on Wifi or Bluetooth...)
Yeah, it definitely makes sense to me if what adtech is often doing is just backing out from specific data to a general profile like income, location, etc, so that that level of targeting can work.
Its just sick.
Knowing what TV you own, what phone models are used in your house, and what other devices you own tells advertisers about your spending patterns and income.
I wonder if you can identify the age of devices based just on network scans? Like if an advertiser can tell I've got a washing machine model that was last sold 7 years ago, it's time to spam me with washing machine ads.
Quite probably. nmap does (or certainly used to) have options to report the OS of a given machine had based on various quirks of the packets it got back from them. It was disturbingly accurate at times. You put that together with banner messages from running services, MAC addresses, responses to broadcast packets, deliberate probing, and the number of devices you _can't_ remotely identify on a network without actually logging into them is probably very small.
If the washing machine is on the network, its manufacturer is already aware about its age.
If you are living in a flat, this could of course be your neighbour's washing machine/TV etc...
It's a lot easier to create an embedding with equivalent information than to reliably identify a particular device, and that embedding is more than sufficient to enable targeting.
And can be used to cross-correlate with other datasets to further narrow down who you are and how you can be targetted.
I love that a poor, stupid man like me is being targeted by teams of the smartest data analytics professionals on the planet.<p>Makes me think of DraftKings. You take your average 20 something sports fan - drinking beer, watching the game. And, on the other end of that smartphone display exist some of the most complex algorithms ever designed by teams of mathematics / statistics PhDs and it's deliberately built around targeting... this one guy from Florida who is pretty sure his team will be up by 7 at halftime.<p>Maybe it's more of a morbid joke, but it makes me laugh to think about.
My income is low. Ignore me, advertisers, you have no power here.
They can get a profile of when you're in which room, how many people are in the house, etc. That's useful for targeting (e.g., up at 5am, leaves, comes back in an hour or two will have you profiled (more complicated than this since it's usually a fuzzy vector thing, but for the sake of argument) as somebody who goes to the gym, maybe leading to creatine advertising or other whatever), and also for attribution (e.g., a TV ad is shown, somebody gets up, and a purchase is made from a device known to exist at that household, regardless of whether it's behind a VPN).<p>If you have even very crude data from somewhere else for the targeting, improvements in attribution tech are actually the more important factor. The adtech company mostly doesn't even care who you are, just whether the ad turned into a purchase or not, and that's where a lot of the invasive tracking comes from. They'd be perfectly happy with a quickly changing "identity" if they knew it was reliable and stable between ad and purchase.
If it scans the network and sees a smart dishwasher, smart washer/drier, and smart lights, but no smart fridge, I imagine its worth something to a company like Samsung to start targeting that customer with ads for a smart fridge.
It’s not so hard to get root shell on some routers via the admin panel, which usually has the same password as the wifi network or a default password. From there the device can capture dns logs.
All data is valuable. Even something as simple as the MAC address to your iPhones WiFi or Bluetooth chip is worth something to dataprofilers.
This does seem to be true in the age of throwing all data in to training the next iteration of the God Machine, but also, some data is a lot more valuable than other data and I want to know what the incentives are of people who are collecting data in our homes and what the actual data / derived data that they're after.
big thing is to be able to serve ads more effectively<p>so if you know that a user is having an affair, you might want to serve divorce lawyer ads (I'd imagine those are very expensive) or something.<p>this kind of data though is just like a cog in the machine, but it can e.g. give enough info to know how many people likely are in that household, and so on. useful when combined with other signals
That new Amazon page that shows you what it has inferred about you told my friend that he “clips [his] fingernails approximately every two months.” He makes extensive and enthusiastic use of Echo products in his household, but I have no idea how it could've possibly reached that conclusion (and neither does he!).
> but how much value even is there is the data that a spyware coffee machine could collect about your home? What is the marginal value of that data?<p>Scale it up - make that millions of homes. Now there is godlike strategic value. Esp when "borrowed" by 3 letter agencies.
One of the reasons that all this stuff goes in its own IOT crap VLAN in my house.
Ha, they will just form a mesh network with your neighbor’s TV and Kuerig and upload all its sniffed coffee preferences data that way.
That’s where they want to be. Your laptop isn’t interesting. You own two thermostats, an EV charger, two Samsung TVs, an LG, etc etc. The LG is watching Netflix. That’s the good stuff.
>You own two thermostats, an EV charger, two Samsung TVs, an LG, etc etc. The LG is watching Netflix. That’s the good stuff.<p>That still doesn't make any sense. If they want to collaborate to build an advertising profile, your public IP is all you need. Otherwise if they're not collaborating, what's the plan, find 0days in random IOT devices and hack them? I might be concerned about random chinese IOT devices doing that, but not devices from western companies.
They don't want to collaborate, they want to sell.<p>Data brokers are buying from multiple sources because maybe a home has a keurig but not an LG tv. Or an LG tv and not a keurig.<p>The plan for the likes of Keurig is "These data brokers will give us free money for data from our coffee machines? Where can we sign up!". It doesn't even matter if the money translates to $0.01 per unit sold. That's probably the most disgusting part.
>Data brokers are buying from multiple sources because maybe a home has a keurig but not an LG tv. Or an LG tv and not a keurig.<p>Right, but OP's premise is that putting everything on the same LAN is somehow even better for the manufacturers/data brokers/ad networks/whatever, which doesn't make any sense. The only thing that actually matters is a device with internet connection.
I recently figured out how to do a vlan and set it so IoT devices can't see each other, just access the Internet (AP isolation). It hasn't broken anything so far (Matter devices excluded).
I hadn't thought of this!<p>Client isolation would help, but it also breaks some devices.<p>Are there decent daemons that allow me to allowlist which broadcast traffic to permit?<p>Ideally it'd be compatible with IPv6-only clients on my LAN.
Agreed, with an ACL that blocks any device to device communication within the network.
It doesn't sound plausible to me that the main buyers of this information would be advertisers. It sounds more likely that the buyers are black-hat hackers, or intelligence agencies. The main reason someone would want a map of all of the devices behind your home router is so they know what to target first for exploitation, if they want access.
There are companies that sell people's home ip address as a VPN/Proxy for anyone who wants to use it for anything. They call it "residential ip's". People use them for web scraping, but probably tons of illegal stuff too. AI companies use them to not get blocked.<p>I've heard that they put it in IoT devices, free Android apps that people use on their TVs, free phone apps, games, prob lots more.. The companies advertise it like its super safe only legit normal people borrow the internet from these people but then in fine print it'll say its not our responsibility etc.<p>What I have been wondering is - since they don't seem to care or check what people are using the "residential ip's" for, what happens when someone does a bunch of illegal stuff on some random person's home IP and ends up raided by cops?<p>I feel like the world is going in these directions.. the excuse is always "well, they clicked Yes on the Terms of Service! They agreed to it!"
> It does so because, as Keurig notes, it’s collecting data about your household in order to let Keurig sell it to advertisers.<p>Off topic, but an odd and dubious upside to AI is that it provides an actually valid reason for this mass data collection. Before AI, as you note it was for advertisers, but what are they actually doing with it?<p>The promise was that with all this data, advertising would be perfected. I seem to remember fears back in the day that it could end up being a form of mind control, with this perfect understanding of you an advertiser could sell you anything, and you'd willingly consume adverts as entertainment they'd be so perfectly tailored to you. Not something any of us would want I'm sure, but that was the promise for advertisers.
The opposite ended up happening. Nobody wants to use the internet without an ad-blocker, when you're forced to use Youtube or something without an ad-blocker you're counting down the seconds until you can skip it, and the rest of the time you don't even notice they're there, let alone any kind of mind control.
Of course you do get thinly veiled advertisements as entertainment, but none of them use mass data collection, they're really not much different to how tv shows used to get made to sell toys in the 80s.<p>The reason I bring this up is for the question; what is this mass data collection for? We (really) don't want it, advertisers are either unwilling or unable to use it and it costs a tonne of money and effort.
The obvious, and disappointing, reason is that we all need to pretend it works or the internet as we know it collapses, for better or worse. That plus AI being the new excuse I suppose.
What kind of idiot is connecting their coffee machine to the network?
I tend to face the problem of too many choices with products. I'm actually thankful that manufacturers like Keurig are voluntarily taking themselves out of the pool of consideration. It makes my decisions easier. I can only see things getting even easier as time goes on.
I love how I’m expecting Keurig to feign innocence but instead they’re just happy to admit it.
To me, this is <i>begging</i> for a class-action lawsuit.<p>Yeah, sure, the terms of service probably say that they can do that. That's still in "unconscionable" territory. And courts do not like unconscionable contracts. If it's unconscionable, it's invalid (if I understand the law correctly).<p>Is <i>this</i> why everybody wants to make appliances with wireless?
You would have to show the judge how you have been harmed and the judge will want to know what the damages are.
Yes, this is why everybody wants to make vehicles and refrigerators and thermostats and ereaders with cellular and/or wireless: subscription revenue from bulk data purchasers of what their scans reveal. IIRC Amazon was an industry leader in this space by showing book authors what page you stopped reading on, and then bulk assessing that data at scale to estimate which sentence or word; of course, Google’s Android remains the most successful at-scale deployment of data collection for advertisers worldwide. See also, for recent context, the top comment (and others) of <i>the LG Smart TV problem</i> (30 days ago, 1012 comments) <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49592375">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49592375</a>
Funny thing, that. Go into an electronics store now and pay attention to the TV boxes and the printer boxes. The amount of crazy fine print on both of them now is absurd. The printer boxes all now have lots of fine print about the various ink protection and DRM schemes and subscription services, the TV boxes have everything ranging from binding arbitration on the box (LG) to "(brand) accounts are REQUIRED to use this TV" (Visio).<p>Customers are gonna get lost in the sauce and skip right past all of that and toss the packaging.
"Is <i>this</i> why everybody wants to make appliances with wireless?"<p>Which raises in my mind the obvious defense, which is that if you try to put four or five of these devices on your network they'll be too busy interfering with each other for them to actually spy on anything.<p>Let the wiretaps wiretap the wiretaps. Keeps 'em busy, makes 'em feel like they're doing something important.<p><pre><code> > What is my purpose?
You wiretap the wiretaps wiretapping our wiretaps.
> Oh my god.</code></pre>
How do I exhaustively check for whether devices in my household are doing this? Is it enough that I don't see them on my desktop's list of available networks?
Could you post the Twitter link?<p>Because the article is also full of 238 advertisers.
It's shocking that, apparently, in addition to making awful coffee, Keurigs are also data sniffers?<p>Good lord.
As in, port scanning or ARP spam or what? Twitter randomly decided I'm a bot
We need to regulate the shit out of this kind of stuff. Flat out ban all data collection by home devices.
Reg 2:<p>But why do they need to collect 1 TB? Sounds like a lot of redundant/doublicated entries then for a small network?
> as Keurig notes, it’s collecting data about your household in order to let Keurig sell it to advertisers.<p>its LGs glass in LG household, and now Keurigs kitchen
> It does so because, as Keurig notes, it’s collecting data about your household in order to let Keurig sell it to advertisers.<p>This is either outright false or at least highly misleading. Keurig says they may sell information <i>about your coffee brewing habits</i> to third parties (i.e. your usage of the coffee machine itself), but nowhere does "Keurig note" that they collect other data about your household through network scans and sell that to advertisers.<p>I'm not even sure which tweet you were referring to that implied that. In any case, there are tons of responses here that are interpreting your quote as saying Keurig admitted they do network scans to acquire info about your household to sell to third parties, and that (the idea that Keurig says they do this) is flat out false.
#1 - why?
#2 - oh, because fucking yikes.
Keurig Exec, probably: "We own the coffee"<p>The people that said LG isn’t the only company doing invasive data harvesting is sadly correct.<p>How did we as a society let it get to this point?
In parallel to the story itself, for f.. sake, the website that hosts the story uses 1700+ tracking partners to operate and pushes for cookie consent. We should ban links to such sites equally strong as IoT devices in subject as my personal opinion
I'm sceptical only because this is a screen shot of unifi client info, and unifi seems to have some bug that will report devices as using terabytes of data in the last 24 hours, which is obviously not true..<p>Here's an example from my unifi dash right now, my laptop has done 24tb of data? lol email and web browsing<p><a href="https://imgur.com/a/I54vcYR" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/I54vcYR</a>
Mine is doing the exact opposite - clients show almost zero activity even when I'm running speedtest, and my main PC shows only 1 GB data used in last 24h when it should be ~26 GB according to OS.
I posted the same below, they’ve had similar bugs for the ~decade I’ve used them.
This is why I'd really like to see a packet capture or at least some interface-level counters
Nobody has mentioned this but the tweet in question is a screenshot of a UniFi dashboard which is notorious for miscalculating bandwidth usage.
I'm not the most versed with networking or operating systems but I wonder how difficult it would be to program a raspberry pi to poison the datasets of these types of things.
Program it to impersonate a wide set of devices and randomly respond as such in a home. Or even if it would be worth it.
Maybe if a phone app could do it too that would make it easy to poison the dataset only when you purchase new smart devices while they do their heavier reconnaissance during the first few weeks (assuming Keurig and the like calm down a bit after some period of time).
The only financial impact to them would be your single ad profile. They don't care about having the widest and most accurate knowledge of all devices on their customers' networks to sell as some dataset, they want to target ads at you based on which products you have - and maybe get a bigger payout if it finds something on your network that it advertised to you a whole ago, as that confirmed conversion is worth a ton to advertisers.
My concern is that poisoning the dataset doesn't really stop the scanning. The device is still poking around your network
I blocked my LG TV and put it behind a router so that it wouldn't sniff around my house, but this is too complicated for most people.<p>What we need is to ban this sort of thing outright.
Plug for <a href="https://adnauseam.io/" rel="nofollow">https://adnauseam.io/</a> ; which is banned from the Google Web Store.<p>Yes, they can trivially build systems to filter this out, but your favorite coding agent can probably make it more stochastic / clever ;)<p>In my experience, this has basically 'neutered' personalised advertising for me (I get all kinds of ads, in all kinds of languages, when using my Google account or network w/o an adblocker); so it definitely has an effect.
If I had a machine like this on my network, I'd be tempted to figure out where it's sending the telemetry data, and help it out by sending a LOT more. It would be funny if they blocked my IP because I was reporting too much data.
Maybe add LLM prompts to poison whatever system is analyzing the Data?
This website values your privacy. Only shares data with 1747 partners.
The real question is: could someone explain me why anyone would want a smart coffee maker?<p>What kind of functions it has that can't be replaced by:<p>- walking a few meters and pushing a physical button<p>- waiting a whopping minute for coffee to brew, instead of triggering it remotely
A smart coffee maker is one of the earliest smart home appliances: <a href="https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2324/" rel="nofollow">https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2324/</a>
I have an admittedly very specific set of constraints that led to me buying a wifi kettle. I:<p>- have a short window to get to the train in the morning
- want coffee on the train
- don't particularly like drip machine coffee
- want the water boiling when I wake up so that I can make coffee and get out of the house as quickly as possible
- am more morally opposed to waking up five minutes earlier (pushing my wake time into the 4 o'clock hour) than I am to having a smart device.<p>I couldn't find a kettle that runs on a timer, and just taping the switch in the "on" position and hooking it up to a plug timer felt unsafe, so getting a stupid wifi kettle and using their stupid app to set it to auto-start was the best option. It's on its own network, though.
These aren't constraints. These are preferences. Framing them like constraints makes it sound like the whole situation is out of your hands, and therefore owning a smart device is practically thrust upon you by external forces.<p>Just say it: you bought a smart kettle due to your completely adjustable preferences.
Yes, having coffee on the train is a preference, which is why I used the word "want". I suppose that having this job, or any job, is technically a preference. I decided to buy a smart kettle to satisfy my preferences given the constraints they impose. The parent asked why someone would buy a smart coffee device, and I thought it would be fun to give my answer for why, despite my general skepticism of smart devices, I bought one.
We are constrained by the decisions we have made based on the preferences that we maintain.<p>Thus-constrained, this person states that they're able to get 5 more minutes of sleep every night and still make coffee before taking the train to work. That's ~25 minutes per week, or ~1.8 hours per month.<p>They didn't have to choose to go to bed earlier in order to gain this time and still make coffee in the morning. They were going to make coffee with a kettle anyway and were constrained by a the necessity of maintainining ownership of a kettle with which to do that.<p>So they simply selected a kettle that can be safely automated so as to be ready at the right time every morning instead of one that cannot be. In exchange, they gain around 20 hours per year, for every year that this kettle lasts for. (What would you do for nearly an entire extra day, per year?)<p>Sure: It's adjustable, just as many constraints are.<p>Maybe there's even a coffee shop around the corner that they could work at instead, and they could just walk there and brew themselves a cup of coffee using the hot tap on the espresso machine before they start their shift -- and skip the train.<p>But maybe that wouldn't fit into the constraint of being able to support the dwelling that they prefer to live in.<p>So maybe they could soften that constraint as well, and live a little lower. (Maybe they can soften enough constraints that they can just live under a bridge somewhere, with no permanent dwelling, no job, and no coffee. Perhaps, if we look hard enough, we might find that even the constraint of living a life -- at all -- is also adjustable.)
GP might realize sooner or later that they need larger security margins, for when unexpected things happen; like really having to go to the toilets, spilling the coffee they just made, etc.<p>They can shift their daily schedule e.g. 30 minutes earlier and peacefully drink their coffee at home. They also should eat something at home or on their way, because hurrying in a cold morning with an empty stomach is not good. Source: personal experience. I did that for months as a student until I passed out one day in class.<p>If they don't like waiting for the train in the cold, they probably can find a warm place near the station, and wait there a little.
Gp also didn't even bother to mention another completely possible solution: not drinking coffee the first thing in the morning.
Boiling water in a kettle takes like 1 minute, in any cases less than two minutes. And other things can be done during this time. There's no real timing constraints that requires a wifi enabled kettle. You may prefer it this way, and that may be what matters the most here, but it's not really a <i>constraint</i>.
I have a smart plug that can turn on and off...I have my coffee maker switched on, and it only switches on when my wifi plug is on. So I can have the water heating before I come down stairs. Whether it's better than a smart coffee maker or not I'm not sure - but at least I have a popular device that has more eye. Not sure how many people are looking at niche coffee makers.
Smart plugs all say not to use them with appliances because the wattage is too high. You can melt one or start a fire if you’re not careful.<p>This is possibly not an issue with a regular drip coffee machine. It’s definitely an issue with a kettle or, say, air fryer.
Do they? The IKEA ones are rated for 3680W, which is plenty even for an appliance on a dedicated 220V 16A circuit.
My understanding, and I would love for someone to explain why, is that they measure current with a shunt resistor which is fine for inductive loads like a water heater, but not fine for a big motor for example.
IKEA's smart plugs are all rated to carry the full wattage allowed by their plug types for resistive loads (though only 300W for motor loads)
You could use the smartplug with a relay to a higher capacity non smartplug.
so you brush when you wake up right? The brushing takes about five minutes. The kettle probably takes less time than that. Probably two minutes in my experience. Why not just wake up fill up water click it on and then brush. I mean, you could even keep the water filled up the previous night.<p>I do feel that over-automation is a thing
I don’t disagree that over-automation is a thing. I miss my more leisurely mornings!<p>I use a Hario Switch to make coffee. It takes 3:30 to brew, so I pour the water and then brush my teeth and prep while waiting. Async coffee! I’m out the door as soon as the coffee is in the mug and get to the train station about 2 minutes before the train arrives.
1) switch kettle on<p>2) brush teeth<p>3) brew coffee<p>?
Maybe they want to save their extraction & profile curves per recipe in the cloud or something. Or for less advanced devices, simply notifications to change the filter I guess.
I mean, if you really want profile curves and so on, it could just save it to some sort of SD card, or if you want to be really fancy sync it via bluetooth to a mobile phone with an app. Same with the notifications to change the filter or whatever, or a damn light on the machine. Right?
I have a very old school manual espresso machine (a La Pavoni). It's connected to a "smart" plug, which lets me turn on the machine remotely, and have it turn on automatically in the morning. It's nice to have it heated up and ready to go when I wake up. Nothing about the machine is smart though.
The problem is that when I want to make coffee, I'm my most stupid self I'll be all day.
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These sorts of products aren't typically driven by consumer wants. Rather they're typically driven by B2B/sales/marketing/investor types, who are primarily focused on finding/addressing secondary markets for further profits, more so than it is about addressing core consumer wants.<p>In other words, these product decisions aren't really made on the rationale that internet connected coffee makers make sense from the standpoint of a consumer who simply wants coffee made...<p>It's more: "let's make smart coffee makers so that we can sell to 2 markets:<p><pre><code> 1) a coffee maker to consumers who want coffee made
2) consumers data/eyeballs to advertisers who want their info/eyes
</code></pre>
... and make more profits for ourselves".
So, separate VLANs, wifi isolation and complete internet blocking for all devices such as this, and only purchase devices that can be controlled via Home Assistant.<p>What hope do normies have?
You don't need separate VLANs, wifi isolation and firewalls. You need to reconsider putting a coffee machine on the internet lol.
Exactly. I have bunch of appliances that are wifi enabled but they work just fine without it. The stories like these and of firmware updates bricking the appliances is enough to never really look at the benefits of connecting.<p>Sometimes I like the idea of preheating oven on my way home but then I get home and forget about it.
Something tells me it's not just coffee machines that do this, it's lots of appliances that have useful online capabilities.<p>My LG washer/dryer tell me when loads are done and when someone lets wet clothes sit in the washer. This is priceless. But yeah they are probably profiling my house.
Can they? It seems that surveillance data will be able to subsidize coffee machines and make it so you get a better machine for the same price, or an equivalent, cheaper one.
Sometimes, and I don't think this is one of those examples, 'family' makes such things necessary.
> What hope do normies have?<p>None, without people like us in their families who are able <i>and willing</i> to help.<p>We as computer people need to internalize and accept the idea that helping our immediate and even extended family with technology is now part of defending human freedom. <i>And we need to form ourselves into the best helpers we can be by learning how to teach and communicate well</i>.
> None, without people like us in their families who are able and willing to help.<p>I am able and willing to help my parents get off of a lot of the spyware bullshit they have throughout their house, but they don't want to hear it. They liked the connected stuff and I think that they think I'm a little weird when I push back about why we can't trust corporations like Google or Microsoft to do everything.
"They like their connected stuff" means their barrier isn't "I don't want a corporation processing my data", it's "I want to be in charge of my interactions with it". That changes what sort of recommendations you can bring to them. An all-or-nothing mindset is rarely the correct way to change someone's mind.<p>Recommending they turn off ACR and other spyware on their TV is based on recent reporting is good and backed up by said reporting. Probably even recommending against too-good-to-be-true connected doorbells even.<p>Meanwhile, telling them not to use a first-party Google, Amazon, or Apple smart home speakers is a bit questionable when there's been pretty good audits over the years that show they really do only do wake word detection. You'll just sound like a crazy person if you can't point to some reporting on a device doing bad.
Getting better at communicating is unfortunately really hard. And it must pair with the <i>helper</i> aspect: you've got to also provide value.<p>"Nomad," the guy from the article, was already administering his parents' home LAN.<p><i>How do you get there?</i> "Mom and Dad, we're going to set up your home network so that it's blended with my home network. To all the machines in your house and mine, it'll look like they're on the same network together. That'll make it easier for me to help you with any tech problems you're having, on your computer or on any smart device. The connection between our houses will be encrypted and secure" You're installing a router/firewall for them and adding to your WireGuard overlay network, but you're not using any of those words to tell them what's going on.<p><i>What to do next?</i> "How was watching TV last night from {$TIMESTAMP_A} to {$TIMESTAMP_B}? Yeah, my network sentinel detected that your TV was sending your viewing habits out to somewhere on the Internet and warned me and blocked it. I can't tell what you were watching, but {$TV_BRAND} sure can." You're monitoring their LAN via the router/firewall you've set up, but you are again not using technical language.<p><i>Wherever spying is invisible and frictionless, make it loud and incessant</i>. And continue to provide value to the family on the shared overlay network. Photo and home video backups, media server (it's like Netflix!), mutual offsite buddy backups, password management, a local Minecraft server for the kids and the cousins.<p>Cultivate a family network garden that is good enough to consider leaving the leviathans behind and build walls around it that are high enough to commit to leaving the leviathans behind for what is now a garden inside a family network castle.
Yeah, I have some relatives that wanted me to turn off the ad blocking because it meant they couldn't watch ads on their mobile games in order to earn more lives / game time.<p>Folks be crazy.
I like my connected stuff, too, and I'm not a normie.<p>I don't <i>need</i> voice-activated lights for the basement for when I head down there with my arms full of laundry, or with a bunch of food to put into the freezer, or whatever shit I'm carrying. I don't need them to turn themselves back off after a time, either.<p>I mean: I could use any of a wide array of motion sensors, but they'll turn the lights on even when I'm just working in the kitchen near the basement stairs. (Or maybe I could use a beam curtain! Yeah! Now they only respond when a beam breaks, instead of when I'm working in the kitchen near the basement stairs!)<p>Or I could just put the shit down and flip the switch.<p>Or: Plan ahead, and flip the switch in advance. And then just flip it back off when I'm done down there.<p>On a long-enough timeline, someone will find a way to make a point of explaining that any combination of a lack of planning and a lack of effort is completely and utterly inexcusable. That every action should should be planned, and that every manual effort has value.<p>But I chose this path anyway, and I like it this way. I invited the spies into my home very deliberately. The basement light automations work great, by the way, and the default non-voice UI is the same, plain, old-school light switch that the house came with.<p>(I also chose to carry an always-on pocket supercomputer with me wherever I go even though I have no way to observe what that thing is really doing at any given time.)
Heh, less like an episode of Black Mirror and more like LOTR. We hobbits have a duty and can't afford to not care about the world outside our shire.
Normies have a cezve.
I had a single Sonos speaker with Alexa (deactivated) and a Nest carbon monoxide detector. They have both been replaced with non-smart alternatives. The tipping point was seeing friends install smart heating systems and smart locks. I can't imagine any level of convenience that would make me literally put the keys to my house and ability to be warm in the hands of a 3rd party IoT company.<p>I find the idea that you'd connect things like these to the Internet absolutely insane. I do think we're past the point where being able to ensure you don't leak data isn't compatible with functioning in the modern world, but trying to limit the things that have Internet access to systems where you have control just seems sensible.
It's so important to have a dedicated VLAN (or 2.4g SSID) for IoT devices and block access to your regular VLAN/SSID or enforce some more granular rules on what devices can communicate with each other.<p>Most non-ancient routers/gateways support this. There are way too many IoT devices running code that's _worse_ than what older LLMs produce.
This is good advice but a simpler solution is to just not buy these things? Coffee machines don't need internet. Your thermostat doesn't either.
I agree on the coffee machine. On the thermostat, not so much. We keep pretty irregular hours so being able to control the thermostat remotely, so the house isn’t being heated unnecessarily but is warm on our return, is useful.
Honeywell Home T6 Pro Z-Wave.<p>It's smart and supports only Z-Wave, not WiFi. So something like a machine running Home Assistant must sit between it and the Internet. And then its up to you to decide how you want to do remote access, but WireGuard overlay networks (e.g. Netbird, Tailscale) basically solve that problem at home-user scale.
This. We should buy Z-Wave or Zigbee as much as possible (Matter over WiFi/Thread can access the internet, so are out) to grow that market. Both are completely disconnected from the internet and you decide how such devices can be accessed.<p>Reject all the WiFi-connected stuff, unless it's very user-centered and worst case you can upload your own firmware (e.g. a bunch of Shelly devices).
That said, getting a Zigbee or Z-Wave thermostat and have Home Assistant or similar control it is a better option that buying a surveillance-ready WiFi-enabled one.
If the house is well insulated, keeping it at a constant temperature might be more efficient than running irregular cooling/warming cycles.<p>Plenty of houses are not well insulated though...
> Coffee machines don't need internet. Your thermostat doesn't either.
reply<p><i>Yours</i> may not, but that's just your personal preference. A lot of folks enjoy these products. An argument could be made that no one needs a coffee machine or thermostat to begin with.
It's not enough to simply have a IoT VLAN that you put all your IoT devices on. Because those devices can see one another. In this case, if the coffee machine can see what type of smart fridge and smart toaster you're using, they can sell that data.<p>I default to adding IoT devices to a 2.4g "Guest" network where they can't see each other. Exceptions are IoT devices that need to see their friends to do what I bought them for, or devices I want to integrate with HomeAssistant. In those cases I create a separate IoT device per IoT brand. Excessive but necessary.
My Bialetti Moka pot doesn't attempt to acquire an IP address.
Of course by VLAN, I presume you mean one that doesn't have access to the Internet.<p>FWIW preventing the harm that happened here would seem to require a second set of APs (radios) on a different channel.
I have a firewall that tells me how much data each device is uploading and downloading. One particular device pulled down 6GB a week and uploaded 1.5GB doing absolutely nothing. I mean literally nothing, I use the local API to communicate with it. Blocking the one domain it was doing this to dropped traffic to essentially zero with no loss in functionality.
It's so strange that in the times when good coffee equipment is everywhere and good beans are everywhere, people prefer devices like this Keurig, paying extra for capsules and letting them use their WiFi for no good reason.<p>I bet a real coffee machine is even cheaper if you consider the cost of beans vs capsules.
To me the most head spinning version of this was at one of my first jobs. They had a Kuerig in the break room but instead of single use capsule it had a coffee filter cup that fit into the single use capsule slot, and people put regular coffee grounds in that and brewed it. Then it would be my job wash it out so it was ready for reuse.
I used a Keurig machine for years before upgrading to ... hand grinding beans and AeroPress. I can understand why --<p>Keurig is <i>really</i> convenient and cheap.<p>A Keurig machine, regardless of model, doesn't take much space. You can almost certainly put it somewhere in the kitchen or an office and just leave it there. By contrast, a machine that can grind beans is much larger, and you need to carefully plan for its presence.<p>The machine is obviously cheap -- most models are under $100, and only "high end" models with questionable features but not necessarily better taste are over that number. The pods are cheap -- you can easily get them for less than $0.5/pod, sometimes $0.4/pod. By comparison, Nespresso capsules are generally around $0.8-1/capsule. Note that I didn't say it's cheap per "unit coffee" -- there is usually less than 10g coffee in each pod (and that varies) and can be really weak for the amount of water used. This is why people suggest that if you have to use Keurig, use the least amount of water allowed.<p>Of course Keurig coffee doesn't taste the best. But most people aren't aware (even though they are likely able to tell the difference), and at the end of the day, the machine gets the job done. What makes them popular is cost and convenience. Like so many other products on the market.
Difficult to tell.<p>I seen a heavy duty (office) top notch and top brand coffee maker breaking down in every two weeks before the IoT frenzy and killing people's privacy by collecting all their data covertly. The mechanics may be good, may be bad, and for a grinder+brewer unit connected to the water pipes so you don't have to fill it up, except beans, can also be 'improved' (if not for the benefit of the user, but for the benefit of the manufacturer, making it cheaper to produce but selling at the same premium price people got used to before the PE bought it from the founders). It can have sensitive parts without software.<p>Now, when marketing and technology-fandom dominates over common sense it is even more difficult telling beforehand if a particular make of a particular brand will be a good buy or a disaster. More goes into the second category as time goes by.<p>To me, a french-press and buying ground coffee from a reliable brand (I am not a coffee evangelist, I only drink it, not worshipping it), or alternatively a moka pot are the reliable choice.
Can someone explain to me what kind of data it collects, and what value could that data have to advertisers or anyone else?
I had a coffe machine be used in a ddos bot network many years ago. Was quite suprised when we figured out what it was.
I checked Amazon's "About You" page, and it said:<p><pre><code> "Performs chainsaw work"
</code></pre>
I'm satisfied with my manliest man profile. Amazon nailed it.
I recently did the following:<p>- switch between my network and the cable router<p>- one port on the switch is set to "mirror mode"<p>- hooked up that port to a dedicated ethernet port on one of my boxes<p>Why do this?<p>Because if I run a tcpdump on that interface I see ALL of the traffic passing through the switch which includes all outbound and inbound traffic from my devices.<p>One interesting thing I've already discovered:<p>My oven sends random unencrypted keepalive messages over regular HTTP (not HTTPS) to an EC2 server.<p>I'm very curious to see if that changes over time.
<i>switch between my network and the cable router</i><p>One ISP here was recently caught scanning the local network on their modem/router-combo and uploading all the MAC addresses to... an analytics company.<p>If you have any chance to replace the ISP-provided router (in some countries ISPs are required to offer this option), do so. You can also replace it by something that has a traffic flow monitor, proper firewall (e.g. to block outgoing connections to trackers), etc.
See ntopng, it provides a nice monitoring UI for exactly this type of scenario. It's higher level than Wireshark, more focused on high level traffic analysis.
Wow, maybe this is the push I need to finally set up an isolated "IOT" VLAN at my home.
I did that relatively recently. Make sure to spend the time planning it out.<p>I've ended up with numerous VLANs, one for entertainment devices, one for security system(s), one for guests, one for IoT trash, etc.<p>If the devices are this level of untrusted, there's a lot of separation necessary.
I recently had a delivery to my Kaiser office in Portland. It was printer ink! My printer had run out of ink. Except, I don't own a printer, and I've never owned one that self-reorders ink. Someone at some time had registered their printer to my office address and enabled self-reordering of printer ink.
I have no idea why anyone would connect a coffee machine to the internet. Mine works just fine with no such connection.
Low efforct content farm website, don't bother, read the original post
This website generated 1tb of bandwidth while serving me 1kb of text
"Nomad explained that he had worked in IT for more than 10 years and decided to look further into what had happened."<p>I was hoping this post would say what happened and what kinds of packets it was sending.
why do you even need to connect coffee machine to network? Not that it will send you ready coffee to your workstation or something...
Why does a coffee machine need internet?
Or the more perplexing, a smart fridge.<p>Think of all that sweet sweet food data that a fridge could on sell.
Exactly. Why would you even want to connect your coffee machine to the network?
To me, it's unthinkable to discover this and not try to figure out what the hell that coffee maker was sending. He should donate the machine to a security researcher.
Remember the T in IoT stands for Tracking
What value to the user is there in such a machine having any kind of network connection?
Holy moly - 1,747 “partners” to share my data with. I mean, how can you even find 1747 data brokers? Where do you get that list. What does the JavaScript look like - I mean … this is getting ridiculous.<p>But at least the EU did me a solid. I really wanted to read that but I think 2000 data scumbags is not worth the effort.<p>All I need know is to realise bottlecaps must be recycled and federalism is good. Repeat in the mirror each morning
How can your or mine data be worth the payment of 1747 to the advertisers ?<p>Advertising is a lottery, they all try to show you an ad knowing very well it will most likely be ignored.<p>Where do they get the money to buy your details in the first place ?
<a href="https://texas-sos.appianportalsgov.com/data-broker-registry" rel="nofollow">https://texas-sos.appianportalsgov.com/data-broker-registry</a>
Somewhere there's an engineer who added Wi-Fi to a coffee maker because marketing wanted an app, and now a family is debugging network saturation caused by their breakfast routine
Keurig always seems like the worst name for this company.
I would require IoT devices to pass a rigorous certification process, like we do for RF devices.
Never assume malicious intent when incompetence.<p>I have multiple devices that queries their update server every 15 seconds, which all shows up as the top 10 queried domain in my network.
Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
It's in Kerig's interest to be evil in this case. There's money to be made in malice. There's good reason to assume this isn't incompetence.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability</a>
There is no way it is <i>not</i> incompetence.<p>Considering the computing power of these kinds of devices, it is most likely stuck inside an infinite loop sending garbage at full speed, there is not enough power to process that much volume in any maliciously useful way.
> Never assume malicious intent when incompetence.<p>I like Hanlon's Razor, but I think sometimes people will use it to fully dismiss the idea of someone being evil <i>because</i> they're stupid, when in reality plenty of people are capable of being both.
> Never assume malicious intent when incompetence.<p>No, fuck this lazy line of thinking. If the outcome is the same then it doesn't matter.
Time to develop an open source tarpit for these types of devices. Return data endlessly about fake network devices to overwhelm them and obfuscate your real devices.
How naive we were a decade ago that the biggest problem of IoT devices was their utter unreliability and configuration hell.<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/12/english-man-spends-11-hours-trying-to-make-cup-of-tea-with-wi-fi-kettle" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/12/english-m...</a>
Just imagine the devs on the other end trying to parse petabytes of data. It's breakfast on the East coast, all hands on deck.
Maybe the coffee machine is subsidized by a residential botnet?
Who's selling a home router that isolates devices by default?
In most good routers/APs (Unifi, OpenWrt, etc.) WiFi client isolation is something that is just a simple toggle (don't remember if it's on by default) and placing an SSID on a separate VLAN is also easy.<p>Some more consumer-oriented router/APs like Fritz!Box support a guest network that uses WiFi client isolation and internally uses a VLAN that is separate from the main network (though due to being non-pro end-user focus, you cannot set up your own VLANs or additional SSIDs).
Must be all the Java bytecode.
`C0FFEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE...`
Smart devices go on guest wifi
The only thing that I will add is that if you buy a smart appliance, you totally deserve this.<p>At my local home depot where I shop, there is like 1 of each type of appliance that has any type of smarts, and each one is always the most expensive. All the rest, and more reasonable, are dumb. No apps, no wifi, etc. I'm not usually a guy who cheaps out on stuff, but I also know when I'm overpaying, and would never pay $2,000 for a fridge just because it has a giant screen (and now shows ads apparently...ahem...samsung)<p>I have 3 Keurig coffee makers, and they are dumb as a brick.<p>If you buy something that can connect to wifi/the internet, please understand that you are never actually buying it. You are actually only renting it. Either you pay the price via lack of privacy, or you pay the price via subscription...and the company at the other end of the deal controls which bargain you get...you have no input.<p>Keurig could brick all their smart coffee makers tomorrow and demand users cough up $30/mo, and users would then have to decide on whether they should toss their coffee makers or pay up.<p>I'm not saying it's right. Governments aren't doing enough in this area, especially the US, but also Europe. However, that is the name of the game.<p>Buy something dumb and enjoy not having to worry about this nonsense at all.
>you totally deserve this.<p>The vast majority of consumers don't understand that purchasing hardware with cloud integration essentially means they're renting their own products. I don't think it's a very logical conclusion to make either, unless you spend some time thinking about it. Therefore I don't think it's fair at all to say that they deserve this. Lawmakers need to push back on this, but that I think we agree on.
I don't think a society where grandma has to be a tech expert in order to not have her network hacked by big corp is a good one.
A year or two ago, I was using NextDNS in ad-blocking and logging mode, which very helpfully exposed malware sitting on my very router, which had been completely undetectable, except for the veritable flood of bizarre DNS queries it was routinely sending to the self-configured DNS servers.<p>Now that I have a new router and I've re-enabled NextDNS, I've ironically discovered that the chief abuser of DNS right now is the router's own legit security software, which is absolutely hammering on the same query, several times a second.<p>Of course, since I am currently on NextDNS free tier, this matters a lot, because they cut you off after about 300,000 queries in a month. So any hammering abuse will make me lose my privileges much earlier than I would otherwise. So, to stop the abuse, should I shut off my legit security software? It is absolutely rubbish at identifying malware on the device itself...
Reminds me when couple years ago I plugged the TV to the internet (so my relatives kids can watch YT) and I forgot to unplug it for almost a week after, only to find the router dns resolved (and blocked) a million queries, all from that one TV!
I love when it keeps checking some random DNS address, because who knows, with a TTL of 64000 it may just have changed in the last seven milliseconds!
The traffic generated here is network scans, not external traffic, and so blocking DNS wouldn’t have helped.
question for those who use it: is it necessary to put the machine in the local network in order for it to work?
Probably because everyone is suffering from benchmark fatigue at this point. Until it handles real-world chaotic production edge cases without silent degradation, it's just another speed-run metric.
I actually think this is going to get progressively better.<p>It's easier than ever today with LLMs to find bugs in the firmware and get complete trace of what's they are sending and shame these companies.<p>The next phase for the technically inclined is to patch these appliances and remove the collection, also possible today
Two mistakes in the title.<p>- A coffee machine should not be broadcasting anything.
- Stop drinking coffee and go outside and enjoy the great outdoors.
can't even make a coffee at home without being tracked
Nobody wonders why the hell a coffee machine needs to DOWNLOAD 10GB as well?
I know, the upload looks bad and all, but why does nobody talks about this?
it took me a month to notice my Midea A/C was absolutely hammering my router<p>I didn't even know it had wifi capability but it was trying to connect<p>I use mac whitelist so it wasn't even getting in but that didn't stop it from trying every seond<p>Fortunately it was just a usb dongle so yanked it out
Most Midea units can be swapped for an ESPhome USB dongle if you ever wish to have remote control on your own terms — note various countries’ shop links, and the various wiki and other outlines for DIY etc: <a href="https://smlight.tech/product/slwf-01" rel="nofollow">https://smlight.tech/product/slwf-01</a>
Ooo. I have a Midea dehumidifier. When it powers up it displays the WiFi symbol. I wonder if it is hammering away at my access point. Might it be better to bring it on line and then just block all traffic?<p>And I wonder how I would even tell if it was trying to associate with my WiFi.
I have two of them, and I just checked and both are quiet. Mine don't connect to WiFi unless you go through an entire process first with an android phone and Matter.<p>It's great having them on WiFi - you can turn on the AC before getting home to pre-cool, without having to leave it on all day.
Spydevices. One can not trust those companies anymore.
What an annoying website to read. I couldn’t get past the video-ad jumping full screen.
Also, can we talk about the fact that it is a Keurig and therefore makes disgusting swill rather than coffee.<p>It’s not like it was an actually good coffee machine that has an app to select espresso profiles like a Wendougee Data S or something.
I honestly hate the IoT so much. Why should a coffee machine of all things use data? Just make the coffee.
VLANs, people. And firewall policies.
So is finally someone going to jail for another insanity like this ?
Why the fuck does a coffee machine need to connect to the Internet?
One purported reason is to inform their "auto delivery" (if you subscribe) that you're low on supply and they can ship you more pods. e.g. when you get to n <= 5 pods left, it will initiate an order so that you're replenished before n==0...no idea if it's smart enough to "know" the consumption rate and order based on drinker(s) or if it's a hard #
What the hell are we doing?<p>There is no good goddamn reason for a coffeemaker to talk to the Internet.<p>I have a VERY VERY nice coffee machine. The model was somewhat controversial b/c it DOES have integrated circuits in it, but only for the PID and the auto on/off. It has no wifi, bluetooth, Ethernet, NFC, or any other such tomfoolery because literally NONE of that would be useful.
My biggest concern is what are we going to do when these appliances come with their own SIM card<p>Right now I don’t care, I just never plug anything into my network<p>I don’t want to have to mod all my shit just to remove data collection stuff this way<p>Cars already do this and it’s a bitch to disable, can’t imagine having to do it every time I buy a blender, coffee maker, knife sharpener, tv, light bulb, speakers etc etc
On the other hand, when they have their own SIM card, they cannot scan or listen on your local network, so there wouldn't be much analytics to collect, except when you make your coffee I guess. Embedded SIM cards would especially be nefarious for devices like TVs. But I think most manufacturers prefer WiFi by far (more data to collect) and most customers just connect their devices to WiFi without even thinking about it.
A great reason to limit “Smarthome” devices to a dedicated guest or iot wifi network.
Last year I had a big dispute with my ISP that was refusing to support or provide proper WiFi on their router, even while they touted a trademarked brand-name to do it. I ended up turning their router into Bridge Mode and purchasing a real router that could do WiFi. I did this extremely reluctantly, because every other personally-owned router had contracted malware.<p>After installing the new router (Netgear) my HP LaserJet began printing error pages. Like, I had done nothing to send anything to it, but a blank error page or three would pop out of it at very random times.<p>It took awhile to narrow down and diagnose this. But it turned out that the Netgear system had a very... proactive network malware detection system. It was red-team scanning my LAN for "vulnerabilities" or exploits or the presence of malware (I think just known vulns). It was a known side-effect of these scans, where it would tickle an RTSP TCP port of some kind and the HP printer would respond with its error printout.<p>I was <i>so livid</i> that the router was scanning the LAN, basically unbidden and completely undocumented. Even worse, they were not sharing the logs or results of that scan with the consumer. No, they were being sent back to the Netgear mothership, and their cybersecurity vendor overlords. So the scans were not designed to benefit me; they were simply designed to spy on everyone from a privileged vantage point. Now I ask you, why is a piece of kit that is supposed to be "yours" compiling secrets about your network, hiding them from you, and turning them over to, I guess a big database for hackers to leak in due time? This is not a question of "well, devices hooked up to a network should not be vulnerable" if the devices were contained in a private network, and 100% inaccessible from outside, and only attackers inside my perimeter could do these exploits in the first place.<p>Thankfully I found a way to disable this. Their "security" shitware is still spamming DNS and I may be forced to disable that as well. Meanwhile, routers 100% cannot self-introspect or self-diagnose and find their own malware. I've said it once; I'll say it again: consumer routers are the Achilles Heel to your network. They are ideal points of compromise for any actor to gain a foothold and pivot, or simply gain persistence undetected. Your ISP doesn't care, and your vendors don't care. Perhaps you should.
If my printer printed random shit I would just get paranoid and wipe every piece of tech clean. But good on you for discovering why though.
Wow that seems bonkers to me. Basically scanning and cataloging known vulnerabilities on the sly, and when anyone notices they pretend it is for your benefit somehow.<p>It would be like finding out ring cameras are taking pictures of your keys and calculating the pin set to producing duplicates and sending that pin set data off somewhere and when caught them being like "Uh, we are uhhh... doing it to make sure your key isn't too worn down or to detect if someone made a crude hand filed key. Yeah that's it!"
Why not setup opnsense/pfsense/openwrt on a small PC. You already went with your own router
One of the routers I had in the distant past, which I flashed with some kind of OpenWRT, was clearly pwned. I do not know if the firmware I downloaded was pre-compromised, or if some entity pwned it as soon as the Internet was accessible. But I would not trust OpenWRT or Tomato or whatever with that track record. I do not need or want such complexity. I want an appliance router that works and will not cause me headaches. In fact, I purchased and evaluated a "gamer router", I believe it was from ASUS, that was extraordinarily complex, and had amazing bells-and-whistles, but ultimately it was not appropriate for home use. That headache-free, simplistic appliance was supposed to belong to my ISP, but they consistently refuse to provide one to me that is fit for purpose.
The GDPR consent form on this blog did not have a “Reject all” button. It required me to manually reject 16 instances of “legitimate interest,” then scroll through 1,746 vendors to make sure they were all set to reject.<p>Seems worth mentioning in a post about excessive and intrusive collection of user data. The moral outrage rings hollow when opting out of tracking is so deliberately onerous.
ahahahah that's gold !<p>IoT network yep, needed yesterday
So now I need a second revolver to put next to the coffee pot? Or do you think I should just relocate the printer next to the coffee pot so I only need one?
As another sign of the enshittified world we live in, the thing probably wasn't even RFC 2324 compliant.<p><a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2324" rel="nofollow">https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2324</a><p>Bruh should have set his PiHole to return HTTP 418 in response to any outbound request this thing made.
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This is what it takes to make actually good coffee.<p>My grandmother made the best coffee I’ve ever tasted. Every time she made me a cup, she transferred an entire library from the studio to the living room.<p>Whenever I saw her coming in from the garden, pushing the wheelbarrow, I’d get excited: “The coffee is coming!”