I disabled WiFi on the new Samsung fridge
eattherich.club
eattherich.club
I'm thinking something similar to what https://adnauseam.io/ does, but but amplified:
1. Someone reverse engineer what does the device send to which address. 2. Block the particular device to access internet (and make it easy for others too). 3. Constantly send bogus data to the manufacturer so the personal data they get overall loses value or is unusable. Make it easy for a lot of people to do it as well, or even just rent a bot farm.
There's too many legit and good services that end up being turned down due to abuse and DDos, and they don't even bring anything good to the attackers. Why not using these techniques for something actually good to consumers privacy?
1) Price increases. It's "smart". Pay us more.
2) Planned obsolescence. You have numerous new points of failure in your product + make repairing vastly more difficult.
3) Monetize collected data by selling it to interested parties. The data quality, or lack thereof, is a secondary concern.
Your other two points are broadly correct though. Also data collection is helpful for seeing how customers use products, which genuinely does influence development.
Hard to believe when a printer manufacturer moves a commonly failing part from cartridges to the printer itself, then makes it impossible to repair that specific part without taking apart the whole thing and buying a replacement part for 160 bucks.
> Also data collection is helpful for seeing how customers use products, which genuinely does influence development.
I'll start calling it helpful once it actually improves product quality and usability.
The effect comes from many sources. When the engineering science is new, tech tends to be way overbuilt because the creators don't know what tolerances are. There's also the ratio of product cost to disposable income of the users. And to their wish for devices over time.
In any case, the natural tendency of a profit-optimizing system of competition is to throw away values (eg., repairability) that consumers at-purchase dont value. In this case, no biz is going to spend extra to include long-life features at a loss to competitors who don't.
The remedy here is regulation, which is the mechanism which sets a floor on competition: since consumers at-purchase are at an extreme informational disadvantage, the gov. should require all biz to build in long-life features given consumers do want them, long after purchase.
It's not a conspiracy, more of a market failure. The market doesnt produce optimal outcomes in cases where these extreme information asymmetries are built in, ie., by the time the product is around for 10yr to be reivewed, it's retired. There isn't a way of getting that information to the consumer.
Ease of assembly is often in opposition to ease of repair. Reliability engineering optimizes failure rates during warranty and extended warranty periods. Why would they optimize repairability? It not in their interest.
The defective Apple MacBooks are great example of this effect. Politically powerful design guy prioritizes design over everything else. Keyboard technology is defective and un-repairable. Result: Billion of dollars of warranty claims.
Was that a conspiracy? No. Just the result of poor priorities, resulting in a bad outcome.
"So they opened the fridge and 15 seconds later closed it again, they might have taken something out, interesting."
Really now?
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-story-behind-the-story-behind-...
Nothing cynical there: you are simply correct. There's overwhelming evidence that companies profit from selling user's data, engage in planned obsolescence and deploy numerous tricks to disrupt the second hand market.
I mean, this has been going on for at least 97 years if you include light bulbs:
“The cartel lowered operational costs and worked to standardize the life expectancy of light bulbs at 1,000 hours (down from 2,500 hours), and raised prices without fear of competition, in what has been described as a "classic example of planned obsolescence". The cartel tested their bulbs and fined manufacturers for bulbs that lasted more than 1,000 hours.”
then they do care about the data, just not the quality of that data. But the fact they are collecting data is definitely of importance or they would not be collecting and selling it.
1) Set up a pihole or ad guard or similar and block the requests the device makes. You can probably find someones list or it may already be in the default one.
2) Put all the IOT's devices into a virtual wifi lan that doesn't by default doesn't allow internet access. Then only add in the few places you want them to be able to get to. In general putting IOT devices on a network separate from your real computers is a good idea for isolation anyway since they are likely to have poor security.
Just can't remember what it was called.
Should read their site in more detail probably.
A DDoS could cause the company to drop support faster(Like they already always do), and hurt the people who can no longer use the features on their expensive device.
Besides, if DDoSing got popular with average consumers it would never stop, and they'd go after everything that has any privacy risk(AirTag/Tile comes to mind), no matter how critical it is to some people's lives.
Admittedly a bit of a slippery slope argument, but less so in an age where there is a significant minority that would love to undo all tech from the last 70 years.
Instead we could be fighting for laws requiring that that all smart devices use an open and app-capable OS, or that all features exposed via proprietary connection to their server also be exposed via local API.
If you aren't one of those people that can just walk by something and passively remember it's location, IoT is great.
Tile doesn't completely replace constant vigilance and planning, and carefully thinking about every step, but it does help.
requests probably need to be send with valid serials, in which you can't effectively anonymously flood the telemetry by yourself.
given that there is absolutely no way even a small percentage of Samsung fridge (why even buy one?) users will care about this, all it does is reveal the participant's identities and motivations.
I'm all for being able to choose whether or not to disclose that data, but then we'll also have to accept different choices than ours. There's no point in sabotaging others.
Because getting a ton of garbage will positively stimulate them to stop trusting this data. That helps everyone.
We're already being sabotaged, by manufacturers - what else would you call this sometimes hidden, non-disablable connectivity/"telemetry", and the disappearance of dumb options? The only question is if we let them get away with it scot-free.
And yet...
What we do know is that even the least price-sensitive consumers, that buy the most high-end TVs, aren't given the option:
Buying a product knowing it has ads in it is one thing, but users on Reddit and elsewhere are understandably angry about ads suddenly being patched into their devices—especially in cases when these devices are multi-thousand-dollar 4K Sony televisions - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/04/google-pilot-program...
Some smart TVs can milk money from subscription partnerships, but on a per-tv-sold basis it's not really that much.
I mean, I can understand the value of user data from Facebook but a stove or a fridge? What exactly are they selling?
Edit: realized now we're talking about TVs but still, is that data really worth that much?
I'd like to see sources on that.
Amazon's tablet is like $20 cheaper if you buy it with integrated ads. A TV will have a hard time showing so many ads through the day that it'll halve the price.
Appliance companies seem to be barely making margins anymore, so it's not like they're robbing you blind, more that a startup would need to create a simple device that is also twice the price of everyone else.
You'd hope that there's be enough of a delta in that "pay more", and enough folks who would do so, to make a market. Shame it seems like there isn't.
- Producing and especially shipping and storing huge and/or heavy appliances is expensive AF, which means you need a lot of upfront capital for inventory and warehouses
- Getting onto Amazon is easy, but almost no one buys a fridge on Amazon - which means you have to establish a relationship with brick-and-mortar retail, and that is difficult: the retailers expect free demonstration units for each location or subsidy for advertising, as well as have ridiculously long payment schedules (depending on whose rumors you listen to, some chains want up to 1 year of time from product delivery to payment due date!).
Basically, it boils down to the question on how and where to get money to disrupt an industry that has enormous cash requirements, low margins and an extremely niche target demographic. Your best bet is a benevolent billionaire willing to put up cash for decades.
There is a lot to be said about throwing whole classes of users under the bus (elderly, people with disabilities) when asking them to manage technology mostly because how these things are going to be implemented (e.g. the security vs usability dilemma).
I welcome new legislation in this area but it seems to me that lobbyists are once again screwing over the general consumer by adding anti-features into these legislations. Luckily IOT-vendors are absolutely abysmal at protecting their devices so I doubt we'll see too many devices locked down that weren't already.
one thing:
> Luckily IOT-vendors are absolutely abysmal at protecting their devices so I doubt we'll see too many devices locked down that weren't already.
it is either compliance or no CE stamp (if a product does not meet safety requirements they have to remove connectivity or take it off the shelves). And either they are already scrambling because the cost of this has already sunk in, ... or they are in for a surprise pretty soon because becoming compliant isn't a one-off activity but means restructuring their entire processes (e.g. test automation to maintain that compliance)
> It should be legally required
Absolutely not. But I also don't want that level of company control over everything. I think "government punishing companies" is a much better alternative to "companies punishing people".
> Or, a soldering iron.
In this case, the wireless card could be just detached physically. But what happens when e.g. device requires network access to work, but also has some malicious feature? What if the malicious feature is baked in the hardware, e.g. DRM? Do we just pull out an electron microscope and a disassembler?
Since we cannot fundamentally eliminate exploitative behavior just yet, seeing as the world is full of suffering and people grow up with all sorts of psychological trauma and cannot help trying to secure themselves at the expense of others, the biggest antagonist of the market that we can tackle is information asymmetry.
In some countries, you can bet that every mention of a regulation intended to tackle a specific instance of information asymmetry abuse (often enabled by advances in technology) will be accompanied by concerns about “government control over everything” and that “the market should fix it”. Unfortunately, that agenda mostly helps the exploitative behavior.
If we don’t do our best to keep the market working by compensating for information asymmetry, command economy will eat it.
> we cannot fundamentally eliminate exploitative behavior just yet
> price in externalities
At which point you'll have to disassemble the damned thing and physically rip out the LTE modem, possibly resulting in the device bricking itself when it can't phone home after a while.
I bet if you're a device manufacturer right now and go to t-mobile enterprise sales and tell them you want 200MB of data per month per IMEI and you're going to have 50,000 units, you'll get a very attractive monthly price per unit.
Mark my words, it'll be commonplace in another 8-10 years.
https://me.me/i/tech-enthusiasts-everything-in-my-house-is-w...
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-...
You can disassemble the interior a bit (usually not too difficult) and disconnect the antenna from the comms module. Depending on the structure of the wiring harness your car uses, it may not be possible to easily do that without also removing GPS/radio functionality. Some models are now integrating WiFi/Bluetooth into the same system.
Alternatively, depending on which manufacturer your car is from, you can "acquire" the manufacturer diagnostic/service software and disable the cellular connection.
I will give a shoutout to Honda for being pretty good about this. The Civic didn't have a cellular connection at least as of the 10th gen (up to 2021). Not sure if the new '22 Civic does. Also, their infotainment systems run Android and you can root/jailbreak it - on the Civic, Accord, HR-V, and others. Again, this may change in current model years so double check before you buy. And (excepting a few years around 2016-2018) Honda also still has physical buttons/knobs for all the important controls, instead of putting everything into a touchscreen like 90% of companies do these days.
BMW has had a cellular connection in their cars for many years, but you can disable the SIM card by programming the TCB through ISTA, even on the current G chassis cars. Not sure if that completely disables Tx. Also not sure how their just released iDrive 8 system handles it though.
Alternatively you could unplug the TCB on the BMWs. That requires dropping the headliner on recent ones (annoying but not hard), and on the really recent ones I don't think you can unplug cellular only (you'll also lose GPS & some other things, potentially including WiFi/BT/NFC, I'm not sure). And it'll show a warning on the dash all the time if you unplug it.
The discourse 5-10 years ago was that this was the price you pay for free (as in beer) consumer services. In reality, no such principles exist, and everything is instead a numbers game. Do enough people complain? Does it factor into their purchase decisions?
Unfortunately, average people seem to not value their attention, even as everyone else is fighting tooth and nail for a share of it.
https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=npr...
WTF. Is this a thing? How?
I don’t really need any of those with my phone in the car.
Can't find the reference but don't they use this for generating precise topological data?
That means it will fail the bi-annual mandatory check.
Right to Disconnect? I want my Right to Disconnect.
When these backhaul comms go in this hardware, that "purchase" doesn't convey ownership. I would describe it as a rental in ownership's clothing.
It's not about 'learn the new tech' - it's 'learn when the company decides you don't need a feature or just decides to no longer support it' and remotely disables
One is learning new tech, the other is loosing your rights
I imagine our leaders won't start thinking about this until we already have ubiquitous 5G / IoT .
I almost would say there is a better chance of a law that says you can't disconnect.
Just wait until someone deliberately buys such a "smart" appliance, tears the SIM card out (or does some free-style rewiring of the PCB), and starts prodding around what they can reach on the other side. They might even be so kind as to take a look at the analytics/remote-control protocol, maybe pull some credentials out of the SoC and provide a free fuzz testing service to the manufacturer.
If the manufacturer can observe the device remotely, can control the device, can add or remove functionality, decide to stop selling you spare parts so you have to buy a new one, or brick it at any time - meanwhile you cant get the device to do what you want, or even to stop showing you ads?
You are not an owner, you are just sucker paying the bill. John deer agrees, in their submission to the court the argued that the farmer is not the owner of the tractor they bought.
This is worse than taxes, at least there you get a vote
It turns out I kinda have that already. My 1919 house has plastered walls, some of which have a wire mesh underlay. It blocks wifi signals between rooms beautifully.
Happy to be proven wrong, wouldn't a Faraday Cage need to be tuned to absorb whatever wavelength you're aiming to block?
In the same way that you can see in to a microwave because the terahertz μm waves can pass through the holes but the microwave mm waves are blocked.
Until it won't be legal to impair Big Brother watching you.
No reading my cards without actually taking them out.
There are a whole bunch of issues that can occur that a patient may not be aware of because they are asleep. Generally I wish we'd all use some kind of sleep monitoring system or at least we started routine screening for sleep disorders
3g definetly was bad for the, maybe lte is not scaling well enough for having each bulb in the house connected to the network without wifi ;D
Oh, I think it will be sooner than that, and beyond that, it won't even be your appliance. You'll be renting it for only $49.95/month, and for only $4.99/month more you can have the RecipePlus(tm) subscription and see what all your friends are cooking, comes with ExtraCare repair and monitoring service too! Even more discounts when you rent the entire kitchen appliance suite.
I wish the guy best luck with his unplug solution. I recently did something comparable and was first lucky to discover when unplugging antennas from the board the device seemingly went on unaffected just to find out that it behaved erratic: Input was terribly lagging up to the point of being unusable to interoperate with. Reluctantly and in defeat I had to re-attach the antenna. I doubt it was designed to behave like this on purpose, but the CPU being tripped for operating out of regular parameters.
However intentionally bricking the device when it can't phone home is a very likely future.
Of course, it's probably a bunch of effort (eg electrical compliance, RF compliance, etc).
Kind of thinking it might be suitable for crowd sourcing. :)
My expectation is the online tracking/advertising is about to hit an incredible hard legislative period. The change that is coming is big, and the fallout it going to seriously badly hit some business models and corporations.
However, you are completely right, they will try anything and everything to continue.
Judging by the new CSAM legislation being pushed by EU bureaucrats, your fridge won't report to its maker but to EU commission and maybe to your own government.
I can't seem to find the relevant part of GDPR that would even attempt to cover that - beyond any tracking data sent back to the manufacturer.
Any ball park idea what this price might be? $10/year/device? Less?
Especially given the ridiculous price difference between a corporate and a common data plan.
That is the final barrier. Right now, they can't financially justify an always-on "hard" link.
And voiding the warranty for sure.
You can't find the touch-buttons in the dark, say when you want to make coffee in the wee morn, so you're forced to turn on lights. When you finally find a button, it takes forever to turn it to max. You have to fiddle around to turn it back down again, first click the button for the corresponding plate you want, then click a separate button to actually power it down. Again, it takes forever.
It's also impossible to train tactile memory for it, becuase the buttons are too close and too hard to discern on the dark-on-dark top, so if you try doing it blind, you'll just end up fiddling forever to find the damn thing.
If you spill something over the touch area, it'll start beeping and complaining before it turns itself off. Meanwhile the corresponding pot might have already boiled over, and you can't react in time, because the touch panel is covered in boiling liquid.
Also, honestly, I think it's actually harder to keep the ceramic top clean than a regular top. Reason: It smudges real easy, and you're never sure how much pressure or abrasives you can use without making scratches. On the old tops, you just didn't have to worry. It could withstand a sledgehammer amount of abuse before scratching or chipping.
And don't even get me started on the microwave installed here... I brought my own two-knob micro despite there already being one installed here. That should give you a clue.
Speaking of beeping, why is it so hard to completely disable the "I'm finished" beep on household devices?
My microwave beeps, incessantly.
My dishwasher beeps, four times, when it's finished. Especially nice when this happens after midnight when everyone is sleeping.
My washing machine beeps, for the best part of 10 mins, when it's finished. Also nice when this happens in the wee small hours.
My tumble dryer - praise the Lord - has a function to disable its beeping. The beeping got disabled within minutes of it being installed.
My microwave beeps for a solid 10 seconds every minute after a run. In this condition, it is perfectly safe no matter what.
My oven beeps exactly 1 time when preheated, similar to how FedEx and UPS notify upon package delivery. In this condition, it could burn my house down if left unattended. There are no subsequent beeps.
My Instant Pot does the same thing, but I only use it in the evening, so not so much of a big deal as the microwave oven.
[1] Before: https://i.imgur.com/xuyQJwL.jpg
[2] After: https://i.imgur.com/ZwX8zWs.jpg
But most of all, it is being cheap and using a piezeoelectric buzzer driven on/off instead of a speaker driven by a small routine that would produce a pleasant sound.
Microwave ovens used to sound a bell when they were done, back when timers were mechanical.
My washing machine loudly plays a lengthy fecking song when it's finished!
I do wish that, at the least, there was a way to reduce the volume of all these beeping things...
I need this! Ours beeps when it's done, then starts up again for a couple of minutes, beeps again... repeat ad nauseam. Yes, I KNOW YOU'RE FINISHED!
When my old microwave (which emitted 4 long beeps when finished) broken down, I specifically looked for an unit with:
- knobs, ie. no buttons (and especially no touch buttons!)
- shortest possible 'cooking finished' bell
I managed to find one that I like but it wasn't easy.
For dishwashers, we now have one that just opens by itself when it is done (to dry) - no beeping or anything. Maybe a bit hyperbolic, but it was quite a life changer!
It will beep FOREVER untill you turn it off. This should be a crime.
Of course, the best way is to make it configurable, but surely.
Plug through the device and when it's done, shout at Mycroft (or other spyware DA) to power it off.
Hmmm? So it annoys you if it beeps at those times, but not when it RUNS at those times? I'm confused...
This should be illegal.
I really miss the induction hob. Cleaning the rangemaster is a complete nightmare, it’s full of places where dirt can accumulate, there’s even holes down the back and gaps in the side where food falls down that are unrecoverable. The gas rings sometimes don’t light up and gas leaks out while you’re cooking and don’t realise, it’s much more dangerous for children and I’ve left it on without realising a few times now.
The buttons on the induction hob sucked, yes, but the user experience was so much better, literally wipe clean and done, safe and powerful. Maybe if I had a cleaner I’d prefer the rangemaster…
And my mom is afraid to let anything drip on it, because they told her she needs special cleaner or it'll ruin the finish. And my parents are not gullible people.
Look forward to more of this shit, too: CA just outlawed gas appliances in new houses. But in an area stricken by permanent drought, do they do something sensible like requiring greywater recovery systems in new construction? NOPE.
That said capacitive touch has no place in the kitchen.
>The only profitable division of the company is its Complaints Department, which, according to the series, takes up the major landmasses on three planets. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines its marketing division as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes," and an edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica that had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came."
Like fan (convection) ovens, is this just something that Europe is used to and is alien to people in the USA?
Personally, I love that the entire surface of the hob (including buttons) is a flat piece of glass. It makes cleaning trivial.
Before: turn the knob to max and wait a moment.
Today: long-press the on/off button to turn the stove top on, press another button to select plate, adjust power by hitting the plus button ten times to get it to the max setting. Then wait a moment.
That's the worst damn user interface you can think of for using a physical machine that begs for tactile controls.
Delighted that my new place just has knobs!
[1] - https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/home-entertainment/i-s...
However I made it myself with an ESP8266 and some Dallas sensors. So it only works for me. Not for anyone else.
Do you have a recommendation on how to start an ESP8266 project? Which board/power supply/??? Did you buy to do this for example
The ESP32 also has bluetooth which the 8266 doesn't. But WiFi and BT can't be used at the same time, you can turn them both on but they have to share the 'airtime' meaning more airtime for BT is more packet loss for wifi. If I need both I will usually just use 2 for this reason :)
For programming I used https://ESPHome.io which is perfect for Home Assistant and you can program it right from the Home Assistant interface, just by declaring a few variables. I even have a $2 OLED display hooked up to it (SSD1306 1-color typical aliexpress thingy), works perfectly.
It's highly recommended, let me know if you have more questions.
And yeah like the other person said, power supply for these boards is irrelevant, any USB supply will do. They're not fussy because they don't use a lot of power unlike a pi.
I personally buy whatever esp32 is on Amazon and use whatever usb power bricks I have laying around.
Simplicity lasts longer.
A general rule of thumb: avoid machines with a large display.
In Sweden, almost all of my electrical bill is heating anyway and water is practically free.
My dishwasher's default program requires 4—5 hours. In the 90s, this was <1h I think?
Does the cost of the electricity and water an old machine uses equal or exceed the cost of the electricity and water involved in having to make a brand new appliance instead of using an already-made one?
If we had good sources of energy (nuclear, or solar+batteries) we wouldn't even need to worry about that. Water as well, water simply cannot get "wasted", you just need to clean it, which requires energy.
The fact is, these "modern" "green" appliances are simply worse, sure they use less energy but waste much more time (because colder water -> longer wash cycle). You can get more (useful) energy, but you can never get more time.
The comparison is the water and energy embodied in the solar panel/turbine/inverter.
If you live in a desert, water is relevant
<laughs in Scottish>
That's it. That's literally all you need.
The most difficult thing about it, is that it doesn't have a start button. It just starts automatically a second after you've set the timer.
This small "smart" feature is actually a problem for visitors who doesn't know the machine, because they'll try to jam in the two knobs in order to "start" the thing. But otherwise I love it, and I use it all the time over the fancy schmansy pre-installed one. Because when I use the fancy one, I'm afraid that if I push the wrong button I'll start a nuclear war...
The smartest stove of them all - does one thing and does it well.
The only significant addition I see in somewhat recent models is auto-turning off, and I'm pretty sure it will help save the house from burning down at some point, so I'm all for it.
Many recent stoves (induction or regular) have figured that, when interacting with them, no one will have wet hands nor need to adjust them repeatedly, they could go ahead and save a few pennies by using shared tactile controls.
My stove need me to press a button corresponding to the plate I want to change, then press a common +/- button to turn it up or down. If my finger is wet, it will have a hard time registering and reach a timeout, whereupon I have to again select the plate. This is hands down the worst UX for an appliance I've had in my life.
We get charged ridiculous amounts for repairs. The repair industry has sort of decided that there should be a high minimum regardless of the problem.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31008275#31009009
"" Better oven ergonomics leads to less cooking fatigue, which leads to less accidents and therefore less downtime. Sometimes it actually pays off to have a higher maintenance workload, especially since most of it is planned downtime, or features that don't have fixed urgently. And sometimes this idea of radical simplicity only shifts maintenance workload from one component to another. One example that gets a lot of pushback in US cooking is gas connections. ""
What OP said was about repairing stuff to avoid smart appliances. From an environmental perspective using old stuff is often much worse than getting new (fridge, car, ...).
2) surely the fact that it has WiFi was known at purchase time? Despite what the internet would lead you to believe, there is still a lot of fridges without WiFi and "smart" features out there, why not buy one of those rather than mess with this?
Edit: point 2 was addressed in the article, sorry I missed it
Like many other 'smart' appliances, it creates it's own AP so allow you to set it up. So anyone within range could attach it to their network, and then do whatever they like with it.
> surely the fact that it has WiFi was known at purchase time?
It came with the place they're living in. Someone else made that decision.
Considering the security risk of smart devices generally working like this, I feel like the industry ought to standardize on something more sensible. Maybe some kind of NFC pairing?
It is irrelevant anyway. Buying something with the intent of modding it is not that unreasonable.
Related HN question from years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25275350
Thankfully it's only an US feature.
It says right there in the article:
these appliances came with the new place so i’ll be stuck with these i imagine for some time
It is also quite possible that these come with cellular connectivity in the future as well…
for now. That’s not true anymore for example for TVs.
Wi-Fi for fridges is available, but no one seems that bothered by it.
Obviously neither should have any actual controls over Wi-Fi, but getting a notification about open fridge door, being able to check if stove or oven is on while away from home, or getting report when something (is about to) breaks would be neat.
Well, this isn't it. Only the corporations receive your data.
I bought all new appliances last year, and none of them were smart. I don't even remember seeing any smart ones at the shop. Granted, this was an appliance store in a town of about 8000 people... but it seems to me they're more gimmicks for people with too much money than a part of most peoples every day life.
I have a couple of IoT VLANs that devices gets sorted into by my level of percieved trust. Things like AppleTV and Sonos goes into the trusted one, things like Printers, various chinese IoT like Aquara sensors, Eufy cameras and more are put into the untrusted one. Trusted devices have static DHCP assigned IPs, as well as printers (for AirPrint and mDNS)
Everything in the untrusted VLAN is blocked by MAC address in the firewall in the outbound direction.
I keep a (surprisingly small) spreadsheet of all my firewall rules, so migrating to a new firewall is a matter of spending 30 minutes setting up the 50 or so lines from the spreadsheet, of which most are rules for allowing inter VLAN traffic, i.e. allow AirPlay reverse connections from AirPlay capabale devices.
I should add that i run Eufy cameras in Homekit mode, so they only need access to talk to a HomeKit bridge/hub (AppleTV/HomePod), and only need internet access for firmware updates.
I've lost count the amount of times I thought about "I should just do an open-source version of <some home appliance I need and is full of spy/crapware>"
So why are we getting it anyway? We are getting it because it is essential to the smart cities agenda. It is planned that everything be micromanaged by a technocratic elite.
Think of China's social credit score on steroids. Have you used up your allocation of credits? Your fridge/heating/etc can be switched off.
Have you been a bad citizen, posting dissenting comments online? Then you can't travel, will have your bank account frozen/constrained.
A digital pass and smart technology everywhere are required. Then technocrats can have fine-grained control of everything.
This will be done in the name of the environment - in the name of 'saving the earth' most of us will choose digital enslavement and will even force it on others.
^ That's the plan in a nutshell - which is aimed to be in place for 2030.
I imagine a product manager took exactly 100ms to calculate that the answer to that question is "functionally no one" and so there went the $X ethernet connector from the build, for patently obvious reasons.
Hell, I'd love to know Sonos's ethernet adoption rate, since they certainly have that data. I'd bet it's fairly high since Sonos is a bit up-market and sometimes professionally installed, or installed by enthusiasts, but I'm willing to guess it's < 5%, and realistically, < 1%, even if we only obviously limit the sample size to "Sonos devices that are eth capable."
*buys a wifi-enabled fridge*
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
RTR should include access to the software running these products, this way people could modify things, brick their appliances if they really want to, turn off "call home" features, etc.
but products can be notorious in the ways they try to make you setup the wifi.
Worse sometimes if you don't setup WiFi they will connect to unprotected networks if the find some and try to use them instead, opening them up to even more attack surface (or networks of wide spread hotspot providers in your country).
I.e. you get annoyed and can't be sure if it doesn't connect to "something" if you don't go that far.
better off disabling it.
These apps often require ridiculous invasions of privacy - refusing to work if you don't give them full access to location, running in the background, etc. - and work poorly at best.
In 30+ years of using computers, I thought that printer companies were my go-to standard for truly hideous software, but appliances are pushing the bar even lower. If my company interviewed a candidate from one of them who didn't proactively state that they formally protested the shipping of their software, I would in most cases refuse to hire them.
Appliance manufacturers are worse than car OEMs in this sense. Making stuff which nobody asked for while screwing it up.
Solution: physically disconnect WiFi.
This pretty much sums up my daily outlook on life.
Have turned off wifi from my device and never turned it on again.
Do you have a source? Proof that it is not a security concern?
"since this got boosted if anyone happens to know about service manuals for appliances, lmk. i’m textin a buddy about this and now we just wanna kill it instead my backup plan (forever dhcp lease + block IP from pf.conf). even the manuals i can find online from samsung don’t mention the smart features, it seems to be more of a “don’t burn down your house idiot” thing "
It seems their plan was to block it at a network level if they couldn't do this.
The idea is to some day make a per-gadget catalog of all the hostnames and addresses these things want to reach, but hopefully someone beat me to it already and you folks can let me know where to find it.
This is the system Google intends PWAs to be, just quick, snappy, easily accessible websites that behave like they belong on your device. Sadly, most "apps" seem to copy the bloated, heavy, mostly JS-based approach we find in native apps, which is besides the point. Take the Twitter web-app, for example, that's a bloated mess that needs some serious optimisation. The alternative front-end, Nitter.net, does a lot better in almost every aspect. It's fast, accessible, and does just about everything except writing tweets and putting together a wall of followed accounts for you.
I like mastodon but I still prefer a native app over the web UI because it just feels that little bit too "web" for me. The main advantage obviously isn't the UI but the decentralized nature of the platform; a clean UI just helps them be a better alternative for the closed ecosystem of traditional social media.
Everyone is limited to 1 dishwasher session during drought season. Fridges run a few degrees warmer during heat waves to conserve energy.
Or it gets factored into your personal and family ESG score which can be used to discriminate.
Are you doing your part, comrade?
"Comrade", if you source your own water and don't rely on "communism when it's convenient for me", water limits aren't a problem.
Your dig at communism doesn't make sense: This dystopia you describe is being actively built by capitalist companies operating within a market economy and encouraged by democratically elected governments.