> The software allows retailers to manage their cold units remotely.
Will they never learn?
Will they never learn?
The problem is that many of these setups are put behind essentially consumer connections, but with a better support contract or simply fitted with a 5G modem and a SIM card from the cell provider with the cheapest plan.
Building a WAN isn't magic, but it does require working with (competent) ISPs and paying the higher cost.
If it's a lot, maybe the manufacturers should be compelled to provide security patches if remote control is required to operate their products. For the sake of national security, of course.
Yes you might need to be able to centrally monitor and manage things but that should be happening on a private network.
How exactly would a more obscure (or even “analog”) encoding help? This seems orthogonal to reducing surface complexity and remotely executable command subsets.
The idea is not to solve everything with one simple trick, but to reduce the attack surface as much as possible in hardware. If you are dumb enough to make your 4 messages something like off, on, hard reset, random dangerous maintenance protocol, then it does nothing. If instead it encodes 4 useful and typically used states that can't destroy your system, then you have massively reduced the requirement for onsite, and accepted that more serious issues require onsite control.
It's not an easy balance to strike, though; the less capable the remote interface is, the less useful it is. "Only completely harmless commands" might simply not be good enough. For example, is "deactivate electricity output of this solar panel" (e.g. because market conditions make it unprofitable to supply at a given instance) harmless or not? What about "increase supplied frequency by 0.01 Hz to stabilize the grid"?
* Fridges are read-only through their remote interface.
Both of these can be true if you must connect them to the internet.
Meanwhile you can use analog gauges if you need perfect max temperature monitoring.
That's what always pisses me off about this. Someone brought up "Hey, if we connect this to the internet to enable that feature, someone will start hacking fridges and hurting our customers, and I don't think the stupid page with a temperature graph on it is worth that tradeoff", and some ass told them to get over it and implement it.
Raymond Chen used to write about feature development at Microsoft, specifically how every single new feature idea started from a negative position, since it requires support and testing and engineering and thought, and has future repercussions, so it's often not a good idea to just add box checking features.
Microsoft believed this in the 90s. For things like UI functionality. That's the effort and thought and restraint required to have a consistent UI, for things to be thought out.
Somehow, between then and now, the industry threw all that thought away, and now everything has 400 totally unused, half implemented, utterly broken features.
Why are we here? "Move fast and break things" just breaks everything eventually. Someone, somewhere, eventually has to fix stuff.
That's termed Post-IPO problem. :)
I doubt the fridge has a remote-controlled robot arm to unload itself.