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Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

"... I think this may have to do with rural stores having essentially consumer-grade internet routers connected to ..."

It has to do with refrigerators reachable on the Internet.

If the refrigerators were not reachable on the Internet, none of this fragility would exist.

The fragility of refrigerators reachable on the Internet was demonstrated just a few weeks ago. These refrigerators were left connected to the Internet.

This lack of discernment and misunderstanding of risks and fragility will not be solved with a better router or a different uplink.

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Yeah

And it would be (mostly) fine if they were on the net, with read only access

The entire reason they are put on the Internet is to allow for remote control. What problem would it solve to allow remote monitoring of refrigerator data without control?

How many times have you changed your fridge temperature in the last year? Once a year? Twice?

And most importantly, these fridges always have someone close by. Make it a physical button instead of a remote function

Because then you can monitor it, and then call someone at the store to change the settings. Or go into the store to fix the one that isn't doing what's expected. You can still get alerts, diagnostics and data.

I mean, what happens when a compressor or other physical part goes out? You can't fix that remotely anyways. You might still want remote monitoring for that kind of situation.

I'm not in perishable food so what do I know.. But organization wide food safety measurements are probably more important than the average process BS.. Performing a full heat cycling of a freezer while no one is present to confirm the correct device OTOH sounds idiotic.

Do you think the code in these systems is secure enough to enforce read-only access?

It doesn't need to be perfect, it only needs to be better than what it is today (predictable passwords)

Easy, you don't connect the control systems to the monitoring systems.

At the very least the system should pull configuration info from a trusted source at predefined times instead of being available for it to be pushed at any time.

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