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And yet... if they had instead invested in making the equipment operable locally we wouldn't be here today. This is the problem with thinking of your users as "nontechnical" lesser beings. The engineering problem becomes remove control and ownership from the user instead of make the product usable. In this case by removing control from the user they simply gave it to an attacker. Great job, guys.

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I addition to the technical knowledge needed to make this work well, there are misaligned incentives between the store managers and the company as a whole.

One particular example: store managers want a very cold, very narrow temperature deadband on their frozen items. This gives the customers a nice experience. They're less likely to complain about melty ice cream. But this type of setup leads to more energy expense, and failures on the compressors due to excessive cycling.

Could this control problem be solved locally? Like is there some intuitive setting you could give an end user that still results in efficient running behavior? Wouldn't that be strictly better than putting it on the internet anyway?

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