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altairprime 2 days ago [-]
In the Twitter thread linked, the person confirms two things:
1. It saturated the local network with 1TB of metadata sniffing scans, not the network uplink to the outside world.
2. It does so because, as Keurig notes, it’s collecting data about your household in order to let Keurig sell it to advertisers.
khriss 8 hours ago [-]
> as Keurig notes, it’s collecting data about your household in order to let Keurig sell it to advertisers.
WTF!! When did we land in the middle of a Black Mirror episode?
I'm half convinced the first run of the LHC split the timeline and we've landed in the evil one.
fcarraldo 7 hours ago [-]
> WTF!! When did we land in the middle of a Black Mirror episode?
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].
And of course practically every website you visit is doing a full session recording with mouse movements and key presses captured.
> And of course practically every website you visit is doing a full session recording with mouse movements and key presses captured.
Well yeah at the very least, that’s Google Analytics and/or similar alternatives.
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.
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.
consp 2 hours ago [-]
See the site this post is about. Only ~1700 trackers, and only an accept all button. Likely at least one is doing this.
godelski 5 hours ago [-]
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
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.
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”.
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.
From a previous comment of mine:
> … 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]
> We got a firehose on behalf of our client, a major movie studio, of search of their titles by zip code from “G”.
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.
Point being, it seems absurd to compare this to snooping on people's private networks by third parties
chaostheory 2 hours ago [-]
Let’s not forget about the apps and devices that ask for Bluetooth access when it’s not initially obvious why
3RTB297 23 minutes ago [-]
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.
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?
rustcleaner 3 hours ago [-]
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! :^)
gblargg 2 hours ago [-]
Recreational beliefs are fun if you don't subject them to too much scrutiny.
Melatonic 5 hours ago [-]
Or we're in the timeline that survives because we maintain the LHC the best and it's needed for some crazy future experiment
FridgeSeal 7 hours ago [-]
There’s an SCP story like that.
World only survives, in realities where this particular creature in containment is alive. I’ll see if I can dig it up.
The patent exists, but that doesn't mean it stands between anything.
People can work around patents, or pay for licensing them etc, if they really want to do something.
OneDeuxTriSeiGo 7 hours ago [-]
ah yes the infamous "please drink a verification can" patent.
VariousPrograms 8 hours ago [-]
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.
n0dose 5 hours ago [-]
Flock messed up courting local police departments, made it feel too real to people.
newswasboring 7 hours ago [-]
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.
cogman10 4 hours ago [-]
Part of the problem is most people don't have an idea of what's being collected.
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.
All this stuff gets slowly collected, aggregated and shared amongst data brokers.
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.
pmichaud 3 hours ago [-]
The cruel irony of this panopticon is that I don’t even get good ads!
bushbaba 3 hours ago [-]
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
pennomi 2 hours ago [-]
It’s going to take a modern war between superpowers to convince nations that appliances shouldn’t be a ubiquitous security vulnerability.
rebolek 3 hours ago [-]
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?
podocarp 2 hours ago [-]
Even if you don't vote the oppressors still come online. It's choosing between cow shit and horse shit.
dofm 5 hours ago [-]
No, we’re in a collapsing time bubble caused by an accident involving that weasel that crawled into the LHC.
April 29, 2016. It explains so much.
dboreham 3 hours ago [-]
The Hitchikers' Guide to the Galaxy had the "agreement to cease to exist".
akssri 2 hours ago [-]
Wait till you find out what your "Smart TV" does.
aintnoprophet 8 hours ago [-]
Unauthorized Bread
MarceliusK 38 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
Grombobulous 1 days ago [-]
I don’t dispute the purpose of the data collection, but I can’t believe this quantity of data collection is intentional.
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.
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.
didgetmaster 9 hours ago [-]
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
MBCook 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah but that can’t even be useful can it? What’s that going to find that only using 500 MB of probes wouldn’t have found?
Still seems buggy.
didgetmaster 9 hours ago [-]
Engineer: How often should our software scan the local network looking for new devices? Once a day? Once an hour?
Manager: We might miss something. Since scanning doesn't cost us anything, better do it a thousand times a second!
gerdesj 8 hours ago [-]
Oh let's be charitable! A parameter measured in ms is mistakenly thought be measured in s. Hilarity ensues.
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.
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.
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.
For me that sort of thing comes under the heading of "you are holding it wrong", potential victim shaming and rubbish engineering.
MBCook 6 hours ago [-]
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.
frogulis 6 hours ago [-]
Not really relevant, but I have to ask: why did you only use letter þ once in your comment?
nom 5 hours ago [-]
I wondered about that too, i think they use a compose key and accidentally pressed it
cobbzilla 2 hours ago [-]
a thorny question to be sure
FabHK 2 hours ago [-]
þorny?
pixl97 5 hours ago [-]
It's impossible to tell the difference between being malicious and being ignorant.
With this particular company, everything else they do is malicious so I won't ever give them the benefit of the doubt.
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.
So yea, screw them.
2 hours ago [-]
johannes1234321 4 hours ago [-]
The scanning is malicious.
The frequency etc. leading to 1TB is probably ignorance, but that doesn't matter as it is consequence of malicious scanning either way.
MBCook 3 hours ago [-]
Exactly. The whole thing is weird and creepy and wrong.
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.
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.
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 that part was intentional.
fragmede 3 hours ago [-]
The reason is the same though. Probe the shit out of your network and gather data so they can sell it.
mahboi 5 hours ago [-]
It's malicious either way. Question is whether 1TB was intended operation. I don't think it was.
al_borland 3 hours ago [-]
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.
This may be working exactly as designed, as it costs them effectively nothing to constantly scan.
Refreeze5224 9 hours ago [-]
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.
MBCook 8 hours ago [-]
I’m not defending the spying.
The traffic volume just sounds like a bug to me.
BLKNSLVR 8 hours ago [-]
A software bug in a coffee machine sounds like a problem of management not understanding the product market they're in.
nekusar 7 hours ago [-]
No, Management completely understands.
Closed source software/hardware is a data exfiltration device first, and the thing they're sold for secondarily.
TVs, Blurays, set top boxes, MS Windows.. All of them are the same.
BLKNSLVR 7 hours ago [-]
All these companies make their money as 'feeders' to the advertising industry, they just sell a different device to consumers in order to achieve it.
Selling devices to consumers is a solved problem. The problem we're currently trying optimise solutions for is selling consumers to the advertising companies.
sixothree 7 hours ago [-]
Maybe they literally just don't care about how much traffic they put on your network. Maybe the thought is "1 tb of traffic internally is very low utilization of the network over the course of a month".
mahboi 7 hours ago [-]
Whatever they're trying to accomplish with these scans would probably be impeded in some way by this much volume. Like it'd compete with the link it's using to phone home or overload whatever on-device processing it does with that data. The man in the article who discovered this called it a bug, I agree with him.
sixothree 5 hours ago [-]
"With enough incompetence, the only interpretation is malice." - SixOThree
nkrisc 7 hours ago [-]
It uses energy paid for by the homeowner.
didgetmaster 6 hours ago [-]
Has anyone done the math to determine how much electricity it takes to send 1 TB of data around your local network?
blackoil 9 hours ago [-]
Than What is the meaning of "used"?
weaksauce 6 hours ago [-]
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.
awesome_dude 8 hours ago [-]
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)
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.
b112 8 hours ago [-]
They could be sued in small claims court.
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.
$15k damages.
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.
zdragnar 7 hours ago [-]
Small claims court in the US typically requires actual damages, and doesn't add punitive damages.
Grandpa gets reimbursed for the four techs who came out, that's it.
b112 7 hours ago [-]
Of course, that's the whole point.
Grandpa gets his money back. The company? Well, it has to spend money talking to a lawyer, because even though a lawyer can't attend small-claims court, they still consult.
They also have to send an employee to small-claims court, just have to deal with it. In the end it costs the company thousands of dollars maybe even over ten grand. It costs you a hundred bucks and you get your money back. That sort of asymmetry is beautiful, and if everybody availed themselves in small claims court, it would be far better than any class action lawsuit.
zdragnar 4 hours ago [-]
> $15k damages.
Grandpa is definitely not getting $15k in damages, and Keurig can deal with this with their in house lawyer that they're already paying a salary for. They're definitely not shelling out big bucks here. It'd be cheaper for them to let the default judgement happen than to actually show up.
mindslight 1 days ago [-]
Probes create much more traffic locally than it takes to backhaul a summary of their results.
sgillen 1 days ago [-]
1TB still smells like a bug
nomel 8 hours ago [-]
My naive assumption would be it's looking for events in time, like sign of occupancy. For example, when your phone leaves the wifi network.
But still must be a bug.
Melatonic 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah that seems insane for text logs or any network sniffing
What kind of processor does this thing have ?
mindslight 14 hours ago [-]
I was thinking that repeated small probes add up quicker than you'd expect. But this is ~1.1MB/sec, which still seems a few orders of magnitude off.
Now I'm left wondering what this traffic actually is - assuming probe (arp/icmp) packet size of 64 byte, that's 17kpps. I don't think an ESP32 class Internet-of-Trash chip can even do that. Even bulk transfers rather than small probes would be pushing it.
Perhaps this thing found some fellow-traveler device streaming video on a port it happened to connected to?
... the linked xit says it "broadcast 1TB of data". So maybe some protocol with a much larger packet than icmp, spammed in a hard loop without any delay?
protocolture 4 hours ago [-]
Its just like, 1TB of LLDP/Pings/Probes/Whatever
Looks like nmap OS detection can use ~90kb per host per attempt.
jimt1234 9 hours ago [-]
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.
josephg 8 hours ago [-]
> everyone is doing it
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?
Aerroon 6 hours ago [-]
I could see its use - you could remotely activate them. Or activate them on a timer that isn't constrained by the functions of the coffee machine.
None of these are worth the spying that these companies do though.
autoexec 9 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
burpingtree 3 hours ago [-]
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.
0cf8612b2e1e 3 hours ago [-]
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.
MarceliusK 39 minutes ago [-]
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
amluto 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Coffee machine scans network? Nope.
Coffee machine reports things about your network? Nope.
TV does ACR? Nope.
TV reports things it incidentally learns about your listening habits? Nope.
TV transmits any microphone data or things derived from mic data that aren't explicit user commands? Nope.
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.
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 also civilly liable to the extent that they should have and did not exercise due diligence to prevent it.
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.
Anyone tries to use a contract that is considered illegal under this law? That party becomes responsible for their opposition's legal fees even if they are ultimately found not liable for some other reason.
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.
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.
al_borland 3 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
amluto 2 hours ago [-]
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 absolutely freaking crazy amounts of money, possibly in excess of the entire sale price of the machine.
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.
komali2 3 hours ago [-]
Why would the individuals that comprise these legislative bodies harm their retirement plan?
amluto 2 hours ago [-]
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 amount spent may not vary all that strongly with as the set of available marketing technologies changes.
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 American companies) to show ads to people selected by other means. Everyone’s retirement account will be just fine.
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.
There’s also the national security aspect. Right now, we expect 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.
gspr 3 hours ago [-]
Stop spreading this idea that all politicians are corrupt. You're killing democracy, and watering down revelations of specific proven cases of corruption.
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.
dboreham 3 hours ago [-]
In the US to a first approximation they are. That makes it hard for Americans to conceive that they might not be so elsewhere.
ultrahax 7 hours ago [-]
One of the reasons that all this stuff goes in its own IOT crap VLAN in my house.
SlightlyLeftPad 6 hours ago [-]
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.
gspr 2 hours ago [-]
Or soon I guess come with an embedded 5G module and be done with it.
This shit needs to be banned, now!
thedougd 4 hours ago [-]
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.
gblargg 2 hours ago [-]
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).
gruez 4 hours ago [-]
>You own two thermostats, an EV charger, two Samsung TVs, an LG, etc etc. The LG is watching Netflix. That’s the good stuff.
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.
2 hours ago [-]
cogman10 4 hours ago [-]
They don't want to collaborate, they want to sell.
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.
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.
gruez 3 hours ago [-]
>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.
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.
clivedup 4 hours ago [-]
I hadn't thought of this!
Client isolation would help, but it also breaks some devices.
Are there decent daemons that allow me to allowlist which broadcast traffic to permit?
Ideally it'd be compatible with IPv6-only clients on my LAN.
kevin_nisbet 5 hours ago [-]
Agreed, with an ACL that blocks any device to device communication within the network.
whycome 1 days ago [-]
Why is this allowed? There’s no way to consent to a coffee machine.
triceratops 10 hours ago [-]
If you buy a Keurig machine you've already signalled you're a sucker. (sorry)
spandrew 9 hours ago [-]
This is the most Gilfoyle-coded comment of the day
triceratops 9 hours ago [-]
I'll take that as a compliment!
zikduruqe 9 hours ago [-]
Laughs in Moccamaster.
Freak_NL 9 hours ago [-]
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.
The device is dead simple. No advanced electronics. Nothing complex that can break. Just a coffee maker fine-tuned to near perfection.
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.
lkjdsklf 2 hours ago [-]
The shower head design is a crime against humanity for the cost of that machine.
thinkingQueen 9 hours ago [-]
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.
m463 8 hours ago [-]
perfect person to sell to advertisers.
Like the people who reply to nigerian emails have already been pre-qualified by 1) ignoring the misspellings and 2) replying.
Neywiny 1 days ago [-]
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.
egorfine 18 hours ago [-]
> Doubtful they just unboxed, plugged in, and it connected to the right AP and went
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).
sroussey 9 hours ago [-]
The use WiFi networks as a form of GPS, much like smartphones on first stage of geolocation
gambiting 9 hours ago [-]
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.
AlexandrB 8 hours ago [-]
I would love to as well. It sounds like something that's plausible but potentially a minefield of liability for the manufacturer.
I could also see some kind of partnership with ISPs to use their "public" WiFi hotspots[1]. This seems more likely since it's (probably) harder to honeypot but requires making regional deals.
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.
pjmorris 9 hours ago [-]
It is one thing to make a law, it is another to enforce a law.
advisedwang 1 days ago [-]
Ok, but it can collect consent
anigbrowl 10 hours ago [-]
LOL
Legislators are cheap to purchase
nicbou 1 days ago [-]
It's not allowed in the EU. Not without consent.
egorfine 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
black6 1 days ago [-]
It's implied consent when you give it access to your WiFi.
Why you would give a coffee maker access to your WiFi is the real question,
pfannkuchen 1 days ago [-]
So in other words, they were asking for it?
K0balt 1 days ago [-]
Well, yeah sorta since the only reason appliances connect to the internet is to steal data. I mean, if you buy a connected x that normally would not be connected, it’s 99 percent there to do nefarious stuff for its real owners. It’s like having a pet lion. Sure, it’s horribly irresponsible that someone sold you a pet lion, but. Uuuh you bought at pet lion. What did you think it was going to do?
Besides, did you see how he was dressed?
noduerme 9 hours ago [-]
This is funny.
How do you feel about thermostats? Are some things worth it? I've had a "smart" one for the past five years, part of a new furnace install, that I've stubbornly refused to connect to my wifi. Of course this means if we forget to turn the heat down while no one's home, there's nothing to be done about it.
05 7 hours ago [-]
There are ways to control a device remotely without letting the device spy on you and call home - Zigbee, Matter, Esphome..
thatguy0900 16 hours ago [-]
How does this analogy go when people buy a house kitten and it turns out they have been sold a lion cub? Most people simply do not have the tech literacy to understand that what they a are buying is actually a lion, they thought they were buying a coffeemaker with some cool features. It's difficult to blame the victim when they would need to spend hours trying to understand why the thing mapping out their local network is something that they should even care about
EA-3167 9 hours ago [-]
In that context the person is a fool who shouldn’t be in charge of another life, because they’re incapable of basic prudence.
I don’t actually think that applies to coffee makers spying on people though. People shouldn’t be expected to understand how computer networks or ad tech spying works in the same way that literally any child or idiot should know the difference between a lion cub and a house cat.
mindslight 15 hours ago [-]
In the analogy, there is no such thing as a house kitten. They are all cute and cuddly lion cubs. Society needs to develop a deep awareness of this, in spite of the ocean of fraudulent advertising to the contrary. (individual-liberty-protecting regulation like the GDPR would be nice too, alas)
ButlerianJihad 9 hours ago [-]
You have latched on to an important idea here.
Since most appliances now contain a general-purpose computer, it would be unfair to say that a device is incapable of hacking or hosting malware, because any device with the given sensors and radios and capabilities can be essentially reprogrammed at any time.
So, if we're looking at smart TVs with cameras and microphones and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and all the connectors, or if we're simply looking at a an ordinary network device, they all fall under the umbrella of general purpose computer, and there is no way to trust their maker, or some equally capable programmer, not to turn them malevolent in some future update.
I don't view this as an issue of terms of service or of software or of your manufacturer. I view this as an existential and fundamental problem with dropping general purpose computers into your home and behind your DMZ.
Consumer operating systems like Windows and Apple have all kinds of countermeasures against this malicious use. But without the proper introspection and without the proper safeguards, a device that looks special purpose but is in fact general purpose is far more dangerous.
mindslight 8 hours ago [-]
Getting technical - the way I see it, the problem arises from a combination of three things - sensors/access, Internet access, and source of software/authority.
Sensors/access is unavoidable, otherwise the device doesn't actually do anything useful. The point is it sets the scope for what the device is able to affect. When people say "set up a separate IoT VLAN" (that still has Internet access) this is basically what they're addressing - how a device can access other devices they may care about more.
Internet access is the catalyst that's created this whole dumpster fire - I don't care about the proprietary software on my keyboard/mouse/UPS/monitor/GPU/etc to nearly the same extent. I've got some TP-Link plugs that I control local network only. They don't get Internet access, so no updates, telemetry backhaul, etc.
The authority to update/configure/change that software is the crux. With proprietary software, there are no cuddly kittens period. Here we've got a case of a "legitimate" company choosing to be a bona fide attacker to increase their bottom line! The harm was exacerbated by a bug causing it to run amok, but even without the bug they are deliberately violating trust.
But even libre software can fall to security holes as well. Meaning you want to centralize the attack surface as much as possible, for administration's sake of keeping updated. "Internet" of things is basically the direct opposite of this - postulating many illegible fine-grained links between devices on different networks. Whereas really need more like the Home Assistant model, where peripheral devices may communicate over the network, but it's only ever over the local network. Think how ethernet is set up when used in industrial control networks (or at least how it should be set up, hehe).
fwip 12 hours ago [-]
Instead of a deep awareness, wouldn't it be easier to simply ban selling lions?
mindslight 12 hours ago [-]
I think the two go hand in hand, unfortunately.
jimrandomh 7 hours ago [-]
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.
radio879 7 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
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?
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!"
dovin 9 hours ago [-]
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?
paimapi 8 hours ago [-]
You can also map a home out depending on signal strength. That gives you approximate size of home which gives you approximate income.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Terr_ 7 hours ago [-]
Also the social-graph aspect.
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.
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.
tomrod 8 hours ago [-]
Its just sick.
danielheath 9 hours ago [-]
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.
swerve3815 9 hours ago [-]
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.
bityard 8 hours ago [-]
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.
dolmen 4 hours ago [-]
If the washing machine is on the network, its manufacturer is already aware about its age.
wiml 4 hours ago [-]
Its manufacturer's competitor isn't, though, and they're probably really interested in that marketing info.
jz391 6 hours ago [-]
If you are living in a flat, this could of course be your neighbour's washing machine/TV etc...
hansvm 7 hours ago [-]
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.
ambicapter 9 hours ago [-]
And can be used to cross-correlate with other datasets to further narrow down who you are and how you can be targetted.
NichoPaolucci 8 hours ago [-]
I love that a poor, stupid man like me is being targeted by teams of the smartest data analytics professionals on the planet.
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.
Maybe it's more of a morbid joke, but it makes me laugh to think about.
BLKNSLVR 8 hours ago [-]
The way you explain it really captures how predatory the behavior is.
It's an accurate explanation.
tomrod 8 hours ago [-]
My income is low. Ignore me, advertisers, you have no power here.
hansvm 7 hours ago [-]
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).
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.
Quinner 9 hours ago [-]
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.
7 hours ago [-]
srcreigh 8 hours ago [-]
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.
jacquesm 8 hours ago [-]
That would be a crime, wouldn't it?
ted_dunning 7 hours ago [-]
Depends on the click-through license that linked to the terms of service that you agreed to as part of buying the machine.
reaperducer 7 hours ago [-]
It's in the Terms of Service you agreed to when you looked at the box it came in at the store.
eckelhesten 9 hours ago [-]
All data is valuable. Even something as simple as the MAC address to your iPhones WiFi or Bluetooth chip is worth something to dataprofilers.
dovin 8 hours ago [-]
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.
r_lee 4 hours ago [-]
big thing is to be able to serve ads more effectively
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.
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
adamrezich 7 hours ago [-]
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!).
scun 4 hours ago [-]
The spookiest thing about the Nail Clipping Song is that you immediately forget singing it, or even knowing it.
lenkite 8 hours ago [-]
> 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?
Scale it up - make that millions of homes. Now there is godlike strategic value. Esp when "borrowed" by 3 letter agencies.
dovin 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah, that seems like the kind of dataset they would like to keep in their back pockets
gblargg 2 hours ago [-]
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.
smt88 2 hours ago [-]
Keurig makes zero high-quality products so this story shouldn’t have changed much anyway
zahlman 3 hours ago [-]
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?
dboreham 2 hours ago [-]
No. You'd need a packet sniffer. Wireshark or similar. And a layer2 setup that lets you see non broadcast traffic from the target device.
Waterluvian 5 hours ago [-]
I love how I’m expecting Keurig to feign innocence but instead they’re just happy to admit it.
dolmen 4 hours ago [-]
Could you post the Twitter link?
Because the article is also full of 238 advertisers.
What kind of idiot is connecting their coffee machine to the network?
dolmen 4 hours ago [-]
Schedule the morning coffee in HomeAssistant?
5 hours ago [-]
5 hours ago [-]
hn_throwaway_99 8 minutes ago [-]
> It does so because, as Keurig notes, it’s collecting data about your household in order to let Keurig sell it to advertisers.
This is either outright false or at least highly misleading. Keurig says they may sell information about your coffee brewing habits 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.
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.
AnimalMuppet 1 days ago [-]
To me, this is begging for a class-action lawsuit.
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).
Is this why everybody wants to make appliances with wireless?
criddell 10 hours ago [-]
You would have to show the judge how you have been harmed and the judge will want to know what the damages are.
altairprime 1 days ago [-]
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 the LG Smart TV problem (30 days ago, 1012 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49592375
kotaKat 1 days ago [-]
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).
Customers are gonna get lost in the sauce and skip right past all of that and toss the packaging.
seb1204 9 hours ago [-]
Enshittyfication of everything
jerf 9 hours ago [-]
"Is this why everybody wants to make appliances with wireless?"
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.
Let the wiretaps wiretap the wiretaps. Keeps 'em busy, makes 'em feel like they're doing something important.
> What is my purpose?
You wiretap the wiretaps wiretapping our wiretaps.
> Oh my god.
mahboi 7 hours ago [-]
As in, port scanning or ARP spam or what? Twitter randomly decided I'm a bot
KellyCriterion 20 hours ago [-]
Reg 2:
But why do they need to collect 1 TB? Sounds like a lot of redundant/doublicated entries then for a small network?
rasz 1 days ago [-]
> as Keurig notes, it’s collecting data about your household in order to let Keurig sell it to advertisers.
its LGs glass in LG household, and now Keurigs kitchen
xyst 4 hours ago [-]
Keurig Exec, probably: "We own the coffee"
The people that said LG isn’t the only company doing invasive data harvesting is sadly correct.
How did we as a society let it get to this point?
lazide 1 days ago [-]
#1 - why?
#2 - oh, because fucking yikes.
malbs 3 hours ago [-]
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..
Here's an example from my unifi dash right now, my laptop has done 24tb of data? lol email and web browsing
This is why I'd really like to see a packet capture or at least some interface-level counters
doublepg23 3 hours ago [-]
I posted the same below, they’ve had similar bugs for the ~decade I’ve used them.
drop_the_mike 5 hours ago [-]
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).
judge2020 4 hours ago [-]
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.
MarceliusK 34 minutes ago [-]
My concern is that poisoning the dataset doesn't really stop the scanning. The device is still poking around your network
Yes, they can trivially build systems to filter this out, but your favorite coding agent can probably make it more stochastic / clever ;)
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.
gblargg 2 hours ago [-]
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.
sam-cop-vimes 9 hours ago [-]
This website values your privacy. Only shares data with 1747 partners.
cuu508 1 hours ago [-]
It values your privacy in the sense that "it is absolutely worth something so I'mma take it thanks"
consp 1 hours ago [-]
And nice dark patterns to not allow you to reject that.
doublepg23 5 hours ago [-]
Nobody has mentioned this but the tweet in question is a screenshot of a UniFi dashboard which is notorious for miscalculating bandwidth usage.
bombcar 2 hours ago [-]
Get out of here with your reasonable explanations, we're having a hissy-fit and a lynching!
jakub_g 8 hours ago [-]
The real question is: could someone explain me why anyone would want a smart coffee maker?
What kind of functions it has that can't be replaced by:
- walking a few meters and pushing a physical button
- waiting a whopping minute for coffee to brew, instead of triggering it remotely
el_benhameen 6 hours ago [-]
I have an admittedly very specific set of constraints that led to me buying a wifi kettle. I:
- 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.
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.
stonedivot 47 minutes ago [-]
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.
Just say it: you bought a smart kettle due to your completely adjustable preferences.
fma 5 hours ago [-]
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.
smt88 2 hours ago [-]
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.
This is possibly not an issue with a regular drip coffee machine. It’s definitely an issue with a kettle or, say, air fryer.
catlikesshrimp 18 minutes ago [-]
You could use the smartplug with a relay to a higher capacity non smartplug.
gfrtgfrtgfrt 5 hours ago [-]
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.
I do feel that over-automation is a thing
el_benhameen 5 hours ago [-]
I don’t disagree that over-automation is a thing. I miss my more leisurely mornings!
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.
noisy_boy 3 hours ago [-]
The margin of error is razor thin. As tight as a global supply chain. I'm worried about your living on the edge like that.
warkdarrior 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, what if Iran, Trump, or the Houthis blockade his/her route to the train station?
boplicity 6 hours ago [-]
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.
WheatMillington 5 hours ago [-]
My Bambino takes 4 seconds to warm up from a cold start.
smallnix 8 hours ago [-]
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.
arielcostas 7 hours ago [-]
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?
simlevesque 8 hours ago [-]
The problem is that when I want to make coffee, I'm my most stupid self I'll be all day.
7 hours ago [-]
361994752 7 hours ago [-]
So you won't want the coffee machine over smart you at that time...
Rury 5 hours ago [-]
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.
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...
It's more: "let's make smart coffee makers so that we can sell to 2 markets:
1) a coffee maker to consumers who want coffee made
2) consumers data/eyeballs to advertisers who want their info/eyes
... and make more profits for ourselves".
mapBasketWand 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
BLKNSLVR 7 hours ago [-]
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.
What hope do normies have?
denkmoon 7 hours ago [-]
You don't need separate VLANs, wifi isolation and firewalls. You need to reconsider putting a coffee machine on the internet lol.
crystaln 47 minutes ago [-]
Something tells me it's not just coffee machines that do this, it's lots of appliances that have useful online capabilities.
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.
fdgfikgfv 6 hours ago [-]
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.
Sometimes I like the idea of preheating oven on my way home but then I get home and forget about it.
mrheosuper 4 hours ago [-]
Well, you could connect your oven to HA, and VPN to your home.
dietr1ch 7 hours ago [-]
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.
7 hours ago [-]
olelele 7 hours ago [-]
Or it is the same crap just w spyware? My stainless Bialetti was invented about a hundred years ago and cost less than 50€.
BLKNSLVR 6 hours ago [-]
Sometimes, and I don't think this is one of those examples, 'family' makes such things necessary.
sfRattan 7 hours ago [-]
> What hope do normies have?
None, without people like us in their families who are able and willing to help.
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. And we need to form ourselves into the best helpers we can be by learning how to teach and communicate well.
tombert 6 hours ago [-]
> None, without people like us in their families who are able and willing to help.
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.
judge2020 3 hours ago [-]
"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.
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.
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.
sfRattan 6 hours ago [-]
Getting better at communicating is unfortunately really hard. And it must pair with the helper aspect: you've got to also provide value.
"Nomad," the guy from the article, was already administering his parents' home LAN.
How do you get there? "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.
What to do next? "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.
Wherever spying is invisible and frictionless, make it loud and incessant. 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.
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.
BLKNSLVR 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Folks be crazy.
aksss 3 hours ago [-]
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.
lstodd 7 hours ago [-]
Normies have a cezve.
BLKNSLVR 3 hours ago [-]
In that case, I don't think I've met many normies.
MarceliusK 40 minutes ago [-]
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
6 hours ago [-]
breppp 7 minutes ago [-]
I actually think this is going to get progressively better.
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.
The next phase for the technically inclined is to patch these appliances and remove the collection, also possible today
ttytty 1 days ago [-]
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.
Most non-ancient routers/gateways support this. There are way too many IoT devices running code that's _worse_ than what older LLMs produce.
Levitating 9 hours ago [-]
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.
bartread 7 hours ago [-]
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.
sfRattan 7 hours ago [-]
Honeywell Home T6 Pro Z-Wave.
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.
magicalhippo 7 hours ago [-]
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.
pezezin 4 hours ago [-]
If the house is well insulated, keeping it at a constant temperature might be more efficient than running irregular cooling/warming cycles.
Plenty of houses are not well insulated though...
stronglikedan 8 hours ago [-]
> Coffee machines don't need internet. Your thermostat doesn't either.
reply
Yours 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.
askvictor 8 hours ago [-]
I can definitely see the case for an internet connected thermostat. A coffee machine, much less so.
delecti 8 hours ago [-]
You're about 35 years behind the times about people networking their coffee machines [0]. People might want to know the status of the pot (the OG example), how their ground/bean coffee supply is, or the ability to trigger a coffee or water boiling before they walk to the machine. My coffee making process is entirely manual, and I like it that way, but I can at least see how there are some features that could be nice.
My Bialetti Moka pot doesn't attempt to acquire an IP address.
ErroneousBosh 8 hours ago [-]
I'm in Rome right now.
There's a Bialetti shop on the road between the flat I'm staying in, and the Metro station.
If I'm not careful this is going to seriously damage my wealth.
jjgreen 8 hours ago [-]
They're not expensive and last a lifetime, get one.
randerson 9 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
mindslight 14 hours ago [-]
Of course by VLAN, I presume you mean one that doesn't have access to the Internet.
FWIW preventing the harm that happened here would seem to require a second set of APs (radios) on a different channel.
pseudohadamard 16 hours ago [-]
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.
eek2121 5 hours ago [-]
The only thing that I will add is that if you buy a smart appliance, you totally deserve this.
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)
I have 3 Keurig coffee makers, and they are dumb as a brick.
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.
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.
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.
Buy something dumb and enjoy not having to worry about this nonsense at all.
aabajian 5 hours ago [-]
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.
judge2020 3 hours ago [-]
If it's HP Instant Ink then you probably won't get any more. After the first included set of them, you have to have those specific ones installed for it to send future refills.
alexpotato 7 hours ago [-]
I recently did the following:
- switch between my network and the cable router
- one port on the switch is set to "mirror mode"
- hooked up that port to a dedicated ethernet port on one of my boxes
Why do this?
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.
One interesting thing I've already discovered:
My oven sends random unencrypted keepalive messages over regular HTTP (not HTTPS) to an EC2 server.
I'm very curious to see if that changes over time.
gh02t 4 hours ago [-]
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.
altern8 9 hours ago [-]
Can someone explain to me what kind of data it collects, and what value could that data have to advertisers or anyone else?
rwz 8 hours ago [-]
It collects the data about your home appliances and personal devices. This data can tell a lot about your income level and spending habits. This is extremely useful for advertisers for obvious reasons.
altern8 8 hours ago [-]
I see, like how many cell phones are in the household and what brand
rwz 8 hours ago [-]
Right, or laptops. Or TVs. Or other IOT devices like coffee makers, dishwashers, washers, garage openers, smart locks, vacuums etc.
wcfields 4 hours ago [-]
This data is used in aggregate to decypher household penetration and refine known data about demographics and household income.
Here's an example of the sorta-end-game:
Currently they can know how many kind of "devices" are in your household and using probabilistic statistics give a decent n value of how many "devices" are in a certain zip code. Using that, your advertising can become more efficient by only buying ads in zip codes that contain certain "devices".
I say Zip code because that's what I've worked on in the past at the most granular level for Marketing Mix Modeling or MMM. You can easily venn diagram your first party data with 3rd party brokers, and you can cleanroom the whole thing to get a decent venn-diagram of the overlap.
mrheosuper 3 hours ago [-]
Why tf we allow whatever protocol was used. Like, why does my phone reply to a request for its information without letting me know ? It should be all off by default.
rwz 1 hours ago [-]
If the device does anything with network, other devices can likely sniff a lot of information about it with high degree of accuracy based on how they react to certain network probes. But also lot of useful protocols rely on devices explicitly announcing themselves and their capabilities, like Bonjour or Chromecast.
rags2riches 59 minutes ago [-]
Who's selling a home router that isolates devices by default?
matthewmcg 9 hours ago [-]
Wow, maybe this is the push I need to finally set up an isolated "IOT" VLAN at my home.
BLKNSLVR 7 hours ago [-]
I did that relatively recently. Make sure to spend the time planning it out.
I've ended up with numerous VLANs, one for entertainment devices, one for security system(s), one for guests, one for IoT trash, etc.
If the devices are this level of untrusted, there's a lot of separation necessary.
landgenoot 1 days ago [-]
Never assume malicious intent when incompetence.
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.
kps 9 hours ago [-]
Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
Telaneo 9 hours ago [-]
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.
foobarian 8 hours ago [-]
It could be incompetent malice.
rwz 8 hours ago [-]
I'm sure they could've collected the same data they're collecting with 0.1% of the traffic. This particular case seems to be greed AND incompetence.
GuB-42 9 hours ago [-]
There is no way it is not incompetence.
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.
I like Hanlon's Razor, but I think sometimes people will use it to fully dismiss the idea of someone being evil because they're stupid, when in reality plenty of people are capable of being both.
Lammy 6 hours ago [-]
> Never assume malicious intent when incompetence.
No, fuck this lazy line of thinking. If the outcome is the same then it doesn't matter.
PinkaDunka 9 hours ago [-]
This website generated 1tb of bandwidth while serving me 1kb of text
MathMonkeyMan 5 hours ago [-]
1631 bytes of text, by my count.
Then I disabled my ad blocker to see how much data comes down. So far it's at 31 MB, but it increases without bound by a few KB per second.
thedougd 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Exactly. Why would you even want to connect your coffee machine to the network?
etoxin 7 hours ago [-]
Or the more perplexing, a smart fridge.
Think of all that sweet sweet food data that a fridge could on sell.
meindnoch 7 hours ago [-]
I would require IoT devices to pass a rigorous certification process, like we do for RF devices.
abotsis 4 hours ago [-]
Must be all the Java bytecode.
mahboi 7 hours ago [-]
"Nomad explained that he had worked in IT for more than 10 years and decided to look further into what had happened."
I was hoping this post would say what happened and what kinds of packets it was sending.
MiroslavPokorny 2 hours ago [-]
Two mistakes in the title.
- A coffee machine should not be broadcasting anything.
- Stop drinking coffee and go outside and enjoy the great outdoors.
lifeisstillgood 10 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
All I need know is to realise bottlecaps must be recycled and federalism is good. Repeat in the mirror each morning
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.
dvdyzag 4 hours ago [-]
I'm sure Claude is allowed to take breaks.
wolfi1 3 hours ago [-]
question for those who use it: is it necessary to put the machine in the local network in order for it to work?
jttnr 9 hours ago [-]
Maybe the coffee machine is subsidized by a residential botnet?
ContinuityLab 5 hours ago [-]
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.
jason_s 1 days ago [-]
`C0FFEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE...`
a96 17 hours ago [-]
418 I'm a teapot
nelsonfigueroa 7 hours ago [-]
can't even make a coffee at home without being tracked
ButlerianJihad 1 days ago [-]
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.
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.
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...
ck2 2 days ago [-]
it took me a month to notice my Midea A/C was absolutely hammering my router
I didn't even know it had wifi capability but it was trying to connect
I use mac whitelist so it wasn't even getting in but that didn't stop it from trying every seond
Fortunately it was just a usb dongle so yanked it out
altairprime 1 days ago [-]
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: https://smlight.tech/product/slwf-01
HankB99 1 days ago [-]
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?
And I wonder how I would even tell if it was trying to associate with my WiFi.
pseudohadamard 16 hours ago [-]
I have a Midea dehumidifier too. It moves around 200kB/hour which seems to be cloud polling about once a minute, so no big deal traffic-wise.
jedbrooke 8 hours ago [-]
it’s checking to see if they discovered a new type of water
I actually have two dehumidifiers, one is the Midea and the second is a totally dumb Aliexpress one that cost a few tens of dollars. It's switched on and off by Home Assistant via a modbus-controlled relay and drains into a sealed water canister with a modbus water-level sensor in it. Zero-maintenance and smarter than any multi-hundred-dollar "smart" dehumidifier.
ars 1 days ago [-]
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.
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.
sillyfluke 1 days ago [-]
Boy: So, how it get this bad grandpa?
Man: Well, before you couldn't turn on the AC before you got home
ars 1 days ago [-]
Realistically people would just leave their AC on. So this saves energy, rather than changing comfort.
seb1204 9 hours ago [-]
Really? And then complain about the energy cost? People are nutz. Like it's so unbearable to come home, open windows to get peak hot air out, then turn on AC and get cool. Energy is too cheap it seems.
Also even very old AC remotes show there is usually the option to set up times etc.
Cpoll 1 days ago [-]
Realistically ACs have timers, so you're really only optimizing for days where you go off-schedule.
sillyfluke 1 days ago [-]
I have a friend who diy'ed a button on single webpage that he presses on his phone while at work in order to open the gate to the building that he lives so delivery people can get in. I also think Bret Victor diy'ed the AC as mentioned while he was a student quarter century or more ago[0]
I know this sounds like the famous "just do it this way in linux instead" criticism of Dropbox back in the day. But I do think we reached "life parodies fiction" with these smart devices where it makes sense to give diy another go. And with AI, there's less excuses this time around I would imagine.
But I would literally rather buy a cheap phone, a cheap SIM, hotspot it and connect it to a charger and have the AC connect to that and isolate it that way instead of letting it touch the network.
You can (and should) just segregate your network to have separate paths for IoT/"smart devices" and normal personal/family devices. Makes it all worry free and transparently observable.
I have my IoT on a separate VLAN and I can observe communications for any given device at any given time.. this seems like a much saner solution than outright not buying any IoT devices, though that is also a respectable decision!
aksss 3 hours ago [-]
VLANs, people. And firewall policies.
tamimio 1 days ago [-]
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!
bombcar 1 days ago [-]
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!
altairprime 1 days ago [-]
The traffic generated here is network scans, not external traffic, and so blocking DNS wouldn’t have helped.
gxs 6 hours ago [-]
My biggest concern is what are we going to do when these appliances come with their own SIM card
Right now I don’t care, I just never plug anything into my network
I don’t want to have to mod all my shit just to remove data collection stuff this way
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
j45 8 hours ago [-]
A great reason to limit “Smarthome” devices to a dedicated guest or iot wifi network.
matteoraso 1 days ago [-]
I honestly hate the IoT so much. Why should a coffee machine of all things use data? Just make the coffee.
anigbrowl 10 hours ago [-]
I love IoT. It's the greedy corporations I hate. Everyone who implements this kinda abusive stuff, from the CEO down to the people building and installing the firmware, are scum.
skupig 8 hours ago [-]
Technology could be so much more useful and fun if we just fully banned the collection and sale of personal data. We've been dreaming of smart homes for, like, 80 years, but advertising ruined it just like it ruins everything. Imagine how cool it would be to able to connect devices to the internet for purely functional purposes without them spying on you!
autoexec 9 hours ago [-]
This is all technology. Everything is being infested with spying and tracking.
Levitating 9 hours ago [-]
No, just pick your technology better. My LineageOS phone and framework laptop do nothing of the sort.
autoexec 7 hours ago [-]
LineageOS helps, like installing an adblocker helps, but there's no hope for cell phones. Your wireless provider is still tracking you and nobody knows what the blackbox wireless chipsets are doing, including your OS. Framework is a pretty good laptop (it's a candidate for my next even) if you can afford the premium. My next TV and car will be my biggest worry.
goatlover 9 hours ago [-]
What is the need for a coffeemaker on the internet?
Yeah, but the people running the Webcam probably didn't make notes about the watch / rings / shirt / dress / shoes worn by the people using the coffee maker, nor take down whether they were wearing glasses and if they added milk - and sell this information to the local jewelers, clothes shop, shoe shop, opticians and dairy.
So is finally someone going to jail for another insanity like this ?
ButlerianJihad 1 days ago [-]
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.
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.
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.
I was so livid 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.
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.
mrheosuper 3 hours ago [-]
Why not setup opnsense/pfsense/openwrt on a small PC. You already went with your own router
freecodeio 8 hours ago [-]
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.
AngryData 22 hours ago [-]
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.
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!"
rendall 1 days ago [-]
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.
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.
wafflemaker 1 days ago [-]
And also illegal. It's illegal not to have one button. Companies didn't do it because they suddenly stopped being scum.
moron4hire 6 hours ago [-]
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?
realaaa 8 hours ago [-]
ahahahah that's gold !
IoT network yep, needed yesterday
bitwize 10 hours ago [-]
As another sign of the enshittified world we live in, the thing probably wasn't even RFC 2324 compliant.
1. It saturated the local network with 1TB of metadata sniffing scans, not the network uplink to the outside world.
2. It does so because, as Keurig notes, it’s collecting data about your household in order to let Keurig sell it to advertisers.
WTF!! When did we land in the middle of a Black Mirror episode?
I'm half convinced the first run of the LHC split the timeline and we've landed in the evil one.
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].
And of course practically every website you visit is doing a full session recording with mouse movements and key presses captured.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_content_recognition
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/05/air-fryer...
Well yeah at the very least, that’s Google Analytics and/or similar alternatives.
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.
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.
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tL8_caB35Pg
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”.
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.
From a previous comment of mine:
> … 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]
[1] https://www.ispot.tv/
[2] https://www.samba.tv/
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.
Point being, it seems absurd to compare this to snooping on people's private networks by third parties
Lovey example: https://frescocooks.com/platform/marketing-and-engagement
Air Fryers selling data: https://abc7news.com/post/certain-air-fryers-app-connected-a...
Student in NZ protesting it: https://www.consumer.org.nz/consumer-rights-and-campaigns/da...
Hope your TV isn't connected to the internet: https://www.cnet.com/tech/home-entertainment/tv-spying-yes-h...
World only survives, in realities where this particular creature in containment is alive. I’ll see if I can dig it up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortalit...
https://reactormag.com/divided-by-infinity/
People can work around patents, or pay for licensing them etc, if they really want to do something.
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.
All this stuff gets slowly collected, aggregated and shared amongst data brokers.
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.
April 29, 2016. It explains so much.
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.
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.
Still seems buggy.
Manager: We might miss something. Since scanning doesn't cost us anything, better do it a thousand times a second!
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.
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.
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.
For me that sort of thing comes under the heading of "you are holding it wrong", potential victim shaming and rubbish engineering.
With this particular company, everything else they do is malicious so I won't ever give them the benefit of the doubt.
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.
So yea, screw them.
The frequency etc. leading to 1TB is probably ignorance, but that doesn't matter as it is consequence of malicious scanning either way.
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.
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.
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 that part was intentional.
This may be working exactly as designed, as it costs them effectively nothing to constantly scan.
The traffic volume just sounds like a bug to me.
Closed source software/hardware is a data exfiltration device first, and the thing they're sold for secondarily.
TVs, Blurays, set top boxes, MS Windows.. All of them are the same.
Selling devices to consumers is a solved problem. The problem we're currently trying optimise solutions for is selling consumers to the advertising companies.
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.
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.
$15k damages.
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.
Grandpa gets reimbursed for the four techs who came out, that's it.
Grandpa gets his money back. The company? Well, it has to spend money talking to a lawyer, because even though a lawyer can't attend small-claims court, they still consult.
They also have to send an employee to small-claims court, just have to deal with it. In the end it costs the company thousands of dollars maybe even over ten grand. It costs you a hundred bucks and you get your money back. That sort of asymmetry is beautiful, and if everybody availed themselves in small claims court, it would be far better than any class action lawsuit.
Grandpa is definitely not getting $15k in damages, and Keurig can deal with this with their in house lawyer that they're already paying a salary for. They're definitely not shelling out big bucks here. It'd be cheaper for them to let the default judgement happen than to actually show up.
But still must be a bug.
What kind of processor does this thing have ?
Now I'm left wondering what this traffic actually is - assuming probe (arp/icmp) packet size of 64 byte, that's 17kpps. I don't think an ESP32 class Internet-of-Trash chip can even do that. Even bulk transfers rather than small probes would be pushing it.
Perhaps this thing found some fellow-traveler device streaming video on a port it happened to connected to?
... the linked xit says it "broadcast 1TB of data". So maybe some protocol with a much larger packet than icmp, spammed in a hard loop without any delay?
Looks like nmap OS detection can use ~90kb per host per attempt.
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?
None of these are worth the spying that these companies do though.
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.
Coffee machine scans network? Nope.
Coffee machine reports things about your network? Nope.
TV does ACR? Nope.
TV reports things it incidentally learns about your listening habits? Nope.
TV transmits any microphone data or things derived from mic data that aren't explicit user commands? Nope.
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.
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 also civilly liable to the extent that they should have and did not exercise due diligence to prevent it.
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.
Anyone tries to use a contract that is considered illegal under this law? That party becomes responsible for their opposition's legal fees even if they are ultimately found not liable for some other reason.
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.
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.
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.
https://help.earnapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/38191916327441--W...
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.
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 American companies) to show ads to people selected by other means. Everyone’s retirement account will be just fine.
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.
There’s also the national security aspect. Right now, we expect 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.
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.
This shit needs to be banned, now!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Client isolation would help, but it also breaks some devices.
Are there decent daemons that allow me to allowlist which broadcast traffic to permit?
Ideally it'd be compatible with IPv6-only clients on my LAN.
The device is dead simple. No advanced electronics. Nothing complex that can break. Just a coffee maker fine-tuned to near perfection.
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.
Like the people who reply to nigerian emails have already been pre-qualified by 1) ignoring the misspellings and 2) replying.
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 could also see some kind of partnership with ISPs to use their "public" WiFi hotspots[1]. This seems more likely since it's (probably) harder to honeypot but requires making regional deals.
[1] https://www.highspeedinternet.com/resources/is-your-router-a...
Legislators are cheap to purchase
Why you would give a coffee maker access to your WiFi is the real question,
Besides, did you see how he was dressed?
How do you feel about thermostats? Are some things worth it? I've had a "smart" one for the past five years, part of a new furnace install, that I've stubbornly refused to connect to my wifi. Of course this means if we forget to turn the heat down while no one's home, there's nothing to be done about it.
I don’t actually think that applies to coffee makers spying on people though. People shouldn’t be expected to understand how computer networks or ad tech spying works in the same way that literally any child or idiot should know the difference between a lion cub and a house cat.
Since most appliances now contain a general-purpose computer, it would be unfair to say that a device is incapable of hacking or hosting malware, because any device with the given sensors and radios and capabilities can be essentially reprogrammed at any time.
So, if we're looking at smart TVs with cameras and microphones and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and all the connectors, or if we're simply looking at a an ordinary network device, they all fall under the umbrella of general purpose computer, and there is no way to trust their maker, or some equally capable programmer, not to turn them malevolent in some future update.
I don't view this as an issue of terms of service or of software or of your manufacturer. I view this as an existential and fundamental problem with dropping general purpose computers into your home and behind your DMZ.
Consumer operating systems like Windows and Apple have all kinds of countermeasures against this malicious use. But without the proper introspection and without the proper safeguards, a device that looks special purpose but is in fact general purpose is far more dangerous.
Sensors/access is unavoidable, otherwise the device doesn't actually do anything useful. The point is it sets the scope for what the device is able to affect. When people say "set up a separate IoT VLAN" (that still has Internet access) this is basically what they're addressing - how a device can access other devices they may care about more.
Internet access is the catalyst that's created this whole dumpster fire - I don't care about the proprietary software on my keyboard/mouse/UPS/monitor/GPU/etc to nearly the same extent. I've got some TP-Link plugs that I control local network only. They don't get Internet access, so no updates, telemetry backhaul, etc.
The authority to update/configure/change that software is the crux. With proprietary software, there are no cuddly kittens period. Here we've got a case of a "legitimate" company choosing to be a bona fide attacker to increase their bottom line! The harm was exacerbated by a bug causing it to run amok, but even without the bug they are deliberately violating trust.
But even libre software can fall to security holes as well. Meaning you want to centralize the attack surface as much as possible, for administration's sake of keeping updated. "Internet" of things is basically the direct opposite of this - postulating many illegible fine-grained links between devices on different networks. Whereas really need more like the Home Assistant model, where peripheral devices may communicate over the network, but it's only ever over the local network. Think how ethernet is set up when used in industrial control networks (or at least how it should be set up, hehe).
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...)
it's probably even more dystopian now with phone apps vacuuming up every last dreg.
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.
Maybe it's more of a morbid joke, but it makes me laugh to think about.
It's an accurate explanation.
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.
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.
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
Scale it up - make that millions of homes. Now there is godlike strategic value. Esp when "borrowed" by 3 letter agencies.
Because the article is also full of 238 advertisers.
This is either outright false or at least highly misleading. Keurig says they may sell information about your coffee brewing habits 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.
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.
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).
Is this why everybody wants to make appliances with wireless?
Customers are gonna get lost in the sauce and skip right past all of that and toss the packaging.
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.
Let the wiretaps wiretap the wiretaps. Keeps 'em busy, makes 'em feel like they're doing something important.
But why do they need to collect 1 TB? Sounds like a lot of redundant/doublicated entries then for a small network?
its LGs glass in LG household, and now Keurigs kitchen
The people that said LG isn’t the only company doing invasive data harvesting is sadly correct.
How did we as a society let it get to this point?
Here's an example from my unifi dash right now, my laptop has done 24tb of data? lol email and web browsing
https://imgur.com/a/I54vcYR
Yes, they can trivially build systems to filter this out, but your favorite coding agent can probably make it more stochastic / clever ;)
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.
What kind of functions it has that can't be replaced by:
- walking a few meters and pushing a physical button
- waiting a whopping minute for coffee to brew, instead of triggering it remotely
- 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.
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.
Just say it: you bought a smart kettle due to your completely adjustable preferences.
This is possibly not an issue with a regular drip coffee machine. It’s definitely an issue with a kettle or, say, air fryer.
I do feel that over-automation is a thing
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.
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...
It's more: "let's make smart coffee makers so that we can sell to 2 markets:
... and make more profits for ourselves".What hope do normies have?
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.
Sometimes I like the idea of preheating oven on my way home but then I get home and forget about it.
None, without people like us in their families who are able and willing to help.
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. And we need to form ourselves into the best helpers we can be by learning how to teach and communicate well.
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.
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.
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.
"Nomad," the guy from the article, was already administering his parents' home LAN.
How do you get there? "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.
What to do next? "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.
Wherever spying is invisible and frictionless, make it loud and incessant. 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.
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.
Folks be crazy.
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.
The next phase for the technically inclined is to patch these appliances and remove the collection, also possible today
Most non-ancient routers/gateways support this. There are way too many IoT devices running code that's _worse_ than what older LLMs produce.
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.
Plenty of houses are not well insulated though...
Yours 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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot
There's a Bialetti shop on the road between the flat I'm staying in, and the Metro station.
If I'm not careful this is going to seriously damage my wealth.
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.
FWIW preventing the harm that happened here would seem to require a second set of APs (radios) on a different channel.
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)
I have 3 Keurig coffee makers, and they are dumb as a brick.
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.
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.
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.
Buy something dumb and enjoy not having to worry about this nonsense at all.
- switch between my network and the cable router
- one port on the switch is set to "mirror mode"
- hooked up that port to a dedicated ethernet port on one of my boxes
Why do this?
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.
One interesting thing I've already discovered:
My oven sends random unencrypted keepalive messages over regular HTTP (not HTTPS) to an EC2 server.
I'm very curious to see if that changes over time.
Here's an example of the sorta-end-game: Currently they can know how many kind of "devices" are in your household and using probabilistic statistics give a decent n value of how many "devices" are in a certain zip code. Using that, your advertising can become more efficient by only buying ads in zip codes that contain certain "devices".
I say Zip code because that's what I've worked on in the past at the most granular level for Marketing Mix Modeling or MMM. You can easily venn diagram your first party data with 3rd party brokers, and you can cleanroom the whole thing to get a decent venn-diagram of the overlap.
I've ended up with numerous VLANs, one for entertainment devices, one for security system(s), one for guests, one for IoT trash, etc.
If the devices are this level of untrusted, there's a lot of separation necessary.
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.
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.
I like Hanlon's Razor, but I think sometimes people will use it to fully dismiss the idea of someone being evil because they're stupid, when in reality plenty of people are capable of being both.
No, fuck this lazy line of thinking. If the outcome is the same then it doesn't matter.
Then I disabled my ad blocker to see how much data comes down. So far it's at 31 MB, but it increases without bound by a few KB per second.
Think of all that sweet sweet food data that a fridge could on sell.
I was hoping this post would say what happened and what kinds of packets it was sending.
- A coffee machine should not be broadcasting anything. - Stop drinking coffee and go outside and enjoy the great outdoors.
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.
All I need know is to realise bottlecaps must be recycled and federalism is good. Repeat in the mirror each morning
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.
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...
I didn't even know it had wifi capability but it was trying to connect
I use mac whitelist so it wasn't even getting in but that didn't stop it from trying every seond
Fortunately it was just a usb dongle so yanked it out
And I wonder how I would even tell if it was trying to associate with my WiFi.
https://xkcd.com/3109/
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.
Man: Well, before you couldn't turn on the AC before you got home
I know this sounds like the famous "just do it this way in linux instead" criticism of Dropbox back in the day. But I do think we reached "life parodies fiction" with these smart devices where it makes sense to give diy another go. And with AI, there's less excuses this time around I would imagine.
But I would literally rather buy a cheap phone, a cheap SIM, hotspot it and connect it to a charger and have the AC connect to that and isolate it that way instead of letting it touch the network.
[0] https://worrydream.com/Electronics/
I have my IoT on a separate VLAN and I can observe communications for any given device at any given time.. this seems like a much saner solution than outright not buying any IoT devices, though that is also a respectable decision!
Right now I don’t care, I just never plug anything into my network
I don’t want to have to mod all my shit just to remove data collection stuff this way
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
Probably.
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.
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.
I was so livid 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.
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.
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!"
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.
IoT network yep, needed yesterday
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2324
Bruh should have set his PiHole to return HTTP 418 in response to any outbound request this thing made.