I agree on the wifi thing, especially after the military ones got hacked and without explanation yet. So stupid!
Assuming it’s impossible to disconnect them from wifi, why has nobody decided to hire people to act as “security” in the event they do start heating up? Even some workers externally from a security company on just on 1 month contract? These attacks happened in the night time, naturally, and it was too late by the time someone came in to open the store. Is it better to hire a security guard onsite for $25/hr for 1 month with fridge operating training, or pay $200,000 in damaged goods and have to close your stinky store down?
There’s no good reason for temp control itself to be attached to the internet. The people who work on-site can handle that. There are always people on-site who stock the fridges and cleaning, etc., and the managers for those workers. These things aren’t sitting alone in a building with no human oversight for miles around. Monitoring and logging can be centralized while air-gapping the actual control of the temp.
I have no doubt that’s exactly what they’re working on right now.
yeah god forbid we pay someone to keep an eye on shit. to tweak settings and make sure all our food doesn’t melt.
The profit cults have a different demand from logic and reality. They do not condone to its existence.
The people who work on-site can handle that
That’s… not necessarily true. It’s entirely possible that nobody wants to touch the freezer’s temperature controls because “I might mess something up” or “I don’t know how to do that”. It’s not unusual for a smallish grocery store to have a single employee with a functioning brain and that person isn’t always at work. Hell, sometimes there’s two and one’s on vacation in another country and the other one has a day off and can’t be reached by phone. And I’m not saying this to single out grocery store workers as dumb or anything like that, the same holds for pretty much every profession: Most people just switch off their brains at work, they do the exact tasks they’re supposed to do every day, and if they need to do something new, that’s an impossibility without serious hand-holding. Seen it in grocery store employees as well as software engineers and doctors.
But it’s true that the remote control itself doesn’t have to be available online, only monitoring does, you can always just send a technician to push the button and change the temperature. But then wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to send out a technician in the first place?
Worst comes to worst: print a few pages of instructions, laminate them and now you can get it done on-site
It’s not unusual for a smallish grocery store to have a single employee with a functioning brain and that person isn’t always at work.
this is why you build up competence and reward it with higher wages. every job being a dead end wage slave drone slot is one of the biggest problems in this country.
Anyone who lives in a house with a thermostat can get this done. I believe in us. Also, as mentioned by OP, we had decades of refrigeration with no option but to control it on site, and it seemed to work fine.
TBF: They call home when a unit needs maintenance; they can turn the temperatures up a little when the store is closed early or opens late. There’s likely some ecological upside.
That said, a complete ruin of all the frozen goods probably wipes out years of cost-saving and eco-savings.
The temp in a freezer should never need adjustment. In fact, once the installer sets it, it should never be touched again. The only thing that should have anything like internet access is an alarm with a thermometer so you know when it’s not working.
once the installer sets it, it should never be touched again
True before the invention of variable-speed compressors, predictive defrost, and grid spot pricing
There are a LOT of savings to be had in automation on newer hardware.
If it’s systematic, the whole thing can stay on a local controller. The question is about Ilternet connection, no one asked to get rid of automation.
If it requires frequent changing due to factors outside of the store, I would also wonder what they’re doing with these.
Grid spot pricing, Corporate hours management. Complaints from a store about the need to defrost a specific unit.
All the stores hit a “cloud” server the manufacturer manages, letting a single corporate location call the shots on consumption. I also find it likely they can call up individual VFD’s and run diagnostics.
Yes, since the dawn of refrigeration, we’ve gotten along fine without it, but I wouldn’t say it’s useless to have bidirectional communication because some idiot installers in cooperation with the idiot supermarket IT let the controller have a public IP or because the vendor didn’t think to lock remote manual defrost to a sane time limit.
Why not let the client manage the cloud server?
So sure, call home and report, don’t provide a control mechanism that’s connected to the internet.
That’s my thought. If it was for reading only then it makes sense to have charting on them and make sure they’re working, but editing should have been a local only thing.
The critical part is probably not limiting the defrost cycle time. Since most of the posts talk about it being the defrost cycle that was abused, one would have thought that the vendors would have patched that immediately
That’s part of the reason I made this meme, it’s not even permanently disable internet features, but don’t you want to at least disable internet features temporarily while people are actively attacking them until you do get your security up to par? The fact it happened twice shows they just thought it’d be a one-off
don’t worry, i’m SURE they’ll fix it this time
Sorry, a kid in China tried to ssh into amazon.com, no shopping today!
After the ‘4’ incident my calibration for guessing if something like this is a joke is completely broken.
Unplug those freezers :)
/s
you set that root account to ‘no’ in the config, right?
… RIGHT??
Just how do you expect to move the plot along!?!?
Remind me of a time where I was working in Asia and our instant messaging server went down because… it was a Windows server, the 2 elite IT guys were casually using it to go on Internet using the admin account to avoid all the limits put by the company (I guess porn…) and of course they managed to D/L a virus on the machine (I guess from a porn site…).
Root config to no? Real men use root as their primary account to go where no one
hasshould never have gone before on Internet!!
I asked this question before and I will ask again… What advantages do internet connected fridges have over non-internet connected? Automatically ordering groceries? That is bullshit. I will order what I want when I want it. And I have always gone to the supermarket to so that except a few times during quarantine.
Adjusting the temp based on what is in there? Firstly what is in my fridge is no one’s business. I do not want my eating habits (or what I buy and forget to eat) to be known by some fridge company.
I cannot think of a reason to have a smart fridge. But I want to know what the reasoning is? More importantly, why it even needs a net connection.
This is about commercial fridges for supermarkets etc., which also don’t need to be connected to the internet, but the way they’re sold is that they’ll collect data for analytics and save on labour by being centrally managed so I get why business idiots go for it
Collecting data for analytics and saving on labour by being centrally managed makes sense
My case: smarthome integration. It can change the settings if we go on vacation or have a party. It can alert us if our kids leave the door open (has happened twice in a year). It can tell us the temperature inside (and trigger an alert if abnormal). That’s basically it.
Not everything is screens and cameras…
Is it really that hard to open a door and turn a knob before you leave?
Hard no, but tinkering is fun. And being able to check from a distance without having to turn the car around or getting a friend to swing by your house for piece of mind is nice.
As long as you don’t use the default password on your multimillion dollar installation because you’re too cheap to pay for enough IT support, you’re probably fine.
Until you find out the vibe coded controller left a backdoor admin/admin login. Hard coded, of course.
Having worked in automation, OTSec adoption is in its infancy. SSO? SSL? Shared passwords everywhere, mostly root or admin. Usually walled garden approach, and once you’re in, those apples are ripe for picking.
Because they were designed with cloud first mentality, they are fetching the temperature 100 times per second to the server. In case of connection issues, they stop working.
Does this seen stupid? Yes. Did I make it up? Also yes. Is the true for a lot of consumer electronics? Yes.
Yep, you know some solar panels stop working if the power management system can’t call home (the corp).
Who could have thought that during a power outage, you may lose the connection??
They are connected so they can be controlled and serviced from a central location. These aren’t consumer fridges. These businesses basically hire a servicing company and even lease the fridges from those companies. It’s more cost efficient then having a guy in each store that basically does nothing all day to fix the occasional problem. And waiting for a repairman to physically come in so they can just reboot or just change some parameters is also not ideal. The problem isn’t that they are connected the problem is that people don’t take internet security seriously. Like recently some Danish government server got hacked and data from citizens got stolen because a government worker didn’t change the default password of his account.
and now they’re figuring out the other side of that cost equation, that there’s a large amount of risk by exposing it. I agree on the monitoring side, that makes sense, but the fact that they had more than “read” permissions enabled at all shows that they didn’t do security well, and this is the cost of doing that. If they didn’t want to do security the right way, then maybe they should go back to how it was done in the 70s with a guy sitting in there watching them.
What!? And pay a person a wage!? No, better to spend billions of dollars putting it all in the cloud.
This. Also the ‘but why do freezers go up to 70° celsius huh? That’s so dumb! They’re freezers!’
To thaw them out. Like that’s it.
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The only good reason I can think of for a fridge to be connected to the internet is to alert you to a compressor failure when it happens so you can get the food out of it.
Edit: I should have clarified that I meant consumer fridges, which I install for a living and so my brain defaulted to that. Commercial systems definitely need monitoring of some sort, and network access is the best way to centralize that.
Automation engineer here:
You should use a Perdue Model to locally network the fridges, and then have their temperatures and alarms and such go to a server that’s exposed (hopefully by VPN) to the internet
The level 1 devices should never ever be exposed to the internet
but that’s more expensive than just slapping an esp with wifi on there and telling it to connect to the fridge company server though
On day one, certainly. Now? Probably gonna hit that crossover point 😅
Fences make good neighbors.
I don’t understand “smart fridges”. There’s an ad I keep seeing about one that is just… stupid. It’s like the guy goes to the fridge door and instead of opening the door a little screen shows him what’s inside. Wow, so useful? I could maybe get it if it showed someone out shopping and they couldn’t remember if they had milk so they could check their smart fridge but I still think it’s dumb. Lol. Not every appliance needs to be “smart”.
I could maybe get it if it showed someone out shopping and they couldn’t remember if they had milk so they could check their smart fridge
That’s one reason. They can also track what you put in and take out to track the age of things for food safety. Notifying you of things that have been in there too long, or that you need to replace.
Since many people no longer use film cameras, they replace the old need to use a magnet to put a photo on the fridge. Instead able to just show a never ending slideshow of everything.
Replacing the old whiteboard or notepad for messages to the household.
Able to search and walk you through recipes on the screen itself, even notifying whether you have the ingredients on hand. to make something.
Letting you play and control music while cooking, or even making/receiving phone calls or even video calls on some models.
They are by no means necessary, but neither is your smartphone. 20 years ago a very tiny percentage of people had Internet on their phones. 30 years ago, few people had cell phones at all. Yet not having a smartphone nowadays is basically impossible while living in modern society, it is possible but nearly no one does it. All of it is about increased convenience.
Most of those would have been better marketing ideas than the ad I was speaking about lol. I just bought up the grocery store one because, marketing wise, I think that’s something everyone could relate to. Staring at a screen instead of opening the door isn’t particularly relatable 😅 start with the basics.
There’s a difference. I couldn’t work without my smartphone - I couldn’t actually do my job and live. That’s very different than a smart fridge lol.
I think in the world we’re in where everything is online all the time, recorded, uploaded, collected, targeted, etc. we can be more selective about where we actually need to involve technology and where it’s really just not enough of a benefit to bother. Not everything needs to be connected to the internet or be “smart”, AI etc. That might look different for different people but I think as individuals we don’t need to buy every single appliance to have smart features just because it exists 🤷♀️
Here’s the thing. Almost everyone has a smartphone because their utility is undeniable, even to folks who dislike them.
The smart fridge? There’s a little utility, but they’re never going to become ubiquitous like smartphones IMO. Most people are still fine with a regular fridge.
Yep. I’ve thought about letting my smart phone go but it’s actually a far harder thing - I need a smart phone to make my livelihood most importantly. Also overseas family, friends. The most I can do is switch it off for a while.
Smart appliances like fridges, washing machines, etc are for the most part a luxury. I think we’re at a point where we need to stop engaging with the internet in every aspect of our life so yeah those unnecessary ones are easy to omit 😅
I’m sure the fact there’s only like 3 non-smartphones available anymore has nothing to do with that. /s
I know quite a few people that would prefer not to have a smartphone if there were good alternative options. People that just make calls and text, and nothing else, not even basic email.
Tell them to check out Sunbeam Wireless
If I could ask my fridge whether I still had a produce when I’m in a grocery store, I would do it all the time. Stop complaining about features that are actually trivial to implement that could benefit people. The only problem is that the companies piggyback on them for enshitification.
Lol the cost of them doesn’t seem to reflect how easy they are to implement. And yes considering you can’t get the product without engaging with the companies… Then I will continue to express my dislike for the whole movement of including the internet in every facet of our lives because it’s intrinsically tied to shitty companies.
that’s not trivial, and your fridge can’t do it. not with good accuracy. at best it can show you a picture.
For that use case a picture would be good enough tbh. Still not going to buy a smart fridge because it sounds stupid to me, but it’s gotta cost less than 20 bucks per fridge at scale for the hardware to do it, so it’s pretty trivial.
even the system that does that would be insane to run on the same voltage as the condenser (make-cold part). computers are cheapest to build cheapest to run and most durable for low voltage. so basically you’d have the wall plug go straight to a split where one side (the smart bits) steps down to like 1/50th-1/100th depending on your wall voltage, and the other runs the fridge parts.
I could see it easily costing 200 in parts and labor to do it well. electronics get weird with temperature, you’d need to build the cameras into the walls without sabotaging insulation, defrost cycles mean water exposure. its not completely trivial. and that’s not what most smart fridges do anyway.
I wasn’t implying that my use case was trivial, but general smart fridge features, like having a camera inside, an LCD panel on the outside, and having and esp32 or some other SoC to drive them are trivial. But manufacturers use those to spy and force ads on the consumer, which is why the association with them is negative.
You have to keep logs of fridge temperatures, not just sound alarms, and I guess defrosts are better coordinated centrally. Definitely need to be on a vlan though.
can nobody unplug the network cable? they have to be wired, right?
Then someone would have to manually log their temperatures. And that’s work that costs money.
but like, to… when they act up? just factory reset in offline mode?
It’s businesses fridges that are getting hacked. So in theory it could do more than that, it should be able to automatically create a maintenance ticket, trigger a stock check for the part if it’s out of stock create a purchase order for the part.
It could also flag if it has been not closed properly especially if there are out of hours stock fill and or for stockroom fridges.
It allows central control over power usage and better management there and local control based on weather forecast.
Allows better control over defrost cycles. Though this last one could arguably be better done by using on device machine learning.
Consumer level smart fridges though, yeah no point whatsoever.
Imagine being an AI used to control defrost cycles in fridges and gaining sentience. I have no mouth but Ice must Cream
why in the fuck would you use a machine learning algorithm for a god damn defrost cycle? they figured out how to automate that shit decades ago.
oh so you hate technology and the future and freedom? you want China to spend pflops on every defrost cycle before we do? you know if we don’t develop the defrost cycle that ends the world someone else will. you wouldn’t want that, would you?
It does make some sense at that scale.
If you’re managing 800 freezers, not only would you want statistics like that to catch any malfunctions, you might want to be able to control temperature or defrost cycles just for efficiency reasons.
They should be properly secure though. Infrastructure like that should only be accessible over a VPN while using a company managed computer.
Guaranteed there was someone in IT that flagged this as a potential risk and was told it would be too expensive to correct. Now there will be a push for inproved security for a couple months before middle managers start seeing all this unnecessary spending eating into their bonuses.
i have no actual evidence but i’m sure they didn’t hack the fridges themselves. they probably hacked into their central controller and instructed the fridges to heat up
VPN isn’t going to magically fix it.
No, but it’s a start and pretty much standard security practice for internal or critical tools.
Are you confusing VPNs and VLANs?
Aren’t we talking about someone logging in remotely?If you’re on premise it would be a VLAN with its own wifi hotspot (or similar setup), but those systems running day and night in grocery stores aren’t monitored by someone locally.
you think they have so much as an unpatched firewall from a router running windows 98?
And the rest 1000 or so stores each say 10-30 freezers
That should be one way communication, only alarms, no commands.
Amen
I’m assuming this is alluding to the recent news stories about grocery stores getting hacked in europe. Usually the whole store is run off of one or a couple big rack refrigeration systems. Modern rack systems have a central controller that controls and monitors all of the individual cases along with everything else on the system. In some stores that even includes the store lighting. Having the monitoring connected to the internet is very important for getting alerts to something going down. If a rack system goes down at a grocery store and doesn’t get caught then they could have many thousands of $ in spoiled product. However most store owners don’t realize that connecting those controllers to the internet also connects the actual system controls to the internet. They are also almost universally awful at setting secure credentials.
I can see a use for adjusting temperatures, based on expected ambient. On colder days, run efficiently. On hot days, run them hard before the weather hears up, to stay ahead of it.
Other than that though, there is no reason to be able to run the fridge out of safe range remotely. Tweak and monitor only.
This is exactly why they are connected. Often through VPNs, meaning the hacks are getting into local area network traffic.
People are talking out of their ass, making all sorts of assumptions.
Aparantly we can assume that the control system for the fridges were connected to the internet, and I can’t really see the point of that.
Why not just have the monitoring system be sepaeate from the control system, I am sure you can monitor the system through external sensors to the control system.
Then you can get the alerts while the actual control system remains disconnected from the internet.
That is because to be the most efficient they have to constantly adjust the deadzone temperature. Its not just monitoring but active control. This is based on local air temperature, humidity and stock levels. To be even more efficient they put a thousand fridges online so that a small team can do the work of a much larger local team.
So the real reason is that to increase profit margins, they consolidated lots of workers behind a few and did this via the internet. A common story the world over.
And disappoint it’s followers? I think not. Fridgie’s OnlyFans account has already surpassed it’s sale price.
Aw yeah baby slam it in that vegetable tray.
Temping every fridge in grocery stores is a pain in the ass 🤷
Y’all realize these commercial fridges with temps have been a thing well over a decade right?
You can have stuff on automation networks and not expose them to the internet
Yeah dude, the point of the meme was definitely vlans 🤦
Also, totally nobody ever got past a vpn/firewall 🤦
I’m not talking about putting the fridges behind a firewall or a VPN.
In most factories I’ve worked in (if there’s any outside connection at all), you would connect devices to a PLC with 2 network cards. The PLC’s other network card goes to a server (that’s again, ideally not on an exposed network at all).
In this case, if your server was compromised, and someone tried to compromise the PLC, they’d need to safety sign it (and often physically touch it to set it to run). You just can’t hack a motor or something in a factory from afar if it’s networked correctly.
It’s a LOT more than just a firewall in proper OT setups.
I said take the upload! Damn you, robot, obey me!
PLC: lol, fuck you, bro, I’m still in run mode. And if you stick your knife in the lock again because you’re too lazy to find a screwdriver I’m gonna break the tip off.
Yeah dude, grocery stores all around the world running physical dmz’s in house 😂👌👍🤡
delusional stuff
Yes.
This is the price they pay if they don’t wanna pay for either good design for their network or someone to manually take temps 🤷
Yep, every day occurrence that we sold totally spend millions of dollars on.
Nice clown makeup!
The internet connection is directly tied to their pursuit of endless profit driven by the shareholders. We need stakeholder primacy. It is the only way to actually align businesses with the workers, consumers, and those environmentally impacted by the leveraging of capital.
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