Was it being used as a node in a botnet? Or did it glitch somehow to keep sending over and over again? I can’t image that behavior is nominal for that washing machine.
Until a robot can hang up my washing, my machine is staying off any networks
When it can you should still setup a private network just for them to communicate
I have this really complicated home setup where I have these little switches on the walls and they control the lights it’s very clever.
With home automation sure I could turn the lights on and off in a room I’m not in but since I’m not in that room I don’t see the point. Anyway I can just pretend I’ve done that and then I’m not in the room so I won’t know it hasn’t happened. I really don’t see the point.
You can get home automated door locks, why. In what scenario would you ever want to unlock the door except when you’re in front of the door?
I was looking at one of those new washer/dryer combo units recently (I have heard these are common in Europe but they are fairly new to the US market) and it had a unique feature where you could fill the detergent reservoir, scan the barcode on the bottle, and the machine would dispense the appropriate amount of detergent for the load.
I can see connecting to the Internet on occasion might be helpful here to update the local barcode database, but I doubt it should need updating more often than once or twice a year. Does that mean the feature will work without constant live updates? Probably not, but I doubt it needs to update very often to remain current.
How do I know this kind of thing ? What app can I use to measure this for my devices at home ?
If you have anything where internet is an add-on to what it does normally, especially BS like a washing machine, then it’s phoning home. That’s the reason they add such nonsense, and sell it as a feature to the buyer.
They have to run a backend for this stuff which eats into the profit of selling it…
That said, Wireshark is a common tool to monitor packets. I haven’t done it for a while. There’s also probably a package you can run on RPi just for this kind of thing. Using PiHole I can see how often and where devices are connecting. I’ve blocked a lot of domains - I’m currently blocking about 30% of all domain requests (most of that is from the TV and windows 10) and everything works fine.
Tomorrow is my turn to post about this
Just put the device on a separate wifi without internet access, or look at the “child protection” features of your router. Ours can put devices based on their MAC into “access groups” which range from “full access” over “internet from <time> to <time>” to “no internet at all”.
Kind of wild we’re getting to the point where various pieces of equipment, with hardware we don’t want to use, need to be tricked into connecting to a fake network in order to prevent themselves from publishing their credentials.
And that’s if we assume there aren’t open Wi-Fi networks they won’t connect to automatically, in order to do their dirty deeds undeterred by their pesky owners.
Luckily, most embedded devices lack the smart to attach to two networks at the same time. So you keep it locked into a network where it can only do your bidding, and it won’t listen to anyone else. Unless they built in some very crazy and nefarious code and drive around with network enabled cars in the owners neighborhood.
puts on tin foil hat
https://www.wired.com/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-investigation/
Wait, I don’t need a tin foil hat for this… It was national news
At the point it becomes impossible to buy hardware that doesn’t have a Wi-Fi antenna in it, I’ll get really worried regardless. Tricking a device into connecting to the right wifi network already is so wild, and people shouldn’t have to do that. I’m smart enough to. Not everybody is. Not everybody has the money for an extra router.
Not everybody has the money for an extra router.
No need for an extra router. I just put those device into the “has no internet access” group. It is one of those “Parental Control” things. Every device inside the net can see and talk to it, but itself cannot talk to anything outside.
Which is understandable… To me, anyway. Until the router needs to be reset, or something else happens to it.
Come to think of it, I’m not sure if my router hardware actually supports this possibility. I’ve got a PiHole, but I’m also not the average person I play telephone tech support for.
Until the router needs to be reset, or something else happens to it.
That’s what “configuration backups” are for. You’ve got some, don’t you?
Bought “smart” LG fridge, range and dishwasher a couple of years ago and never connected any of them, they function like they are supposed to, refrigerate, heat food and clean dirty dishes. No need to connect.
Fridge manual explained something like “in case of peak energy consumption your smart energy company can send a signal to your fridge to not use power”. What the heck do I need that for? To find spoiled food and mold growing in the fridge later on?
Why does one need to connect a range to WiFi?
Some people have hourly electric pricing, in their case it’s worth scheduling stuff based on predicted pricing. How that should is that you’d have a home server which controls your IoT stuff (so the gadgets themselves can be firewalled from the internet and controlled only by you) and then your server would fetch pricing data and pause stuff that doesn’t need to run when prices are high and run stuff like washing when it’s cheap
TIL - cool, makes sense.
It would make sense if we had a server that could fetch prices instead of opening up potential weak systems to the internet.
Because now manufacturers are tying the last year of their warranty to having the devices connected to their stupid information harvesting apps.
Meh. It’s an article based on a guy who didn’t even see what the data it was sending was our even if it was bugged
There are probably 3 main groups of people with WiFi appliances:
- The vast majority of people don’t care, and put it on their normal WiFi router and would never notice something like this
- A smaller group of people don’t care much, but pay attention to their bandwidth usage and would spot an appliance trying to send 3.7 GB of data a day
- A much smaller group of people are paranoid and would put the device on its own isolated subnet, or use firewall-type features to limit the access their appliances have to the Internet.
My guess is that if this were a widespread problem, people in the second group would notice, or would have immediately checked and chimed in and said “holy crap, mine is doing this too”. I didn’t hear many people saying that, so I’m guessing this is a bug, and it’s either a one-off weirdness, or it’s a bug related to people in group 3 who are blocking their appliances from being able to connect to the Internet.
It’s probably something as simple as a badly programmed firmware update check that doesn’t do exponential backoff when it fails. It probably connects, fails, then immediately tries again. A proper exponential backoff would wait before trying again, and if it failed again it would double the wait time down to some minimum value like once per day or something.
Incidentally, this is also why claims about smartphones monitoring people’s conversations when they’re supposedly off is BS. That would require either huge amounts of bandwidth to transmit all the conversations, or huge amounts of computing power inside the phone to decode the voices. Either way you’d be using tons of battery, and probably a significant amount of bandwidth. There are enough paranoid people out there that if this were a real thing, someone would have caught the devices doing it by now.
I’m puzzled why a eashing machine should need any data, or even need internet connectivity at all.
LG’s app is an absolute privacy nightmare too. That app must be used if you want access to any smart appliance features and it requires precise location permissions 100% of the time. Even then, the app features are mediocre, it doesn’t work very well and often doesn’t notify of a finished wash load until long after it’s completed.
Why anyone would want to allow their washing machine manufacturer to continuously track their exact location in exchange for some crappy, poorly implemented features is beyond me.
The LG app also checks SafetyNet/Play Integrity so you can’t use it with root. They probably fear that you can then unleash how much more of a privacy nightmare it is.
I just use a timer on my phone … average wash cycle I use is about 30 minutes … just set a timer on your phone … KISS, Keep It Simple Stupid
If you buy a “smart” washing machine and actually connect it to the internet, you deserve what you get.
The smart people don’t connect these “smart” devices to the network
I don’t even let my smart TV connect to the internet. Why would I help it fetch ads for me lol
No it couldn’t. My washing machine cant connect to my network! I can’t think of a valid reason why I would even want that.
I can think of a very valid reason. I very often forget that I ran the washing machine, I’m already investigating how to send a notification to my phone or computer after it is done. Right now I am checking how much electricity it consumes and when it stops doing it. But a API would be nicer.
What about a NFC tag that starts a timer on your phone?
On one hand, it would be nice for us to drop the smart plug here, but at least those can be entirely local-only. I highly doubt any device API would be local.
They sell clean/dirty indicator magnets for dishwashers for like $2.
Yeah, I don’t get it. I guess I can see the appeal of some “Internet Of Things” connected appliances, like smart fridges suggesting recipes and keeping track of stock and auto-populating shopping lists for you. I don’t need that personally, but I can see why it could appeal to some people.
But things like washing machines and dishwashers? You need to be there in person to fill them up just before they’re ready to go on, and to empty them when they’re done. And when they’re not turned on, they’re sat there doing nothing. What “smart” functions can they even offer?
Because it’s advertised. That’s why.
A remarkable (and actually concerning) percentage of people completely lack the critical thinking skills to question whether that’s a good idea. The box says it has WiFi, WiFi is good, so I connect it to WiFi. Simple as that.
Plot twist: it was the Asus router misreporting the amount of data.
