Electrolux IoT microwaves turning into steam ovens

[NiHaoMike]

https://hackaday.com/2022/03/18/welcome-to-the-future-where-your-microwave-thinks-its-a-steam-oven/
How useful is IoT on kitchen appliances anyways? Every use case I can think of (which is not many) is better done with local communications.

[daqq]

How useful is IoT on kitchen appliances anyways?

Fixed: How useful is IoT on kitchen appliances anyways?

[SiliconWizard]

How useful is IoT on kitchen appliances anyways?

Fixed: How useful is IoT on kitchen appliances anyways?

Fixed: How useful is IoT on kitchen appliances anyways?

[PlainName]

How useful is IoT on kitchen appliances anyways? Every use case I can think of (which is not many) is better done with local communications.

Does IoT really only cover cloudy stuff? The principle is surely that the devices are networked (as opposed to being slaved to a single remote control). Whilst most commercial stuff is cloudy (although I have some which will work perfectly well locally, completely cut off from outside access) that started as a way to get going easily and not have the no-skillz end-user asking hot to punch these hole things in the router. Cloud is (to me, at least) just a part of IoT capabilities and not the defining attribute.

[SiliconWizard]

As IoT is Internet-connected by definition, it's necessarily connected to a central server to make things workable for the average user. Which leads to "cloud" stuff.
If that wasn't so, every device would need to act as some kind of server itself, which would not only make it harder to design, harder to setup for the average joe, and more prone to security issues.

Now of course, local networking would be good enough (and even way better for a number of reasons) for home appliances. But then that wouldn't be "IoT". That would just be "home automation" of some kind, something that has been around for now a few decades, and would probably have flourished if the Internet wasn't swallowing every networked device, just because.

[MrMobodies]

I have this problem right now when quoted for solar inverters.

I am going to request to switch the WIFI and "cloud" crap off all of them.

One wired, two of them have WIFI/RS485/USB with one WIFI only where you can only see the readings through an "app" to a "cloud" which is a big nono.

A company called Engensa tried this bullshit back in 2012 when they didn't want to sell me a Sunny web box which they eventually did that interfaced with the inverter to show me the readings and alerts but they wanted to sell me this crappy solution that would measure the differences between two meter readings to upload to some portal to tell that it is working okay but I remember that service being shut down some years after.

I tend to get very upset and angry when installers keep on telling me this:

Me: I want it wired up to my switch and does it have a basic built in webserver to show me the status and readings?

Installer: "It's "WIRELESS" and "SMART", we'll tell you where to go and what to do, first You have to create account, sign in, download an "app" on your phone, sign in to that... you need the cloud to access it, it's all cloud these days".

Assume I *only* a phone Bullsh*t

No! I do not want a stupid app, a mobile, broadband, WIFI, a webhosting/cloud or a series of finite things all depended on working in order to access it's current status on something that is right next to me, it is not smart it is very stupid!" I see all that as an optional extra which comes later if needed.

If I have no broadband or the service stops that's going to be useless isn't it?

Welcome To The Future, Where Your Microwave Thinks It’s A Steam Oven

It's not a human.

Can my internet enabled fridge be hacked? No, and you are out of milk …

Another point above... I don't trust having systems like communicate over wifi in a packed residential area.

Drone says: March 18, 2022 at 10:53 pm

OTA firmware updates, hmmm… the greedy MBA thinks. So if it’s out of warranty brick it, then charge ’em an arm and a leg to “fix” it. Icing on the cake is shifting the blame over to the engineers

I found this last night with Solar edge from two reviewers on trustplilot:


https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.solaredge.com?page=1

Alison Meek 3 reviews GB Rated 1 out of 5 stars 2 days ago
Not fit for purpose
Our solar panel battery storage does not always store yet Solar Edge deny there is a problem and keep saying we need another software update. It is not fit for purpose and we are left with an expensive piece of rubbish. Now they have turned off the real time monitoring so we cannot check if it is storing or not - they would only do that if they knew there was a problem with their product. Shoddy product and appalling customer service. I regret paying £15k for this piece of garbage.

michael E 1 review US Rated 1 out of 5 stars Sep 28, 2021
unreliable and failing inverters and Terrible customer service
The inverter has failed three times, the last time it failed at the same time my monitoring app locked me out

https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.solaredge.com?page=2

Mischele Mccall 1 review US Rated 1 out of 5 stars Aug 7, 2021
Awful Service SolarEdge Inverter/Monitor Issues
Awful Service. Solar Edge invertor/monitoring system just doesn't work. We have been unable to monitor our system for a year. Solar Edge says, "contact installer"; the installer says, "contact Solar Edge. Bottom line upfront, I'm told, my system is producing power I simply cannot monitor the production due to Solar Edge inability to fix the inverter/monitor system which connects to the app. It has been a year of blame the other guy. I'm so tired of being pushed to the side. We paid for our system in "full", in "cash" and have had nothing but excuses from both parties. I'm leaving my name Mischele Anderson in the hope that someone in a position to help will do so.

Hamilton Richard 1 review US Rated 2 out of 5 stars Nov 13, 2020
You can't administer your own system.
I'm an electronic engineer and have designed inverters and solar monitoring software, knowledgeable of the industry and products. I have solar on 3 different homes and one of them is SolarEdge. I'm a consultant to other companies in the industry.

The inverters are ok and about as reliable as other companies. No major issues. Optimizers are not as reliable and may fail over time. My main issue is with the monitoring software (cloud portal). It is not as well designed as other manufacturers of systems, and has limited ability. My biggest problem is a restriction placed on customers by SolarEdge that DO NOT ALLOW a customer to set their own alerts for when there is a failure of a system component. And you don't have admin access to the portal even if you paid for the system and own it outright. SolarEdge controls what you can see or change. They INSIST the customer have a solar installer make any changes. Although customer support could easily do it, they won't.

This is the ONLY company that has this restriction. Other companies allow customers to easily set up email alerts or text alerts. Most solar installers will tell you they monitor your system, yet they don't. You need ability to set your own alerts. Otherwise, when a failure of a component occurs (and it will at some point), you will only find out about it when you are hit with a bit monthly electric bill. I suggest buying a system with a LOCAL monitoring box that you can access with a computer or has a separate in-house display.

How hard can it be to view your readings from your own equipment... sometimes you can see what's on the screen but need more insight with my previous system, type in the IP address in the we browser, username and password and there it works. I never had these problems before with the manufacturer restricting stuff and interfering over my rights and ability to use and access information from the equipment that is brought and paid for.

[PlainName]

As IoT is Internet-connected by definition

Kind of. There is The Internet but there are also internets.

necessarily connected to a central server to make things workable

I think that's the defining definition, but doesn't require an offsite cloudy server. Things like Home Assistant do this stuff perfectly well, even over The Internet, without being off-prem.

That would just be "home automation" of some kind

Sure, that's the old term. But even your definition of IoT, which means 'must connect to the cloud' isn't, strictly speaking, an internet of things because all those clouds are distinct entities. Kind of super things. Recently they are becoming able to speak to each other, but that ability never existed when IoT was coined so it's not the original definition.

When we say 'IoT' are we saying 'The Internet of things' or 'an internet of things'. Subtle difference which is completely missed by most retail consumers, but it does affect how things are designed. Suppose your new client says "And it must do IoT", what are they really asking for?

[madires]

As already mentioned, cloud services can be shut down at any given moment. We've seen this over and over again. And your internet access can also fail, just for a few minutes or even several weeks. If your IoT appliance requires a cloud service to work correctly it will be bricked. And also important to know: the 'S' in 'IoT' stands for security.

[PlainName]

the 'S' in 'IoT' stands for securit

Do you know, I've never heard that one before!

OK, I have, and there are 32,700,000 matches on Google for it. Can we please give it a rest and find a new cliche to get bored of.

[MrMobodies]

As already mentioned, cloud services can be shut down at any given moment. We've seen this over and over again. And your internet access can also fail, just for a few minutes or even several weeks. If your IoT appliance requires a cloud service to work correctly it will be bricked. And also important to know: the 'S' in 'IoT' stands for security.

... and they might even decide to try and charge you a subscription for it  one day:

https://www.which.co.uk/news/2017/12/y-cam-now-charging-for-previously-free-cloud-storage/

Owners of Y-Cam wireless security cameras will have to pay a subscription fee

The UK-based home-security company Y-Cam Solutions has changed its free unlimited cloud-storage service. Previously, if you bought a Y-Cam smart security camera, you received unlimited storage in the cloud for a rolling seven-day period. Under the new terms, existing users will have the seven-day cloud storage limited to one year with effect from the date of activation. To continue using the storage after that, they will have to pay a monthly subscription fee of £2.99 per camera. Y-Cam customers can’t use alternative options for storing their recorded footage, such as third-party cloud storage (DropBox, Google Drive or OneDrive) or their own networked hard drive. Existing camera owners received an email on behalf of Y-Cam giving them 14 days’ notice of the changes coming into force. Essentially, important features are being rescinded unless people are willing to pay. New customers will also get free cloud storage for a year before they have to pay. Best Buy wireless security cameras – find out which models topped our tests. As you can expect, Y-cam customers are not happy with this development, and have voiced their criticisms via Twitter:

@ycamsolutions very disappointed that you’re charging for all camera storage. I feel like I’ve been suckered in with little option and very little time to decide. You always promoted yourselves on the free 7 days storage and now you’ve taken that away.
4:24 PM · Nov 30, 2017

‘Unlike cheaper IP and CCTV cameras, the Y-Cam system operates through a central cloud-based technology platform that requires hundreds of servers processing over three million videos for its customers every day. It is a fully managed system with highly qualified engineers looking after it 24/7 to ensure customer accounts remain online and secure, which is more important now than ever before as internet security threats are becoming increasingly sophisticated.’

I was given one of these that came out of a job.

£2.99 a month seems okay for remote recordings but I would have wanted to be able to join onto my own cctv recorder, it does have a built in portal running on port 80 and uses rtsp? I think no different to other IP cameras, I confirmed this on the phone that it is just a normal IP camera but they refuse to give the login details to use with other stuff. It was very low resolution and didn't bother with it but I would never buy something like this but given to me and I had a few "free" years out of it.

In other words they lock the customer in.

[PlainName]

In other words they lock the customer in.

Actually, they make any reasonable customer swear never to touch anything from that company again. Or should, but Sonos did worse than that and they still have customers 

[madires]

Common sense outsourced into the cloud? This reminds me of Einstein's quote about human stupidity.

[MrMobodies]

I am a bit confused how the word or term "CLOUD" has slipped into the terminology have been seeing recently and on the rise too.
I remember, clustering to do with banks of CPU's and time sharing or storage and hosting.

Now it seems to me that they are using that one word to possibly mean what they want it to mean like with cloud phones or cloud this and that.

Do correct me if you think I am wrong.

I have got my answers today, ALL of the inverters in the quote, use HOSTED "CLOUD" bullsh*t that one day of course they might start charging me. They will only allow diagnostics, readings and data logging through their "cloud" in other words they have be connected to the broadband to their stuff and their hosting which to me is "load of bullsh*t".  They said I can switch off the wifi completely and pull the dongles out.

If I go for the contract I am going to ask the contractor to switch off the WIFI and for the wired ones I'm restricting lan access. I'll just use it with the network monitor to see if the inverters are there or not (if they intermittently down power). They will show the details and any faults on the dot matrix screen and they are in sight so that's shouldn't be a problem.

I was told they may need to send people out for firmware updates if there is a known fault. I said well if they send people around to do a firmware update and it goes wrong and fails then at least it happened in front of them and they have got to act straight away rather than me not knowing about it for a while behind my back and it's nice to be prepared incase anything happens.

[SiliconWizard]

The "cloud" is a term that has be coined with a purpose, and this purpose is to be as vague as possible, as the word itself suggests.

It basically qualifies any computing, in the widest sense, that happens non-locally, offloaded to some distant resource on a global network, which is currently the Internet.
Usually, the less you know about this distant resource as a user and the more spread out it is, the more it qualifies as "cloud".

[madires]

'Cloud' is the euphemism for 'someone else's computer'.

I was told they may need to send people out for firmware updates if there is a known fault. I said well if they send people around to do a firmware update and it goes wrong and fails then at least it happened in front of them and they have got to act straight away rather than me not knowing about it for a while behind my back and it's nice to be prepared incase anything happens.

That's a brilliant answer!

[Berni]

The problem with IoT popularity are regular Joe users.

A lot of fancy IoT functionality could be done completely locally without internet involvement, but this requires the local network to be set up correctly. So to avoid frustrated users it is the easiest to use a server 'in the cloud' and have devices connect to that, then have the phone app connect to that too. This means it always just magically works... as long as there is internet... and they haven't shut down that server.

There are some genuine good uses for home automation when done properly on a local network.

Tho i really don't see a single useful thing a microwave could do with WiFi

[dbctronic]

Tho i really don't see a single useful thing a microwave could do with WiFi

I'm very leery of ovens of any kind running unsupervised. Internet of Crap SpyTech Things extends your ability to make them do so. And, in the case of microwave ovens, yeah, for what? To make it warm up a mug of coffee a minute before you get home from shopping? (Pull over, or drive and thumb at the same time!) What if you forgot to put the mug in before you left? Self damage time for the oven?
Well, maybe the damthing can at least call you back while you're pulling into your driveway to tell you it needs servicing. Hmmm... I guess every cloud does have a silver lining!! 

[PlainName]

Tho i really don't see a single useful thing a microwave could do with WiFi

Block it.

[madires]

Next one: Epson payments snafu leaves subscribers unable to print (https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/21/epson_payments_issue/)

[MrMobodies]

Deal: Every month we will send you ink cartridges so you don't want to worry blah blah blah....
Requirement: Lock you out of your printer/restrict it if certain conditions aren't met where a company takes control of it.

However, when something goes wrong, the user can also get locked out of their printer, unable to produce any documents, as is the case for one Epson customer who discovered Epson was unable to process his payments.

A deal that does not include the user in the management of their own printer... Very stupid!

If the printer was a rental then okay they can take it back.

Someone brought an Epson printer that I helped set it up with these ink bottles, £5-10 a bottle and they got so much out of it and it seemed quick. Scanner not too great, only software scan button no network scan folders but it was small thing and suitable for their space and gave them no problems after the 2nd year hearing from them and they print from it a lot every day so that's good.

It makes me wonder whether that service above is necessary unless it is a rental where when it goes wrong they send someone around to exchange it with a working one.


Reminds me a bit like this:
There was a joke I remembering hearing when Boeing merged and brought out McDonnell Douglas but it was McDonnell Douglas who brought Boeing out using Boeing's own money.

What I'd expect:
If they can't receive payment for whatever reason, simply settle out what's due whether it is money owed to them or they owe you cartridges, cancel the contract and reset/release the printer back in the customers control until the matter can be resolved.

If the company insists on keeping the contracts maybe they should allow the customer to print for free until they resolve the issue. Why shouldn't they not be allowed to continue printing for something that is not their fault.


Aaaah I was looking and it seems like a rental service for 1/3 of what the printer is worth:
https://www.epson.co.uk/readyprint


Unlimited, that's interesting especially if you are printing much more than what you pay for one set of cartridges a month or mass printing using many bottles.

[MrMobodies]

Video:
https://odysee.com/@rossmanngroup:a/smart-devices-get-stupider-and:0

I couldn't have put this any better in the comments:

@patric a day ago

Who does NOT want a botnet in their microwave?!

Isn't that a really good point?

Yes I find it almost like a botnet where all of the ovens (if allowed to join wifi) possibly connect to their "cloud" hosting crap and then they can instruct them and do as they please without any knowledge or permission from the owners.

Years ago with my other solar panel setup it was just uploading the monitoring data that I can switch off on a small scale and local interface and diagnostics from a datalogger that benefited me and now it's direct control to appliances in the home (with possible restrictions on it that tells the user b*gger all) which to me is a big no no just like the YeaLink phones I had been offered.

[SiliconWizard]

Infiltrating everyone's life with constant surveillance, whether they want it or not, and whether this is just for commercial or political reasons, is a gigantic force that is getting increasingly hard to oppose.

[Neutrion]

What makes me wonder with this BS is, that all the appliances are gettin crappier each year because the engineers have to "optimise" out every single penny. And than the enormous resources put into this shit, while in the same product they still cheap out on every component.

If manufacturer would be forced only to declare the design lifetime of the products, the competition to build good quality products would finaly began, we could see resources put into designing long lasting products instead of this nonsense.

However, when I think about the idiots buying the Iot microwawe, it makes sense to think about how important a general phylosophy education would be. Just to be able to ansver the question  sometimes: "What do I need and why?"

[AlfBaz]

I'll just put this here

https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/15/22332212/cricut-crafting-machine-design-space-upload-limit

Essentially you have to use their cloud based program to send data to the cutter.
This was a free service which is now being limited unless you pay a subscription fee.
Attempts have been made to circumvent this which requires hacking the hardware but it appears that's going nowhere fast

[AlfBaz]

Oh, and if you google the machine there is a never ending stream of hits from well known retailers flogging this crap with barely a mention of this limitation
So yeah, fuck you too Google