I'm not opposed to smart homes, I love being able to turn my lights on and off from across the room. But I don't know if I understand the use case for a networked washing machine.
I'm not opposed to smart homes, I love being able to turn my lights on and off from across the room. But I don't know if I understand the use case for a networked washing machine.
In a follow-up post a day after his initial Tweet, Johnie noted “inaccuracy in the ASUS router tool.” Other LG smart washing machine users showed device data use from their apps. It turns out that these appliances more typically use less than 1MB per day.
A megabyte a day still seems excessive.
If you agree to some form of anonymous tracking for diagnostics I can see 1mb being reasonable. This would be periodic update on things like usage levels, part quality, etc.
Most likely that tracking acceptance is buried in some 500 page eula, but thats a separate issue.
Why do you need an entire megabyte for that? Even if you did laundry five times a day, it shouldn't take more than a few bytes to store a few metrics.
Even if you're lazy and uploaded an uncompressed JSON array of objects, that shouldn't be more than a few kB. Way less if you compress it.
A megabyte is a LOT of data.
I could easily see it measuring the forces and weight on the drum every 5 seconds (or even every 10 ms) during the whole wash, to be able to produce charts of vibration patterns, that engineers could use to correlate with failure. Remember -- when you're spinning at high speed to wring out the water, it's actually some pretty crazy strong forces.
Or other things measured every ~second, like stuff related to the motor, temperatues, humidity, etc. and other diagnostics.
Seems really easy to generate a megabyte if you consider time series. Even easier if it's in XML or JSON rather than a CSV.
You really think they're going to measure all that, upload it, send it to some expensive engineer, have them try to physically model the error, and then... what?
That might make sense during development, but there's no way they do that in a consumer product. If a part breaks they're just going to send out a replacement or the repair guy is gonna get some third party part. Recording that much detail would just be noise.
Even if they had specific parts sensors (doubt it, for costs), they could just process that locally and send up an error code, not the whole log.
I find that all pretty hard to believe, but if anyone has evidence to the contrary, I'd be glad to be proven wrong. I had a LG washing machine bought new a few years ago promising all sorts of bells and whistles and app integrations. But it was super janky and cheaply made, the app integration was terrible, the on board memory would lose its configured settings, the entire LCD broke after a few weeks... it was not what I would consider well-engineered at all. If it was sending a megabyte a day I'd just assume it was yet another bug, not some forward thinking QA.
It's cute you think there is some intelligence to this design... it's just whatever some PM/exec dreamed up and some low-level engineer implemented based on requirements. The data is likely just sitting there collecting digital dust.
I would suspect they measure everything and use almost none of it. Like most web services. This was a common complaint and low hanging fruit optimization, that people were storing metrics that never got read. Just in case.
I'm not really sure what you're asking:
Is he sure they're sending < 1 MB a day? Yeah.
Is he sure it's plausible it's measuring time series data? Yeah.
Is it plausible they measure vibration patterns? Yeah.
It's not about like "oh we'll send an electrical engineer to fix your specific vibration pattern", it's "we can collect data from the field to make forward-looking decisions": ex. maybe we switch supplier mix for replacement motors, and a data scientist ends up finding 6 months later that something changed in June 2023 where serviced washers in New York report dramatically more intense vibrations and now we know to go talk to the supplier who gained mix.
It's error logs for non-tech. YMMV on individual team quality if they actually follow-up. Conceptually, Big Data(tm) is something CEOs have been hearing regularly since, what, 2014? So definitely plausible.
I would imagine that they just log everything. Serial number, temperature, which cycle is used, time of day, how long it takes to fill the washer, how long it takes to drain the washer. Everything. Put all data in a great big database. When something needs to be fixed and is covered by the warranty, mark that the failed part is associated with that serial number.
Then do some sort of a regression to discover what logged parameters are associated with what failure modes/broken parts. If washers that take less time to fill up have higher than normal failure rates for some elbow joint, that probably means that high water pressure causes the elbow joint to fail. If a certain elbow join's failure rate is simply correlated with the number of cycles, that tells you something different. If a certain elbow join has a high failure rate that's not associated with anything, that probably just means it's a shitty part. But you learn something.
By logging everything and running a regression analysis, when you develop next year's model, you know where to improve. Now when you tell an expensive engineer, "This elbow join failed on 1000 units of revision F. Make it fail on 100 or less units of revision G." you can also give them a starting point to work with.
I'm a software guy. If I get 10 crash dumps, and you don't tell me anything, I don't necessarily know what to work with. If you give me those same 10 crash dumps and tell me that 9 of them had the language set to Arabic or Hebrew I know it's probably a BOM bug. Same thing.
Or you just sell the data to ad companies and let them figure out how to get value from it.
Well if you claim warranty, I'd expect them to want to have that data.
Maybe they also just sell it together with your advertising id, why not use washing patterns for deanonimyzation ...
When I worked in a storage group years ago, the system that controls swipe card access for a building generated something like 3TB of Java exceptions a month.
Because of the criticality, it was on high tier reliable SAN storage, replicated to a second site. IIRC, storage was like $80 Gb/mo.
Love how you said exceptions, rather than just logs. I am unfortunately (painfully) aware of exactly what you mean. The storage costs were the cherry on the top. But seriously, $240k and nobody raised a stink?
It’s one of those things that cloud storage helps with.
Because it was on prem, the chargeback model was associated with the business unit and not super granular. It got lumped in with another business function because it should be a trivial workload.
I found it when I was doing estimates for a new platform and the app’s growth numbers didn’t add up! Even at $240k, it wasn’t an obvious outlier.
"Even easier if it's in XML or JSON rather than a CSV."
Yes indeed, but compression algorithms are not that new.
Sure, but it's also easy to imagine an engineer just forgetting to or not bothering because it wasn't in the spec.
If they're not doing that they should, albeit finding a way to make the additional cost minor.
Collecting all that data for analysis would be incredibly valuable, especially considering the wealth of analysis tools today.
> Even if you're lazy and uploaded an uncompressed JSON array of objects, that shouldn't be more than a few kB.
See, that’s just one lazy engineer writing one telemetry solution. Multiply that by several engineers across several teams, each cobbling together a different telemetry solution for a different product manager’s initiative using a different stack of JavaScript libraries, throw in some poorly-rolled-out infrastructure changes a few years later resulting in some unanticipated retry loops, and I think you can hit that megabyte per day easily enough.
A megabyte is a LOT of data.
Well it is, but in this Cloud Native world the clueless management and IT engineers have been convinced that single micro service running on 50 kubernetes pods and generating 20 MB trace logs for single transaction is normal.
Now once we have built this inefficiency industry wide nobody is there to wake the management up about huge wastage of resources. They are floating in this lurid dream of "ultra smart" machines generating gigabytes of precious intelligence about customer behavior for target ads
It seems completely inconsequential
It seems completely inexplicable.
I don't care if it's a small percentage of my symmetric gigabit fiber, I only care why they supposedly need it and where it ends up.
A phone number or a timestamp is a tiny amount of data.
In the quaint olden days, you had to go out of your way to volunteer to be a part of some study to have any aspect of your activity recorded every few seconds 24/7 to be collected and analysed like that.
It also doesn't matter that my washing machine usage might not seem like sensitive info. It's wrong by default rather than OK by default. You need a compelling need to justify it, not the other way around. It needs to be necessary to prevent one dead baby every day or something, not the other way around. No one needs to produce any convincing example of harm for that kind of collection to be wrong.
But even so, it's easy to point out how literally any data can end up being sensitive. Washing machine usage could lead to all kinds of assumptions like, this person does not actually live where they say they do (which impacts all kinds of things), or this person is running an illegal business, or housing too many people for the rating of the dwelling or allowed by the lease, etc, or just another data point tracking your movements in general. Or even merely to get out of 10% of warranty claims.
The users did go out of their way to volunteer, by hooking the washing machine up to their network.
They did not. They went out of their way to buy a washing machine and maybe use some monitoring or alerting feature it offers. I decline to believe you do not know this.
War and Peace is 3mb as uncompressed plaintext[1]. 1mb a day is a lot.
Would you prefer to read War and Peace, or the (shorter) washing machine logs?
It’s touch and go for me. The variables names in washing machine code would likely have be less easily confused.
It's 12 bytes per second, or less than 1kB per minute. Doesn't seem like much.
For telemetry on a washing machine, it is enormous.
That's WiFi/Bluetooth signal strength mapping amounts of data.
It's probably a single probe packet once a minute.
Which is likely what is happening here. The LG "ThinQ" washing machines do allow for remote starts: https://github.com/ollo69/ha-smartthinq-sensors/issues/234
After 10 minutes (IIRC) in remote start mode without starting the machine goes to sleep. You must use the smartthinq_sensors.wake_up command to wake it up, then the remote_start command to start it.
It uploads a novel a day. That’s a lot!
Just checked mine which is used all the time and it's about 1.5mb per week.
My Ubiquiti UniFi UDM is not good at device identification. It's kind of annoying because I have this big list of devices on the network and it's peppered with devices that I know don't exist. I'd appreciate it if it said something like "Maybe iPad Air", instead of just "iPad Pro 2nd Gen" when I know no such device is on my network.
ios devices (unsure about android) use random MACs on wireless networks by default.
The random MAC would still be within the vendor prefix though, and a MAC address won’t identity a specific device type anyway.
Edit: I’m wrong
No it isn’t, vendor prefixes are sort of an anachronism. Bit 41 - bit 1 of the first octet is reserved for local (random) use. That and the group bit (40) set to 0 means the second digit of the human readable MAC is 2, 6, A or E, but that’s it.
My bad, thanks for the correction! You still can’t identify a specific device type based on the MAC address though, right?
On the same WiFi network yes you can - it uses the same MAC on the same SSID. Remembers the "random" MAC after the first connection (and if you first connected to the networks before they added MAC randomisation in iOS14, it "remembers" the actual MAC of the device, so you didn't have compatability issues after the iOS14 upgrade).
So you can't use it to track devices between multiple SSIDs including when scanning for networks, but you can use it to persistently identify a device when connected to the same network.
You misread the question.
Yep, you're right. Agree with the other post - the randomly generated MACs have no manufacturer info.
Other than perhaps the manufacturer from the OUI, no.
There’s no manufacturer in a randomly generated local OUI.
Random aside for this, I believe this functionality existed for many years but actually hasn’t worked until recently. (Take this with a grain of salt)
I had to turn random MAC off, my google mesh could not handle it. Wifi on my samsung phone would only work for a couple of minutes.
The random MAC is generated only once per network, and re-used for every subsequent future connection to it, until the network settings are reset
Occasionally it's fun to discover new devices.
"It thinks my WiFi dog feeder is a Technoelectrocom 56XR-2000? What the hell is (was) that?"
I found out that unifi plug in doorbell chimes use an esp32 this way because I saw one on my devices table, before it had booted fully and handshook as it's real Identity
Do you mean the non-PoE version? I have the PoE version sitting in a box somewhere and I'm a ESP32 enthusiast so I'm wondering if that's what I'll be doing today. Surely they're using it just as a WiFi coprocessor? Or...?
The non PoE one, the one that just plugs into a normal power outlet
My PoE one has only ever identified as what Ubiquiti thinks it is, so no idea
Cisco ISE thinks all iPhones are FreeBSD.
That’s because your profiling is not set up correctly
Do the UniFi products just try to use MAC addrs for this, or do passive/active TCP/IP fingerprinting?
Just MAC registrations.
You can fix this by setting fixed IPs. But yes Unifi is not great at this.
Most personal devices now use randomized MACs so it's hard to ID them.
You can go via IP though, pull up your DHCP lease on your phone/laptop/whatever and match it to the same IP in Unifi, then manually name the device.
The traffic stats my UDM shows are complete fiction. The data it presents makes no sense.
Other users having low data usage doesn't prove they also have low usage?
Are people so uncomfortable saying "we don't know" that they use such loose reasoning to "get the answer"?
I'll re-read the article/tweets, maybe I missed something.
Why are you ignoring that the person who made the original claim about 3.7 GB of data per day stated that it could be an accuracy issue with his router?
Other users having low data usage doesn't prove they also have low usage?
The follow-up Tweet is from the same person who reported the initial issue.
This happens a lot: Devices get a new IP address but some tool has an internal database that remembers the old device at that address. It then shows stats for the new device at that IP address but reports it as coming from whatever it was initially recognized as.
Ah! I should have read a little further. I apologize!
Note: that was inaccurately reported in the TomsHardware article
The fact that it shows up as using iMessage is the part that I said may be inaccurately reported.
Even now, I am still seeing some suspicious data usage. I’ve started wiresharking it yesterday to track it down.
If these devices are designed to upload "automatic diagnostic reports" to a central tracker, it's possible this machine is stuck in a failure state that is generating massive amounts of error logs.
Does it matter? It shouldn't be hogging bandwidth like this, that's a failure by itself regardless of whether there another failure state at play. Also, I'd have to question any washing machine that can generate 'massive amounts of error logs'. 3.7 G / Day is an insane amount of data.
a program running on a 480 megahertz microcontroller can quite reasonably crash a million times a second; even a single 80-character error log line would be 80 megabytes per second or 7 terabytes per day. and it would be reasonable to record more telemetry from a crash than a single line
Really megabytes or it's just a typo? If so. How 80 characters could possibly generate so much data?
it's not a tumor. i mean a typo. 80 bytes multiplied by one million times per second equals 80 million bytes (also known as 80 megabytes) per second
Uplinks are usually somewhat restricted.
yeah, and maybe someone was depending on that historical situation without realizing it
You are right. Thank you for clarification.
sure, happy to oblige
My napkin math:
freq = 480 megahertz // 480000000 Hz
size = 80 * 1 byte // 80 bytes
cycles_per_write = 400 // 100 to print, 300 to fail
writes_per_sec = freq / cycles_per_write // 120mHz
duration = 24 hr
(writes_per_sec * size * duration) to terabytes // 8.2 tb
i think that instead of 120 millihertz you mean 1.2 megahertz? and your calculation actually works out to 8.3 terabytes? otherwise i agree
btw the units(1) program is useful for things like this
You have: 480 megahertz / 400 * 80 bytes * 1 day
You want: terabytes
* 8.2944
/ 0.12056327How far we have come. Back in my day, a program could only crash a few thousand times a second.
To err is human. To really screw things up we had to invent microcontrollers.
It is amazing how far we have come. On my own, I can only really screw up a few times per day, unless I am really trying. On a really, really bad day, maybe a few dozen times? How inefficient.
A washing machine is probably running a 48 MHz, not a 480 MHz processor, but even if it were running its core at 480 MHz, its network interface is probably not going to be able to output TCP packets at 1 MHz.
we are faced with the assertion that the washing machine was sending 3.7 gigabytes per day of data
someone asserted that that is an unreasonable amount of data for a washing machine to generate
i'm pointing out an easy way for a washing machine might generate 2000 times more data than that
the fact that the network interface is possibly insufficient to send the data out is irrelevant to the question of whether the washing machine can or cannot generate it in the first place, which is what was being discussed
however, i will point out that if it's using tcp, unless it opens a new tcp connection for each telemetry message, the tcp stack will batch together many telemetry messages into a single tcp segment, probably about 1500 bytes worth
— ⁂ —
of course you can control a washing machine with an 8051, or an eprom and a register clocked from the power line (see jeff laughton's printing press controller at https://laughtonelectronics.com/Arcana/One-bit%20computer/On...), or for that matter a mechanical timer or, as i've done, by unplugging the power cord and pulling a rubber drain plug when you think the agitator motor has been running for long enough. but more powerful control systems enable new functionality
historically it is true that manufacturers have used low-spec microcontrollers because more powerful ones were too expensive. today digi-key will sell you a 500-megahertz i.mx rt1010 cortex-m7 from philips/nxp, with 128 kilobytes and dc/dc conversion on-chip, for under four dollars, roughly π dollars in fact https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/nxp-usa-inc/MIMXR.... home appliances and motor control are two of the application areas the datasheet claims it's 'specifically useful' for. unlike an 8051, you can program it in micropython and single-step it over a debugging umbilical, and once it's deployed, it can send you surveillance data over the internet. and you can get cheaper and better chips on lcsc if you can read datasheets in chinese
oops, did i say surveillance data
i meant telemetry. telemetry, telemetry, telemetry
for better or worse this unlocks a lot of temptation for manufacturers to put ridiculously powerful cpus in things where they only serve to cause headaches to the consumer
other comments in this thread have even pointed out non-evil ways this could make manufacturers more profitable
yeah, usually try to provide some kind of delay if the MCU can detect that it rebooted from a crash / watchdog timeout
as well you should, and also on restarting failed tasks, but maybe somebody forgot
maybe it's the error logging that crashed and then triggers ...
Software can have errors.
What an enlightening comment, thank you.
Why hasn't anyone mentioned a botnet yet? Those devices are perfect targets for Mirai clones.
(yes, you still cannot run a mailserver at home, currently because we live in the age of Internet of Shit).
This was the first thing that came to mind. Imagine a fleet of laundry machines each sending 3.7GB of data. That's the perfect way to run a DDOS, and nobody will ever notice.
Using a washing machine to launder data
Hopefully they were using a socks proxy.
You win
For some reason the scene in the mall from The Mitchell's Vs the machines popped into my head:
delicates, fluff n fold, carnage!
Most people in the reddit thread I saw seemed to assume botnet.
I'm not convinced though. That would assume that the washing machine was opening an external port on the user's router, which seems unlikely. I looked up a manual for one of the the washers which has the "ThinQ" feature and there's no mention of UPnP.
Don’t need an open port to be a useful part of a botnet
Yes, but if it's behind a NAT gateway, how is it going to get the initial infection? I know there are ways, but realistically none of them make sense in this context.
Yeah, you'd need someone on the network to be doing something like browsing the internet and coming across a malicious website capable of making requests to other nodes on the local network, or downloading something that gives an attacker userspace access to scan the local network.
Those situations strike me as super rare, unlikely, and unrealistic, too.
This is my assumption also.
For those who do not want WiFi on their appliances you still can get highly rated reasonably priced washing machines without WiFi, even from the companies that are putting WiFi in nearly everything.
E.g., I recently bought an LG WM3400CW washing machine for $650. On Consumer Reports it is tied for 3rd on the front loader ratings list. The LG 3900 and 4000 are tied for #1 with overall scores of 87, then the 3400, 8900, and 3600 tied for #3 with overall scores of 85.
Nearly every LG has WiFi nowadays, but not the 3400. Consumer Reports says it does but I think they probably got confused because it has LG's "Smart Diagnosis" which lets you get diagnostic information via LG's mobile app.
On models with WiFi Smart Diagnosis does indeed use WiFi.
On models without WiFi it uses sound. The washing machine plays sounds that sound similar to the sounds that acoustic modems made back in the pre-broadband internet days. Their mobile app listens to those and extracts the diagnostics data.
can't you just plug it in and never configure the wifi?
That’s not an option for me. I live in a rental unit in the SF Bay Area so the appliances are what they are. I cannot afford to buy because I was born into a disenfranchised generation. The LG washer/dryer I use removed all dials and most buttons for a “sleek” look so if I want simple settings such as “permanent press” for clothing beyond jeans and t-shirts I have to use the app to select “permanent press” mode. Otherwise I get “normal” which cooks my clothes. I get a notification on my watch when the cycle ends which is useful so I guess that’s nice.
I cannot afford to buy because I was born into a disenfranchised generation.
A bit off topic but..
You can probably afford to buy a house in almost every other part of the world though.
It's not like in the past everybody was able to buy a house in the "popular" places.
Generally with devices that are WiFi enabled but do not inherently need WiFi to do their main job there are a few possibilities.
• You do not have to configure WiFi to just use the device. It can do all the functions that type of device generally does, with a reasonable interface. You can configure WiFi to gain access to extra features, such as sending notifications or a friendlier interface.
• You have to configure WiFi to initially set up the device and/or to change some settings later, but it does not need to use WiFi during normal operation. WiFi can be used during normal operation for extra features.
• It needs WiFi during normal operation. Without WiFi you can only do at most a basic subset of normal operations.
For devices that do need WiFi it is worth distinguishing between devices that need to use the internet (directly or via an app on the local network) to function. There are devices that need WiFi because they use that to talk to a required app, but neither the device nor the app need internet.
This can be important when you have an internet outage. A device that requires WiFi but does not require internet can often continue to work when your internet is down as long as the outage is upstream from your home router.
For people whose reason for not wanting to configure WiFi is that they don't want the device sending their personal information to the device maker, it is not necessarily enough to just leave omit configuring WiFi. Allegedly some devices will look for open WiFi networks and use those if you don't explicitly configure a WiFi network.
As far as LG washing machines go I believe they fall under the first bullet item above.
On models without WiFi it uses sound. The washing machine plays sounds that sound similar to the sounds that acoustic modems made back in the pre-broadband internet days. Their mobile app listens to those and extracts the diagnostics data.
That's actually pretty cool! I think we should use this for more stuff to help usher in the R2-D2 future.
I don't know how other smart speakers (eg. Google Home/Alexa) do this, but the Yandex Station smart speaker uses this for initial wifi setup. You enter the Wifi password on your phone in their app, then your phone plays a series of sounds in which the SSID and the password are encoded, the speaker listens to that and connects to the network.
There was a company called chirp who offered an sdk for this, they also had fun proof of concept apps where you could share arbitrary data to people around you via sound. They eventually got bought by sonos and their offerings vanished...
A couple of notes:
1. If you must have an IoT device, favor zigbee.
2. Put your IoT devices on a segmented network that you've throttled. IoT devices neither need nor deserve privileged network access.
3. Probably don't use a consumer grade router if you know how to monitor network traffic.
4. That all being said, it feels unlikely that an IoT device would be exposed on a properly configured router to anything beyond vendor spyware.
It shouldn't even need internet access. IoT is a stupid name. It's just networking.
Uhhh, alright.
Anyhow, many devices require network access for useful functionality.
That network is ideally zigbee.
(It's also possible for Bluetooth to make up for some of the lost featureset for non-realtime applications, so I'd favor Bluetooth smart devices over wifi smart devices.)
Yes, Zigbee is the way to go. But the point is there shouldn't be any internet involved. Using the internet protocol on wifi is the stupidest way to do this kind of stuff and leads to dumb crap like your washing machine phoning home.
I mean, it's obviously a pretty good product in terms of effortlessly providing networking to a device in a way that an average home user can manage. Everyone has wifi.
That being said, a better architected device would probably just use Bluetooth and your smartphone as a controller. I don't think many average home users could tell the difference.
I have a label printer that works like that and I hate it.
I'm not sure what the better answer is now that I am trying to think of one. Maybe all I really hate is how shitty and lack of control the app is. It requires me to turn on location, and does who the f knows what on the network between the app and brother. I do not want to have to turn on location to use a label printer. No matter the tech excuse about detecting proximity, something has simply gone off the rails at that point.
But using Bluetooth as a local connection, I guess that's OK if the protocol were just open and I could choose the app to use with it.
Devices with web servers have that one big plus, which is that you use your browser, not someone else's browser.
Make the same sort of genericization on bluetooth and that would probably satisfy a good number of use cases.
I disagree with some of these points:
1. Z-wave is better, but Wifi can be fine in the right environment. Like, my weather station uses Wifi because it sends a few bytes of data to a server once a minute. No need for an additional protocol going on that interferes with everything else on 2.4GHz anyway. I also use Wifi for a sensor I put in my box that stores 3D printer filament to measure its humidity, so I know when to recharge the desiccant. An ESP32 wakes up every half hour, measures the humidity, and sends it over HTTPS to an InfluxDB instance in "the cloud". Its tiny lithium polymer battery lasts a year. It took me maybe an hour to design the hardware and write the software for it. Why do anything more complicated? Why bother with an esoteric protocol when you just want to use the Internet?
3. Consumer grade routers are great these days. I have a 10G WAN, 10G LAN, and Wifi6e on the router that Verizon provides with my service for free. To buy something like that myself, I'd be spending 700 or 800 dollars so that I can pretend to be a sysadmin on my day off. Why bother?
3. I don't think you're understanding what the contentions about consumer grade routers are.
Make no mistake: consumer grade routers are a massive security risk, and continue to be to this day.
They have no incentive to respond to and mitigate CVEs.
They frequently have hardwired credentials.
They don't have robust networking tools.
They are common targets for hacks for these reasons.
Regarding throughput, yes, 10gb is quite a bit. It'd probably be somewhat troublesome to get a home router with those kinds of physical ports (though CPU throughput would be trivial, see Intel's latest offerings. The n100 range can saturate any reasonable connection, including IPS, which you don't have).
It's just not necessary, though. I am a power user, software engineer, hosting ~50 docker containers, many with custom code on 300mbps. No slowdown. No saturation.
Furthermore, a cheap enterprise AP from eBay, even on wifi 5, is vastly superior to your Verizon AP.
I'm not a networking professional. I installed OpnSense and connected a ruckus AP. Done.
1. If you had a decent AP, zigbee interference wouldn't be an issue, wink emoji.
Well it's still better than a Chinese robotic vacuum cleaner with a bunch of cameras doing it.
iRobot, the robotic vacuum cleaner company that leaked photos of people on the toilet as viewed from the vacuum cleaners' cameras, is an American company. If I'm not mistaken they grew out of MIT.
That's rather cherry-picked.
The information you left out:
1. Those were test units, not purchased devices used by customers.
2. For consumer Roomba devices that include a camera: photographic data is not sent to iRobot for processing.
3. The test data for the images you mentioned was leaked by a 3rd party based in Venezuela.
4. These test devices were operated by employees and volunteers in exchange for rewards. They were aware that their image was being taken.
5. The devices also contained additional monitoring hardware attached to the device which is not present in the consumer models.
If anything this fiasco demonstrated:
(i) one of the weaknesses of outsourcing,
(ii) individuals taking part in testing should be mindful of their privacy,
(iii) test units should have user-purgeable test data (if this was not already included)
(iv) the importance of reading beyond a headline
Refs: (1) https://www.businessinsider.com/roomba-photos-recorded-bathr...
I read a headline, chose a position, and remember only the grossest of one-sided arguments with no chance for the other side to respond. Am I not now entitled to hold a strong opinion and try to influence others in the matter?
The data and the means to collect and deliver it, EXISTS AT ALL.
Cameras are just the lurid example. Audio is just as bad or even worse. Anything that can hear at all, knows everything that's going on in the whole property and even surrounding area.
And, practically any sensor of any type regardless of nominal intended purpose, can hear. In fact circuit boards with no actual sensors of any kind, can hear.
A light switch with no mobility and no apparent sensors like a camera or mic, not even a light sensor for automatic adjusting, can hear and report if someone is having a fight or having sex 4 rooms and 2 floors away.
600 items of "evidence" that Roomba doesn't misbehave means absolutely nothing.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i... For those that didn’t hear
It probably sends just sounds all the sounds
China is cheaper than making it in the USA with an onboard NSA chip. The assumption that China is spying on us is based ... I dunno but why buy it if you are worried?
LG washing machines are the bane of my existence today because we have a power outage that will last for quite a while, clothes inside the washer, in water, and a locked lid. So far I haven't any way to open the damn thing without taking a hammer to it.
Having a little UPS handy might be useful if you have power outages. You could just plug the machine into it to unlock it. Ridiculous, but an idea.
Definitely trying this. Brought our UPS to the hotel to charge it up.
Update: it worked! We were able to save our sopping filthy clothes. ;-)
ooof this is why I bought a generator after the last big outage. Well not unlucky enough to have clothes stuck in a washer but it was still damn cold for 2 days.
PSA:
If you buy any hardware that requires an internet connection to work return it as faulty.
Is this washer going to get software updates for it's entirely lifespan?
"It's behind NAT and a firewall".
Well if one of your other devices get infected and it gets infected now what?
"But NAT" you heard of STUN servers? It doesn't need to be in a botnet to be malicious... That's assuming your ISP router from 10 years ago without any updates isn't also vulnerable.
"But I keep an eye on my stuff" what about the 5billion other users in the world?
IOT is insecure garbage you shouldn't be putting in your house and you shouldn't let your family do so either.
What if I'm using a Unifi UDM router and all of my IoT devices are on a separate VLAN and the firewall prevents them from initializing connections to any other devices on the local network?
"But I keep an eye on my stuff" what about the 5billion other users in the world?
And I concider thr UDM to be IOT in and of itself but that is arguably an opinion not objectively true
what about the 5billion other users in the world?
Okay? I'm not sure how it affects me. Perhaps the people who don't "keep an eye on their stuff" are the ones who shouldn't get IoT devices, it's weird to say that nobody should get them
You are reinforcing a market driven by incorrect principles, it's got nothing to do with you. You are voting with your money and you are voting for something that shouldn't exist in the way it exists.
Easiest way to be a revolutionary is to not do something in this case. The market will self correct if you show them it's wrong. At this point you, an informed technical user, are doing a disservice to the uninformed public by continuing to support products that are arguably evil by design.
This should be illegal unless the data format is open, documented and user can turn it off or set their own endpoint or their preferred repairer.
Or you could just not buy one
Until every manufacturer does it. Such a daft take.
Or if it's a good washer otherwise, just don't hook up the wifi. That's what I did with my bosch. VLAN is a good solution too.
Assuming I'd be stupid enough to have a "smart" washing machine, in this case I would've immediately started capturing packets to determine what's going on. Apparently it was a misreporting(!) in the router's firmware, but the opaqueness of modern technology (and the ignorance it tends to perpetuate) can be very infuriating.
Meanwhile my washing machine has zero electronics and is completely predictable and obvious in operation.
Zero electronics? What are you using? A washboard and a mangle?
Mid-century Whirlpool top-loader. Electric but not electronic.
The router was misreporting network activity. The machine wasn't sending 3.7GB a day. It says so in the article.
That is incorrectly reported.
No, it's not.
In a follow-up post a day after his initial Tweet, Johnie noted “inaccuracy in the ASUS router tool,”
I created a wifi network for most of the smart appliances at home. It's nice that Unifi hardware lets you choose some of the higher-level wifi protocol options per-network, so I have a modern roaming-enabled 802.11 5GHz network for most devices, and the legacy 2.4GHz one for the fridge and stove to make use of.
Most routers have a "guest network" - that's where all my smart devices live.
If I even connect them.
If I recall correctly, his washer was mining Bitcoin.
you do not recall correctly
The newest form of money laundering.
I have both an LG washer and dryer, about 2 years old I’m unable to connect the dryer to WiFi at all (UniFi). The washer does nothing useful on WiFi. All I want is them to connect to HomeAssistant or HomeKit and send a notification when they finish their cycle. I am super disappointed in LG.
I would suggest using a tasmota smart plug and check energy consumption to determine if program has finished.
Like another user mentioned, I'd recommend getting a smart plug. I use the TP Link Tapo plugs with the energy monitoring.
There was a post on Ozbargain that had a better automation than what I was previously using and works really well.
3.7GB seems like a lot, but modern appliances are highly efficient, a lot of those bits just circulate between the laundry and the router to cool down between wash cycles ... people just don't understand how much data they use when hand washing clothes, sloshing gigabytes down the drain...
(after https://twitter.com/meekaale/status/1744807035454079079 )
It's probably just retrying constantly because it is being blocked by the pihole. It's probably just trying to send a few kb.
It's most likely just a SOCKS proxy. (Credit to SwiftOnSecurity)
It's the Russians.
They've run out of their own washing-machine chips to re-use in their missiles, so they've found a way to hack into washing-machines all over the world and use those millions of chips to guide their missiles instead.
It would be a sad day for ballistics if you needed 3.7 GBs of data per day to guide a missile.
I have an LG washer and dryer with wifi capability.
WHY THE FUCK DO I WANT THEM CONNECTED TO MY NETWORK
Yup, doesn't make any sense at all.
An LG washing machine owner and self-confessed fintech geek has asked the Twitterverse why his smart home appliance ate an average of 3.66GB of data daily.
What about non-techies?! How would they notice and react to such data harvesting behaviors in their homes' appliances, computers, phones, gadgets? I believe there must be a bare minimum of self-awareness to deal with the ever-evolving digital world we live in.
Awareness is the last thing the companies who create these things want users to have.
My rule for these types of appliances is hook up long enough to get any firmware updates and then unplug and wait and see if the machine functions normally, then it is likely to never see my network again. I suppose they could still use 4g but I doubt most companies will do that.
The way I see it, it's a washing machine. It shouldn't need firmware updates.
Yet another reminder I need to segment off my network. Have a VLAN with just IoT junk and severely restrict access to the local network and internet.
If I'm hand washing the stuff, I'm probably posting 6 gb an hour on Instagram so this seems about right to me.
According to UniFi, my LG washer and dryer have each used 15.9MB in the last month. LG Dishwasher used 3.8MB. I keep all IOT devices like these on client-isolated WiFi on their own VLAN with a speed limit of 250Kbps. They don’t have access to all the bandwidth they can eat, so they can’t participate meaningfully in a DDOS attack when compromised. 250Kbps is enough for “laundry is done” and “grill is pre-heated” push notifications to squeak through.
I had a similar scare with an Amazon smart plug. Later the heavy user was another device. Turns out AsusWRT / asusMerlin has a pretty severe accounting bug . My router was running the same software as this author
While I get the appeal of having networked devices that you can access from anywhere, I want local control for everything. Sure, a cloud option on top is nice, but local first!
I feel that the current solution to "control from anywhere" is the laziest and most privacy invasive. Also, when XYZ company shuts down there service in 2 years and abandons your product, you might not even be able to use it anymore. What a waste.
Well, why guess. Check the outgoing destination of the traffic on the router.
When cryptocurrency tumbling gets literal...
Edit to add: I also just realized I have an LG that does have wifi that I've never used, which may now get used for entirely different reasons...
I buy asus having a math bug or something, it is also possible those are constant retries on something failing. I put a pihole on my parents home network and in a month their roku had some stupid amount of blocked attempts, in the tens of thousands.
For those who want to IoT-ify their washing machine, I've had great success with a power meter like a TP-Link HS110.
It's connected to a power strip with a switch so that it can be turned off when not in use (which BTW would also be a solution for the owner of the LG machine).
Due to the ability to read it out with Python it sends me an Email when the washing is done and I can also track the power consumption in Grafana. It also shows a "finished X minutes ago" message on some HA-like always-on tablet dashboard.
That's why we have bufferbloat.
Which OS are these machines running? Are we still doing RTOSes here or have we moved to a full Yocto linux image?
New: data-efficient washing machine. Only 90Gb per load!! Buy now!
Stupid laundry machine spends all day on reddit downvoting my jokes and memes.
Trash SEO article. You have to sleuth through a page of info and ads to glean a paragraph of inconclusive content. Looking at you, Google.
The software was replaced by an AI, and it's watching YouTube videos on how to do it's job.
Title clickbait. Please remove article.
If I'm being charitable, I assume most of these IoT devices that could just use local-only networking for basic functionality do it through a central (Internet) server for 'security'.
If the device just opened a simple TCP/HTTP server on your network for phone app access, there would be dozens of breathless articles from the typical low-quality technology sites claiming that your washing machine can easily be monitored by hackers. By hitting a specific LG domain and verifying/pinning certs, the vendor can ostensibly secure that central API and easily make updates if issues are found.
It sure seems like it would be much cheaper to have the device simply connect to Wifi and be able to respond to simple TCP packets (TP-LINK smart switches do this) rather than build all this centralized infrastructure that costs money in perpetuity.
I just wonder which of LG's competitors ordered this nonsense.
Is anyone else surprised at the ~70GB per day usage (assuming 3.7GB is 5% of total usage)? That would exceed the 1.28TB data cap on my ISP.
It's all Mime fellatio video?
[dupe]
More discussion here with even the person who reported it posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38930507
I have a LG washing machine and LG dryer that are wifi connected. I keep 90 days of netflow data. Both have used about 10mb total over the last 90 days, 100% on port 8883 tcp back to AWS EC2 owned IP addresses. Typically less than 100kb/day with a high of 2mb/day and a low of 12kb/day.
Looking at the calendar, this corresponds to days we ran loads vs idle no use days. I'm okay with this level of data usage.
I'm totally with you, except a notification that it's finished would actually be really helpful.
It's apparently possible to track a washing machine's progress with a smart switch that monitors power draw; I've got one lying around so might try to implement that soon, to complement my hacky RPi-Ring-doorbell-announcer :)
Wait an hour. It’s done.
Our washing machine offers various programs between 30 minutes and 2 hours and 40 minutes.
Yes, it's not hard to set an alarm, except the timing on the washing machine is unreliable (I've lost count of how many times I've set an alarn with a few minutes extra and still had to wait longer.) It would just be nice to have a little notification - making that chore 1% pleasanter. :)
They all make a sound when done, you could set up a SoC with a microphone to listen to it. Or monitor power draw. Many ways to do it externally.
My worry would be that you'd have to do some diagnostics on the audio to determine the actual sound. The loudest noise my washer makes is the spin/rinse cycle, which is right before the sound it makes when it's done. You can't just key off of "loud noise" and I don't know how hard setting up to listen to specific frequencies for alerting is.
Fast fourier transform on the audio would give you volume for each frequency range. That probably requires some DIY hardware & programming.
But a power metering plug would be a cheap off-the-shelf solution. Find the ones pre-flashed with ESPhome for ~$15-20, find thresholds for ON/OFF with a bit of trial and error, and you're done.
Yea, I'm for sure that it's possible, but it's harder than just getting a sensor for noises larger than some Db.
Then key off of "noise, noise, noise, noise....no noise, no noise, no noise". Done. Can maybe even attach a vibration sensor to the machine...
Even easier than that: Amazon's Echo devices can be set up to detect beeps.
I have one in my kitchen, near the laundry room, and one in my home office. When things beep in that area, the one in the office says "Beep, beep." (I could have it do other stuff, but this was simple.)
It works for laundry. And the dishwasher. And the Instant Pot. And any other beepin' thing. It's just a remote beep detector.
(And if it detects beeping for 2 or more minutes, it notifies my phone, since that presumably means that my house is on fire.)
My dryer will straight up lie to me and say “20 minutes” for anything between 0 and 60 minutes. I think it realizes the clothes are still too damp and just keeps running, but whatever differential equation it’s using to predict time remaining seems flawed.
When that happens to me, my solution is to pause the cycle, clear the lint screen, and resume. Lint screen is always cleaned before a cycle, but sometimes a single load produces enough lint to be a problem.
And having written that out, now I want a notification from my dryer when it’s not making progress as fast as it expects…
My dryer timer is reasonably accurate, but on my washing machine the last two minutes are like the last two minutes of a football game.
Yep - ours seems to take 0-10 minutes longer than it predicts at the start.
You are still dependent on a smart gadget but with less quality.
My washing machine is a liar, I'll start a 3 hour program and in 10 minutes it'll say 2h20min remaining. Sometimes I check up on it and it says 20 minutes remaining, but it then takes another 30-40 minutes until it's actually done.
Can confirm, it's what I do. I can even detect which part of the cycle it is in using plain Home Assistant template sensors.
It's crude but it works. Detecting washing vs not is trivial, but I went the extra mile, looking at the power history and analysed the thing visually to get the general profile of each part, taking into account peaks, throughs, noise to have some unambiguous rules. Some are wrong if taken in isolation but taking the order of priority into account, flattening the result with if/elif in a single state sensor it becomes correct. That strategy is also very easy to debug visually with a entity history list in the dashboard.
I could probably also detect error states (which I had a few, like filter clogged with lint preventing water drain) as in this case the panel stays lit with the error code basically forever VS a normal cycle has it lit but ultimately it shuts down to deeper sleep states once it's done.
I really enjoy making dumb devices smart, it's a nice decoupling too and means I can just change e.g washing machine if it dies, adjust a few values below, and be all the merrier.
(nixos config, but it's a 1:1 to YAML and you get the idea)
I guess it might be quite fun to graph that and overlay the graph of the current cycle over an original benchmark - it might indicate when, for example, the heating element was no longer working as efficiently.
I imagine that would get complicated pretty quickly. Water takes significantly longer to heat up in the winter just because it's so much colder to begin with.
Similarly basically all washing machines today weight laundry and stuff then tune cycle duration, amount of water, drying time (if applicable), etc...
Sometimes I feel a little dumb here. I don't know what kind of master of evil would wake a day and think about hacking the vault that keeps their underwear safe and sound, but I love it.
Now is time to add "flamethrower_mode", lock online and send mail offering the regain_access_to_your_precious_cozy_pajamas code for a fair fee, and became the hidden kings of the undieworld with our "pay_per_brief" program. Muahahah!
My Miele washer and dryer send me notifications when done.
That is, I think, the only valid use case. I have an AEG washer that does some voodoo to decide wash times and only shows the estimate at the start, then it weighs the clothes, looks at how dirty they are and so on. The washer is two floors down and I never know when it’s actually done. As a side note, I think my washer is “smart” ready, meaning it has all the electronics already in and the panel has the lights already installed, just that it’s not activated because a didn’t pay another 100 euros for it.
I guess another use case would be measuring water and energy consumption but I doubt that people paying top dollar for these appliances are the type to keep an eye on such things.
I sometimes use it to start the machine remotely when I'm away the whole day, so I can time it to be ready when I get home and can switch over the clothes to the tumbler immediately.
"but I doubt that people paying top dollar for these appliances are the type to keep an eye on such things."
Some people do - to brag in their circles (and to their own consciousness) how green they are. So then you can go flying around the world for fun with a clear consciousness ...
Even dumber: I sense when the washer door has been closed longer than 70 minutes (the longest cycle is just shy of that), and start making a loud noise, which continues until the door is opened.
Simple as that, no wireless components required. I simply leave the door open when the machine isn't running.
People want notifications so they knew immediately when the laundry is ready: Either to take it out before it gets musty, or to start another load as soon as possible.
I have the very simple one. I can hear it across the apartment, because the spinning is noticeable. The actual washing is even louder.
You can use Bluetooth for that though, and it would probably be cheaper.
Bluetooth requires a paired device and has range issues.
I'd see the internet connected route as useful for anyone in the household to be able to check notification without having to pair all the phones (and then what if you don't want it on a phone), and getting the notification when outside. Now it would better with a home server dealing with the data, but we're so far from that.
In general I see bluetooth as fine for personal wearables (headphones) and not great when a device is shared (bathroom scales, smart plugs, switches etc)
ISTR you can use a Bluetooth beacon without pairing. Range might be mitigated by using a decent antenna, but might run into legal power limits.
This is the best approach, if you can do it. Keep the devices dumb and add in whatever modules you need on top to make them as "smart" as you want them to be.
Some Ikea stuff does it halfway. Local-only Zigbee, so it's not exactly dumb, but if you want to go online you can buy a gateway.
Definitively possible. It’s what I do with my dumb washing machine. Just have your home automation tool of choice notify you if power draw moves below 5w or something.
We live in a smaller appartment building with a shared laundry room with two machines. They both say exactly how many minutes the laundry has left so we just set our timer for the last machine. They take between 35 and 55 minutes per run. We can run 6-8 machines in the five hour slot we can book. Since they slowly get desynced depending on what program you run, there is no need to get a notification. You have 20 minutes to sit until the next machine needs taking care of :-)
NSA filters the power to sensitive computers.
You can exfiltrate encryption keys if you can monitor power usage.
https://www.securityweek.com/platypus-hackers-can-obtain-cry...
That link doesn't support what you're saying.
Someone might be able to do that if they're monitoring power usage directly on the CPU with >microsecond precision for an extended period of time, not with a power metering plug that gives a fairly inaccurate reading at the wall every second or two, after having gone through the power supply transformers, rectifiers, capacitors, and containing noise from every other component in your device.
I get significantly cheaper electricity at night ($0.12 vs > $0.50/kwh, stupid California). Being able to schedule saves money, not that WiFi is necessarily required.
Did you check how much power your washer uses? Mine uses 0.4 kwh so you'd be saving 15.2 cents per load. Not really worth the hassle IMO.
You've neglected to include the energy used to heat the water.
Yes, using ~cold water - washer does not have hot water inlet and using "daily" programme.
n.b. it's pretty new albeit cheap generic Midea front loader
The dryer is more interesting
A lot of washing machines remember their previous state when the power goes out.
You can use this to your advantage using a smart switch: start the wash cycle, turn off the power straight after. When you turn the power back on at a scheduled time (using the smart switch), the washing machine will pick up where it left off (at the beginning of the cycle).
Also a lot of them just have a timer built-in anyway.
Careful about switching large inductive loads on a smart switch, the ones I’d looked at weren’t rated for big inductive loads (like the motor inside a washing machine or a dryer).
Inductive loads are less of a problem for alternating current. (Still a bit of an issue, though).
I was thinking more, turn the switch off within a few seconds of starting the cycle. Usually nothing happens in that time other than the drain pump doing a quick cycle to remove any residual water.
This is exactly what I do with my dishwasher. I load the dishes at night, start the cycle and immediately switch off the smart switch while it is just trying to empty any residual water. The smart switch turns on every night at 3 am and the washer resumes with whatever settings I had chosen. By the time I'm awake the washing has just finished.
How much electricity is your washing machine using?
Our washing machine and dryer are networked (Bosch). Current benefits are secondary reasons and I could live without them:
- Notifications when done: Nice, but a beeper would work, too.
- Select program via App, based on what I put into the machine: Occasionally useful when I'm not sure. Also, I can put in my wife's cloths and let her pick the correct program (I did that wrong once and we both don't want that to happen anymore).
- The dryer can load the correct settings based on the washing machine's last cycle. Very convenient.
What's planned (primary reason): Our photovoltaic is also networked, so the plan is to eventually start the cycle when we get energy for essentially free. This saves us money and allows us to use more clean energy instead of the grid mix. I guess the non-smart variant also supports this by setting the "finished in x hours".
What I don't like: Our smart home is fully offline, except for these two appliances. I thought there was a local API, but last time I checked I could not find the info anymore. Also, they sometimes lose connectivity to their cloud (not sure why, maybe hick-ups after that archaic 24h disconnect) and need to be restarted to reconnect.
Edit: Ah, mind we did first replace the old, power-wasting dryer with the new one (amortized after ~2y). Later when the old washing machine started failing, we got this one (which is also better suited for our needs, regarding size; and generally uses less water IIRC). I wouldn't have replaced good units for the sake of smartness. Obviously we could have saved some money by getting more basic appliances, but we had good timing on offers.
I'm guessing this was mostly the reason it has any connectivity at all. If they can convince you to run an app they can start getting all kinds of data off your cell phone 24/7 if they wanted to, even if the app requests no permissions at all.
Living in Europe the GDPR applies, and with Bosch there is a better chance that they stick to it compared to other brands. Of course I don't know for sure.
The app transferred 1.56MB of data in 3.5 months. While the could include lots of data that I don't want them to have, at least it's not a massive amount indicating non stop tracking.
Ultimately you're right, and I would love to have the two appliances fully local (the other smart things don't even have Internet access, thanks to awesome projects such as Tasmota or Valetudo), including fancy program selection.
All of these use cases are a huge argument for "home hub" standards and aggregation and (user controlled) filtering.
None of which would happen because then "the product" would stop letting the exploitation happen.
I have an LG Washer/Dryer with smart functions.
As others have said, the notifications are useful, but you can also track the wash/dry cycle and see what it's done so far, what is left and the estimated remaining time.
I like it because the smart features are optional and are genuinely useful.
My sister has such a smart washer and funds these same features useful.
I had to helo her get it connected to wifi - it would not stay connected. Turns out she was on the same channel as literally all her neighbors.
When I was in college, the machines in my dorm building’s laundry room would send you an SMS when the cycle finished. It was super handy, and would be awesome to have if your home is multi-level (or the machine is tucked away where no one can hear it scream)
So we have three laundry rooms here where I live, and they were all managed by CSC ServiceWorks until recently. When I first moved in, CSC had an amazing system setup, whereby you could go to their website and see a real-time animation of all the machines in the room, their current status, and their remaining time. This page updated very rapidly and always showed accurate information, including any machines that were out of service.
Therefore, it was very easy for me to put together some laundry loads, and then navigate to that website and see exactly whether I'd be able to go downstairs and start my loads immediately, or how long I'd need to wait until machines were freed up for my purposes.
Then they enshittified it. They took away the central payment kiosk and installed individual card readers on each machine. These card readers had some unholy mix of Bluetooth and WiFi on them and the new app was completely incompatible with the Android tablet I had at the time. Apparently it was mandatory to have both Internet and BT access before you could even start a machine anymore. To add insult to injury, they deprecated the public status website and walled up the status reports inside the app. In fact, you couldn't even get a report until you'd paid to start one of the machines, thus invalidating my old strategy of proactively checking for availability.
Then there was a protracted battle between landlady and CSC whereby there were many malfunctions and accusations about whose responsibility it was. The pandemic struck, and there was some third-party disinfecting service that was supposed to be sanitizing machines, but left huge gobs of lint and detritus behind them all anyway.
Eventually it came to a head, and the landlady severed their contract with CSC and brought in a new service company. They have apps and cash preloading and whatever and you know what? I stopped using the laundry room entirely. Now I bring my clothes to a Wash & Fold service, and have it professionally cleaned, because doing laundry is too strenuous for me anymore. Problem solved!
I have a smart plug on my washing machine and dryer which I use to try and identify when the cycles have finished.
It doesn't work great, I'd much prefer a direct API to send a notification when the machine says it's actually finished.
You can buy smart vibrations sensors for that. No vibrating should mean it’s done, unless it lets the clothes soak- I have no idea, washed clothes hundreds of times but I’ve never looked to see what the washer actually does
Progress tracking, diagnostics, temperature tracking, load unevenness alerting, remote disable if broken, etc.
Here’s the only terrible use case I’ve found; my Samsung washer and dryer now interrupt movies on my Samsung TV to let me know when they complete a cycle.
Really? “Hey your washing is done, come move it to the dryer.”
“Hey, it’s been a year since you replaced your filters.”
Most people I know who have the connected "white" appliances are mostly interested in the reported resource usage. I have a connected LG dishwasher, and it's possible to have it report water usage, electricity usage, and other stats to home automation hubs (like home assistant) for aggregation.
I'm not so into that, but I know people who buy connected domestic things for that very reason.
Zwave & zigbee + HA or another home automation platform > some wifi connected data mining crap with vendor lockin for turning off lights across the room.
Notifications are my main use case. The huge gaping downside is that they removed every dial and most buttons so unless you want a “normal” cycle you have to use an app to select the cycle. It’s neat that there are specific cycles for specific things and all, but not even having a “permanent press” option selectable without an app is incredibly stupid.
Well, clearly if manufacturers want to continue making their machines less like they used to, they'll need all the analytics they can get to figure out which A/B tested engineered failures result in the lowest continued usage.
I could imagine a situation like, "I will be out all day and only return in the late evening - if I start the wash cycle when leaving, it will sit wet in the machine all day. But if I start it when I return, I will have to stay awake to put it in the dryer. I'd like to start it on a timer so the wash cycle finishes just as I return." But that's both pretty contrived and most non-smart washing machines can do that with a timer anyway.