If what's needed is the ability to monitor them, then why are these things remote-controllable?!

Obviously read-only access to some sensor is not the same attack surface as having the ability to remotely shut-down the refrigeration.

There is value in nuance and debating whether the solution should be scaled down to say a store ( or only available on local vlan or something), but I think the value of discussing that is kinda diminishing, when, apparently, the controls for all stores can be done from the same hit.

But to address your specific point:

being able to monitor does not ( or at least should not ) automatically equal put it on the web

This still shouldn't be online. They can be networked, if you need remote monitoring, but that's different from being online (at least in my definition).

Obviously it's a question of cost and convenience, and just dumping your appliance on the internet and make it phone home is going to be the cheaper option. If you want security those appliances goes on a separate network, which cannot reach the internet.

<< ignore the incredibly smart people at major international corporations and their strategies.

Ignore may be a tad strong. I am merely asking for hardware that is subject to my control to be within my control. I think somewhere along the way executives got a little to comfortable saying 'they will buy what we give them'.

More to the point, maybe there is exactly too many smart people with agendas that don't seem to align well with my current needs vis-a-vis fridges:

I want something that keeps things cool with minimum of fuss and does not die upon update.

In short, that executive should be fired as they are not doing their job: they are actively undermining their own market.

> This kind of inspector gadget "smart tech" lunacy has infected basically all consumer products. It's got to stop.

Absolutely, and this is why I refuse to connect any home appliances to the Internet. I have a limited number of Zigbee devices, and they are managed through Home Assistant and can't access the Internet.

> When was the last time you changed the temperature setting on your fridge or freezer?

Then again when was the last time you opened your freezer hundreds of times during one day, letting humid air in and building ice at an accelerated rate? These units actively heat up the back of the freezer (evaporator plate) nightly to quickly melt the ice without warming up the food.

There is no reason to directly trigger it remotely but they probably work on a customizable schedule, to account for different store opening times, timezones, or freezer size and model. The hackers could target that schedule to make the defrost last longer.

well they weren't shut down. just adjusted. and the adjustment range apparently went up all the way to +50 centigrade...

Perhaps they’re motivated by Europe’s support for Ukraine and the recent data center attacks in Russia?

Building reps for hacking all the electric cars and starting battery fires

I think Russia is doing random stuff of the kind, my understanding is it’s just about sawing general chaos, not doing a strong action that would be discussed at a diplomatic level.

Do you know how much that costs?!? What about our executive bonuses?

That's way the non-smart walk-in coolers work; every 12 hours they turn off the fans and heat the cooling element for about 15 minutes to melt any ice that's built up on it.

Ice anywhere else is treated as a separate problem and turning the cooler off to fix it is not typically an available option.

> Connected vehicles are the example that terrifies me the most.

Fortunately, there is a straightforward solution. Find the cellular modem fuse and pull it. You now have a modern, but fully offline car. Security aside, connected cars are absolutely awful for your privacy.

Leased lines, MPLS, custom routing setups, hell just a VPN that fails closed. There are so many options for doing this, all more secure that just slapping a device online behind whatever router the cheapest ISP gave you.

The problem is that many of these setups are put behind essentially consumer connections, but with a better support contract or simply fitted with a 5G modem and a SIM card from the cell provider with the cheapest plan.

Building a WAN isn't magic, but it does require working with (competent) ISPs and paying the higher cost.

Remote control does not mean "has a public IP address."

Yes you might need to be able to centrally monitor and manage things but that should be happening on a private network.

Surely, there must be a way that does not force the devices onto world wide web..

I'm interested to know how many "legacy" controllers no longer patched by the manufacturer are operating solar and wind farms today.

If it's a lot, maybe the manufacturers should be compelled to provide security patches if remote control is required to operate their products. For the sake of national security, of course.

* Fridges are welcome to send a panic message.

* Fridges are read-only through their remote interface.

Both of these can be true if you must connect them to the internet.

That's funny, last I checked my fridge keeps food reliably cold with no internet connection, and most supermarkets have people around all the time to notice such a failure, a plan around such a failure, and expect to have such a failure periodically since fridges break down anyway.

Meanwhile you can use analog gauges if you need perfect max temperature monitoring.

That's what always pisses me off about this. Someone brought up "Hey, if we connect this to the internet to enable that feature, someone will start hacking fridges and hurting our customers, and I don't think the stupid page with a temperature graph on it is worth that tradeoff", and some ass told them to get over it and implement it.

Raymond Chen used to write about feature development at Microsoft, specifically how every single new feature idea started from a negative position, since it requires support and testing and engineering and thought, and has future repercussions, so it's often not a good idea to just add box checking features.

Microsoft believed this in the 90s. For things like UI functionality. That's the effort and thought and restraint required to have a consistent UI, for things to be thought out.

Somehow, between then and now, the industry threw all that thought away, and now everything has 400 totally unused, half implemented, utterly broken features.

Why are we here? "Move fast and break things" just breaks everything eventually. Someone, somewhere, eventually has to fix stuff.

Honestly, if you ever come to Cyprus and get good fries from the potatoes here, freshly cut and fried…

The Belgian fries have no leg to stand on, nothing. Sorry. Just my opinion :) but I’ve been a life long fries lover from Germany - and these beat out all other fries I had so far in Europe at least by a wide margin :P

I know it wasn’t your article but I wanted to spread this important knowledge to the world!!