Smart ovens shouting out to servers in Russia and China

The device in the article (an internet connected oven) is checking for internet connectivity by pinging: google.com, baido.cn yes, and yandex.ru every 5 minutes.<p>My guess is this isn&#x27;t about sending data to those sites, but rather using relying on high availability urls that you can connect to from most countries.<p>Is this bad engineering? Probably. Is it nefarious? Probably not.<p>One thing to keep in mind is that the companies making these smart appliances do not make their money from the internet connected features. Internet connectivity may be enough for to push a buyer over the edge or for the device to qualify for some rebate.<p>The manufactures make them from selling ovens. This means they probably don&#x27;t have the best software development team or processes.

The real wtf here, I mean once you get past how stupid it is that your oven is now connected to the internet. Is why does it need to check if the internet is available? There are two cases, it can reach it&#x27;s api endpoint and will work, or it can not reach it&#x27;s api endpoint and will not work. The availability of several well known domains has no effect on this. The only reason I can think of is so you can have a different error message for &quot;the oven service is down&quot; and &quot;unable to access the oven service&quot;. Even then you only need to make that check when the api access fails.<p>Tangently: I don&#x27;t quite buy the prewarming use case, the only halfway legitimate use case for a internet connected oven is if you are the type to worry if you left the oven on.

We have a simple rule: do not buy anything with wifi that does not actually need to have wifi. Which is most things. I&#x27;ve survived my entire life with dumb appliances. Maybe I am just becoming a cranky old man, but there aren&#x27;t any smart &#x27;features&#x27; that seem worth the surveillance and security hassles, as well as the eventual obsolescence and failure of the smart components, which will only serve to shorten the useful lifespan of the appliance. Are we being promised support for 20 or more years of service?

I fucking hate the &quot;It&#x27;s because of security&quot; excuse companies default to so god damn much. Really burns my hide. 99% of the time it isn&#x27;t. It&#x27;s just an excuse to cover lazy or poor product management and engineering.<p>I&#x27;ll at least give this company credit for giving an example, but like usual, the response is flimsy. There&#x27;s almost always much better ways to handle situations these companies claim they&#x27;re covering.<p>I recently discovered I couldn&#x27;t change my email address at Target.com. When I asked the rep why, they responded &quot;It&#x27;s because of security.&quot; I told them, &quot;I know you have nothing to do with the policy, but please let your managers know there&#x27;s better ways to handle this. One thing you guys can do is never again hire an MFA as a CISO in the future.&quot;

Wow… Russia AND China… that’s like the axis of evil, dude!

Why would an oven need Internet access? You physically need to open the oven and put stuff in it and then take it out. Food over IP is not a thing yet.<p>Unless it has an internal camera with which you can observe the food while it&#x27;s cooking, I see no advantage of using an Internet connected oven.<p>edit: okay, preheat, fair - that&#x27;s actually useful

I spent last weekend moving my access point behind an opnsense firewall so that I can see what&#x27;s happening. Things having wifi is grand...but needs to work locally.<p>I&#x27;ve also had one case already where it works locally (HA) but eventually the device hits a overflow issue if it can&#x27;t resolve the phone home address.

My Siemens dishwasher is smart and it’s got a nice feature where from my phone I can set it to start or finish washing at a certain time.<p>Except, if there is a power failure it forgets the schedule. At the moment in South Africa we lose power 2-4 times a day for 2 hours at a time due to load shedding (useless government and power utility). This powerloss scenario is not a rare edge case here.<p>It’s a pity because I would like to schedule the dishwasher to start after the power is due back (the load shedding is on a mostly reliable schedule), but with this loss of memory, that doesn’t work.<p>Relatedly, on my oven (and the AEG one at my previous place) you can’t turn them on until you set the clock, as someone who lives where there are multiple power outages a day, this seems like the most counter productive “feature” ever, is it actually useful in some way?

This article got me thinking about the use of the term smart. I&#x27;m not sure why we call the every connected device smart. For the most part they&#x27;re connected devices not smart devices. Smart to me means more than just being able to be controlled remotely. I think this is likely been pushed by marketing, but just because corporations say it&#x27;s &#x27;smart&#x27;, does that mean we should all blindly start following suit.<p>On a bigger note, we probably do this blindly for lots of products and services, trust and use the terms we&#x27;re sold by entities that are mostly only interested in one thing...<p>I&#x27;m as guilty as anyone, bit it would be good if we wised up to this stuff a bit more.

House fire as a service...

My oven and refrigerator pump out RF beyond the range of my RF meter.<p>I found the wifi chips in both and pulled them out. There was no way to turn them off through the interface for either.

You know what&#x27;s much worse? When I was playing with blocking shady countries via pfSense, I found that making a NVIDIA GeForce Now account uses .cn servers by default.<p>Why?

You can supposedly keep the internet alive with just this method of using your stove...<p>If you want more look up doomsday survival plan using stoves.

Yeah, an oven you can turn on remotely, I&#x27;m glad it&#x27;s secure but that really should not be a thing, no no and no again.

Now the entire CCP knows I just burnt this souffle, my god!

Those spies are going to know I burned the roast!

Tbh as American should I be more worried if my data is shared with some far away government agent who is probably pronouncing my name incorrectly or our domestic favourites NSA or FBI? I believe the current paranoia about China completely overshadows the real danger for american citizens, but maybe that is the intention.