this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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Amusing, clever, but extremely fake.
This is a GE Café CFE28/CYE22 refrigerator and it definitely does not run Windows. You can use its little LCD screen as a digital photo frame, though, and there's a USB port for that purpose tucked beneath the lower edge of the bezel under the buttons. Somebody's just made an image of this fake "Windows update" screen and put it in the photo frame rotation.
You may be right, however windows iot does in fact exist, and this is what the update screen looks like.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/windows-iot
still more tech than it needs
Don't know why the downvotes. You are absolutely correct.
My fridge doesn't even have a screen, but it has wifi. Wifi!! You do one thing. You are a box designed to keep my food cold. I set the temperature, and I forget that exists.
Anyway, we bought it when we bought our house. The previous owner offered to include all the appliances in the contract so it was nice to not have to buy any appliances. But that refrigerator stays OFF my network.
I know the real objective is mining your data and acting as an insecure node for identity thieves to access. But what is its stated objective? I have no idea why anyone would think that is a positive.
Indeed, you're better off buying a dumb fridge and attaching your own iot device amiright
but think of all the frosty bitcoins you could be mining!
It just sits there, silently plotting revenge...
“The minute I see an unprotected WiFi your personal data is soooo screwed.”
— the fridge, probably
I'm OK with it for some things tbh. With a wifi fridge for example I can know if it stops working and the temp starts rising before I have a fridge full of spoiled food. With an oven I can know if I left the house with it still running. With the washer/dryer I can get notified when I need to fold the cloths before they get wrinkled. I think connected appliances have more useful applications than people give them credit for.
You don't need a wifi fridge for this. My wife and I manage this via Home Assistant and cheap Switchbot sensors. Fully self contained on my network, nothing to phone home anywhere.
The rest of the things you listed are kind of silly. If you left the oven on, that sucks, but you're already gone. Also, who sets the oven on before leaving the house? That's just an odd... like, really odd thing to do. Like, senility/dementia level odd, at which point what difference is a notification? And the dryer thing... well, that's nothing a 15 minute wrinkle cycle doesn't already solve on a dumb dryer.
"not that iot device, use this one instead and get less function out of it"
Wrinkle cycles don't work as well as getting the laundry while it's still hot. It reduces it some but not as much as getting the laundry when it's still hot. It also wastes a fair bit of energy to run the dryer for another 15 minutes instead of just telling me when it's done.
And it's not a dementia thing, it's an adhd+generalized anxiety thing. Piece of mind is pretty valuable to me and mine.
That's a fair take. I dunno, the potential security vulnerabilities outweigh any possible gains for me with most IOT devices, and I feel smart appliances are just more complicated to fix and more easily break down. Plus, the last thing I need is my washer to brick or my fridge to stop working from a botched firmware update.
Definitely a valid choice, just not one that's for everyone. I'm content that they're on a separate IoT network and can't reach into my main network and will make that trade for the QoL improvements that it buys me.
Something that might happen once in ten years isn't worth the additional security surface exposure. IMO
I have a small child. It's not just mechanical failure. Then again, I've got a separate network for IoT things. They can't see anything by each other and their controller. Unfortunately, most of the IoT appliances do NOT like this setup.
A built in alarm sound would achieve the same goal without running the risk of your fridge becoming part of a botnet
Alarm is going to have to be pretty loud for me to hear it many miles away.
The notification on your phone or whatever also isn't super useful if you're many miles away.
Sure it is. I have family friends and neighbors.
Yeah, honestly I don't want to have to stress about something that can't be fixed and might otherwise ruin a day out or vacation.
If my dog dies don't tell me till I'm back from vacation kinda thing.
You can also do that with a simple smart plug with energy monitoring. You can get a 4 pack for $35.
"not that iot device, use this one instead and get less function out of it"
You can get 4 ZigBee smart plugs with energy monitoring for $35. These are not IOT devices and if you just want to know if the fridge is running, these will do that, with the added benefit of allowing you to leave the fridge's WiFi disconnected, which is a security gain.
The zwave alliance disagrees that it's not an IoT platform (https://z-wavealliance.org/ Literally the title of the page calls it IoT). Also, how much power it consumes doesn't necessarily tell you if the fridge is running and it certainly doesn't tell you what the temperature inside the refrigerator is. Even a compressor pump zero refrigerant still inside the loop can consume power just spinning the motor.
Edit: Apparently saw zigbee and read zwave but the point stands https://csa-iot.org/all-solutions/zigbee/ (the standards body that controls the zigbee protocol).
IoT is essentially a catch-all marketing term, like "organic", and if I'm not mistaken, the "I" in IoT stands for "internet". ZigBee devices cannot connect to the internet. Doing so requires a hub or coordinator that contains WiFi or ethernet connectivity. There are many ZigBee coordinators that lack this functionality, which allows your data to stay local, on your own network, without exposing it to the internet.
I never claimed that a smart plug could monitor the temperature inside a fridge, but there are certainly ZigBee temperature devices you could put inside your fridge to do that, and they would work just fine.
A ZigBee smart plug with energy monitoring would certainly give you enough information to determine if the compressor had failed, as the compressor is the component that uses the most power. If the energy usage of the fridge dropped significantly, it could indicate a compressor failure. While this method isn't foolproof and won't detect all possible fridge issues, it can serve as an early warning system for major problems like compressor failure.
Refrigerators are damn near Faraday cages. Zigbee devices are going to have a hard time getting their 2.4ghz signaling out.
A failed compressor doesn't necessatily use less power. If it's simply lost pressure and hasn't seized the motor will still cycle and appear to be working from a power usage perspective.
And if the coordinator doesn't have network connectivity, how is it ever going to alert me to problems when I'm away?
I get that you're very afraid of the security implications of iot devices, but none of the ideas you're proposing are actually solutions to the problems a truly connected device can solve.
I've been using a cheap Aqara temp/humidity sensor in my fridge for years. Works fine, as I said. Many others do the same. There's a lot more plastic in fridges than you might expect.
My ZigBee devices use an ethernet based coordinator which communicates with my Home Assistant install via MQTT. The coordinator software is called Zigbee2MQTT. The coordinator does not send any data anywhere except Home Assistant.
There are many easy ways to keep your data local and private while still allowing notification when you're away from home. In my case, I pay $65/year to Nabu Casa to access my Home Assistant when I'm not at home.
I use a very similar setup to keep an eye on my mom's place from 500 miles away, including many sensors and multiple camera feeds, which are also local only with no cloud component. Frigate NVR is installed as a Home Assistant add-on, which runs detection on each camera feed and records clips when a person is detected on any feed and also pops a notification at the same time. If she wants to save a clip, she can download it, otherwise it'll be deleted after 5 days (configurable).
There are other ways to get access to local data remotely. If you don't want to pay for Nabu Casa (which funds Home Assistant development), there's also Tailscale/headscale, ZeroTier, Cloudflare, DuckDNS, reverse proxy, etc.
You could also just have Home Assistant send you an email when an event is triggered, like a rise of 2 degrees in your fridge in an hour, or a drop of 20% in energy usage over 30 minutes.
Or you could just have a notification pop in the Home Assistant app on your phone, which will work remotely with most of the methods I just listed.
EDIT: Didn't respond to your last paragraph:
I'm not "very afraid", I'm simply aware of better alternatives. Why would I risk the security of my network by giving Samsung or GE or LG a backdoor into my network when I can get most of the same information their app can give me by using cheap sensors and Home Assistant?
I'm very familiar with homeassistant, been using it for ~5-6 years. First primarily z-wave but now primarily zigbee with a tiny bit of wifi-backed matter mixed in.
That's a lot of work to replace the sensors that are built into the fridge. 2 temp sensors for the fridge and freezer separately (I'm still not convinced I wouldn't have issues with the connection being unreliable), a power clamp (you probably don't want to use a plug since the relays fail open), 2 door sensors, and a fair bit of automation to get notified, not to mention you've now added a maintenance task for all those batteries. Especially when the alternative is to connect it to the internet and you're done. I do connect my homeassistant install to their cloud service so I can get long term tracking and whatnot but the part I need is done with just the internet connection.
That's just it, with either client isolation or a dedicated and isolated IoT SSID (nearly all modern home routers have one of these) they're not actually on your network and can't communicate with any of your other devices, only the internet. I've been building enterprise networks for ~20 years now and this is how it's handled at that level and should be more than enough for a home network.
I do 100% agree for cameras though, that's all local or not at all.
Depends on the fridge, in my opinion. I don't need any door sensors because my fridge will beep at me if I leave a door open for 12 microseconds, and the freezer is pretty reliable, it's just the fridge that needs adjusting from time to time.
I just use a ThirdReality smart plug with energy monitoring primarily so I can see power consumption, but I still contend that this combined with the temp sensor is enough to let me know if there's a problem when I'm not home.
Also a 20 year IT person, but on the Linux server side. I do have an isolated network for IoT things that don't have local alternatives (pfsense hardware firewall, 24 port managed switch in the rack and ruckus APs), but I hate (hate) the enshittification of perfectly good hardware with software that exists solely to harvest my data so a corporation can have an additional revenue stream for the shareholders, and I will go pretty far out of my way to avoid giving money to companies that do this. Dreading the day my beloved dumb LG plasma TV dies.
What hardware are you running your HA instance on? Mine runs in an HAOS Proxmox VM with the USB port for the zwave dongle (for the locks) passed through. ZigBee coordinator is ethernet, so it's just plugged into a switch in the living room.
But if you get the app you can unlock the crisper drawer+ for only $11.99/mo and get those extra fresh veggies that you crave!
To be fair, making a device wifi connected is stupid cheap nowadays. That being said, you bet your ass they're harvesting data.
My parents got a fridge with a similar feature and no screen (they didn't know it had that) but I was curious and hooked it to the IOT network. Literally the only smart feature it exposed was a door open sensor...
Other than keeping things cold, the only tech a fridge needs is a light and a way to see inside without opening the door; which we resolved decades ago by simply using a window, but fridges like that haven't existed since, like, the 60's or so.
We ran out of things we need about the time we learned how to filter water and grow wheat.
I'm ok with the further progress into antibiotics, vaccines, surgery, all that good stuff.
I'd be a cripple if not for our progress with surgery. I'm very glad to live in an era of modern medicine.
Apparently, some politician tried to shutdown the patent office in the nineteenth century because "everything that can be invented has been invented."
edit: no need for "I" there.
But but but but but this is our "upmarket" model and we need some kind of rationalization to upsell people to it over the Profile PFE28/PYE22 which is the same fucking refrigerator mechanically minus the screen and with different handles, but this one costs 30% more.
Doesn’t even have AI, how am I supposed to know what to eat
You know a lot about refrigerator models
Whhhhhhhyyyyyyy
So you can run Doom on it, duh.
I just wanted some water...