I mean technically attacking people’s food supplies is super fucked. But doing it by fucking with internet connected refrigerators has got to be a massive blaring alarm that we are no longer fit for survival.
These corporations that produce this technotrash are the ones not fit for survival. A fridge doesn’t fucking need a computer it in at all, let alone one connected to the internet.
I get the sentiment and the insecure connectivity is pure incompetence, but commercial refrigeration is not the same as consumer refrigeration, with much more complex controls required to deal with managing large energy consumption, irregular and frequent access, variable amount of goods being held, and usually mandatory persisted logging and automatic alarms, sometimes being sent centrally and 24 hourly to meet strict food regulations.
Nowhere do fridges need to send off data to meet any regulation.
Nowhere do they need to be remotely controlled. Period.
This is not something that showed up in the 21st century. Grocery stores have been successfully refrigerating things since before personal computers even existed.
I am sorry but no. I spent nearly 20 years working in the control industry and specifically for a global company that provided some of these control and monitoring systems. Tracing food from production through to end consumers has strict industry standards that need to be met in most developed countries. For example FDA CFR 21 in the US and the EC regulations in the EU which all have track and trace requirements. This is key if there are any issues at any point of the supply chain so that the appropriate entities can respond in the interest of ensuring the health safety of the public.
You are probably right on this regard, sometimes some regulations can have a big impact on how things function. However, do we really need to have the thing itself exposed to the internet? Can we not have a better architecture to have the same thing, but safe? The technology is there, is just a matter of doing it right
The internet connection doesn’t bother me a bit. The lack of Network 101 level security does. An easy fix, throw the fridges on a local VLAN, firewall that off from the internet except for communication to the monitoring endpoint’s IP.
Of course someone on lemmy today let me know that it’s easy to hack a corporate firewall, so there’s that expertise to consider. 🙄
