this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024

691 points (87.5% liked)

Technology

59405 readers

2844 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

691

Homeowner baffled after washing machine uses 3.6GB of internet data a day (www.newsweek.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

192 comments fedilink hide all child comments

(page 3) 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 69 points 7 months ago (29 children)

Why the fuck does my appliance need wifi? It's not ordering refills for consumables when low at a great discount nor is it going to schedule it's own maintenance as it passes lifetime milestones or detects errors.

I don't want my fucking washer/dryer to text me when the load is done and I definitely don't want my fridge to alert me I'm low on milk or bread, or the door is open. That's such a huge backdoor for anyone looking to maliciously gather data and peer into my life, definitely without my consent.

load more comments (29 replies)

[–] [email protected] 47 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (6 children)

Glad I bought a non-smart washer and dryer. I've yet to encounter any situation in life where I thought, "too bad my appliance doesn't have Internet". Not once ever.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I think my oven/stove can be connected. I have never tried because I don’t see the need to preheat my oven when I am not home.

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments (5 replies)

[–] [email protected] 24 points 7 months ago (1 children)

If you put any of these things on your wifi add them to your parental control settings that most routers have. Restrict what it can access and what times it allowed to connect to the internet.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Or ideally just don't put it on the wifi. I just set a timer for when it is done. Even those with variable cycles are fairly predictable and it isn't usually a big deal if your timer is 15min late.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

True it is the better option, but putting it on a guest network and adding parental control lowjacks it pretty well. Set it schedule to when you need it.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I dunno, isn't the homeowner an idiot for putting a smart washer on WiFi in the first place? We don't need smart devices, they aren't making our lives better.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

To the average person, putting that much thought and effort into it is for elite hackers only. I know a guy that does cybersecurity and still has smart everything in his house.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

Must not actually be good at cybersecurity then.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Anyone I know who’s actually deep into cybersecurity avoids extra devices, including smartphones. If you’re not hyper paranoid, you’ve missed the majority of what the nation states are up to.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago

Or you just know how to block and segregate it on your network.

load more comments (1 replies)

[+] [email protected] 18 points 7 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (8 children)

[removed by mod]

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

A buzzer on the washer/dryer has worked fine for DECADES.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

my personal favorite is the part where the washer/dryer is noisy. And you can just hear it not running, and then remember to not forgor about it.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 7 months ago (5 children)

Newer washing machines vary in time depending on how dirty your clothes are. So the same program may take 50 minutes or 90 minutes. This cannot be solved with a regular timer.
If you have a job with varying hours, you might want to start the washing mashine when you're heading home. Then you're clothes are ready to be hung as you arrive and they aren't laying around for hours.
If you own photovoltaic, you might want to time energy intense home appliances such as washing machines, dish washers etc. to a period of overproduction.

Not saying, these issues are super important but there definitely are use cases for smart devices. However, I'd always recommend using a local / self-hosted rather than a cloud-based solution.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago

y'all are min-maxing life a bit hard there.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I just want a washer that can work with the water softener to determine if there's enough soft water for a load or if it should request the softener regenerate first. So the smart home I'd like to have is one where sometimes it will advise against doing laundry until I've acquired more salt. All without any data leaving my home network, and if I'm accessing it remotely, it's by accessing my home server without any other computer needing to be involved.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

If smart options were actually smart you could do that.

With the right devices I’m certain this can be done with HomeAssistant, but everyone who makes these appliances wants to wall you into their cloud ecosystem and harvest your activity data.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Yeah, technologically, it's not only possible but even simple. It would come down to the washer knowing how much water it needs for a cycle and the softener knowing how much soft water it can provide, a means of getting that information from each of them, and then an if statement with a > check and a way to tell the softener to cycle and washer to start.

I wonder when an appliance hacking community is going to rise up. I know that all that information is available to my water softener controller because I use it to manually check that before running the laundry or dishwasher. So a custom controller could add network capabilities. Then just give it an API so it can be queried and directed and the actual smart software can exist entirely on the server.

Kinda makes me want to buy an extra softener to hack and see if it's as easy as I suspect it might be, but don't want to try it with my only one because I also suspect I'm wrong lol.