Why the fuck does a coffee machine need the internet.

Watching porn. Griding those beans, hnnnfggh…🥵

What furries and smart coffee machines have in common; a love for beans. 🐾

it sickens me that this is funny to me

Upvoted because more people need this inflicted upon them.

And some people thought the milk froth was milk.

streaming porn while its brewing a crappy keurig cup.

Mining crypto

To spy on everyone in your household and try to sell you more garbage coffee pods.

So you can control it remotely, obviously. It’s not like it’s a new thing.

Indeed!

its a keurig machine apparently, probably the most expensive ones.

To become part of a bot net.

Wow! It’s almost as though random household appliances shouldn’t be connected to the internet

But how else am i going to operate them? In-person?

I personally have found it most convenient to put my detergent and clothes in the machine, then drive out to a spot where i can get some free wi-fi. Perhaps the Starbucks in the next town over. So, 15-min drive to Starbucks (and grab a PSL since 'tis the season) and then log onto their free wi-fi, then log into my account on Whirlpool’s app on my phone. Click on My Washer, select a cycle, water temperature, rinse options, etc. and press Start Cycle. By the time i get back home, the washer is almost done. I wait around an extra 10 mins or so for the cycle to finish once I’m back home, move the washed clothes into the dryer, and I’m back on the road! I’ve opted to start using the public library as my secondary wi-fi spot (when they’re open, at least), so another 15-min drive and I’m back on the app ready to commence a drying cycle! A few choice button pushes (the app really is streamlined) and my dryer is tumbling and heating like it’s nobody’s business.

A connected coffee pot has a lure to it. You preload it. Sleep. Wake up. As you’re browsing Lemmy in bed, you tap your phone to start the morning coffee. The aroma reaches you in bed, letting you know hot fresh coffee is waiting for you, making it easier to get out of bed.

It’s not enough of a temptation for me to go buy a connected drip coffee pot, but I’m betting that’s why people do it.

You could get them 40 years ago with a simple clock. No internet connection, just set up for coffee at 7

If you have an analog switch to turn it on, you can even use a wall timer to have it automatically start. It’s further off-track from the intention, but if you’re hellbent on yelling at something, you could connect it to a smart outlet.

Why even add that complication of a secondary device? Programmable coffee makers are like $30 and they last forever. I’ve been using my Walmart cheapo machine for 20+ years. This is a totally solved problem.

Less to the point of buying this setup to start with, but repurposing an existing one using far less components.

The only innovative thing most companies’ R&D budgets support is making stuff spy on you using either WiFi or GPS. And old solutions are a no-go, of course. They’re people with standards, you see.

I’ve had good luck with locally connected devices (zwave and zigbee usually). I have a bunch of light switches, temperature sensors, etc. But I bet local connected stuff is hard to find for appliances.

Shelly smart outlet + homeassistant + dumb coffee maker = genius coffee maker.

bonus points for z-wave/zigbee only devices without wlan/bluetooth connectivityy

Shelly outlets can do zigbee and BT without wifi now, thread soon in a firmware update or now with esphome.

Outlet timer + dumb coffee maker = genius coffee maker…but cheaper, and simpler and doesn’t randomly break because an update fucked something up in HA (again) so your automation isn’t running today.

Also yes. My response was more about showing you can have a modern smarthome that does not talk to the internet. You can of course automate without.

Just recently set this up, but with a zigbee energy monitoring smart plug. I recently got a Technivorm Moccamaster for $175 that has a physical toggle switch for power and another for the hot plate. Turn them both on, grind the beans and fill the water tank the night before, then set up an automation to turn the smart plug on when the lights go on in the morning, and boom, coffee is ready by the time I stumble into the kitchen, narrowly avoiding death by tripping over hungry cats.

Since it’s an energy monitoring smart plug, I could add a bit to the automation to cut the power when the watts drop after the float switch in the water tank automatically flips and turns off the boiler, or I could just tell the automation to cut the power 5 minutes after turning on, OR, as I discovered when I messed up the automation, the Moccamaster can actually physically FLIP ITS OWN POWER SWITCH OFF automatically if it’s been on for over 100 minutes because it has a freaking tiny SOLENOID built into the power switch assembly that will mechanically move the toggle switch into the off position, physically cutting the power to the unit, which you’ll want to account for in the automation, because it won’t work if the power switch is turned off.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk. I mostly just wanted to tell someone that my coffee maker has a tiny solenoid, because no one in my house really cares.

You know I’ve found the store bought stuff is now way worse that the occasionally tempermental homeassistant stuff. I’m playing with migrating Shelly’s to esphome since they dragged their feet on thread for so long and their latest zigbee firmware is laggy and annoying.

I doubt your grandpa is going to do that. No, he’s probably going to buy the “smart” drip pot and be proud of his purchase.

He’s allowed to. I described an option, not a mandate.

My grandpa just uses a drip pot with no internet like he has for the last 70 years.

You know coffee pots have had automatic brew timers fro decades, right?

People do it because they just take whatever corporations shove up their ass. That’s the reason.

You’re probably right.

Everyday apliances being online is just insane to me.

I’m not opposed to the concept of smart appliances. Getting a phone notification when my load of laundry is done. Remotely starting the oven preheat. Having the humidifier interact with the thermostat automatically. Blinds that open on a schedule to gently wake you with natural light.

For the record, I don’t have any of these things, but I like the ideas of them. It’s the kind of stuff I was wide eyed and hopeful about as a sci fi loving kid.

The problem with ask these things is not the connectivity ideas, imho; it’s pretty much capitalism. These things can’t exist in a way that doesn’t also spy on you, build a profile that knows you better than yourself, and sells every last morsel of information to not just the highest bidder, but every bidder.

And to be clear, I don’t mean can’t on a technical level.

Commercial products can’t do this from a business case level. There are ways you can achieve this on a technical level, but it is very much DIY at this point. I hope to slowly implement this over the next while until I have a system that works for me, uses no cloud or corporate servers, and is possibly accessible from outside my home (that’s a security challenge and I may not be up to it).

Use a VPN to access outside the home.

And make it wireguard

you can do this with home assistant and z-wave / zigbee sensors. but you have to do it yourself and this takes time and knowledge.

TVs are bad enough

if the idea is to command the machine to brew while you’re stil in bed, bluetooth is enough connectivity, unless you live in a big house, but what i know, i use aeropress

“Nomad said that most of the suspicious traffic didn’t escape the network. He has a hypothesis that the unit was simply affected by a bug. Nomad said he has over 10 years of experience in IT and works as a Technical Field and Community Specialist at the 3D printer manufacturer Prusa.”

Absolutely what I thought. I love how everyone assumed it was hacked… In the 20 years I have been at my job we have had a particular model of desk phone that it happened to twice and when it did it creates a network storm and tanks your entire network (at the time this company did not have proper vlans in place which would have mitigated the issue). You trace it to the device and reboot it and everything is fine again. The phones were still replaced just in case, but that was always one of the wilder ones here. My guess is this was something similar and since it’s his older parents they probably didnt even notice the network being bogged down.

“After rebooting the device and reconnecting it to a segregated virtual LAN (VLAN), the issue did not reappear.”

Why even bother? Is it actually required to have an internet connection? If so get rid of it, thats so dumb and intrusive… and if not just turn off wifi on it, why even leave it on at all.

I attended a talk by someone who hacked his ceiling fan. He discovered that the remote’s circuit board was so poorly done that every time you press a button, it sends out the signal 20 times. He was wondering why the batteries kept dying quickly on the remote, and that was why.

mine did, too, and downloaded a bunch of torrent movies

probably training its llm

Uh, yeah! Mine too. All the pirate stuff has been my damned appliances. I delete the files immediately, of course. I wouldn’t even steal a car, let alone a movie.

My coffee maker broke out of containment and played a bunch of video games during work hours at my office. Crazy what these AIs are doing.

My Smart AI Powered Candle™ 5G ultra min-max* Blue and Yellow™ Hue Smart Ultra Adapter Plus + Vegan and Eco Friendly Air Conditioning Low Callory Ambient ASMR Battery Powered Candle with RGB and ADHD with ABCD Military Grade Smart Light smart candle went rouge and went out and broke 4 Flock cameras just yesterday. It was the model with 16gb DDR5 RAM and 2TB of internal SSD storage, if that helps to identify the issue. We really might be reaching AGI soon… I’m scared for our future.

(sidenote how does one spell callory?) calory, callary, callorie, kckallaru?

I was thinking about stealing a navy ship, but pirating a movie is where I draw the line

You wouldn’t steal a helmet…

Keurig

Oh for fucks sake, IMO people buying that shit are asking for it.
I completely stopped buying Pickwick tea because now they are owned by Keurig.
Something that is a bit cumbersome to find out because they have removed that fact yet another level from the Pickwick wikipedia page.

But Pickwick -> Douwe Egberts en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickwick_(brand)
Douwe Egberts -> JDE Peet’s en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douwe_Egberts
JDE Peet’s -> Keurig en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JDE_Peet's

It’s well hidden, owner or parent isn’t even stated on the Pickwick page anymore! You have to comb the text to find that! But I checked it out because my favorite tea was no longer available where I shop tea, and the closest alternative was Pickwick, but since Pickwick is now owned by Keurig, I refuse to buy that crap.

Be vigilant! Don’t buy American, and don’t buy from companies who’s business model is to provide lesser products at higher prices. Keurig is both.

Tired of seeing this sensationalist X post reposted.

Keurig machines are everywhere. Has anyone verified this? Don’t give x users this much attention. What kind of IT expert posts on X? Smart enough to know better, but supporting fascism nonetheless - worst of the worst.

Nomad said that most of the suspicious traffic didn’t escape the network.

Okay so it was just a bug that caused repeat/looping LAN traffic. This is sensationalized.

Most of the traffic…

Bugs like this are a legitimate concern in the age of internet connected coffee pots.

No, it didn’t “use” data.

How many times is this going to be posted? It’s it even a news article. It turned out to be nothing.

I assume most people browse all communities on Lemmy like I do since it’s default. Everything gets posted to mulitple communities, it’s just a thing. I see the most common stuff hit Lemmy like a dozen times.

Nothing particularly wrong with that, it’s just how things work.

It’s been posted in this community several times now.

First time I’m seeing it.

Exactly this - I spend too much time out here; you spend a more appropriate amount of time. :)

Why the fuck would you connect a coffee machine to the internet?

What advantage would you have? Anyway it requires a pod to be inserted manually, so it’s not that you can operate remotely.

“But one day I could get a new setting for a new kind of recipe”

What kind of “recipe”, it’s just putting pressurized boiling water in a cup.

The only kind of update this machine will ever get is a DRM to block compatible/unofficial pods

BTW 10gb downloaded in 10 days is also not bad

Seriously, this is a “feature” looking for a purpose

I imagine one feature they could claim, would be pre-set coffee brew times that are sync’d up with internet time servers to ensure they’re kept in alignment with DST, and so they don’t ‘drift’/need routine adjustments.

I could even imagine coffee machine makers purposely gibbling the clocks, to make them drift more, if they’re not sync’d up. Sorta like removing granular feature-based screenlock times on a smart phone (eg don’t sleep while streaming video), and replacing that functionality with a blanket “click this function to prevent your phone from sleeping while you look at it, don’t worry, we won’t record your face / send any of that data out to third parties, we swear!” to force people to use the face monitoring features.

They’ll also prolly build in AI, so that you can speak to your coffee machine to operate it, and remove most of the buttons at some point. Then they’ll need to constantly update the AI, because “Hackers have figured out how to make our coffee machines turn into super intelligent skynet terminators! OH NO!! Update immediately and buy our stock!!! DOOOM!!”.

Okay but like that shouldn’t use more than maybe a few MB per month with tons of metadata added in – it’s like it’s uploading HD video at the rate mentioned in OP

Yeah, but you see, they’re using the new “Rich Data” time messaging blocks, which include recordings of nearby audio. They need that data so that they can train their AI models on what a normal kitchen sounds like – so that the AI coffee maker can then alert you or the proper authorities to things like break-ins, and mice, and spouses sneaking midnight snacks, and political wrongspeak, and fires, and earthquakes. That sort of thing.

First webcam was to watch the coffee pot. Coffee is no joke.

Pod coffee machines are a businesses dream. Lock in the customers. And then don’t care about the plastic and foil waste per cup you create in order to do this. No surprise if they do other bad things. Visiting friends and they show you their pod machine? Ask them what happens with the used pod? Do them a favour and tell them there is a better way. Such as coffee machines that you put beans in. No not Heinz baked beans you moron! Coffee beans that produce only bio degradable waste. And freshly ground tastes great. No chemicals added.

Wasting your internet is trivial compared to the landfill waste created.

I can see use cases that aren’t just laziness but yeah it’s mostly a bad idea

I mean, they make poor-tasting coffee. That seems like it’s the worst thing of all.

When you roast and then grind coffee, it releases carbon dioxide. If you seal it up after processing, it will usually inflate a bag; that’s why most coffee bags at the grocery store have that little one-way check valve in the bag itself.

The only way to keep coffee from offgassing is to let it go stale first. That’s what they do to most coffee that used to come in metal cans. They have to do the same thing to the pods. At best, your coffee is pre-staled and only gets worse from there.

Then you have all the stupid non-recyclable waste. A plastic pod that gets boiling water run through it, I’m sure that it’s leaching a fun mix of chemicals into your coffee. There is also a paper filter in there and a foil top. No way to recycle these things unless you separate all three parts and the plastic body weren’t made of unrecyclable frankenplastic (aka #7).

Fuck those pods and any twat who is too lazy to make a damn cup of coffee without one. Get a cheap ceramic pourover and a box of #2 filters. Grind coffee, boil water. add grounds to filter, pour hot water. The only waste is a soft paper filter and some grounds, both of which can be easily composted if you like.

I’m lazy too. But my push-button espresso machine takes coffee beans instead of landfill. And has no paper filter. Only coffee grounds to go in the bio degradable waste.

Sure, a case for pods, is a seldom used machine in an unmanned hotel room. But that is better solved with sachets of instant coffee and a kettle. In someone’s home, show visitors what a polluting jerk you are.

Use a damn French press.

It’s not hard.

These stupid machines suck, make shit coffee, and surveil you.

People are so lazy

And generate SO MUCH waste

Yes thank you!

Can’t believe I forgot the INSANE amount of waste

IT pro shocked! Jfc what kind of society did we become? This is so embarrassing to read. Just the thought of humans ending up here. Something about an internet coffee machine malfunction.

It’s all so ignorant and moronic.

Tried a pod machine at work for a bit. It made warm, weak coffee.

I use a Bialetti Moka. Makes great coffee.

Depends on the pod. Usually in offices they put weak stuff.

I’ve never had a cup of coffee from a Keurig that didn’t taste burnt, and wasn’t a pain in the ass to get get working to begin with

This reminds me the tue smart tea kettle that required an always online connection to function, and became completely useless when the servers shut down.

Yes, it was a kettle. Yes, like the one you use for boiling water.

It had settings for certain types of tea that it didn’t have on-device. And it didn’t have a basic “just boil the water” function.

Sounds like a Juicero.

Oh gods, the Juicero. Yeah, it’s of the same ilk. The “smart” trend of adding computers and network connections to things that literally never needed them.

Like the smart water bottle that reminded you about being thirsty and needing to drink.

IIRC the excuse for Juicero having internet access was to read QR codes on the fruit pouches that included the expiration date, and it would refuse to squeeze expired fruit. Because at it’s heart, it was a screw press. A severely over-engineered screw press. Like Jurassic Park, they spared no expense.

Wasn’t the Juicero also simply not strong enough to press actual fruit, so the bags were just… Bags of fruit juice? I remember seeing people buy one and just poking a hole for a straw like those lunch juice pockets.

No they were full of fruit. Thing is nothing stopped you from squeezing the bag with your hands.

Anyone else remember the massive bot net that killed the internet in Europe and half the US doing a DDOS attack over a Minecraft server? Apparently it was mostly made of smart refrigerators, thermostats, and other appliances.

In other news

Gasoline-laced wooden beam catches fire, leaves OSHA Pro shocked

Coffee machine uses 1,000GB of traffic in 10 days, leaves IT Pro shocked

yet there’s nothing shocking about a coffee machine that needs to connect to the internet

With this much data, maybe it’s not a coffee machine, but a replicator.