I don’t mind them hacking supermarkets but destroying food is drawing the line for me. Granted, most of the frozen goods sold there are probably highly processed and not very healthy, but still.

Hacking the price tags is definitely great.

Consider the benefit though–one HUGE reason for people not to automate everything and still have people running the store.

The best way to influence business behavior is to disincentive behavior you don’t want by making it cost money, preferably a lot of money.

Typically IoT things controll the temperature in cold chain applications. This is about food safety and health.

Don’t know about those fridges. I assume the monitoring targets open door alarm (glass door fridges), temp controll at all, and saving energy.

But hey, shout out loud your bad energy first. Don’t start thinking.

Don’t know about those fridges. I assume the monitoring targets open door alarm (glass door fridges), temp controll at all, and saving energy.

And why does any of that need a constant internet connection?

I would assume for remote monitoring of some kind. You can imagine an automated system monitors 1000’s of freezers and helps control their temperature/performance.

That said, clearly this shouldn’t have been on the open internet, assuming that’s what happened. It could also be an inside job and/or unhappy former employee

Why does that need to be centrally monitored? All the information is local to the refrigerator and the rules about what to do are not dynamic. A refrigerator knows it needs to kick on if it gets too warm. Why does it need to call in to a server to ask for permission? It makes no sense.

All you’ve done is create the possibility of one MASSIVE system-wide failure for the price of a circuit board in every unit that costs a few bucks and that is inevitably going to be there anyway.

Principles aside, defrost shouldn’t be available remotely, even if all the other stuff is, because the freezers have to be emptied and that can’t be done remotely.

I’m just guessing 🙂

About defrosting, it could be that you want to turn the defrost on to literally remove frost without thawing the whole freezer.

Just saying there are reasons why you might want to monitor remotely and possibly be able to take action remotely.

Then again maybe this was a feature that was turned on/left on by mistake

Ah, yes, I guess you can defrost without thawing items. I haven’t seen frost in my freezer for a long time, so I guess they solved it for people’s kitchens.

Yes, there are reasons to do things remotely, my problem is I think people knee-jerk to doing things remotely WITHOUT a reason, that just to being able to do something remotely is enough reason to do it remotely.

Put some energy in your thoughts snd you‘ll get it.

Pretending I’m a fridge:

My door has been open for 10 minutes and my temperature is currently 65 degrees Farenheit. What do I do?

I better contact the central server.

Hello? Central server.

No answer.

Oh well. Guess I won’t activate the door alarm without permission, then, and let everything melt and develop deadly bacteria.

Though I guess, yes, knowing that there was a 40 minute period where it got warmer would be good to have somewhere at the home office (local manager might just not want to take the loss), gathering information centrally is not the same as running behavior locally.

The central server then sends the notification to an app. User of the app is local staff. E.g. they get this message each evening before the store close doors. Same with the freezer room backdoors. At sunday it might escalate to a supervisor who is responsible to a region. This is how such things typically work.

Additional value might be a freezer who can serve a range of minus temperature. It can buffer cold when energy costs are low - typically at night or at sunny days. You need the energy prices online tho.

Now those are good reasons to centralize. Thanks.

Fast food chains destroy food rather than donate it. People get fired for taking food home that’s “supposed” to be thrown away.

On an unrelated note, your avatar is awesome!

Oh sure, but that’s a separate issue. These guys are hacking the stores knowing it will spoil food. Fast food workers are reprimanded for trying to not spoil food. Both things are bad.

And thanks!

I still don’t understand why people hate supermarkets so much. Yes food is expensive, it has nothing to do with supermarkets. They make one of the lowest profit margins in any industry (~3%). New York’s government groceries will be heavily subsidized by taxpayers. You might be fine with that, but he could have just subsidized private groceries for the exact same effect and saved a ton of money (it just sound worse to do that).

Oh, I hate the Internet of Things, not supermarkets.

But making low profit margins doesn’t mean they’re not trying to run up costs as much as they can. And the whole concept of a supermarket is depedent on cars, and I definitely hate car dependency.

I remember living in a South American city and it was absolutely wild to walk a few blocks to gather everything I needed for the day–bakeries, butchers, roadside vegetable vendors…

I remember living in a South American city and it was absolutely wild to walk a few blocks to gather everything I needed for the day–bakeries, butchers, roadside vegetable vendors…

You can still do this in many (most?) US cities (at least the ones I’m familiar with).

I rented a room in Boston once and I had to go to a single, medium-szed grocery store. I think rents can get too high to sell staples… But, yeah, if rents are low and you have foot traffic, of course you can pull it off. But you also need to have a substantial population that isn’t driving to work every day and consequently passing 3 supermarkets on their way home.

I would bet my next paycheck that you absolutely can do it that way in Boston.

3 seconds on Google found me this (not a grocery store, more like a farmer’s market with vendors): bostonpublicmarket.org

Search things like “bakery Boston Mass” or “deli Boston Mass” or “Italian market Boston Mass” or “Polish market Boston Mass”…

And you will find places that sell various things and they’re often found in the vicinity of one another.

You might be fine with that, but he could have just subsidized private groceries for the exact same effect and saved a ton of money (it just sound worse to do that).

Yeah, that would not be the “exact same effect.”

And to like (at least) half of the people in this country, the thought of a private solution is the only acceptable one. It absolutely would not sound worse to them to do that, they’ve been tricked into thinking that’s better for them.

What social activism? This feels more like a state-sponsored attack.

Really? Wasting an inordinate amount of food while there are people who literally starve to death?

Go fuck yourself

You do know what’s in those giant inaccessible dumpsters behind grocery stores, don’t you?

You sound like someone that could subsist on a diet of boot leather.

That makes it ok to destroy it all. Great logic.