5 comments

  • altairprime 3 hours ago
    In the Twitter thread linked, the person confirms two things:

    1. It saturated the local network with 1TB of metadata sniffing scans, not the network uplink to the outside world.

    2. It does so because, as Keurig notes, it’s collecting data about your household in order to let Keurig sell it to advertisers.

    • AnimalMuppet 2 minutes ago
      To me, this is begging for a class-action lawsuit.

      Yeah, sure, the terms of service probably say that they can do that. That's still in "unconscionable" territory. And courts do not like unconscionable contracts. If it's unconscionable, it's invalid (if I understand the law correctly).

      Is this why everybody wants to make appliances with wireless?

    • whycome 1 hour ago
      Why is this allowed? There’s no way to consent to a coffee machine.
      • Neywiny 1 hour ago
        Presumably during setup and connection to the AP it has a ToS. Doubtful they just unboxed, plugged in, and it connected to the right AP and went.
    • lazide 2 hours ago
      #1 - why? #2 - oh, because fucking yikes.
  • ButlerianJihad 8 minutes ago
    A year or two ago, I was using NextDNS in ad-blocking and logging mode, which very helpfully exposed malware sitting on my very router, which had been completely undetectable, except for the veritable flood of bizarre DNS queries it was routinely sending to the self-configured DNS servers.

    Now that I have a new router and I've re-enabled NextDNS, I've ironically discovered that the chief abuser of DNS right now is the router's own legit security software, which is absolutely hammering on the same query, several times a second.

    Of course, since I am currently on NextDNS free tier, this matters a lot, because they cut you off after about 300,000 queries in a month. So any hammering abuse will make me lose my privileges much earlier than I would otherwise. So, to stop the abuse, should I shut off my legit security software? It is absolutely rubbish at identifying malware on the device itself...

  • tamimio 1 hour ago
    Reminds me when couple years ago I plugged the TV to the internet (so my relatives kids can watch YT) and I forgot to unplug it for almost a week after, only to find the router dns resolved (and blocked) a million queries, all from that one TV!
    • altairprime 1 hour ago
      The traffic generated here is network scans, not external traffic, and so blocking DNS wouldn’t have helped.
  • ck2 3 hours ago
    it took me a month to notice my Midea A/C was absolutely hammering my router

    I didn't even know it had wifi capability but it was trying to connect

    I use mac whitelist so it wasn't even getting in but that didn't stop it from trying every seond

    Fortunately it was just a usb dongle so yanked it out

    • altairprime 1 hour ago
      Most Midea units can be swapped for an ESPhome USB dongle if you ever wish to have remote control on your own terms — note various countries’ shop links, and the various wiki and other outlines for DIY etc: https://smlight.tech/product/slwf-01
    • ars 3 hours ago
      I have two of them, and I just checked and both are quiet. Mine don't connect to WiFi unless you go through an entire process first with an android phone and Matter.

      It's great having them on WiFi - you can turn on the AC before getting home to pre-cool, without having to leave it on all day.

      • sillyfluke 1 hour ago
        Boy: So, how it get this bad grandpa?

        Man: Well, before you couldn't turn on the AC before you got home

        • ars 33 minutes ago
          Realistically people would just leave their AC on. So this saves energy, rather than changing comfort.
  • rendall 46 minutes ago
    The GDPR consent form on this blog did not have a “Reject all” button. It required me to manually reject 16 instances of “legitimate interest,” then scroll through 1,746 vendors to make sure they were all set to reject.

    Seems worth mentioning in a post about excessive and intrusive collection of user data. The moral outrage rings hollow when opting out of tracking is so deliberately onerous.

    • wafflemaker 19 minutes ago
      And also illegal. It's illegal not to have one button. Companies didn't do it because they suddenly stopped being scum.