Comment by jgerrish
9 hours ago
Like the other poster mentioned, blanket statements like this ignore the incredibly smart people at major international corporations and their strategies.
I have a smart fridge and washer. I won't name names. But for several years they were never connected or online at all (unless they was compromised and I didn't know). I connected them and one of the first updates included in the washer was changing the default wash cycle from something like 110 minutes to 46 or something. I don't remember all the values if I'm honest.
There are executives who have spreadsheets and charts of how much water that saved per household over varying periods of time. How much it would save with greater adoption. And the unsaid message, or maybe they'll be explicit, of how many people are going to face tragic water supply issues in the future.
It's a powerful message, even if we know it's cyncical and calculated to push not just washers, but firmware security systems and institutions to govern those systems.
And yes, compromised systems can also be used to build zombie networks to push horrible content.
I feel horrible that this critically important surface issue of water supply is used to push other agendas. I honestly wish I could do other work not related to it.
<< ignore the incredibly smart people at major international corporations and their strategies.
Ignore may be a tad strong. I am merely asking for hardware that is subject to my control to be within my control. I think somewhere along the way executives got a little to comfortable saying 'they will buy what we give them'.
More to the point, maybe there is exactly too many smart people with agendas that don't seem to align well with my current needs vis-a-vis fridges:
I want something that keeps things cool with minimum of fuss and does not die upon update.
In short, that executive should be fired as they are not doing their job: they are actively undermining their own market.
>Ignore may be a tad strong. I am merely asking for hardware that is subject to my control to be within my control.
Which is how they got into this situation. These are industrial refrigeration systems subject to a huge list of variables (how many units, their sizes, and doors hooked up to a refrigeration circuit, open vs closed cases, ambient conditions, hours of store operation, what type of refrigerant, whether heat is going to a cooling tower or air heat exchanger). They use a ton of energy, and percent optimization leads to millions of dollars over a fleet. They are designed to let the user dial in every operating parameter, like defrost.
Compare this to my home fridge where all these parameters are fixed in the firmware because the hardware is 100% identical.
Industrial systems are necessarily different from mass-produced home appliances.
<<Industrial systems are necessarily different from mass-produced home appliances.
Honestly, reality begs to differ.