Now, there are certain ways that Internet connection can help us. Even before the lock down, secondary students in Britain took classes online because their schools couldn’t offer them. Teachers from other schools, or even instructors from universities, stepped in to cover the teacher shortage. (Note to French students: No need to riot over a lack of a class when you can find an alternative way to take it. Besides, look at average class sizes in China, Japan, and other Asian countries, they seem to be doing okay, academically.)
The Internet gives us false ideas of what we “need.” And in France the other day, the fridges were turned off because they were connected to the net. Someone might say, it was the fault of the Russians, or Iran, or Corsican separatists, or some other political discontent. Maybe it was a striking student or a bored housewife, or a retiree who was retired too early. It doesn’t matter who did it, the problem is that the weakness existed in the first place.
Why do refridgerators need to be connected to the Internet? Most never need temperature changes at all. Okay, sometimes you might defrost a fridge by unplugging it when it is empty. But in that case, you need to empty it first anyway, so you are literally right next to the fridge that you need to turn off. A switch on the fridge will suffice.
It is convenient to have apps on your phone (the weather or directions), and computers can do more (like R programming, high end video editing, or reading Hey Cluj online), but do we really need appliances or buildings connected to external controls?
We hear that the appliances in French Supermarkets were attacked because they were past their life. (Not only France, but other European countries too. Romania could be next.) They no longer received updates. In the comments on any video about it, you can see hundreds of people talking about how they still own fridges from over thirty years ago, before there was any need to update software.
Imagine everything in your house just stops working, or worse, gets hacked, because it is a little old. Ten years is not a long time.
My guess is that the hacker is a former employee of a supermarket, who was laid off. Perhaps he worked in the tech division, and he was recently downsized. Or, maybe he worked in acquisitions or logistics, and one of the last recommendations he made was to update the fridges. He could have been blamed for something he didn’t do.
Another possibility is that the fridge company itself did the damage. They (or a group of stockholders among them) were annoyed that the supermarkets did not buy the latest fridges, so they hired a hacker to show that the newest versions needed to be bought.
Maybe it was someone who is against refridgeration in principle.
Or it could have been a sales agent, who noticed the software in the fridges were out of date, making them vulnerable… and wants to get a commission for selling the latest model.
There are a lot of people who could benefit economically from the spoils. And there are a lot of people who might have motives to do something like that. Being that “vulnerable” is reckless.
Let’s look at the age. A new version came out five years ago:
But, they were not correcting people who were calling the new one AK-SM 800 three years ago.
Let’s be honest, it’s extremely expensive to replace refrigerator systems in supermarkets. The Danish company should be fined and forced to pay damages for not providing updates. This is ridiculous.
Who is to blame? 1. Danfoss. 2. anyone who bought an internet controlled fridge. 3. everyone who pushes new tech as always better than old tech.
The fact that some kid could turn off the switch remotely is the problem. We all know anti-social people who would do that kind of thing exist. Let’s not make it easier for them.
The earliest mention I found for the AK-SM800 was 2014. It seems to have still been widely available on the market in 2020, as the newer model only went on sale sometime around 2021.
So, these fridges are at most 12 years old, perhaps less than seven years old. And they expect supermarkets to just throw them away and replace them with new models! How reckless is that!
No wonder there are so many toxic waste dumps in Europe.