The smart vacuum cleaner was remotely bricked for not collecting data.

An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device. That’s when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn’t consented to. The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers’ IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after. After a lengthy investigation, he discovered that a remote kill command had been issued to his device.

  • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
    133·
    5 days ago

    Had a kill command actually been sent, or does the device just not work without a remote server talking to it every so often?

    Because the second one is probably worse from a “what if this company goes bust” standpoint.

    • Nalivai@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      5 days ago

      Don’t worry, the quality of the modern hardware is so shitty, it will not outlive the company for long

    • ඞmir@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      4 days ago

      Furthermore, the engineer made one disturbing discovery — deep in the logs of his non-functioning smart vacuum, he found a command with a timestamp that matched exactly the time the gadget stopped working. This was clearly a kill command, and after he reversed it and rebooted the appliance, it roared back to life.