Via Insty, this little gem:
Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update
bricks Samsung smart fridges
Affected fridges “suddenly lost power and stopped functioning immediately after” trying to issue a firmware update through SmartThings, Samsung’s smart home platform, per Star News Korea. The SmartThings app then showed the devices as offline. Some users said that their fridge’s internal display was stuck showing the message “Checking SmartThings app during update.”
There are numerous reports on Samsung’s Korean community forum detailing the problem. Some users claim that they have owned their affected fridge for just a year or less.
“[T]he refrigeration and refrigeration functions themselves did not work normally, so all the food in the refrigerator had to be disposed of,” one user wrote.
Of course, Samsung says that this only affected Korea — like it could never happen anywhere else. Uh huh.
Here’s where all this technology — in appliances, cars, whatever — cocks things up. What has happened is that “must-have” has been largely replaced by “nice to have”, and in the nature of the human condition, a lot of “nice to have” things have become “must-have”. Let’s use fridges as an example.
Must have: maintain a constant temperature that cools or freezes foods. This is the sine qua non of any refrigerator.
Nice to have: a means whereby one may control the temperature (initially, by a manual dial inside / outside the refrigerator), and by extension, a means of notifying the customer when the fridge stops working — e.g. the little light inside doesn’t turn on when the door is opened.
So when the above “nice to have” slowly transforms away from the manual / visual of the fridge itself into “you can now check your fridge’s condition on your phone” (to give but one example), all sorts of failure points are introduced into the process. And that’s the simplest one I can think of; but of course it doesn’t stop there, does it?
Anyway, I can see that at some point you will no longer be able to get a simple fridge like the one your Mom had in her kitchen. Oh no: you’ll only be able to get one that tells you the time, sets variable temperatures inside the fridge by drawer, tells you when the icemaker level drops below a certain point, and so on and so on. All very nice to know, but nowhere close to being “must-have”. (It will also cost three times the amount that a basic fridge used to, and will yield five times the profit to the manufacturer, which is your answer right there.)
And when the upgrades come along (why?), and the whole thing falls over, you’ll be left in the same predicament as the hapless Korean restaurateurs.
I can dream, can’t I?
I have a Samsung clothes washer and dryer. Big fucking mistake – they don’t wash clothes worth a hoot, don’t dry worth a hoot because their lint filter is a joke, and I have to clean lint out of the air passages every six months, they’ve had a recall for exploding washer drums, and too many service calls.
“Samsung” is Korean for “sucks ass.”
As to all this computer controlled shit: I worked with a brilliant electrical engineer from the Apollo Program a long time ago who told me: “Just remember, every software control program will always have three bugs left in it for all eternity, and when the right combination of events occurs, it will do something you won’t like, maybe even kill you.” He was so right.
There’s a whole universe of employment opportunity opening up for those with the skills to install bypasses to such automatic “upgrades” in automobiles, computers, phones, and other such appliances. Particularly if they’re cunning enough to ensure that Central gets an affirmative response when it sends an inquiry.
.
One could easily argue that we’ve passed peak design several decades ago and everything since has been affected by the enshittification of the universe. I was talking to my son this weekend and he had replaced the wheels and tires on his vehicle. Said the TPM system was a pain in the ass to get right. I thought to myself, used to we carried a tire pressure gage in the glove box. If a tire looked low, or the car pulled a little one side, we’d simply get out and check the pressure manually. Why the fuck was that so hard that they had to put monitors in each wheel?
I’m to the point of thinking I should start going to these estate auctions I keep hearing about. Except, instead of bidding on the usual junk, I’m going to bid on that extra freezer they’ve had in the garage since the Nixon administration. Surely I can get one for $20 or so. It’ll still work forever.
My 20+ year old oven died 2 weeks ago.
Finding a replacement that didn’t need an “app” and didn’t have all controls through a touch screen took a while, but I found one by digging down into the very low end of the European produced products.
I just paid $1300 last summer to keep my built-in 26 year old SubZero going, hopefully for another decade or so. Yeah, they’re expensive, but they are tanks. Sadly though, they have webified their new models. I beat that move by buying a lightly used 634 and have it in the garage as back up.
My Montgomery Ward chest freezer, which I bought in Key West in 1975 and drug through 38 years of Navy moves, still works as good as the day I bought it. I replaced the seal in 1999, but that’s it. Yes, I have to defrost it every other year, but that’s a small price to pay for that kind of longevity.
I like to remember Murphy’s Law: “If something CAN break, it WILL.”
Along with its First Corollary: “…and usually at the worst possible time.”
I cannot imagine an actual USE for connecting any household appliance to the internet. This includes the soi disant “smart” thermostats and lighting systems, which allows a hacker from Bangladesh to control your home’s temperature in the middle of winter and to turn your lights on and off at random in the middle of the night.
One of the things that people have forgotten is the concept of independent systems and redundancy. If our boiler goes out, at least we’ve got the mini-split A/C that can run in heat pump mode (at great expense, but less than fixing frozen plumbing). If the electricity goes out, at least we can run the wood stove (a pain in the butt, but it keeps the whole house warm).
They’re now selling back-up whole-house generators THAT ARE CONNECTED TO THE ‘NET. That’s a case of somebody completely missing a point.
I might suggest Crosley Appliance. They are a mid-west manufacturer and I think they still make a basic fridge. Or at least they did.
Some retailers even have them in stock.
I’ve been pricing potential replacements for my aging side-by-side fridge/freezer. Who on earth needs a “smart” fridge, enabling to see what’s in it 24/7 from anywhere in the world? I already know about the dead hooker. I’m the one who put her there, FFS.
I’m reminded of a line from James Doohan in one of the Star Trek movies: “The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.”
I am convinced that there is a business opportunity for a smart hacker living in Brazil, to sell reverse engineered software that deletes or turns off most of the ‘connected to death’ software paths in internet connected junk.
An even better product would be a reverse engineered John Deere motherboard, which allows complete operator control of all of the software/sensor junk: turn it off, ignore etc. instead of a brain freeze and a notice to call for service. A motherboard with the software, so that the software is NOT a breach of copyright and so that the software on the original motherboard is never touched or replaced which would be a breach of copyright “protection”.
I’m not against convenience features that have zero interface to the basic functionality of the device in question. I have 12V fridge in my Jeep for long camping/overlanding trips. If I lose battery power in the evening I don’t want to wake up to a fridge full of spoiled food the next morning, so sure, include something that gives me remote temperature readings and alarms my phone if the temp rises above 40°F. Great.
Ditto even for our home fridge. If I accidentally the door slightly ajar, by all means make a sound or even ping my phone. But I do NOT want any way to remotely set temperatures or control the basic functionality of the device in question. Likewise, I don’t object to getting a ping from the laundry room equipment when the cycle is finished since we can’t hear it all the way upstairs, but nothing more than that. Our 35 year old top-loading Maytag will outlast me!