Technology

Clickbait, he tweeted “inaccuracy in the ASUS router tool” later on.

Anybody in his right minds wouldn't connect a washing machine to WiFi in the first place.

Well the missing socks have to get sent somewhere... /s

LG's app is an absolute privacy nightmare too. That app must be used if you want access to any smart appliance features and it requires precise location permissions 100% of the time. Even then, the app features are mediocre, it doesn't work very well and often doesn't notify of a finished wash load until long after it's completed.

Why anyone would want to allow their washing machine manufacturer to continuously track their exact location in exchange for some crappy, poorly implemented features is beyond me.

No it couldn’t. My washing machine cant connect to my network! I can’t think of a valid reason why I would even want that.

You are doing it wrong!

It really irritates me when IoT devices force you to use "the cloud" for access. My home automation consists of roughly 100 devices. The vast majority are Zigbee, but a few use wifi. With the exception of my irrigation controller, all the wifi devices are blocked at the firewall from accessing the internet. The fact that I have to send a command half way across the country to a remote server only so it can send it right back to my home network when I want to change the watering schedule for my plants is ridiculous. Sure, I could buy a different controller, but I already spent $300 once. I'm not doing it again.

Imagine spending extra money on a new clothes washer only to have someone turn it in to a crypto miner. 😬

Why are people connecting their machines to wifi in the first place?

IoT = bad

Plot twist: it was the Asus router misreporting the amount of data.

Until a robot can hang up my washing, my machine is staying off any networks

Bought “smart” LG fridge, range and dishwasher a couple of years ago and never connected any of them, they function like they are supposed to, refrigerate, heat food and clean dirty dishes. No need to connect.

Fridge manual explained something like “in case of peak energy consumption your smart energy company can send a signal to your fridge to not use power”. What the heck do I need that for? To find spoiled food and mold growing in the fridge later on?

Why does one need to connect a range to WiFi?

Thats gonna me my new excuse when I loose in CoD. The washing machine was clogging up the Network.

If you buy a "smart" washing machine and actually connect it to the internet, you deserve what you get.

There are probably 3 main groups of people with WiFi appliances:

1. The vast majority of people don't care, and put it on their normal WiFi router and would never notice something like this
2. A smaller group of people don't care much, but pay attention to their bandwidth usage and would spot an appliance trying to send 3.7 GB of data a day
3. A much smaller group of people are paranoid and would put the device on its own isolated subnet, or use firewall-type features to limit the access their appliances have to the Internet.

My guess is that if this were a widespread problem, people in the second group would notice, or would have immediately checked and chimed in and said "holy crap, mine is doing this too". I didn't hear many people saying that, so I'm guessing this is a bug, and it's either a one-off weirdness, or it's a bug related to people in group 3 who are blocking their appliances from being able to connect to the Internet.

It's probably something as simple as a badly programmed firmware update check that doesn't do exponential backoff when it fails. It probably connects, fails, then immediately tries again. A proper exponential backoff would wait before trying again, and if it failed again it would double the wait time down to some minimum value like once per day or something.

Incidentally, this is also why claims about smartphones monitoring people's conversations when they're supposedly off is BS. That would require either huge amounts of bandwidth to transmit all the conversations, or huge amounts of computing power inside the phone to decode the voices. Either way you'd be using tons of battery, and probably a significant amount of bandwidth. There are enough paranoid people out there that if this were a real thing, someone would have caught the devices doing it by now.

The issue with web IpT is that devices send data reports of their status every fraction of a second. The packet may just be a few bytes but over time it adds up. Instead I wished they could just send status when they change state and wait for a confirmation but that’s harder to code…

A: Why would a washing machine have internet access? B: If it has the option, why would You even connect it to the internet? C: If it has to be connected to the internet, why would You even buy it?

I have a similar model washer/dryer and refuse to put it on my wifi. I only want it to wash and dry.

Just put the device on a separate wifi without internet access, or look at the "child protection" features of your router. Ours can put devices based on their MAC into "access groups" which range from "full access" over "internet from \ to " to "no internet at all".

Why a washing machine need the connect to the Internet in the first place?

Was it being used as a node in a botnet? Or did it glitch somehow to keep sending over and over again? I can't image that behavior is nominal for that washing machine.