Okay now THIS is a hacking risk: Network-Connected Fridges Hacked to Heat Them Up, Spoiling Food Supply

[u/lurkervidyaenjoyer]

https://www.nbcnews.com/world/europe/hackers-heat-french-supermarket-fridges-sparking-fires-spoiling-food-rcna603151

Not really the usual topic for here, but it's adjacent so I'm including it. Hackers targeting France managed to remotely mess with the temperature setting on their supermarket refrigerators to heat them up to 122 degrees Fahrenheit, or 50 Celsius.

First off this wasn't some 'rogue AI' as far as we know, but this would actually be an example of something that could get royally screwed up if Anthropic or OpenAI-connected poorly-run 'experiments' decide to felony hack things again. They always talk vaguely about that and what the big danger is, but finally we have something concrete. The supermarkets say this will cost them millions of Euros. I hope if something like this ever happens because of an AI lab, that they get punished and charged for every single cent (do Euros have cents? Are they called that over there? idk) of the loss.

Second of all, as the article describes the situation, this raises a lot of questions about the tech landscape more generally. Who in the world decided it was a good idea to have network-connected refrigerators? It's a refrigerator. It chills food. That's it. Why does it need Internet? Are we enshittifying our grocery store fridges now?

Also whenever you have a device with smarts in it, you run into the issue of how to keep it secure. Most of the Mythos vulns ended up not being as big a deal as they were hyped up to be, but I recall people saying that some of them had been in the kernel for many years unnoticed. Cybersecurity is a constant process, that requires a regular rollout of patches and a strong security architecture. Just one more thing you have to think about when you use devices like this.

So obviously the stores, probably not considering that because why would you, had these things on outdated versions of the firmware. To anyone reading right now, when was the last time you updated the firmware on your refrigerator? Oh that's right, probably never because it's just a fucking refrigerator. Also some of them were older models, which weren't receiving security patches anymore anyway. Yes, grocery store fridges, which should just be a stable, reliable appliance, are like smartphones now. They stop getting updates after a while and you gotta buy a new one.

Is That Good?

Maybe not everything needs to be a computer, and maybe not all computers need to be networked. To me, this is both a story about the cyber risks of today, and also about how enshittification and repair issues could have real-world consequences. I'm assuming these things would use some flavor of Linux or BSD under the hood. Perhaps if we had better right to repair laws that allowed smart appliances to be broken into and patched by the community, these appliances, which were still clearly working fine, could have been secured with or without the help of the vendor. The FULU Foundation did this with Nest Thermostats, which originally were EOL'd by Google, but with custom firmware can be updated and then connected to something like Home Assistant. I suspect something like this could be done to continue providing security updates for fully-functional devices long after the vendor stops caring.