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Manufacturer issues remote kill command to disable smart vacuum after engineer blocks it from collecting data — user revives it with custom hardware and Python scripts to run offline (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 12 points 11 months ago (4 children)

I was thinking about getting one but I learned that they do require a lot of maintenance like cleaning the brushes and you have to change parts regularly. That sounds like more work they just sweeping from time to time. Also, broom has a lower carbon footprint.

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  • [–] [S] 6 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Ours has needed very little maintenance and has quickly become a necessity because it gets the floors much cleaner that we ever did. An unexpected consequence is that the whole house stays cleaner because we still spend some of the time and energy we were spending on sweeping on other cleaning tasks.

    As much as the thing irritates me you'd have to pry it from my cold, dead hands.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    Yeah, ours mops the floor every other day too. It’s really a game changer, having shining floors all the time has benefited me in myriad ways!

    I also enjoy using the remote control feature to troll our cats while I’m at work.

    There are privacy concerns, (mine is a Dreame), but we are already so far from an ironclad privacy operation that I feel keeping my wife from the purchase would be needlessly cruel.

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