It's the Russians. They've run out of their own washing-machine chips to re-use in their missiles, so they've found a way to hack into washing-machines all over the world and use those millions of chips to guide their missiles instead.
LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day
91–100 of 256 posts
Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you need an entire megabyte for that? Even if you did laundry five times a day, it shouldn't take more than a few bytes to store a few metrics. Even if you're lazy and uploaded an uncompressed JSON array of objects, that shouldn't be more than a few kB. Way less if you compress it. A megabyte is a LOT of data.
I could easily see it measuring the forces and weight on the drum every 5 seconds (or even every 10 ms) during the whole wash, to be able to produce charts of vibration patterns, that engineers could use to correlate with failure. Remember -- when you're spinning at high speed to wring out the water, it's actually some pretty crazy strong forces. Or other things measured every ~second, like stuff related to the motor…
That might make sense during development, but there's no way they do that in a consumer product. If a part breaks they're just going to send out a replacement or the repair guy is gonna get some third party part. Recording that much detail would just be noise.
Even if they had specific parts sensors (doubt it, for costs), they could just process that locally and send up an error code, not the whole log.
I find that all pretty hard to believe, but if anyone has evidence to the contrary, I'd be glad to be proven wrong. I had a LG washing machine bought new a few years ago promising all sorts of bells and whistles and app integrations. But it was super janky and cheaply made, the app integration was terrible, the on board memory would lose its configured settings, the entire LCD broke after a few weeks... it was not what I would consider well-engineered at all. If it was sending a megabyte a day I'd just assume it was yet another bug, not some forward thinking QA.
Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Siri set a timer for *looks at washer screen* minutes That's it. But tbh wish my smart speakers would learn all the appliance chimes instead.
My dryer will straight up lie to me and say “20 minutes” for anything between 0 and 60 minutes. I think it realizes the clothes are still too damp and just keeps running, but whatever differential equation it’s using to predict time remaining seems flawed.
And having written that out, now I want a notification from my dryer when it’s not making progress as fast as it expects…
Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day
#94Assuming I'd be stupid enough to have a "smart" washing machine, in this case I would've immediately started capturing packets to determine what's going on. Apparently it was a misreporting(!) in the router's firmware, but the opaqueness of modern technology (and the ignorance it tends to perpetuate) can be very infuriating. Meanwhile my washing machine has zero electronics and is completely predictable and obvious i…
Zero electronics? What are you using? A washboard and a mangle?
Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get significantly cheaper electricity at night ($0.12 vs > $0.50/kwh, stupid California). Being able to schedule saves money, not that WiFi is necessarily required.
A lot of washing machines remember their previous state when the power goes out. You can use this to your advantage using a smart switch: start the wash cycle, turn off the power straight after. When you turn the power back on at a scheduled time (using the smart switch), the washing machine will pick up where it left off (at the beginning of the cycle). Also a lot of them just have a timer built-in anyway.
Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I could easily see it measuring the forces and weight on the drum every 5 seconds (or even every 10 ms) during the whole wash, to be able to produce charts of vibration patterns, that engineers could use to correlate with failure. Remember -- when you're spinning at high speed to wring out the water, it's actually some pretty crazy strong forces. Or other things measured every ~second, like stuff related to the motor…
You really think they're going to measure all that, upload it, send it to some expensive engineer, have them try to physically model the error, and then... what? That might make sense during development, but there's no way they do that in a consumer product. If a part breaks they're just going to send out a replacement or the repair guy is gonna get some third party part. Recording that much detail would just be nois…
Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day
#97> In a follow-up post a day after his initial Tweet, Johnie noted “inaccuracy in the ASUS router tool.” Other LG smart washing machine users showed device data use from their apps. It turns out that these appliances more typically use less than 1MB per day.
My Ubiquiti UniFi UDM is not good at device identification. It's kind of annoying because I have this big list of devices on the network and it's peppered with devices that I know don't exist. I'd appreciate it if it said something like "Maybe iPad Air", instead of just "iPad Pro 2nd Gen" when I know no such device is on my network.
Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I could easily see it measuring the forces and weight on the drum every 5 seconds (or even every 10 ms) during the whole wash, to be able to produce charts of vibration patterns, that engineers could use to correlate with failure. Remember -- when you're spinning at high speed to wring out the water, it's actually some pretty crazy strong forces. Or other things measured every ~second, like stuff related to the motor…
You really think they're going to measure all that, upload it, send it to some expensive engineer, have them try to physically model the error, and then... what? That might make sense during development, but there's no way they do that in a consumer product. If a part breaks they're just going to send out a replacement or the repair guy is gonna get some third party part. Recording that much detail would just be nois…
Is he sure they're sending Is he sure it's plausible it's measuring time series data? Yeah.
Is it plausible they measure vibration patterns? Yeah.
It's not about like "oh we'll send an electrical engineer to fix your specific vibration pattern", it's "we can collect data from the field to make forward-looking decisions": ex. maybe we switch supplier mix for replacement motors, and a data scientist ends up finding 6 months later that something changed in June 2023 where serviced washers in New York report dramatically more intense vibrations and now we know to go talk to the supplier who gained mix.
It's error logs for non-tech. YMMV on individual team quality if they actually follow-up. Conceptually, Big Data(tm) is something CEOs have been hearing regularly since, what, 2014? So definitely plausible.
Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day
#99Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you need an entire megabyte for that? Even if you did laundry five times a day, it shouldn't take more than a few bytes to store a few metrics. Even if you're lazy and uploaded an uncompressed JSON array of objects, that shouldn't be more than a few kB. Way less if you compress it. A megabyte is a LOT of data.
I could easily see it measuring the forces and weight on the drum every 5 seconds (or even every 10 ms) during the whole wash, to be able to produce charts of vibration patterns, that engineers could use to correlate with failure. Remember -- when you're spinning at high speed to wring out the water, it's actually some pretty crazy strong forces. Or other things measured every ~second, like stuff related to the motor…
Collecting all that data for analysis would be incredibly valuable, especially considering the wealth of analysis tools today.