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LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day

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Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day

#141

If these devices are designed to upload "automatic diagnostic reports" to a central tracker, it's possible this machine is stuck in a failure state that is generating massive amounts of error logs.

Does it matter? It shouldn't be hogging bandwidth like this, that's a failure by itself regardless of whether there another failure state at play. Also, I'd have to question any washing machine that can generate 'massive amounts of error logs'. 3.7 G / Day is an insane amount of data.

Software can have errors.

Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day

#142
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ios devices (unsure about android) use random MACs on wireless networks by default. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102509

The random MAC is generated only once per network, and re-used for every subsequent future connection to it, until the network settings are reset

Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day

#145

Earlier 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…

I would imagine that they just log everything. Serial number, temperature, which cycle is used, time of day, how long it takes to fill the washer, how long it takes to drain the washer. Everything. Put all data in a great big database. When something needs to be fixed and is covered by the warranty, mark that the failed part is associated with that serial number.

Then do some sort of a regression to discover what logged parameters are associated with what failure modes/broken parts. If washers that take less time to fill up have higher than normal failure rates for some elbow joint, that probably means that high water pressure causes the elbow joint to fail. If a certain elbow join's failure rate is simply correlated with the number of cycles, that tells you something different. If a certain elbow join has a high failure rate that's not associated with anything, that probably just means it's a shitty part. But you learn something.

By logging everything and running a regression analysis, when you develop next year's model, you know where to improve. Now when you tell an expensive engineer, "This elbow join failed on 1000 units of revision F. Make it fail on 100 or less units of revision G." you can also give them a starting point to work with.

I'm a software guy. If I get 10 crash dumps, and you don't tell me anything, I don't necessarily know what to work with. If you give me those same 10 crash dumps and tell me that 9 of them had the language set to Arabic or Hebrew I know it's probably a BOM bug. Same thing.

Or you just sell the data to ad companies and let them figure out how to get value from it.

Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A megabyte a day still seems excessive.

It seems completely inconsequential

War and Peace is 3mb as uncompressed plaintext[1]. 1mb a day is a lot.

1: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/2600

Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day

#147
post #38

Why hasn't anyone mentioned a botnet yet? Those devices are perfect targets for Mirai clones. (yes, you still cannot run a mailserver at home, currently because we live in the age of Internet of Shit).

Most people in the reddit thread I saw seemed to assume botnet. I'm not convinced though. That would assume that the washing machine was opening an external port on the user's router, which seems unlikely. I looked up a manual for one of the the washers which has the "ThinQ" feature and there's no mention of UPnP.

Don’t need an open port to be a useful part of a botnet

Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it matter? It shouldn't be hogging bandwidth like this, that's a failure by itself regardless of whether there another failure state at play. Also, I'd have to question any washing machine that can generate 'massive amounts of error logs'. 3.7 G / Day is an insane amount of data.

Software can have errors.

[deleted]

Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day

#149

If these devices are designed to upload "automatic diagnostic reports" to a central tracker, it's possible this machine is stuck in a failure state that is generating massive amounts of error logs.

Does it matter? It shouldn't be hogging bandwidth like this, that's a failure by itself regardless of whether there another failure state at play. Also, I'd have to question any washing machine that can generate 'massive amounts of error logs'. 3.7 G / Day is an insane amount of data.

a program running on a 480 megahertz microcontroller can quite reasonably crash a million times a second; even a single 80-character error log line would be 80 megabytes per second or 7 terabytes per day. and it would be reasonable to record more telemetry from a crash than a single line

Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day

#150
I have both an LG washer and dryer, about 2 years old I’m unable to connect the dryer to WiFi at all (UniFi). The washer does nothing useful on WiFi. All I want is them to connect to HomeAssistant or HomeKit and send a notification when they finish their cycle. I am super disappointed in LG.
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