CAFE by GE for those who are wondering.

We are renovating our house including all new appliances. I have told my partner to make sure we get non smart appliances. This is why.

Yes I can setup a VLAN for it to be on but that’s not the point.

  • TimeSquirrel
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    12922 days ago

    You didn’t buy an oven. You bought a node for someone else’s botnet.

    • @[email protected]
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      2022 days ago

      Whenever someone designs or purchases a smart device, this is what they need to be told. Is it really worth the risk for potential harm?

    • @[email protected]
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      822 days ago

      Hanlon’s razor, but its interesting to imagine that some Russian, US, Israeli, Chinese, etc agents infiltrated management at appliance manufacturers and convinced them to make all their devices smart, just so they could build bigger botnets

  • @[email protected]
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    22 days ago

    Our GE Profile oven did the same. Of course the software is so shit, it tripped up connecting to the VLAN I set up and now it has air fry mode and no wifi.

    Maybe try switching to airplane mode on your phone while trying to onboard the oven? I’m sure it’s too late for that.

  • Admiral Patrick
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    4622 days ago

    That’s a big, honking “no” from me.

    It’d be one thing if the “smart” features were there but only supplemented the basic functionality. It’s another entirely for those basic features to require an internet connection.

    Out of curiosity, did the product description indicate the internet connection was required? I’m soon to be replacing some appliances and want to know what to look out for (besides all mentions of “wifi” or “smart”).

    • @[email protected]
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      220 days ago

      did the product description indicate the internet connection was required?

      That’s an important question.

      That said, we were recently appliance shopping and none of them said that it was required, but a couple of the negative reviews mentioned it.

      We ended up choosing one of the very few that didn’t list wifi or an app as a feature. Hopefully there isn’t a stealth modem hidden in there somewhere. I guess we’ll find out next week when it’s delivered…

      • Admiral Patrick
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        320 days ago

        Thanks for the additional insight.

        A coffee maker, I’d just return. But a dishwasher, refrigerator, oven, etc would be a huge hassle I’d want to avoid. I think my best bet, like you said, is to just look for one that has absolutely no mention of w-fi or “smart”.

  • @[email protected]
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    22 days ago

    Why the fuck can’t we make things hot without the internet? FFS

    Fire: “I got you, bro.”

      • @[email protected]
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        522 days ago

        It’s like playing Zomboid, but you don’t actually have to break into the house to put your clothes in the oven and turn it on.

        • Chriin
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          322 days ago

          Closer to how the first Megaman Battle Network starts as the scenario cmnybo mentioned is exactly what happens.

  • @[email protected]
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    4322 days ago

    Why the fuck does an oven have a touch screen? That’s a horrible idea. Good luck cleaning your kitchen without accidentally hitting “buttons” on the oven! And heaven forbid food splatter turns on your oven broiler.

    • @[email protected]
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      821 days ago

      I don’t love touch screens on ovens either, but you just press the lock button and then you can clean to your hearts content.

    • @[email protected]
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      21 days ago

      I would hope it’s a special, heavy-duty kind at least.

      They’re on everything because it legitimately just is a good way to get lots and lots of controls and displays on a limited space.

      • @[email protected]
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        20 days ago

        I would hope it’s a special, heavy-duty kind at least.

        I’ve seen an expensive microwave with a capacitive touch panel right above the door (and the door was the classic oven style, so attached by the bottom edge). If you ever had a phone with crappy moisture detection, you know where this is going.

        You put your food in the microwave. Turn it on and let it heat the food up. Open the door, take the food out and close the door again. Congratulations, your microwave has probably just turned itself back on, because it detected the humid hot air rising from the briefly opened door as you touching the screen. And because most of the touch screen is “touchable”, there’s a pretty good chance this gust of humid air can successfully pick a cooking/heating mode and confirm it.

        The microwave randomly navigating its own touch screen happened pretty much every time, passing all the menus and turning on was successful about 10% of the time.

        In short, I wouldn’t expect a microwave interface to have any thought put into it.

    • @[email protected]
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      321 days ago

      Yeah, the touch screen is awful, but just try finding a decent induction range without one and without spending twice as much for the privilege. (It seems that induction ranges are the most popular for this unfortunate design trend.)There’s not really any choices out there. You can lock the screen, which is great for cleaning. Just don’t do that while you’re using the oven or range because it turns everything off and cancels the bake.

      I do love everything else about my induction range though. Cold searing stuff is faster and easier to get right. I can bring a pot of water to a rolling boil in about 4 minutes.

  • Captain Beyond
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    22 days ago

    But they told me I can just not connect it to the internet and it’ll be just like any dumb device.

    Eventually these things will come with modems built in so you can’t even do that.

    • @[email protected]
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      2122 days ago

      Cars already do that with having their own cell connection that you can’t turn off. It’s dystopian.

    • WilfordGrimley
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      3022 days ago

      My APAP machine has a sim card and unless I am careful to not disable airplane mode every time I start it up, it will send all of my health data to company that I have signed no agreement with.

      I explicitly declined to agree to the privacy policy of the company that sold it to me.

      If I find my data in a breach, lawyers will be involved.

      • @[email protected]
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        521 days ago

        Hopefully you don’t live in the US where your insurance company can buy that data and use it to deny you coverage or raise your rates.

        They already do it with cars why not CPAP machines.

  • Blackout
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    1422 days ago

    I bought one of those ge induction ovens to swap out a gas one. The only smart feature I liked was the ability to turn my oven on to preheat from my phone. Guess what feature just doesn’t work no matter the tech support help i get with it.

    • @[email protected]
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      422 days ago

      I worked for a phone manufacturer a few years ago. We’d get callers who were referred to us by shitty IOT vendors who wanted to insist their buggy apps just didn’t work because our phone broke it and not because their crappy IOT “features” were clearly tossed together by lowest bidder contractors they stopped paying 2 years ago. The number of IOT devices I just referred the customer to the Google Play reviews and read them the first 5 reviews that all detail various bugs in the companion app was concerning to say the least

  • Hadouken Shoryuken
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    1222 days ago

    I wonder if they will eventually make a toilet bowl to connect to the Internet. Can’t flush until you connects to the Internet just because…

  • rem26_art
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    7822 days ago

    they’re using the Wi-fi radiation to cook your meals /s

    Thats really, really dumb. I can understand maybe wanting the option of having your oven ping your phone when the timer goes off, but what could it possibly need internet access for in order to turn on the heating element and a fan for a set period of time??

    • @[email protected]
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      1922 days ago

      I had a bakery/kiosk mix of shop, where I baked bread every morning for 13 years or so. There was a customer who questioned my oven, because she actually does not know if it really radiates. And how I can be this sure about it. Its a damn oven! Like one in every household, just a bit bigger. People are really this dumb. Besides, it wouldn’t be legal… oh man still upsets me. Not because of being accused for, but it upset me that people like her have the right to vote.

      • Saik0
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        3222 days ago

        The microwave region extends from 1,000 to 300,000 MHz (or 30 cm to 1 mm wavelength).

        Source: https://www.britannica.com/science/electromagnetic-radiation/Microwaves

        2.4Ghz, and 5Ghz are microwaves. Your typical microwave oven operates at about 2.45GHz due to resonance frequency of water. 2.4Ghz wifi is literally a typical microwave’s neighbor.

        The difference is sheer amount of power and shielding. Not the type of radiation.

          • Saik0
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            722 days ago

            It may very well be. However, with how matter-of-factly you said it, some people might not think it’s a joke.

        • @[email protected]
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          21 days ago

          The water resonance thing is a myth, AFAIK. Strong absorption is actually a bad thing for a microwave oven, because then it would only heat the surface. The way they work is effectively bouncing the radiation through a barely-absorbing dielectric thousands of times, to get the effect really even.

          The frequency is probably just an easy one to build magnetrons for.

          • Saik0
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            121 days ago

            The frequency is probably just an easy one to build magnetrons for.

            The real reason is that that range is reserved for consumer devices so that it doesn’t interfere with actual ISM sanctioned communications as enforced by the FCC. We just also decided to put wifi in the same range cause they’re stingy releasing frequencies for public use.

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISM_radio_band#Frequency_allocations


            But research was done on it cause of course it has been.

            https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0031-9120/39/1/006

            This article deals with the generation of microwaves in the oven and includes the operation of the magnetrons, waveguides and standing waves in resonant cavities. It then considers the absorption of microwaves by foods, discussing the dielectric relaxation of water, penetration depths of electromagnetic waves in matter and, in considering the possible chemical changes during the microwave heating, multi-photon ionization or dissociation.

            So you’re likely right that it’s not water resonance, but chassis cavity resonance. I can’t say that I’ve read deeply into it. And thinking about it I remember hearing something about some of the high level stuff that I just read in relation to this article. I probably ran into it in passing and just failed to recall it. But to be frank, I’m okay just calling it voodoo wizardry in of itself. But I have to understand wireless communications stuff for my profession, and it’s well known that it’s basically the same range as wifi 2.4ghz/bluetooth/other consumer standards that sit in the same crowded space.

            • @[email protected]
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              21 days ago

              There’s several ISM bands, though, pretty evenly spaced. The 13.5MHz one is used for passive RF chips like on credit cards, for example. They’re skinny, but for purposes where bandwidth doesn’t matter they can be. For other purposes bandwidth is scarce enough there has to be tight regulation.

              Actually high water absorption happens in mm wave bands up in the hundreds of GHz (and THz too, if we could make a decent transmitter). Those fucked up riot control devices that make your skin feel on fire work based on that principle, because the heat will only go deep enough to hit pain receptors. Presumably, they stop working if you get a water mixture of any kind on the window, too.

      • Karyoplasma
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        722 days ago

        That could work if you amped the waves up and trapped them in a confined, isolated space, no?

          • Karyoplasma
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            322 days ago

            We’re not trying to be efficient, we are trying to be innovative!

            • AWildMimicAppears
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              122 days ago

              I for my part would rather like to use the microwave for Hi-Power WiFi (and you can hold a bag of popcorn into the datastream for nutrition too!)

        • @[email protected]
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          222 days ago

          I’m not sure if that’s possible, but if, not in this size. You would probably need an oven in the size of an entire truck maybe? It probably needs lot of energy for both, isolating and transforming/amping the signal. At that point the power going in to transform the signal could be used more efficiently otherwise to achieve the same goal without Wi-fi (as those small microwaves proves it).

    • @[email protected]
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      5622 days ago

      It doesn’t need it. That’s exactly the point.

      Even though air frying doesn’t need Internet, the manufacturer is restricting that feature as a way to force you to set up the WiFi, so they can then slurp up all your data.

      They’re literally holding the feature hostage, as motivation.

      • @[email protected]
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        122 days ago

        Is data on when I turn the oven on, and how long I run it for, even worthwhile? Or do you think it’s sniffing out other info from my network?

        • @[email protected]
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          422 days ago

          Is data on when I turn the oven on, and how long I run it for, even worthwhile?

          They wouldn’t be holding you hostage for it if it wasn’t.

        • @[email protected]
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          221 days ago

          At the bare minimum, they’re going to use that data to figure out, on average, how much use it gets while under the warranty period. They’ll use that to further cut corners on the materials or other design considerations.

        • @[email protected]
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          622 days ago

          I’ve honestly come to the conclusion that some companies have management that actually believes its worth while to collect the most meaningless telemetry data, even after the ridiculous cost of bandwidth, database storage, hosting, etc. which all become more bonkers the larger the dataset. I’ve seen the cloud bills for actual useful data, I don’t want think about how much they must be paying AWS/Azure/GCP to host such worthless data. There’s no way its at all profitable to do so

      • @[email protected]
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        2122 days ago

        Do what you like, friend, as I did. Why? I don’t swear a lot in person, and for me, I communicate the same online and off.

          • @[email protected]
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            822 days ago

            It is an odd choice to argue over such a thing. No one was harmed in the making of the first comment. Or the second. If anything, that person is being completely reasonable instead of demanding what others should do.

        • Baggins
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          22 days ago

          Good point. Not everyone swears like a trooper. I’m ex British army so can live with it. But I wouldn’t swear in mixed company or in front of my daughter, even though she is over 21.

          • Sternhammer
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            522 days ago

            To each his own, of course, but coy swearing is still swearing.

            Actually I do sympathise. I swear too much (but not more than the average Aussie) and wish I could train myself to use some other intensifiers in my language but most of them lack intensity. By Jove! My word! Sweet zombie Jesus! Drokk!

    • @[email protected]
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      1021 days ago

      I can totally see a point in some of the features.

      The other day my wife and I got 20 minutes from home before I said “oh shit I don’t know if I turned the oven off”. Turns out I did, but we had to drive home to check. I would have loved to pull up an app that told me it was actually off, or even if I was on be able to turn it off from there.

      With that said, it’s not worth all the extra bullshit in my opinion.

      • Jack
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        721 days ago

        And what if someone else downloads the app and turns in on?

        • @[email protected]
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          220 days ago

          That’s always a possibility especially when every company under the sun is making smart things on a whim for as cheap as possible. I don’t trust any of them as far as I can throw an oven.

          I have a few random smart things, but before I connect them to the internet I make sure they have a decent api that I can use, block external access from the router and set up a little interface so that I can VPN into my home and control stuff if I need to. So in order for anything to be compromised my whole network would have to be owned. Which is still possible but I trust that a lot more than letting 20 different apps for each device have access to anything in my home.

          • Jack
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            20 days ago

            Another way to say this is that a hacker needs only access to your private network to gain control of all connected devices.

            IMO this is hardly worth it when the benefits are I can check my oven remotely or I can check what the vacuum is doing.

            I tend to not buy connected devices if it can be avoided.

    • @[email protected]
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      120 days ago

      I actually find it very nice to get notifications about my toaster oven being preheated or done cooking, or being able to see how much time is left or remotely stop it.