The smart vacuum cleaner was remotely bricked for not collecting data.

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.

  • 0x0@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    8 hours ago

    it was bricked remotely because it couldn’t communicate with the manufacturer’s servers.

    That bit seems inaccurate… if it couldn’t communicate it wasn’t bricked remotely… it was more like digital seppuku.

    • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      1·
      6 hours ago

      Earlier in the article he says that he only disabled some of the network connections but he left open the ones for firmware updates and stuff so to me it’s not impossible that it was able to receive remote commands although I would certainly want to see more technical details to satisfy my curiosity.

      The article says in words that it was a remote command. But again, we don’t have any details supporting that description. So maybe the journalist got it wrong.