As article says, the coffee machine didn't 'collect' or phone home a TB of data. It just saturated the local network looking for data to collect. This doesn't cost Keurig or any other IoT device company a single cent. It might have been a bug, or maybe not. Without some bad press, like this post; they have no incentive to change anything

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nkrisc 16 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It uses energy paid for by the homeowner.

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MBCook 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah but that can’t even be useful can it? What’s that going to find that only using 500 MB of probes wouldn’t have found?

Still seems buggy.

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didgetmaster 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Engineer: How often should our software scan the local network looking for new devices? Once a day? Once an hour?

Manager: We might miss something. Since scanning doesn't cost us anything, better do it a thousand times a second!

	▲	gerdesj an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Oh let's be charitable! A parameter measured in ms is mistakenly thought be measured in s. Hilarity ensues. Real world example: þe Windows registry DWORD time periods seems to invite 10^-3s granularity for totally inappropriate timescales. Perhaps its considered a "best practice" by the dick heads that decide to do these things, who knows? Why bother considering how a sysadmin might actually want to use the knobs and dials and what is an appropriate value for a parameter. I could probably find a better example but this is recent: Smoothwall has an agent (IDEX) that you install on a Windows domain controller and one of its functions can be to harvest DHCP data and pass it onto the firewall so that it can track sessions. The upload period is a registry DWORD value. I fixed a "problem" by stopping IDEX trying to upload data a thousand times per second. I will also point out that switching on this functionality and the periodicity setting is only applied by editing the registry - there is no GUI for this. The dReal world example -ocs are clear that you should initially set 1000 as the period. For me that sort of thing comes under the heading of "you are holding it wrong", potential victim shaming and rubbish engineering.

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Refreeze5224 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't understand giving the benefit of the doubt to a company that is actively spying on its customers, which in some jurisdictions would be illegal.

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MBCook 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I’m not defending the spying.

The traffic volume just sounds like a bug to me.

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BLKNSLVR an hour ago | parent | next [-]

A software bug in a coffee machine sounds like a problem of management not understanding the product market they're in.

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sixothree 25 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Maybe they literally just don't care about how much traffic they put on your network. Maybe the thought is "1 tb of traffic internally is very low utilization of the network over the course of a month".

	▲	mahboi 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Whatever they're trying to accomplish with these scans would probably be impeded in some way by this much volume. Like it'd compete with the link it's using to phone home or overload whatever on-device processing it does with that data. The man in the article who discovered this called it a bug, I agree with him.

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blackoil 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Than What is the meaning of "used"?

	▲	awesome_dude 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I mean, it wasn't clear to me without the explanation (I too thought it used 1TB of public internet data), but it's clear now that it is accurate (it literally used 1 TB of private network data) It might not seem to be anything (people will assume private network traffic is free) but there is a cost - it's capacity that could be used for other purposes, eg. home alarms.

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b112 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They could be sued in small claims court.

Here that means no lawyers, no discovery, $100 to file in plain language, and a company employee (not a company lawyer, or a contractor, or a temp employee) must attend or they default.

$15k damages.

Reasons it could happen? Imagine grandpa has a tech come out 4 times, because his network is super slow. EG, this thing pounding his wifi for its scans.

	▲	zdragnar 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Small claims court in the US typically requires actual damages, and doesn't add punitive damages. Grandpa gets reimbursed for the four techs who came out, that's it.