Data specialist Mark Rittman wanted to make tea around 9:00AM, but found himself in an eleven hour saga trying to get his wi-fi tea kettle to work. He documented his struggle on a website that’s also struggling, a social network called Twitter.com.

Rittman literally had to hack his kettle in order for the water to get boiled… 11 hours later.

What’s the lesson here? Never give up. JK, the lesson is fuck the internet of things. Go analog, baby.

The public promise of the Internet Of Things from years ago when the first journalists discovered the idea and strove to make it comprehensible to the masses was that your kitchen appliances would be internet-connected and somehow this would make our lives better. Fridges would have screens, we were told, and would magically order more bacon when supplies ran low.

A decade or so later some fridges have screens, but the real boom in IoT applications has not been in such consumer-visible applications. Most of your appliances are still just as unencumbered by connectivity as they were twenty years ago

The market hasn’t been devoid of IoT kitchen appliances though. One is the Smarter Coffee coffee machine, a network-connected coffeemaker that is controlled from an app.

ts not having a console application. He thus set about creating one, starting with reverse engineering its protocol by disassembling the Android version of its app.

What he found was sadly not an implementation of RFC 2324

On the face of it you might think that the machine’s lack of security might not matter as it is on a private network behind a firewall. But it represents yet another example of a worrying trend in IoT devices for completely ignoring security.

Reversing the Smarter Coffee IoT Machine Protocol to Make Coffee Using the Terminal.
https://www.evilsocket.net/2016/10/09/IoCOFFEE-Reversing-the-Smarter-Coffee-IoT-machine-protocol-to-make-coffee-using-terminal/