cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/37646129
Source: Reddit post— Private front-end.
Samsung Statement to Android Authority:
Samsung is committed to innovation and enhancing every day value for our home appliance customers. As part of our ongoing efforts to strengthen that value, we are conducting a pilot program to offer promotions and curated advertisements on certain Samsung Family Hub refrigerator models in the U.S. market.
As a part of this pilot program, Family Hub refrigerators in the U.S. will receive an over-the-network (OTN) software update with Terms of Service (T&C) and Privacy Notice (PN). Advertising will appear on certain Family Hub refrigerator Cover Screens. The Cover Screen appears when a Family Hub screen is idle. Ad design format may change depending on Family Hub personalization options for the Cover Screen, and advertising will not appear when Cover Screen displays Art Mode or picture albums.
Advertisements can be dismissed on the Cover Screens where ads are shown, meaning that specific ads will not appear again during the campaign period.
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The easiest thing in the world is not to connect your fridge to the internet.
Also don’t buy Samsung refrigerators they are truly truly horrific.
I’m an appliance repairman.
What is their issue? Their warranty often out competes other manufacturers here.
Two primary issues with Samsung refrigerators:
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On the French door models, the drainage system for the ice maker is poorly designed. Instead of water draining down into the pan underneath the refrigerator to evaporate, it backs up into the ice maker compartment. This causes a heavy buildup of ice. Eventually, the ice can get so bad inside the compartment that it prevents the refrigerator section from cooling properly.
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On almost all Samsung refrigerators, the drain holes for the freezer evaporator coil are too narrow. This leads to water and ice backing up into the freezer, creating widespread issues across the unit.
As a result, these refrigerators break down frequently. More than 50% of our work orders are Samsung ice maker problems. The root cause of these service calls is simply poor engineering and design deficiencies by the manufacturer.
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They’re low-quality. My family just got rid of one partly because the condenser line kept freezing over and spilling water everywhere but mainly because the electronic touchscreen controls also froze and never worked again so the temp could never be adjusted even after a thaw and reboot. Their microwaves also suck.
The refrigerator I have is a cheap one purchased by a landlord. The house was then sold about 20 years ago and it entered private ownership, that owner sold the house again, the next owner died of old age, the next owner entered a care home, the next owner got married and moved out and then I bought the house. Through it all the refrigerator has endured.
I have no idea what make it is because the label has worn off, to my knowledge no one has ever done anything to it because when I was redoing the floor I found a snickers wrapper underneath it, dated 2005
I swear everything is crap now and made to last all of 5 years and 1 day so that it breaks down just outside of the warranty window.
In that case the easiest thing is not to buy a Samsung or any other “smart” fridge
Don’t ever buy any fridge with internet connectivity. This also extends other home appliances. Just buy those classic white boxes or, if you fancy yourself the Gordon Ramsey type and have money/credit score to buy one, get a Viking fridge.
I’d love a fridge with network connectivity and ‘smart’ features, but I’d need control over the firmware it runs
why. It’s a fridge.
As someone who’s into home automation:
- Some of the features are cool, like seeing what’s in your fridge remotely. That’d be nice to have while I’m out shopping
- I currently have an old NUC hooked up to a little interface and some speakers in my kitchen. It’s a bit janky, and it would be nice to run that through some hardware that’s actually intended for kitchen use
Admittedly I’m not sure I could justify the price for “would be nice” features like that
Ok I’ve been wondering this about the “see the contents of your fridge” thing.
Where does the camera go? What part of the fridge is firing of away from the food storing part that you could get a good angle with a camera. The only place you could put it is on the door, but then it’s just right up against the milk and you wouldn’t be able to see anything.
I imagined something like this (youtube video L7iROzIKm1M ) but idk if it’s still a thing
It’s moot for me anyway because there’s no chance of appliance makers opening up their hardware
EDIT: can’t post a link to YT for some reason
inventory management is helpful
Can’t you just look. That’s how I do it, I look at it. I open the door and I look at what I’ve got in the fridge, and that’s how I know what I’ve got in the fridge.
I live in England and own a small (by US standards) fridge. That last head of cabbage has nowhere to hide. You can see everything in a glimpse.
Which ties in to two broader considerations: we don’t overheat our homes, so you can leave things like butter on the kitchen counter that would be refrigerated in most of the US, and we live in a small, compact city, so anything we need is no more than a 10-minute walk away. So there’s no reason to stock up a huge fridge (though we do have a separate freezer).
ah. We ended up using Paprika for His Lordship’s ADHD. Bonus is he could noodle through it on the train home and snag anything he wanted at the supermarket on the way past.
Love my dumb fridge. No screens, no water dispenser. I own a pitcher and a facuet. Don’t need to change filters every six months or check the weather on my fridge. I never want a screen on my fridge.
Given how many times Samsung’s been caught spying on customer mics, and throwing ads into everything with an internet connection, I don’t understand why anyone is still putting wifi credentials into a Samsung device.
I don’t understand why people even buy their products. Shouldn’t trust them farther than you can throw your fridge.
Agreed. They’re not even good products without the spying. Bad on top of bad.
Last time I had a Samsung product was their S7 phone, and even then it was so full of bloatware I just couldn’t take it anymore.
If you have gone out of your way and intentionally purchased a fridge with an internet connection and a screen frankly you deserve this. What did you expect? Screens have advertisements on them, why else would they put a screen on there.
There was a time when WiFi was actually useful in smart appliances, I have an LG washer/dryer about 7-8 years old, no touchscreens, but by WiFi you can get cycle done alerts, time checks, even remote start it. My matching fridge gives me energy conservation information, and allows me to choose a lower duty winter cycle
I like these features. IDK why the fuck I would want a fridge with a touchscreen. All the smart appliances I’ve seen in the last 5 years are just there to serve you ads and steal your data.
Yeah, if I wanted to monitor and control my appliance online (which I don’t), just give me wifi connectivity and a REST API.
Yeah. We have a smart washer. It’s out in our detached garage/shop so even if the chime were on, no one in the house would ever hear it.
The only “smart” feature we use on it at all is remote notifications.
And we don’t use the GE app for that either. I have it linked through our Home Assistant, so no one in the family needs their crap on our phones. Yes, HA must link into their servers, but the only real data GE gets is how much we use it, and the “city” where our internet connection says we’re in… which is 300 miles away from our actual home, in a completely different state.
but the only real data GE gets is how much we use it
Nope. If they want my data, they can pay me for it. Fuck them.
I hate the enshittification going on everywhere but I’d say the whole smart fridge thing was pretty shitty to begin with…
The other crime here is Bixby.
I’d still take a dumb fridge and magnets at any time of the day.
Magnets is science…too liberal.
yet those magnets don’t show the time of day, do they?
no, for that you get a dumb analogue clock
They can, get a set with numbers ane arrows, move the arrow each time you pass.
I need my fridge to maintain a cold temperature on the inside. That’s it. That’s 100% of what I need from a fridge. The last one I bought was $300 and there’s no place to put an ad. I have no idea why y’all were hooking your appliances up to the internet in the first place, but I’m sorry you’re having a bad time.
You could add a printed ad with adhesive tape to the front door of your fridge to have a similar experience like all those “smart” things…
In the past, the typical example for a “smart device” was a refrigerator, that would automatically buy milk online once it’s empty, but I’m not sure if that really works (or makes any sense). But at least you can now see ads together with weather and news on your refrigerator door.
Tfw u set up Pihole so ur fridge stops spamming you with ads.
I wonder how much longer that will work. DNS over HTTPS is now a thing and totally defeats the mechanism of a pihole.
VPN running on a WRT router? I know very little about this stuff I just know the buzzwords for street cred.
Pihole’s act as a DNS or “Dynamic Name Server”. All internet traffic is IP based once it leaves your home because routers dont know how to forward traffic for “https://samsung-ad-hell.com/”, so there is a dedicated kind of packet for “Where is https://samsung-ad-hell.com/ located?” and that is a DNS Lookup. The Pihole pretends to know because it maintains a list of bad urls that host websites that only support privacy exploitation and advertisements and tells them “oh you want to go to 0.0.0.0, that’s where you’ll find your stuff” as it snickers.
But DNS Lookups were always plain text. When your laptop says “Where is https://big-booties.com/” your ISP knows you want porn. Now there is a new variant called “Secure DNS Lookup” which encrypts the url you’re asking about. The ISP knows you’re asking for a domain’s IP, but it can’t know which one and it no longer cares. Neat.
The trouble is that the Pi-Hole can no longer protect us from all the stupid fucking smart devices that want to earn a fraction of a penny per device by spying on us because THEY use the new Secure DNS Lookup.
It’s not a huge issue, you need a DoH resolver now (e.g. your browser which has a secure connection to a secure DNS server) which cannot block <script> from requesting the ad, but can definitely block <script> from displaying it once the domain resolves.
Extra overhead though, agreed
Wow really? I was under the impression that the SSL part would prevent the pihole from being able to spoof itself as a legitimate DNS
prevent the pihole from being able to spoof itself as a legitimate DNS
Not to be pedantic, but a pihole is legitimate DNS. Being able to do your own DNS has always been a fundamental part of the Internet Protocol, and is used a lot in enterprise to handle name resolution for internal subnets and stuff like that.
Being pedantic is totally OK here - we’re talking about SSL’s spoof protection. I’ll have to look up how any rando can host a DNS that supports DNS/HTTPS when a system would be expecting a valid SSL cert that declares who it was issued to and by whom and the requester is expecting a particular whom.
SSL operates after name resolution. It’s one way that information about your browsing habits is not protected by application-layer encryption; the domains you’re visiting are available to your DNS server.
Unless you’re using DNS over TLS!
Or DNS over https, but that’s kind of gross.
That works for the web, because you control the browser & can know the domain before it gets resolved (& encrypted by DOH/DOT), but for a fridge you’re SOL
it can block scripts requesting the ad, because scripts cannot send arbitrary network traffic, they ask the browser to do something with a domain, which may in turn use doh for finding the IP.
Interesting… Well, this prompted me to search what Pi-Hole has done for this, and they seem to have a way to continue blocking even DoH, using “cloudfared”, which is another daemon that needs to run with Pi-Hole… They can’t possibly think their enshittification will continue to work.
It works on 99% of consumers. As long as preventing the enshittification from stealing your data requires effort and knowledge, this will continue to be the case. Hence the arms race between enshittifiers and human beings, two grouos that are mutually exclusive.
Me yelling “enhance” at my router so it blocks ads better
I can tell you didn’t read the manual because it obviously states that you have to be staring over the top of sunglasses for that configuration option to work.
Maybe block the DoH endpoint and in theory the device might fall back to normal DNS, dunno if that would work.
and also block outgoing connections to port 53 when it’s not the pihole device’s allowed IP
DoH is tricky to block since it’s just using https on port 443. The only options are blocklists of known servers and attempting to detect it with deep packet inspection.
Yeah gotta inspect the traffic and block whatever hostnames it uses.
I’m speculating, but it wouldn’t change a thing. You would still need to request domain addresses from a server somewhere, but traffic between your device and server would be encrypted in transit. The DNS server would also be verifiable to prevent imitators.
So, the request would go to the PiHole and if it was not being filtered the PiHole would make the request of whatever upstream server is configured same as before.
the difference is that it’s very hard to block doh connections because it looks like web/API traffic. and if you don’t block it, it will work around your pihole without you noticing. pihole only works if your devices actually use it without evading it, or if you can firce them to do so. doh is not used for connecting to pihole, it does not even support it.
Used to be I would spam my pie hole with junk from the fridge.
Or just block internet access completely.
This is the way. Although, when I did this to my Samsung television, it eventually began to display dialog boxes complaining that it was having trouble accessing the Internet. So I had to completely delete all network settings in the TV and give up the ability to control it through Home assistant. Annoying.
Samsung is cancer.
How can I watch Roblox let’s plays in my kitchen then hmmmm
through HDMI
What’s that, some sort of labubu or something?
a mediabox. maybe a small PC or a big one. but if you know what is a VLAN, how routing works, and how your router works, you can make it safe to connect it to an internal network with only a jellyfin
if people are buying 1800$ fridges, its on them if they get ads from samsung.
lol who downvotes this? You have to be a colossal moron to buy an appliance without doing 5 minutes of research about any given model.
The ads are new. Research wouldn’t have revealed them.
Buying a fridge with a screen on it is part of the moron circle.
on the sub, where it was discusssing the same thing, it was referring to the 1800$ samsung fridges.
Next model will come with a latch that won’t unlock the fridge door until you’ve watched a 30 second ad or are subscribed to SnackPass+ for 29.99$ a month.
Drink verification can to continue.
is this punishment for expelling hyundai workers?
They should just push a ton of anti-Trump graphics.
👏 You 👏 Don’t 👏 Need 👏 A 👏 TV 👏 On 👏 Your 👏 Fridge 👏
In the 1980s, home computers were sold like this:
“Look at these awesome games, kids! And as for your parents, uh… well, you could use the computers to… uh… I dunno… keep track of the contents of the fridge? Yeah, let’s go with that.”
Nobody ever did that. Not then, not now.
Don’t buy a smart fridge, it’s a scam
The computer manufactuers knew what they were doing. Although, 8-bit computers were cool typewriter replacements/spreadsheer machines if an adult wanted to use them.
and if you do: just get it separately
