All Your Coffee Are Belong To Us

Wolf nipple chips writes "Craig Wright discovered that the Jura F90 Coffee maker, with its honest-to-God Jura Internet Connection Kit, can be taken over by a remote attacker, who can cause the coffee to be weaker or stronger; change the amount of water per cup; or cause the machine to require service (call this one a DDoC). 'Best yet, the software allows a remote attacker to gain access to the Windows XP system it is running on at the level of the user.' An Internet-enabled, remote-controlled coffee-machine and XP backdoor — what more could a hacker ask for?"

Re:Java?

[BWJones]

Yeah, well.... I don't know whether to laugh or to roll my eyes. Your post is exquisitely lame, yet somehow.... amusing. :-)

At least it was a Coffee Maker...

[patio11]

... and not, oh, an integrated diabetes management system, pill dispenser, etc...

classic example of why...

[timmarhy]

... not everything needs an internet connection

End of the Internet?

[carmaa]

Distributed Denial of Coffee? Really? This is the attack that will cause the End of the Internet, when caffeine-addicted sysadmins not getting their daily "fix" turns their frustration towards the servers.

Re:Bah!

[jimicus]

Oh no, those things are terrible. The coffee always comes out warm, what you need is one of those expresso machines that sit on top of your stove top.

I disagree. The problem with the stove-top devices is that they're a devil to keep clean (absolutely vital for good coffee) and it's fantastically easy to burn the coffee with them.

A culture of helplessness

[jandersen]

This is probably going to be simply ignored, as it is just one of my pet peeves; but as it is one of my pet peeves, I will proceed none the less. Consequently, this is my Message To The World:

What's the bloody sense in making a thing like this - let alone owning one? It is not exactly demanding, making you own coffee: put ground coffee beans in your favourite cafetiere/filter/mysterious glass thing with a spirit burner, add water, possibly hot. Wait for the magic to unfold right before your very eyes. Pour and drink. If you want to go all out, you grind your own coffee beans.

Recently I've seen more and more of these pointless gadgets where you insert a little foil capsule into a complicated piece of equipment and out comes a mediocre cup of coffee that has cost probably 10 times as much as a good cup of hand-made coffee; and you will have left a huge, reeking carbon footprint in the process. Plus, after a while you will have convinced yourself that you could never go back to doing it the old way - in other words, you have become dependent on a silly gadget, a little bit more helpless.

I suppose that is exactly where the industry wants us: unable to cook our own food, so we have to rely on ready made crap, unable to perform even the simplest of everyday tasks, because we rely on household machinery. Why do people fall for it? We honestly don't need most of these things unless we suffer from a physical disability; and they don't actually save us any meaningful time - by which I mean time we then spend on doing things that are worth doing rather than sit down to watch tv or play computer games.

Re:A culture of helplessness

[amdpox]

I agree to some extent: certainly, the packet mixes are useless, and an "automatic" coffee machine that just makes the equivelant of instant or poor percolator coffee is useless: but I must say, it does take a good bit of effort to make an espresso cappuccino, and the more you need the coffee, the less proficient at making it you will be. Then again, the instant espresso machines make fairly mediocre coffees too... you can't beat a hand-made one you make yourself, unless you get someone else to make you a greek coffee.

what more could a hacker ask for?

[Mind Socket]

I dunno, less ads dressed as news on slashdot perhaps?

Re:A culture of helplessness

[GroeFaZ]

And what do you propose to do about it, if anything? If that's what the people want, then by all means, let them have it; isn't that the whole point of a relatively free market, to be able to decide what to spend money on? As for people becoming helpless imbeciles regarding their own food: where I live, books and TV shows about cooking have seen a massive surge in popularity over the last few years, so the sky may, after all, not yet be falling. At least not everywhere.

Perceived user friendliness

[jotaeleemeese]

Not to disagree with you, but to note that a capsule *seems* more user friendly compared with the relatively messiness of doing coffee the cheaper, old fashioned, way.

People become dependent on these machines in the same way they lock themselves in to proprietary software solutions: the coffee capsules are not interchangeable, which allows companies to hike prices for them as they see fit.

Think bubblejet printers and the extortionate prices of ink. Any geek/nerd falling for the same trick when it comes to coffee should hand over his geek card immediately frankly.