I’m just picturing a scenario where the fridge won’t open its door unless you finish watching an AI generated, very low quality, scammy ad. Looking at you, YouTube…
“The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”
In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.
“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
Dance along with the characters of the new Series, now streaming on $sponsor, and achieve a score of at least 6/10 to get another door unlock your door.
---
Your dance was not good enough, try again or buy a door unlock with the flash discount code "Distopia" for 99ct.
We need to create a type of business type for ad businesses. We have S-Corps, C-Corps, etc. We need an Ad-Corp. And the rule should be if your business sells any ads at all your business gets automatically converted to an ad-corp and you get taxed on revenue.
It frustrates me greatly how little people, and especially regulators, value attention in modern society. Your behaviors as a human are largely driven by the things you pay attention to, and advertising is a form of driving your behaviors by bringing your attention to things that are good for them (and not necessarily good for you!).
In other words, advertising is a form of mind control. By hijacking your attention, it hijacks how you think about the world and changes what sorts of things you focus on every day, pulling your mental cycles into products when maybe without seeing that ad you'd instead be thinking about family.
I really think the social and societal cost of advertising is immense, and that it should be strongly regulated. Especially because most people greatly under-value their own attention and under-estimate how much seeing ads in their kitchen every day is going to disrupt and hijack their normal thinking patterns.
Regulators don't "value attention little", they did the exact opposite, harnessed the power of the internet to grab unreal amount of power. They are doing the exact mind control you are writing about, and what they care about is whether they control the minds or not.
How we fix, I have no idea. Personally, not many ads make it into my private life. Other than this, I got nada.
It would be fine if you willingly buy stuff which shows you ads. But what happens is that you buy stuff without realizing it shows ads, or - even worse - it starts showing ads long after you bought it.
Case in point, my echo show first showed ads months after I bought it, but only once every few days. Now, it shows ads almost all the time.
I wonder how this is even legal here in Germany.
Ok, I know we always say this kind of stuff on HN and then the product is hugely successful anyway... But seriously, why am I even interested in buying a fridge with a display? That seems annoying even without the ads, and the ads are a product-killer.
I have a whole box full of buzzers and beepers that I've liberated from their original equipment environments. Needy electronics are not in line with my idea of a quiet environment. I've made an exception for a pretty powerful Lithium-Ion/LiPo charger, that thing has the potential to burn the place down and I like the fact that it only alerts when it needs to and never 'just because'.
For a while now Samsung and LG have been on my list of appliance makers not to buy. And this simply confirms that decision. I do not want smart features in my dishwasher, laundry, stove, or any other appliance, and I sure as hell don't want them to be internet-capable.
> I sure as hell don't want them to be internet-capable
There isn't really a good reason for appliances to be online-capable and in some cases it puts homes at risk. If you have that and like it, cool - good for you, but that's "innovation" for the sake of having a reason to sell a new product... a product that can be hacked to break or shutdown via a firmware update.
I get the idea that "oh man we've got billboards in every home, imagine the money" motivation.
I don't get how that gets through the usual meetings and there's no sense of "people won't like this, they will associate our products with obtrusive ads".
> I don't get how that gets through the usual meetings and there's no sense of "people won't like this, they will associate our products with obtrusive ads".
Most people's TV show ads nowadays, be it Samsung or a competitor. The thing is, people don't care about ads. They just deal with it. Hence how Samsung gets away with this sh*t.
The fact that this is true feels like we as a society just shrugged and gave up about something like, say, ubiquitous lice or ticks. "Yeah, everyone just has those, all the time."
They care but not enough for "the free market" to generate an ad free competitor that can be trusted to never show ads for the lifetime of the product. Especially because they'd have to charge more for that product.
Government regulation is the only way to stop this.
I've got a fridge that I trust to not show ads for the lifetime of the product, because it doesn't have a screen like that. It's pretty new, too, and fairly nice.
So such competitors exist. I can't imagine that they will cease to exist.
I've been thinking the same. Our GE fridge is just... a refrigerator/freezer. No screen, no internet connection. We went looking for that.
Our Miele dishwasher... no internet connection.
Our GE range / stove wants an internet connection and a phone app to use it's broiler features (I think). They're actually gated behind internet connectivity. We do without it.
Our home thermostat was installed with wi-fi everything... Which we promptly disconnected when the installers left. The same for the irrigation system. We want to use the device to control it, not have to connect to some server on the internet to manage our heat, A/C, or watering schedule.
Don't get me started on looking for "dumb phones" for our child.
I mean, to be fair, most people’s TVs have shown ads since forever. Granted, those ads were distributed by the broadcaster rather than the TV manufacturers, but the association between TV and ads goes back far enough that it’s just sort of part of the cultural consciousness. I’m not sure that means that people “don’t care about ads”, especially when they are appearing in their homes through channels other than television. It may be that people who normally wouldn’t accept having ads on their devices have a blind spot for TV ads, just because that’s how TV has always been.
>there's no sense of "people won't like this, they will associate our products with obtrusive ads".
One, I don't think people mind it too much. By too much, I mean two things: actually stating that they don't give a damn (even though they are just as susceptible), or grumbling about ads, but still doing nothing against them.
Two, price is everything. People put up with ads ever for a pittance. They listen to an ad every 15 minutes for hours a day, just to not pay $5 for the ad-free tier. That is how low this barrier is.
So ads not not much a problem PR-wise. You'd think, you'd hope, but it isn't.
Samsung appliances are already well known to be among the most problematic around with about the worst warranty service (and lowest rates for techs who work on them) in the industry. They probably figure anyone who's okay with that nonsense is also okay with a few ads.
> I don't get how that gets through the usual meetings
Sadly, I can imagine it easily. I've been in a few such meetings across a few past jobs, and often found myself the ONLY advocate for sanity. Counter arguments were often usage count goals or "our userbase is sticky and switching costs are high. It'll be OK, quit worrying." One leader honestly said "KPIs - up now, blowback - after i switch teams"
Because the person whose job depends on keeping the customers happy is not the same as the person whose job depends on making spreadsheet numbers go up.
These are end-user products with many real alternatives, if people didn't like them, they wouldn't buy them. So the problem is not that the decision-maker and the user are different, like in case of the famously dreaded electronic healthcare software.
I was fully invested in Alexa & Echo devices to have a voice-activated computer agent in every room, but each new "feature" was launched enabled-by-default, and every interaction started including "follup-up" prompts....which is all just ads.
I know that such devices are another sales channel (funnel?), but when you compromise the customer experience in the name of increasing sales that's a failure of the product.
The Kindle doesn't inject ads into the books you're reading because it's a successful product that already drives increased book sales by good at what it does.
There's an ad-supported Kindle, but that's opt-in for a discounted device price, and the ads are non-intrusive while reading a book - unlike Alexa/Echo where the ads get in the way of using the product :(
>It’s still unclear which exact refrigerators are getting the ad infestation
You know the ones that won't? The ones without a display.
Wherever there is a display, there is software. Whenever there's software, there will be updates. Whenever there are updates and a screen, ads will show up - and consent will be trampled. We will just see the different iterations of this, ad infinitum.
Free software is not immune either, like in case of Ubuntu, or Firefox. But honestly, it's nitpicking, free software is humanity's real chance of having ethical software, and the situation in open source land is orders of magnitude better in this regards, than in proprietary land.
"The cause of the recent crash of flight ADZRUS-666 has been determined to be a badly scheduled ad impression which covered all screens in the glass cockpit to show aan ad of a dancing hippopotamus in a tutu selling skin care products while the plane was on final approach in IFR conditions."
Careful, they will likely make you sign an agreement that you are not going to reverse engineer, jailbreak or gain access in any unauthorized way to the electronic systems. At least car manufacturers are doing that.
The right-to-repair opponents would like to remind you that if you attempt to disable these ads you will impact the safety of the temperature module and thus everyone you love.
Any statups working on where a homeowner can just "subscribe" to their appliance set for the house? With appliances getting more and more high-tech, low-quality and not worth repairing its not sustainable to keep replacing appliances every few years.
How about a subscription service that just sends you a new fridge full of food every week and takes the previous fridge back to be refilled. Instead of doing dishes we could also have a subscription service that delivers a whole new set of dishes and cookware every week. No more dishwashers!
What surprises me is that they don't forcibly try to connect to an open wifi network. I'm thinking the Comcast xfinity network. It feel like something that they would do.
A few years ago someone showed a BMW concept car with an LCD Panel as the entire body of the vehicle. I called it back then, we're going to need Ad blockers for everything.
This reminds me of gas station pumps that play ads on sub-par displays and tiny crackly speakers. I'm already paying for gas and now you think you can force crap ads on me?
If an ad starts I immediately stop pumping and go to a different gas station.
The fridges in people's homes. Expensive fridges! That's a hard pass.
"Smart" devices have become so ubiquitous that we don't use the "Internet of Things" buzzword, but this Twitter account is still doing god's work documenting the insanity: https://x.com/internetofshit
Samsung fridges were not great even before they started showing ads. The back of my Samsung fridge constantly freezes itself into a solid block because it doesn't defrost properly.
Ive noticed an increase in white goods appearing in my network-managers SSID list.
I currently have a Samsung fridge/freezer and a delonghi espresso machine in the list in nmcli dev wifi.
My friend has recently moved and bought a new Samsung fridge/freezer for her new home.
I did a quick wifi scan on my phone and there it was. The new samsung fridge/freezer waiting to be connected to the internet via the app you have to download.
It works fine without connecting to the internet.
I told her not to install the app or connect it. So she hasn't.
Maybe in the future, if you are obese, or struggle with food, the manufacturers will be able to monitor the contents of your fridge, how often the door was opened, how much food is eaten, take a quick photo of you each time you open the fridge to monitor your weight, and, if it has become a problem, lock the fridge so you cant eat any more food.
The fridge then contacts all the local fast food restaurants and supermarkets you use, to prevent you from buying any more food until you lose a few pounds.
More likely they'll identify you as having a weakness for junk food using your image and fridge contents and show an ad for cheezy blasters every time you walk by the fridge.
It's more likely that they'd monitor your consumption, and send it to your health insurance so they charge you more due to your "unhealthy habits", while also showing you ads for more addictive junk food.
> The fridge then contacts all the local fast food restaurants and supermarkets you use, to prevent you from buying any more food until you lose a few pounds.
Where’s the money in that? They’ll tell them to bombard you with weight loss adverts for expensive products that don’t work well or at least require you to keep buying them for life.
> The fridge then contacts all the local fast food restaurants and supermarkets you use, to prevent you from buying any more food until you lose a few pounds.
That may be how it works in other countries, but I can assure you in America, it will target ads towards those things you consume the most and related items so you consume more.
Mine doesn't have screens but it has a BS wifi network that shows up. I disabled it via button controls but it came back so I had to open the back of the fridge and disconnect it from the board. Very annoying!
I’m just picturing a scenario where the fridge won’t open its door unless you finish watching an AI generated, very low quality, scammy ad. Looking at you, YouTube…
Philip K Dick's worst nightmares are coming true.
"Should you really be having that 3rd ice-cream today?" the fridge said. It sounded smug.
There will come a time when it isn't 'They're spying on me through my phone' anymore. Eventually, it will be 'My phone is spying on me'.
I'm just picturing me watching their stupid ad, then opening the door and permanently disabling the locking mechanism, with a sawz-all, if necessary.
I tried to disable my washing machine lock. Bricked it. Bought a Speed Queen.
What about a toilet that won't give you loo roll unless you watch an ad first? ( https://metro.co.uk/2025/09/17/dystopian-toilets-wont-give-l... ). As the toilet makers jump on to the AI bandwagon, soon toilets will be photographing your butt to fingerprint your anus, while data brokers sells your poop data to ... ? ( https://www.businessinsider.com/scientists-designed-a-smart-... )
That is dystopian, but to be fair, this is China. They are literally rolling out facial ID tech to prevent paper thieves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj2bZCwJeVc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foT2kCByOgs
> soon toilets will be photographing your butt to fingerprint your anus, while data brokers sells your poop data
Life imitates art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ
[dead]
You should read Ubik
“The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”
In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.
“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
"Please drink a verification can of MTN DEW™"
And with eye/face tracking it can tell if you really watched it, with a smile.
Sorry, you are all out of door unlocks for today!
Dance along with the characters of the new Series, now streaming on $sponsor, and achieve a score of at least 6/10 to get another door unlock your door.
---
Your dance was not good enough, try again or buy a door unlock with the flash discount code "Distopia" for 99ct.
We need to create a type of business type for ad businesses. We have S-Corps, C-Corps, etc. We need an Ad-Corp. And the rule should be if your business sells any ads at all your business gets automatically converted to an ad-corp and you get taxed on revenue.
It frustrates me greatly how little people, and especially regulators, value attention in modern society. Your behaviors as a human are largely driven by the things you pay attention to, and advertising is a form of driving your behaviors by bringing your attention to things that are good for them (and not necessarily good for you!).
In other words, advertising is a form of mind control. By hijacking your attention, it hijacks how you think about the world and changes what sorts of things you focus on every day, pulling your mental cycles into products when maybe without seeing that ad you'd instead be thinking about family.
I really think the social and societal cost of advertising is immense, and that it should be strongly regulated. Especially because most people greatly under-value their own attention and under-estimate how much seeing ads in their kitchen every day is going to disrupt and hijack their normal thinking patterns.
Regulators don't "value attention little", they did the exact opposite, harnessed the power of the internet to grab unreal amount of power. They are doing the exact mind control you are writing about, and what they care about is whether they control the minds or not.
How we fix, I have no idea. Personally, not many ads make it into my private life. Other than this, I got nada.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269
It would be fine if you willingly buy stuff which shows you ads. But what happens is that you buy stuff without realizing it shows ads, or - even worse - it starts showing ads long after you bought it. Case in point, my echo show first showed ads months after I bought it, but only once every few days. Now, it shows ads almost all the time. I wonder how this is even legal here in Germany.
Why would you accept it? I would return it as defective immediately.
I confirm I will never buy a Samsung fridge.
It's probably best to expand that to any kitchen appliance that connects to the internet and has a screen.
Samsung appliances are notoriously not worth buying.
Ok, I know we always say this kind of stuff on HN and then the product is hugely successful anyway... But seriously, why am I even interested in buying a fridge with a display? That seems annoying even without the ads, and the ads are a product-killer.
I own the bare-bones, bottom tiered Samsung dishwasher and fridge. They're both pretty good.
Just refuse to pay for fancy crappola.
I have a phillips sonicare toothbrush and I was baffled when it emitted a loud beeping sound when it was done charging.
There is no reason on earth my toothbrush needs to alert me of something.
When you hire people to "innovate" they will whether its a good idea or not.
I have a whole box full of buzzers and beepers that I've liberated from their original equipment environments. Needy electronics are not in line with my idea of a quiet environment. I've made an exception for a pretty powerful Lithium-Ion/LiPo charger, that thing has the potential to burn the place down and I like the fact that it only alerts when it needs to and never 'just because'.
Huh. I'm on my third Sonicare toothbrush and none of them have done this.
This should be considered theft, they are stealing electricity to perform rendering/computation
For a while now Samsung and LG have been on my list of appliance makers not to buy. And this simply confirms that decision. I do not want smart features in my dishwasher, laundry, stove, or any other appliance, and I sure as hell don't want them to be internet-capable.
> I sure as hell don't want them to be internet-capable
There isn't really a good reason for appliances to be online-capable and in some cases it puts homes at risk. If you have that and like it, cool - good for you, but that's "innovation" for the sake of having a reason to sell a new product... a product that can be hacked to break or shutdown via a firmware update.
> Samsung is calling it a pilot program for now, which — I kid you not — is meant to “strengthen the value” of owning a Samsung smart fridge.
[0]https://www.theverge.com/news/780757/samsung-brings-ads-to-u...
I get the idea that "oh man we've got billboards in every home, imagine the money" motivation.
I don't get how that gets through the usual meetings and there's no sense of "people won't like this, they will associate our products with obtrusive ads".
> I don't get how that gets through the usual meetings and there's no sense of "people won't like this, they will associate our products with obtrusive ads".
Ever turned on a Samsung TV?
I don’t think I own one, granted mine is perpetually offline too.
Most people's TV show ads nowadays, be it Samsung or a competitor. The thing is, people don't care about ads. They just deal with it. Hence how Samsung gets away with this sh*t.
The fact that this is true feels like we as a society just shrugged and gave up about something like, say, ubiquitous lice or ticks. "Yeah, everyone just has those, all the time."
Hey, so remember COVID?
They care but not enough for "the free market" to generate an ad free competitor that can be trusted to never show ads for the lifetime of the product. Especially because they'd have to charge more for that product.
Government regulation is the only way to stop this.
> an ad free competitor that can be trusted to never show ads for the lifetime of the product
There is no such thing, every big corporation adds greedier and greedier practices over time.
I've got a fridge that I trust to not show ads for the lifetime of the product, because it doesn't have a screen like that. It's pretty new, too, and fairly nice.
So such competitors exist. I can't imagine that they will cease to exist.
I've been thinking the same. Our GE fridge is just... a refrigerator/freezer. No screen, no internet connection. We went looking for that.
Our Miele dishwasher... no internet connection.
Our GE range / stove wants an internet connection and a phone app to use it's broiler features (I think). They're actually gated behind internet connectivity. We do without it.
Our home thermostat was installed with wi-fi everything... Which we promptly disconnected when the installers left. The same for the irrigation system. We want to use the device to control it, not have to connect to some server on the internet to manage our heat, A/C, or watering schedule.
Don't get me started on looking for "dumb phones" for our child.
I mean, to be fair, most people’s TVs have shown ads since forever. Granted, those ads were distributed by the broadcaster rather than the TV manufacturers, but the association between TV and ads goes back far enough that it’s just sort of part of the cultural consciousness. I’m not sure that means that people “don’t care about ads”, especially when they are appearing in their homes through channels other than television. It may be that people who normally wouldn’t accept having ads on their devices have a blind spot for TV ads, just because that’s how TV has always been.
>there's no sense of "people won't like this, they will associate our products with obtrusive ads".
One, I don't think people mind it too much. By too much, I mean two things: actually stating that they don't give a damn (even though they are just as susceptible), or grumbling about ads, but still doing nothing against them.
Two, price is everything. People put up with ads ever for a pittance. They listen to an ad every 15 minutes for hours a day, just to not pay $5 for the ad-free tier. That is how low this barrier is.
So ads not not much a problem PR-wise. You'd think, you'd hope, but it isn't.
Samsung appliances are already well known to be among the most problematic around with about the worst warranty service (and lowest rates for techs who work on them) in the industry. They probably figure anyone who's okay with that nonsense is also okay with a few ads.
> I don't get how that gets through the usual meetings
Sadly, I can imagine it easily. I've been in a few such meetings across a few past jobs, and often found myself the ONLY advocate for sanity. Counter arguments were often usage count goals or "our userbase is sticky and switching costs are high. It'll be OK, quit worrying." One leader honestly said "KPIs - up now, blowback - after i switch teams"
Because the person whose job depends on keeping the customers happy is not the same as the person whose job depends on making spreadsheet numbers go up.
These are end-user products with many real alternatives, if people didn't like them, they wouldn't buy them. So the problem is not that the decision-maker and the user are different, like in case of the famously dreaded electronic healthcare software.
I can't possibly see how this wouldn't warrant an immediate full refund for the fridge...
This is why I de-Alexa'd my house.
I was fully invested in Alexa & Echo devices to have a voice-activated computer agent in every room, but each new "feature" was launched enabled-by-default, and every interaction started including "follup-up" prompts....which is all just ads.
I know that such devices are another sales channel (funnel?), but when you compromise the customer experience in the name of increasing sales that's a failure of the product.
The Kindle doesn't inject ads into the books you're reading because it's a successful product that already drives increased book sales by good at what it does.
There's an ad-supported Kindle, but that's opt-in for a discounted device price, and the ads are non-intrusive while reading a book - unlike Alexa/Echo where the ads get in the way of using the product :(
>It’s still unclear which exact refrigerators are getting the ad infestation
You know the ones that won't? The ones without a display.
Wherever there is a display, there is software. Whenever there's software, there will be updates. Whenever there are updates and a screen, ads will show up - and consent will be trampled. We will just see the different iterations of this, ad infinitum.
Plenty of junk without a display that has crapware in it. CPUs are just too bloody cheap now.
What kinds of junk do you mean?
Pretty much all consumer hardware has one or more CPUs in it.
Related Samsung smart fridge displaying advertisements (29 points, 2 days ago, 21 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45262808
If there's a screen, there will be ads.
Not if it runs free software.
Free software is not immune either, like in case of Ubuntu, or Firefox. But honestly, it's nitpicking, free software is humanity's real chance of having ethical software, and the situation in open source land is orders of magnitude better in this regards, than in proprietary land.
"The cause of the recent crash of flight ADZRUS-666 has been determined to be a badly scheduled ad impression which covered all screens in the glass cockpit to show aan ad of a dancing hippopotamus in a tutu selling skin care products while the plane was on final approach in IFR conditions."
"We have determined removing the ads will cost us more in lost revenue than compensating victims families the occasional time this happens."
- Is this behavior obvious before purchasing or is it a surprise?
- Does this give corporation and government control over cooling temperature?
- Is there telemetry?
- Could devious people replace the ads with porn; or worse, AI generated content at some point?
can you imagine allowing this into your house? who is this for? I guess maybe if they give the fridges away.. oh god don't give them ideas.
No, they won't give the fridge away. It will be like Smart TVs. They will be slightly cheaper (allegedly) because they are "subsidized" by ad dollars.
Don't give them ideas you say?
What if they develop an iconic fridge and dial up the brand recognition to 11 via an intensive and prolonged ad campaign.
Introducing...
No embedded ads yet. Then they wait for the reviews in all the usual places to be released.After the dust has settled, they push the ad update remotely.
You don't connect your fridge to the internet, like some kind of Luddite?
No worries, they thought of that and bundled a sim card with it.
I'll take the free fridge and jailbreak it
Careful, they will likely make you sign an agreement that you are not going to reverse engineer, jailbreak or gain access in any unauthorized way to the electronic systems. At least car manufacturers are doing that.
2025: you need an ad blocker to keep your beer cold
The right-to-repair opponents would like to remind you that if you attempt to disable these ads you will impact the safety of the temperature module and thus everyone you love.
They're gonna have to make these sooooo cheap if they're hoping to sell any quantity of these.
Like $100 fridge with nice amenities cheap... And even then it's hard for me to imagine this making the cut.
How long until this is in computer monitors as well? Seems like that's the last frontier of Samsung screens that don't come with ads.
Many Samsung monitors are not monitors anymore. They are mini TVs with ads.
Any statups working on where a homeowner can just "subscribe" to their appliance set for the house? With appliances getting more and more high-tech, low-quality and not worth repairing its not sustainable to keep replacing appliances every few years.
How about a subscription service that just sends you a new fridge full of food every week and takes the previous fridge back to be refilled. Instead of doing dishes we could also have a subscription service that delivers a whole new set of dishes and cookware every week. No more dishwashers!
Yup. A little known company called Bosch started offering this in Germany and Netherlands. https://www.bluemovement.com/nl-en
Nice.. you will own nothing and be happy!
What surprises me is that they don't forcibly try to connect to an open wifi network. I'm thinking the Comcast xfinity network. It feel like something that they would do.
LOL this is why I don’t buy Samsung products of any kind.
They have interesting hardware but their software is so egregious I never want anything to do with them.
When tech stops working for us we should fire that tech.
A few years ago someone showed a BMW concept car with an LCD Panel as the entire body of the vehicle. I called it back then, we're going to need Ad blockers for everything.
No, it won't, because it will never, ever enter my house.
It's already bad enough we pay $1k+ for a TV and cannot turn off ads coming from the OS (ahem Roku, Fire TV). Now refrigerators?
hell Windows shows ads now on regular computers with nothing installed
framework will now also have to make fridges
This reminds me of gas station pumps that play ads on sub-par displays and tiny crackly speakers. I'm already paying for gas and now you think you can force crap ads on me? If an ad starts I immediately stop pumping and go to a different gas station. The fridges in people's homes. Expensive fridges! That's a hard pass.
"Smart" devices have become so ubiquitous that we don't use the "Internet of Things" buzzword, but this Twitter account is still doing god's work documenting the insanity: https://x.com/internetofshit
Looking forwards to hearing about how we should let the market sort it out instead of regulating the shit out of this dystopian abomination.
Unauthorized Bread: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-...
"What's the password for the fridge?"
Samsung fridges were not great even before they started showing ads. The back of my Samsung fridge constantly freezes itself into a solid block because it doesn't defrost properly.
Just another reason not to buy Samsung. They're already notoriously fragile fridges.
Ive noticed an increase in white goods appearing in my network-managers SSID list.
I currently have a Samsung fridge/freezer and a delonghi espresso machine in the list in nmcli dev wifi.
My friend has recently moved and bought a new Samsung fridge/freezer for her new home.
I did a quick wifi scan on my phone and there it was. The new samsung fridge/freezer waiting to be connected to the internet via the app you have to download.
It works fine without connecting to the internet.
I told her not to install the app or connect it. So she hasn't.
Maybe in the future, if you are obese, or struggle with food, the manufacturers will be able to monitor the contents of your fridge, how often the door was opened, how much food is eaten, take a quick photo of you each time you open the fridge to monitor your weight, and, if it has become a problem, lock the fridge so you cant eat any more food.
The fridge then contacts all the local fast food restaurants and supermarkets you use, to prevent you from buying any more food until you lose a few pounds.
The new wegovy-ai-fridge.
cool!
More likely they'll identify you as having a weakness for junk food using your image and fridge contents and show an ad for cheezy blasters every time you walk by the fridge.
It's more likely that they'd monitor your consumption, and send it to your health insurance so they charge you more due to your "unhealthy habits", while also showing you ads for more addictive junk food.
> The fridge then contacts all the local fast food restaurants and supermarkets you use, to prevent you from buying any more food until you lose a few pounds.
Where’s the money in that? They’ll tell them to bombard you with weight loss adverts for expensive products that don’t work well or at least require you to keep buying them for life.
> The fridge then contacts all the local fast food restaurants and supermarkets you use, to prevent you from buying any more food until you lose a few pounds.
That may be how it works in other countries, but I can assure you in America, it will target ads towards those things you consume the most and related items so you consume more.
Mine doesn't have screens but it has a BS wifi network that shows up. I disabled it via button controls but it came back so I had to open the back of the fridge and disconnect it from the board. Very annoying!