[paulgerhardt]

I have a dozen or more devices that can burn down my house (or kill me in other interesting ways) connected to the internet because I am confident in the precautions taken by the engineers who designed them and mitigating the “hacker” threat model is mostly already addressed by precautions already taken to mitigate failing (“rogue”) controller boards present in their non-internet connected counterparts through 30+ years of iteration.

Specifically my laser printer has a thermal bypass switch, my smartphone(s) have charge controllers integrated into the batteries, my water heater has a pressure release valve, my oven is literally designed to withstand max heat for an indefinite period of time, my garage door is a death trap in four different ways (but has redundant safeguards for all of those), my kettle has has a thermocouple that trips when it boils dry etc. etc.

From a micro-morts perspective, adding “electricity” to an object makes it significantly more dangerous than adding “internet”. Ie going from a hand grinder to an electric grinder. But the utility is worth the trade off.

[gpderetta]

The issue is that hardware interlocks might at some point be replaced with software interlocks, if they haven't already. See the Therac-25 incident for a concrete example.

[paulgerhardt]

Once a hardware interlock safeguard requirement is put in place by a regulatory body it’s rarely removed. See British fused sockets for instance.

My threat model allows me to be completely cavalier with a dishwasher. I would be considerably more serious with safety concerns were I to put a chemo machine in my garage. My suspicion is that people who haven’t shipped home appliances connected to mains are not aware of how much of the engineering effort goes into making these machines safe relatively to how little it does for adjacent categories and are mis-indexing risk over bigger issues like vendor lock in as with the Sonos upgrade fiasco a few years back.

[jacquesm]

Compared to 'the internet' electricity is pretty predictable.

[paulgerhardt]

My experience is with making a few consumer electronics products and running through the UL/CE gauntlet. In those cases, the ‘materiel’ required to make sure you don’t shock your users to death is a bigger lift than what happens if one of nine I/O lines are held high or low or fuzzed in interesting ways when there are secondary layers of fusing built in.

From what I recall your background was in industrial machines and I concede the point that if sent an inappropriate signal, disaster would ensue. I don’t connect my CNC machines to my network but I meant to scope this discussion to home goods which are meant to have a lot of protections built in - specifically against the “user” - which compared to “internet” or “electricity” will always trump unpredictableness :-)

[jacquesm]

That's a fair point, users tend to find interesting and novel ways to apply for Darwin awards with disconcerting ease. They also excel in coming up with reasons why all those fancy lock-outs don't apply to them. Tape, pens, kitchenware, anything will do to get that gear to run with the door open...