Appliance manufacturers are betting big on digital, but European authorities are ill prepared to police the brave new world.
Early morning US East Coast time on 21 October and internet giants Amazon and Twitter start to notice mischief traffic on their sites. The flow soon grows to a torrent so intense that within hours, the titans of internet traffic spin out of control and go black. Tumblr, Reddit, Spotify and Netflix were brought to their knees the same day. The attack was different not just because of the size of the scalps claimed by hackers, but because they had weaponised a vast drone army of toasters, video cameras, washing machines and other ‘internet of things’ home appliances with little or no defences. The Atlantic ran an experiment shortly afterwards, setting up a wifi toaster and watching it come under attack within just an hour of being turned on.
Hackers made toast out of internet giants last month. Manufacturers are betting big on digital, yet European authorities are not up to speed.
Other than the bean counters at Amazon, nobody was hurt in the attack. But it is easy to think of far more serious targets in our connected world. The situation illustrates both the ambition of the manufacturing sector to embrace a digital future and its naivety. It is now charging headlong into digital, according to its 10 year European plan. That future that holds a lot of promise, but also huge unseen vulnerabilities that go beyond hacking.
**Brave new world**Gadgets that understand us can serve us better. Picture the Jetson family washing machine of tomorrow — it might see the price of electricity coming down during the night, sense a load with a particular type of soiling and kick into action to an extent precisely tuned to its load. Great stuff. Before the October attack, the chief downside of connected home appliances seemed to be the threat from over eager coffee machines annoying their owners with status updates. That ‘always online, always ready’ setting is already wasting a lot of energy and CO2 unnecessarily. But it goes deeper and darker than that.
Machines armed with sensors and computerised controls are enhancing the capability of our tools like never before. But Volkswagen’s hugely damaging dieselgate debacle revealed the considerable potential for crafty software to dodge official energy tests. Many more car firms are now in or near the dock. Today, the humble domestic fridge can come equipped with thousands of lines of code, complexity that leaves a lot of scope for… optimising performance, let’s say, during official tests. European government agencies have been flagging to the European Commission suspicious behaviour in TVs and fridges and Coolproducts this September announced a €400,000 investigation into potential software abuse in home appliances.
Finding software cheats is a cat and mouse game stacked heavily in favour of the bad guys. The best safeguard are well-resourced and proactive state agencies enforcing a clear set of rules and imposing eye-watering penalties that deter misbehaviour in the first place. Sadly, just like in automotive, the opposite is true in Europe. Green and consumer NGOs reached out to public authorities charged with upholding the law as part of a three year project called MarketWatch. They found that most were critically under-resourced and focused on physical safety of products rather than energy efficiency and software. If they did find fishy software, they may have to sit on their hands, since European law has failed to keep up and explicitly prohibit it. The European Commission unit responsible is also badly under-resourced. Thankfully, a measure explicitly ruling out VW like behaviour in the appliance sector is entering the final stages of legal approval in Brussels.
**The net effect**With the legal regime unable to head off a potential Great Crash of 2017 or #fridgegate scandal of the future, our best hope is probably industry itself. For it to reap the tantilising benefits of digital while avoiding its pitfalls, it has to gain maturity, fast. The October hack represented an unnecessarily steep learning curve. Firms need to do a better job of distinguishing between ‘can’ and ‘should’, as well as think through the consequences. Not all will, so regulators need to get their act together to safeguard the public interest. Miltonite fantasists like Daniel Hannan MEP, who argue wrongly that the market will look after itself, should be politely ignored.
Coolproducts is an NGO campaign to make appliances better for people and the planet