this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2025
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An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device. That’s when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn't consented to. The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers' IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after. After a lengthy investigation, he discovered that a remote kill command had been issued to his device.

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[–] brsrklf@jlai.lu 24 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

There's something not working in this article.

They say it "makes sense" for the device to basically send the plan of your home to some online server, because the vacuum is not powerful enough to process this data on its own. This is already a bit horrifying to me, but okay.

And then when that guy blocked it out, the vacuum "worked for a while" before something sent the kill command through an update.

How come is it still working at all if navigation requires that server?

[–] MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 4 hours ago

They do process mapping locally, there's no reason for a remote connection other than remote control outside your LAN and data collection.

[–] fonix232@fedia.io 31 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

It's not the navigation that requires the server but the processing of the mapping data.

Which in itself is BS because most of these vacuums come with hardware roughly equivalent of a top of the line smartphone from about 5-6 years ago. They can easily do the raw data to map conversion, even if it's a bit slow and takes 20-30 seconds.

Also if you read the article it specifies that the damn thing is already running Google Cartographer which is a SLAM 3D map builder software - one of the better pro-grade mapping software suites, mind you. So the whole claim of cloud needed for processing is BS.

[–] Nalivai@lemmy.world 4 points 9 hours ago

It's not that it's impossible, but it requires effort, skill, and time. Instead of hiring a bunch of programmers who would make it run on the device locally, you can just throw the same amount of money at Amazon and it will run whatever unoptimised version of the renderer you stole on some random Chinese forum. As a bonus, you got to enrich a multibillionaire and make a world slightly worse place, which is a second and third priority of every CEO after getting money.

[–] brsrklf@jlai.lu 8 points 11 hours ago

My VR headset can create pretty accurate 3D maps of my environment like nothing, and it only uses cameras to do so, so I can imagine it's doable.

Then, yeah, it doesn't "make sense" for that thing to externalize that.