Operation Smart Kettle – Börzels Blog

If you ever ask yourself what German hackers do with their life, while our peer in the US build startups:

That’s what we do.

cyberpunk 22 hours ago | |

It looks like all he managed to do was setup a wifi access point on a laptop and connect a kettle to it...

That's 'hacking' these days is it?

niemandhier 21 hours ago | | |

He was having fun with a device that exposes needless endpoints, than he sat down and wrote about it, without ai in his own words.

As far as I can judge, there is nothing in his writing, that indicates it is driven by the desire to get “an edge in competition” or “visibility” for his clients.

When we bemoan the loss of the old internet, we feel the loss of people like him.

Is what he does hacking? It’s what we used to call ‘hacking’, maybe we should come up with an another word now.

I’ll retreat to my basement now and will sing the “free software song” in front of an image of St. IGNUtius.

Twirrim 18 hours ago | | |

I miss the days when my tech feeds used to routinely include these style of "Wonder what's going on here?", and "I did sometimes ridiculous with <something I'd never expect to have complicated electronics>" posts.

Feels all too often like it has been replaced with "We switched from $A to $B, the reasons will shock you!" (Followed inevitably by "We switched from $B to $C").

sagebird 20 hours ago |

IF the EU isn't enforcing the 418 status code reply, honestly - what are your taxes going to?

Asraelite 23 hours ago |

I don't get it. A kettle is not a teapot.

IndrekR 19 hours ago | |

It is not really just a kettle. Has integrated tea strainer, you can use it as a teapot.

It is missing a proper tea cosy, however.

_ZeD_ 19 hours ago | |

that's the ERROR code 418 for you :D

Asraelite 19 hours ago | | |

But it's meant to be returned in cases where the server is a teapot, more specifically when it's a teapot requested to brew coffee, not for cases where it's not a teapot.

speedping 23 hours ago |

Probably a beken chip, should be easy enough to flash OpenBeken using the pins if they're exposed You can usually take over tuya devices if you sign up for a developer account and go some sort of verification process, it's pretty easy, sometimes it's possible to get a token for local control (tuya-local)

ninalanyon 19 hours ago |

So you can't use the app to control the kettle if your internet connection is down. Why doesn't it just run a simple server?

utopiah 21 hours ago |

Honestly this, the countless "I hacked my [insert here the most random appliance]" every day, e.g. before that on HN https://medium.com/@ivangomezarnedo/how-i-added-a-non-wi-fi-... and the polite arguments in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49680275 shows me that :

we do need an actual INTERFACE for appliances.

Intellectually speaking it's really cool to "hack" your device, I do it too, but ... we shouldn't have to.

We should be able to interface with hardware on our terms, offline, no proprietary app needed. It could work with the official app, with or without the server of the manufacturer, but it should not have to be the case.

bariumbitmap 19 hours ago | |

This is sometimes called "the right to interoperate", similar to the right to repair movement. Unfortunately it has been less successful than right to repair so far.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/legislative-path-inter...

utopiah 18 hours ago | | |

Well that's a right, I'm asking for an actual interface, like USB-C or a protocol e.g. HTTP.

bariumbitmap 5 hours ago | | |

How do you propose to convince appliance manufacturers to all use a freely accessible, standard interface without mandating it via legislation? It's been decades now, they're not going to do it of their own volition.

XorNot 21 hours ago | |

Honestly if Tuya just added official support so you could OTA flash their stuff, then between that and ESPHome this would already be done.

If you have physical access (not easy always) it's relatively straight forward to upgrade a Tuya device to be truly local, but they've aggressively tried to shutdown things like Cloudcutter.

BlackRabbit1 1 day ago |

Ah good old Tuya.

Played around with them a while go.

Found out you could do code execution while staying in the bootloader mode.. lol.

But wasn't able to extract the keys I wanted.

nom 1 day ago |

high chance you can just flash a suitable base firmware directly through pins on the board

kova12 21 hours ago |

I have a govee kettle which has a limited Bluetooth support, which is mostly used to configure WiFi, but can also turn kettle on and off and reports temperature. Not sure if this is interesting to anybody, but if yes I can wrap it up in GitHub project