this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2025
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Manufacturer issues remote kill command to disable smart vacuum after engineer blocks it from collecting data — user revives it with custom hardware and Python scripts to run offline (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 2 days ago by spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works to c/technology@lemmy.world
142 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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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[–] illpillow@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The mentioning of Valetudo should be more at the top to make people aware of the existing alternatives.

My aged Roborock S5 suddenly stopped working a year ago and only cleaned a very small segment making it effectively useless. Since I knew that data is exchanged with the manufacturer I suspected them to actively prevent the device from working properly to make me buy a new one. Thanks to Valetudo the device is working back again just fine. Meaning there never was a hardware (or software) failure, but a remote issue.

[–] rowinxavier@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

This is why free software is so important. The company can just lie to you about their product and for some reason it isn't illegal. I really want to have a dishwasher and washing machine with an ESP32 controller and free software to control it, ideally with Home Assistant integration, but at this point I can't find anything.