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Coffee Time

Exactly the reason I want an unsmart and unconnected home (and car) as long as possible. My thrift store French press is a good enough for me - it's never going to demand a ransom. This is all amusing to read unless it's happening in your own kitchen:

“Originally, we wanted to prove the fact that this device could mine cryptocurrency,” Hron wrote. “Considering the CPU and architecture, it is certainly doable, but at a speed of 8MHz, it doesn’t make any sense as the produced value of such a miner would be negligible.”

So the researcher settled on something else—a machine that would exact a ransom if the owner wanted it to stop spectacularly malfunctioning the way shown in the video. With the benefit of some unused memory space in the silicon, Hron added lines of code that caused all the commotion.

“We thought this would be enough to freak any user out and make it a very stressful experience. The only thing the user can do at that point is unplug the coffee maker from the power socket.”

Maybe the coffee maker should have been one never to need a power socket
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