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Does Your Rice Cooker Have Its Head in the Clouds?

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security lockRecently I read an amusing article in IEEE Spectrum titled “Android My Rice Cooker: Gateway to Future Home Invasion?Why would my rice cooker need to be part of the burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT)? Because it’s lonely and wants to talk with other rice cookers? To conspire with my refrigerator and diss me on Facebook about that green glop in the back of the fridge?

Well, it was amusing until you actually read it and thought about it. If hackers can invade your fancy desktop computer, they sure shouldn’t have much trouble taking over the tiny 8-bit brain in your rice cooker. And once into your home network they can reprogram everything in ways you wouldn’t care to imagine. Equipping a small appliance with an operating system and giving it Internet access strikes me as a solution that went looking for a problem, and not finding one, created one. A potentially big one.

The Spectrum blog post picked up on a Bloomberg article “Google Android Baked Into Rice Cookers in Move Past Phone.” As the author explained, “Google Inc. (GOOG)’s Android software, the most widely used smartphone operating system, is making the leap to rice cookers and refrigerators as manufacturers vie to dominate the market for gadgets controlled via the Internet.” OK, I guess I could turn on my rice cooker from my cell phone on the way home from work, but if I put the rice in the water in the morning before I left then by 5:00 PM (or 7:00 PM+ if you live in Silicon Valley) it would be mush. Not well thought out.

rice cookerBe that as it may last year in Japan Panasonic introduced its $600 Android-controlled SR-SX2 rice cooker that lets users search for recipes on their Android phones and then transmit them to the cooker. The SR-SX2 works with FeliCa-enabled smartphones, FeliCa being an RFID smart card system developed by Sony. Through a downloadable app users can specify the type of rice they’re cooking, the length of timers, and other settings, all by touching their phone to a blue icon on the cooker’s lid. How exactly the humble rice cooker—well, at $600 I guess it isn’t exactly humble—can add different ingredients and spices is not specified.

Google, of course, is in it to collect more data and no doubt run ads on your cell phone app or possibly even your rice cooker, where you might see an ad from the local Target for Mahatma long grain rice on sale and touch the screen to add it to your cart—however that would work. Do you ever get the feeling that technology might just be getting a bit too intrusive? If you answered yes, you’re probably not an engineer.

Now don’t get me wrong—I’m a big fan of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, for which there a lots of industrial, medical, and consumer applications. This is a large market about to become huge. According to IDC the number of Internet-enabled devices will double to almost 4 billion units in 2015 from more than 1.8 billion units and more than $1 trillion in revenue in 2011. Just as data communication over the Internet has long since passed voice traffic, the number of machines communicating via the ‘cloud’ will shortly exceed the number of people doing the same.

This brings with it security concerns, from which Android—while it’s more secure that Windows—is hardly bullet proof. I’ve programmed applications on Android and it’s a very capable OS. Still, with billions of machines going online, security will be a major concern for the IoT. Large cloud-based services should be quite secure, but small MCU-based devices like rice cookers are another matter. I don’t think this is an issue that has been adequately addressed.

I have a very nice, if dumb rice cooker that I bought from Target for $19.99. It cooks rice perfectly every time. I’m no Luddite but I can buy a lot of recipe books for the $580 I’m saving by not buying the Panasonic SR-SX2.


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