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The Internet Networking Idle

Three Smart Ovens Turned On Overnight, Then Preheated To 400 Degrees (theverge.com) 182

Posted by EditorDavid from the cooking-remotely dept.
AmiMoJo quote the Verge: At least three smart June Ovens have turned on in the middle of the night and heated up to 400 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. The ovens' owners aren't sure why this happened, and June tells The Verge that user error is at fault...

The June Oven debuted in 2015 as a $1,495 countertop oven that uses a camera and computer vision to identify food that's been placed inside. The company raised nearly $30 million in funding and released its second-generation version in 2018 for $599. It's billed as "seven appliances in one": an air fryer, dehydrator, slow cooker, broiler, toaster, warming drawer, and convection countertop oven. It also pairs with an app that allows people to choose their temperature and cooking settings, as well as live stream their food as it cooks thanks to the built-in camera.
The company is planning an update that'll hopefully remedy the situation and prevent it from happening again, but that change isn't coming until next month.
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Three Smart Ovens Turned On Overnight, Then Preheated To 400 Degrees More

Three Smart Ovens Turned On Overnight, Then Preheated To 400 Degrees

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  • I have an idea! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jjeffries ( 17675 ) on Saturday August 24, 2019 @11:39AM (#59120706)

    How about a FUCKING POWER SWITCH? No, it's not something you can install with NPM.

    • I don't think I would want that kind of power switch.
      If you ever had two of them, you'd end up with hundreds of little power switches all over the place.

      The old adage "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should" applies here, I think

    • Re:I have an idea! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rudy_wayne ( 414635 ) on Saturday August 24, 2019 @12:57PM (#59120900)

      Rule #1 - Any product with "smart" in the name -- isn't.

      • I would go a step further. Any product with "smart" in the name is dumb. I have often found that to be the case with people.

      • There is a team of very smart engineers in Belarus who monitor your oven and will turn it on when you put inside something that resembles food.

    • Although many appliances don't have true power switches, you can fix that. You can even control it from your smartphone [amazon.com]. No problems, guaranteed.

  • Potentially dangerous equipment... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Saturday August 24, 2019 @11:51AM (#59120726) Homepage

    ... should not be run by bug ridden hipster "AI" code - this is nothing more than tech for its own sake to sell to suckers. In fact there should be no code at all - just some mechanical switches for each ring and/or the oven and a big red power switch at the wall.

  • What a future (Score:4, Funny)

    by Dunbal ( 464142 ) * on Saturday August 24, 2019 @11:52AM (#59120730)
    Sorry I accidentally butt-burned down the house.

  • Bad UI (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hawguy ( 1600213 ) on Saturday August 24, 2019 @11:52AM (#59120734)

    From TFA:

    June CEO Matt Van Horn says that owners, not the oven, are at fault. “We’ve seen a few cases where customers have accidentally activated their oven preheat via a device, figure your cell phone,” he tells The Verge. “So imagine if I were to be in the June app clicking recipes and I accidentally tapped something that preheated my oven, we’ve seen a few cases of that.”

    That's not user error, that's bad UI -- turning on the oven shouldn't be so easy that you can do it accidentally by tapping something while browsing recipes.

    • The whole remote oven premise is stupid, you have to put the food in the oven to begin with.. why not just set it there while doing that? Yea preheating.. well ovens used to preheat a lot faster than today's ovens when they didn't have to pass efficiency ratings. They also didn't have a stupid noisy cooling fan that made everyone in the house know the oven was in use, or was in use within the last hour...
      • I can kinda understand the reasoning behind it. Sometimes you're prepping the ingredients for a meal, and you get to the step where you put them into the oven and you realize you forgot to pre-heat the oven. So now you have to wait 10-15 minutes to do that. I can see someone thinking, "I wish the oven were smart enough to know I was going to use it and pre-heat itself."

        Obviously we're nowhere near an AI being intelligent enough to determine from what we're chopping up in the kitchen if we're making so

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Doke ( 23992 )
          Are you preparing the ingredients somewhere other than your kitchen? As long as you're there anyway, you might as well turn on the oven. Maybe in the distant future AI will get as good as you suggest, but for now, this is dumb.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Ambvai ( 1106941 )

        I know two people who actually use a remote oven feature-- they routinely have hour+ long commutes (20min to 90min, depending on traffic), so they'll put food in the oven in the morning and turn it on in the middle of their commute.

        Now, 'smart preheating'... I'm not so sure about that.

    • Steve Maguire wrote about this kind of thing in Writing Solid Code [brown.edu]. Chapter 5 is called Candy Machine Interfaces.

      "Occasionally, I would get the munchies and stroll down to the vending machine. I'd plunk in my quarters, press 4 and then 5 on the selection keypad, and watch in horror as the machine spit out jalapeno-flavored bubble gum instead of the Grandma's Peanut Butter Cookie I thought I'd asked for. Of course, the machine was right and I was wrong -- number 45 was the gum. A quick look at the little sign by the cookie would always verify my mistake: No.21,45.

      "That candy machine always infuriated me because if the engineers had spent an extra 30 seconds thinking about their design,

      people's ovens might not be turning on unexpectedly.

      But maybe the candy machine developers were evil knowing that nobody would want jalapeño gum especially when they wanted cookies and would just shell out another 45 cents to get them.

      I'm not sure of the ulterior motive for these guys to turn on your oven in the middle of the night though. Maybe they're just not very good at what they do.

      • Donald A. Norman is also a good guru for stuff like this.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Ambvai ( 1106941 )

        Just in case anybody else didn't really get the problem with the vending machine story-- the cookie was item 21, with the price being 45 cents. Not some x,y coordinate that got mixed up or something. The storyteller is complaining about how people would punch in the price of the item, instead of the item number.

  • The camera detected that the user is a lazy sob and decided to turn on the pyrolyzation cycle to clean the oven.

    • Not at 400 degrees Fahrenheit, that's not even hot enough to bake a pizza crust. "self cleaning" is like 900 F.

  • It WAS user error! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AndyKron ( 937105 ) on Saturday August 24, 2019 @11:57AM (#59120746)
    I agree it was user error. It was their error to buy that piece of shit to begin with. I don't need my oven connected to the Internet and I don't need it identifying what food I've put in it. I also don't need someone keeping data on my cooking habits.
    • I'd like a normal oven that can simply turn off w/ the oven timer, rather than require me to have to go to it and turn it off. That way, the food doesn't burn even if I'm not around to turn it off.
      • i wished both my stove top & oven had timers that i could set to turn them off, but no smart stuff, just timers connected to an "off only" switch

    • This isn't about food, or cooking. This is about not cooking. This product is designed for people who don't cook, but dream of cooking. It keeps the dream alive. Maybe if they tried to cook, it would work? Maybe they wouldn't burn anything? It is just a dream, they're not actually going to make anything.

      • Maybe if these people ever cooked, they'd figure out that the ingredient acquisition, cutting, mixing, assembling, serving and cleanup are usually over 99% of the work. Operating the oven controls is less than 1%.

        • When was the last time you said, "I wish I could turn on the oven from my cell phone, so it's on when I get home."

          • Even if there were an app that did that task on their smart phone, they also have an app for getting a pizza delivered to their doorstep and ditto Indian deconstructed samosas. Which of those apps actually gets used after stepping into their Tesla but before backing out of the parking space?

          • I remember back in the 90s when nerds on slashdot were saying, "I wish I could turn off my oven over the internet, or at least check if I left it on while I'm at the airport waiting to go on vacation."

            "Did I leave the coffee maker on?"

            There was a time in the 90s when my mother bought a coffee maker with an auto-shutoff timer, and people were like, "Wow, that's really fancy!"

            • Oh yeah, that's a good point. Being able to turn the oven off from the phone could be useful, even if you never particularly want to turn it on remotely.

              Now we just need security and reliability.

        • That's all mechanical prep work, they won't even notice if they screwed up that part. They're going to blame either the oven, the recipe, or individual mysticism.

          All three of those might be defeated by an oven that sees what you put in, and adjusts the temperature. Of course, that feature would only work if your recipe is really consistent and these people aren't going to be able to work with the tool even to calibrate it that well. The whole idea is a technical failure because of the size of the range of t

      • Re:It WAS user error! (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Comrade Ogilvy ( 1719488 ) on Saturday August 24, 2019 @05:25PM (#59121456)

        Bingo. We have a winner.

        After our old oven died several years back, my wife and I found shopping for an oven a mystifying experienced. It made a lot more sense when we realized that 99% of the stove/ovens on the market were designed to look really impressive, but were never expected to do more than heat a large frozen pizza.

        We an imported stove/oven from France, because our needs were not met by anything built on this continent.

    • Re:It WAS user error! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Saturday August 24, 2019 @01:48PM (#59121036) Journal

      Things like this are not necessarily user error.. They might have wanted other features the oven had, such as it fitting properly in their kitchen or being on sale that day. The "smart" features just tag along for the ride. It's just like the noise-maker alarm in my car. I didn't ask for it, and all it's done is piss me off. The dealer said their "alarm specialist" wasn't in, and if you ask how to disable car alarms people actually think you're a potential criminal when in reality I'm just trying to get rid of a feature for which I didn't ask.

      Anyway, stuff like this is insinuating itself into appliances, usually the "high end" models where they want to check off all the boxes.

      Just the other day I was looking at grills and smokers at the hardware store. All their bigger models had WiFi. Yes. WiFi to control your smoker. If you wanted a big smoker, WiFi came along for the ride there.

      Users have to be really dedicated to avoid this stuff. It's not a choice, it's a foist.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        They still let you cook stuff if you don't connect them to your wifi, right?

        Or is someone about to tweet "help the wifi is down and we are starving"?

        • That's not an either-or. The oven has controls on it, so yes, you can just cook something. But someone might still be confused in that situation, because stupidity is infinite.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sjames ( 1099 )

          On the other hand, it's annoying to have to spend time making sure smart "features" I didn't want but couldn't avoid are well and properly disabled knowing the whole time that the presence of those nuisances was used in an attempt to justify over-charging me for the damned thing.

          And, of course, the extra research to make sure the thing actually can be used without the smart features.

      • You can choose not to connect it to your home network. I recently bought a "smart" TV (no choice, really), but I skipped the set-up part of connecting it to my home network. It seems to work fine as a lobotomized "dumb" TV.

    • But consumers see something shiny that they want.

      This isn't something I would buy with or without the IoT things,but it is something that appeals to a lot of people. Is there anything else like it? I don't know, but I have my own weaknesses. We're getting our privacy torn down slice by slice.

      I mean I had to let Mattel know my location for one of their toys to work right. And the data from that "fitness tracker" that's constantly on my wrist is probably being sent to China where they are no doubt busy st

  • Take it easy there, killer (Score:5, Funny)

    by magarity ( 164372 ) on Saturday August 24, 2019 @12:00PM (#59120748)

    It’s a really wonderful feature to be able to remotely preheat your oven, and it’s a completely new world that’s very exciting

    Prescribe Valium, quick.

  • User error (Score:3)

    by Kyogreex ( 2700775 ) on Saturday August 24, 2019 @12:01PM (#59120756)

    June CEO Matt Van Horn says that owners, not the oven, are at fault. “We’ve seen a few cases where customers have accidentally activated their oven preheat via a device, figure your cell phone,” he tells The Verge. “So imagine if I were to be in the June app clicking recipes and I accidentally tapped something that preheated my oven, we’ve seen a few cases of that.”

    If it's rather easy to accidentally preheat the oven without realizing it, it might be user error, but it's also poor design.

  • Useful features (Score:3)

    by Daralantan ( 5305713 ) on Saturday August 24, 2019 @12:01PM (#59120758)

    uses a camera and computer vision to identify food that's been placed inside

    You can't do that with your eyes? Are people just blinding grabbing stuff and shoving it in without a clue of what's going on? I guess the intention is that the oven would just automatically be like: "Oh, turkey, this needs to cook at X Degrees for Y amount of time." "Oh, lasagna, Z degrees, for Q amount of time." But I doubt it would be something you'd want blindly to trust to cook anything and all to "safe eating temperatures" and whatnot

    It's billed as "seven appliances in one": an air fryer, dehydrator, slow cooker, broiler, toaster, warming drawer, and convection countertop oven

    Now it has 8 features. New feature: Power waster!

    With all the stuff about the "Internet of Things stuff got hacked," I feel like having any kind of smart connected oven sounds like a bad idea. 400F preheat overnight? Try having someone hack the oven and put it on the cleaning cycle, 1000+ degrees all night long.

    • A smart oven that can recognize what I've put into it and cook it accordingly is not a bad idea. It probably needs to do a lot more than just set the temp and timer, though.

      I don't know what hardware the affected models have, but their current models seem to have a temp probe, which is part of what I'd expect. Between the camera and the temp sensor you could conceivably not only detect what food is and figure out generally how to cook it, but you could also cook the food as quickly as possible while still g

      • ...why is a smart oven a bad idea? Any oven could be lousy.

        A smart oven is a great idea, if it's executed properly. AFAIC 'properly' in this case means that it (a) doesn't rely on some cloud service that both gathers data about its owner and can brick the oven on a whim, (b) is designed by people who know and care about making networked devices secure, and (c) is at least as safe and reliable as a conventional oven. When it comes to the June oven I don't know if point (a) is a factor, but they've certainly failed points (b) and (c).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Viol8 ( 599362 )

        "A smart oven that can recognize what I've put into it and cook it accordingly is not a bad idea"

        If you have no idea how long to cook various foods for just get a microwave and TV dinners and then stay out of the kitchen FFS.

        • If you have no idea how long to cook various foods for just get a microwave and TV dinners and then stay out of the kitchen FFS.

          Not only is that a dumb thing to say, but characteristics of food vary wildly and the amount of cooking they actually require is not something you can simply look up from a table. That's good enough for a half-assed attempt, but not for quality results.

      • I wouldn't say "bad idea" (OK, I would, see the article above for justification.),,, I would say it's a useless idea. Why would the oven need to recognize the food? I have already recognized the food, way before it gets to the oven. I already know how I want it cooked. Turning the time and temperature dials take about 3 seconds, I'm not sure the oven could beat that time, but I am sure that it won't matter. Even a zero-prep microwave dinner takes much longer to get out of the freezer, get out of the box, t

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      To be honest I'd buy a smart oven that I can just shove food in and it pings when it's cooked to perfection... But not if it needed an internet connection.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Doke ( 23992 )
      How is it going to tell the difference between a frozen turkey, and a thawed one? Stuffed or not? Will it baste for you? This sounds like mostly a fire hazard.

  • Bad Customer Relations (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cellocgw ( 617879 ) <cellocgw.gmail@com> on Saturday August 24, 2019 @12:02PM (#59120762) Journal

    To say the least, blaming users as the first response is both bad PR and stupid. And I say this as a proud owner of the "It Must Be User Error" t-shirt.

    Even if it really is an "accidental click" that did this, it should be obvious that anything which leads to turning the oven on must require multiple verifications with a clear readout informing the user thta the oven will turn on later.

    But my money's on the internal software (which is not AI by any means) not having sufficient error-checking to avoid autonomous turn-ons.

    • To say the least, blaming users as the first response is both bad PR and stupid.

      Apple already paved the way for this. Last I checked, people are still buying their products.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      My first guess was they got hacked. If you can turn it on with your phone, then it's connected to an external network, and there's all sorts of stuff roaming around trying to install itself everywhere.

      But lousy UI is certainly another reasonable possibility.

      • It doesn't have to be available to an external network. It could check that the connection is coming from local wifi. That would mean you couldn't use your phone from the mall to turn it on but that's probably a good thing.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by HiThere ( 15173 )

          No, it doesn't *have* to be connected to the internet. Do you want to bet that it isn't?

  • It knows it's an oven. I'm not quite that old yet where I need help turning a knob and pressing start.

  • That's IoT for you. Every computer expert on the planet warned that this would happen. IoT is a fad, and this is a perfect example why.

    http://richdale.de/iot-iot-ooo... [richdale.de]

  • Keep It Simple, Stupid

    • If you take out the thermostat it gets even simpler, and stupider. So that is a win, right?

      • If you take out the thermostat it gets even simpler, and stupider. So that is a win, right?

        "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler" If you're taking out controls necessary to use the tool, you've gone too far in the other direction.

        • So, it isn't possible to cook with a wood stove?

          Are you sure? My family grew up doing it, and we had a modern electric too.

          I've been thinking, it would sure be nice to buy a house instead of living in an apartment, because then I could build a wood fired outdoor pizza oven and have better pizza.

          Waving your hands at the thermostat as required, while saying that timers are only good if they're simple enough, it just breaks down. You need an actual needs analysis, not a one dimensional rule of thumb. Adding a

  • Sans the megaman to fix it.

  • Toaster oven (Score:3)

    by stabiesoft ( 733417 ) on Saturday August 24, 2019 @12:23PM (#59120814) Homepage
    and should never be operated without someone being in the room. Toaster ovens are notorious for fires. One of my neighbors had one catch on fire because they accidentally left it on.The one I have has a mechanical switch/timer and I thought the original instructions still suggested unplugging when not in use to prevent fires. Any fires from this thing and the CEO/Board should be held personally liable for damages and if someone dies, for murder.

  • 8 appliances in one! (Score:5, Funny)

    by cnaumann ( 466328 ) on Saturday August 24, 2019 @12:32PM (#59120838)

    Automatic fire starter with plausable deniability. It is a feature, not a bug.

  • The "user error" being that they BOUGHT A FUCKING SMART OVEN. Someone who actually wants to cook things would not do that. The only person who would actually buy a smart oven would be someone looking for hits on their youtube channel, and it sounds like these guys got their wish. So close wontfix notabug and let everyone else move on with their lives.

  • Obviously they were holding it wrong.

    Seriously, buying a "smart oven" is a dumb thing to do. It's just more shit to break, fail, or go wrong.

    On the plus side, I'm sure it's super inexpensive to fix this oven, right? Right?

    • Yep. Then some 'software update' they push onto it, without your permission, of course, will break it to the point where it won't even work manually. Who the hell needs this shit? Digital controls for an oven are as far as things need to go. Anything beyond that is just someone trying to convince you to hand over the contents of your bank account.
  • My garage door suddenly opened for no reason yesterday, something it's never done in 25 years. The only trigger attached to it is a simple pushbutton on a hardwired connection. I'm guessing some component is failing or just the right kind of power glitch came down the line.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dwedit ( 232252 )

      I was once reading about how Encryption is used as a method to prevent random noise and power glitches from being a valid command signal. Fascinating stuff.

  • Oh, goodie! An over-complicated appliance, complete with totally unnecessy-for-it's-primary-function computer and other hardware, connected to the Internet, so corporations (and hackers, of course) can see what it is you eat, how much, and when you eat it. So they can sell that information to marketing companies, who will pester you with food ads you don't want, and likely health-related ads you don't want. And who will also inevitably sell that information to insurance companies. Who will raise your rates because you were eating a frozen pizza, or french fries, or chicken tenders, or whatever it is their actuarials decide is a 'health risk', and therefore you should be paying more in health insurance costs, or life insurance costs, or whatever. Oh, and then there's the hackers, who will hack into your over-complicated oven, screw with it, and make it burn your house down, or at least ruin it somehow.

    Who the hell needs an 'smart oven'? Just another solution in search of a problem.

  • Unsafe At Any Setting might be the title of Ralph Nader's best-selling book if he were a younger man.

  • Three things ... (Score:3)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Saturday August 24, 2019 @01:42PM (#59121020)

    One owner’s oven turned on around 2:30AM and broiled at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for hours while he slept, and he only noticed when he woke up four hours later. Nest cam footage captured the exact moment it turned on: ...

    First: I'm guessing this owner has *way* too many cameras in/around their home. (The oven camera, Nest camera, ...)

    “It’s a really wonderful feature to be able to remotely preheat your oven, and it’s a completely new world that’s very exciting, and there’s things that happen,” Van Horn says.

    Second: This doesn't need to be a thing. Seriously, it doesn't take that long to pre-heat a small oven like this. In addition, one of the "exciting" things that may happen, in this "completely new world", is that your house burns down. (See #3)

    The New York City Fire Department says “unattended cooking” accounts for 33 percent of home fires, and that fires typically start when a stove or oven is near items that can catch fire, like paper towels, or when food or grease is left in the oven. (None of the June Oven owners reported fires.)

    Third: A fire started from this sort of unattended behavior is just a matter of time, no matter how the oven is turned on (un)intentionally.

  • My goddamn $20 Walmart toaster oven did the same thing. Turned itself on to full power and ran that way for a while before I happened to wander back into my kitchen and find it red hot and burning. A fucking $20 oven with no smarts.

    I did the smart thing, though: I took that $20 oven and threw it in the trash. Who cares, 20 bucks is not work risking using it again when it is clearly defective in some manner. These smart oven people spent a lot more on their ovens, no doubt. But they face the same pro

  • So they "butt-dialed" their ovens to explode? (Score:3)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Saturday August 24, 2019 @02:56PM (#59121160)

    Well, not quite. But I do not need this "smart" trash and I have good reasons why. Expensive, immature, does not actually provide benefits, but comes with new and exciting risks.

  • FTA: June tells The Verge that user error is at fault...

    And June is "planning an update that'll hopefully remedy the situation"

    User error indeed.

  • ...but with these stoves, you're more likely to be calling me late for dinner.

    We have a stove about a tenth as smart, but it has a circuit board in it, and that's just a bad idea. Ovens make heat, so circuit boards need cooling fans. If they break in any way, your perfectly functional oven stops working.

    With ours, we started getting this message across the tiny display that said the cooling fan was not running fast enough or something - that is, the temperature sensor on the circuit board somewhere was t

  • Glorious Soviet technology is flawless. Only human makes error!

  • ... to identify food that's been placed inside.

    If you stick your head in, will it just turn on the gas?

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