alt Hacker NewsI worked in the field of control systems for supermarkets back in 2008.
These systems are internet connected and remotely controllable because the managers need to be able to see shifts in usage over time and take action to save electricity and provide better food storage. One example might be that due to shifting customer patterns and products, you might want a certain refrigerator case to be kept colder with a narrower temperature range. Another example is for Demand Response: when a brownout may occur, the utility companies want people to lower their load, which, in the case of supermarkets, means turning off lights, increasing the thermostat on the AC, turning off dehumidifiers, etc.
One notable story from that time: this was during the 2008 economic crash, and the company went from hiring to laying off within a week. A group of technicians were working on a refrigerator compressor system and were told by security to stop what they were doing and immediately exit the building. They tried to explain that they were running a special test and needed to shut things down before leaving, but the security guys weren't having it and made them leave right away. The test ended up running overnight, and the managers came in the next morning to over $100,000 worth of damage to the refrigeration equipment.
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Managers can just call the store on-site employees. Or come in person. They just want to save on labor (aka replace humans with robots).
Those are good reasons to have the machines network connected. They are not good reasons to have the machine internet connected.
> They tried to explain that they were running a special test and needed to shut things down before leaving, but the security guys weren't having it and made them leave right away. The test ended up running overnight, and the managers came in the next morning to over $100,000 worth of damage to the refrigeration equipment.
Dear god I hope the moron manager responsible for that got their bonus revoked
> These systems are internet connected and remotely controllable because [reasons]
I understand why it's beneficial to have these systems connected to a network. You have not explained why that network has to be the Internet, and TFA is one reason why it shouldn't be.
> These systems are internet connected and remotely controllable because the managers need to be able to see shifts in usage over time and take action to save electricity and provide better food storage.
That doesn't really make a ton of sense. Stores have personnel in them pretty much all the time, who can take action when necessary. Data collection for monitoring, forecasting, etc. is a reasonable thing to do obviously, and centralized aggregation clearly makes sense. But remote control smells more like a fanciful shiny tech bauble than an actually useful, let alone necessary, feature. It's easy to imagine how that feature got sold internally within an engineering organization, but it's very hard to imagine customers clamoring for it.
There's huge difference between _sensors_ and _actuators_. You can put sensors online if you don't care too much about data leaking out. You put _actuators_ online... You need to be able to deal with the consequences.