Coffee Break

Are you always the first one on your block with the latest toy? Then this new Microsoft Internet-enabled coffee maker is right up your alley. The prototype for the new coffee maker was introduced at this week’s Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas. It’s one of the household appliances that feature a new kind of connector and technology that allows homemakers to hook up their common household appliances to the Internet for a variety of reasons. The new software platform is being developed in conjunction with a company called Fugoo. This pretty little machine is causing a bit of a stir in the tech circles — here’s a news release from China talking about the internet powered coffee machine. One guy over at TGDaily muses about whether we’re really ready for this kind of technology, both from a tech standpoint and from a security standpoint. He imagines his 16 year old son cruising the neighborhood with a WiFi controller and reprogramming everyone’s fish tanks from the street. And over at InQuistr, Duncan Riley imagines dialing up your coffee maker from the road so that it has your coffee prepared by the time you get home.

Of course, this really isn’t all THAT far-fetched. Last year’s hottest coffee machine was the Clover 1s, an $11,000 commercial coffee machine that’s handmade and — wait for it — is connected via the Internet to a network that monitors the machines, sends it instructions on brewing different kinds of coffee, reports back on how many cups of coffee it has made and can be set via remote control to use specific “recipes” to make each kind of coffee exactly, precisely, the right way. Yeeha, standardization.

Lemme ask you - do you REALLY want your coffee machine to be able to go online? What happens when it meets up with a sleek new Capressa Impressa and wants to run away? Or, more to the point, what can someone do to it from afar? Believe it or not, last June the Jura company found out that the folks who designed their Jura Internet Connection Kit didn’t think too much about security . The discovery caused a three-day stir among IT and security techs and posts with titles like “All your coffee is belong to us”. The issue? The coffee maker’s interface didn’t require any sort of authentication so a hacker using wireless could access your machine and program it to make your coffee too weak or too strong, cause it to overflow or even tell it that it required servicing so that it quit making coffee altogether. Imagine a nation-wide coffeemaker strike? Yikes!

Lemme ask you this — do you really want your coffeemaker to be able to go online?

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