Gilfoyle was here. Everything that has been mocked in the Silicon Valley Show has either already happened or will happen.

Single source systems provider and integrator and a doom date?

Could be a hack or a design flaw. I await the root cause analysis.

There's a far simpler explanation than some outside actor (either state sponsored or otherwise) deciding that the best thing they can do is to muck around with freezers.

We know there's been a severe rot of operational capabilities in the military thanks for Hegseths purges and general stupidity. It's entirely possible and quite likely that over the course of his various drunken binges he decided to get rid of people who were in charge of operational control for stuff like freezers across military bases.

Welcome to the internet of shitty unsupported and insecure crap! Are we really this dumb as a society?

Very interesting article, very neurotically written. Definitely got grating by the end.

The author doesn't really claim it was a hack, just that it is a possibility. But they are charging down the path of the potential hack before asking the more obvious question: How many refrigerators exist in the military at all? And of those, how many are having problems?

Because a half dozen a day sounds plausible as standard maintenance issues, as the author acknowledges. If it were a hack, I'd expect something like 50% of them to have problems. But not knowing how many there are, I don't know how significant these incidents really are.

I'm waiting for the OpenAI report that their agents defrosted everything.

This would be a bigger deal for the commissary locations outside the US, though I see none are on the list. Many of the very junior enlisted make very little money (~2400USD/month), and the low pricing at the commissary helps quite a lot. In the US, you would typically have some affordable off-base options. Overseas, it depends. Many of the locations are remote, or in places where the local groceries are significantly more expensive.

A couple years ago I worked on a service that had to communicate with a Siemens S7-1500 PLC. Based on my experience with that project, none of what I’ve read recently about unsecured industrial PLCs is surprising.

I opened Siemens TIA Portal and PLCSIM for the first time and thought “wow, I didn’t think the Windows 95 GUI library was still supported.” None of the PLC contractors we had hired knew how to enable TLS on the thing (user/pass eg admin/admin was their usual). Anecdote: I once spent hours reading the docs and clicking around trying to get it to accept an SSL certificate signed by a real CA and it wouldn’t go, but it accepted one I self-signed in openssl.

In all fairness, the people who are experts in the field of Siemens PLC programming are usually mechanical-ish engineers and security is not in their skill set or on their mind.

I would suspect a firmware bug. Or a "Service Required" timer that was ignored.