10 ms·

> the machine has determined it's unsafe to serve the contents Wouldn't that mean, though, that the Kytch device could be working around the issue in detriment

> the machine has determined it's unsafe to serve the contents Wouldn't that mean, though, that the Kytch device could be working around the issue in detriment of the patron's, or "end user", safety? The franchisees certainly were very happy with Kytch's reduction in their maintenance and downtime cost, caused by very temperamental, ill-designed machines. Franchisee's are clearly victims of a tightly controlled McD ecosystem (sounds so Apple...). But if the machine is operating in a way that could harm users, even if harmful workarounds is just 1 or 2 out of 30 other harmless issues Kytch monitors, fixes or clarifies, still, it would absolutely justify the take down! Imagine a batch of people who suddenly get a bacteria from unpasteurized ice cream from a Kytch-hacked McD machine. How could McD justify knowing their franchisee's were installing a device that could put their patrons in risk of eating a spoiled dairy products? It's a backdoor for a health crisis, a PR nightmare and endless lawsuits. Even if it doesn't know for sure the device can be blamed, the liability is there.

tfvlrue 5y ago
I don't have any first-hand knowledge of what the Kytch device did. But nothing I've read about it ever gave me the impression that it was overriding lockouts. It was intended as a remote monitoring device and troubleshooting tool. For example, instead of an employee having to read a pattern of blinking lights on the machine itself, a franchise owner might receive an email that says "soft serve machine cleaning required" and send somebody to take care of it.
- ojosilva 5y ago
  Regardless, like I said, the Kytch box (a Raspberry Pi) is overriding the code that accesses the secret menu of the ice-cream machines [1]. That's outside the intended operation. And that's liability if McD knows about it and says nothing. The machine produces food that goes into people's bodies. Ie, if it were to produce a poisonous glycol ice-cream (glycol one of the pasteurization ingredients) all of a sudden, even if it has nothing to do with what Kytch is intended to do, could you really 100% discard in front of a judge that a glitch or a hack in the Kytch's linux computer, which is btw connected to the internet, didn't order the ice-cream machine to do that which, as a consequence, killed a hypothetical 5-year old kid from food poisoning? Imagine McD is now Boeing and the Kytch box is something airlines found that make 737-MAX fly safer by plugging into and overriding the system codes so that it can warn pilots of possible 737-MAX issues... Does it make sense for Boeing to allow such thing even if it makes planes safer? [1] https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-makers-started-cold-war/ https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-...
  - stickfigure 5y ago
    Wow, you are going to be horrified when you find out what goes on inside a family-run restaurant or food cart. They actually make food using humans.
    - mbg721 5y ago
      If they like you, they mostly keep humans out of the ingredients, though.
    - sandworm101 5y ago
      That is the difference between family business and industrial food production. The cleaning products used in small restaurants are basically harmless. A little bleach residue in someone's food will taste horrible but probably won't kill anyone. Glycol tastes like sugar. It very much will do harm if it leaks into the food. But using glycol allows a food producer to reduce labor costs via automation, automation being a bright line between mom-and-pop burger bars serving perhaps 10 customers per hour and a busy MacDonald's location serving 500.
      - stickfigure 5y ago
        As a sibling comment mentioned, polypropylene glycol <> ethylene glycol. Polypropylene glycol is an FDA approved food additive and one of the main ingredients of vape fluid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propylene_glycol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propylene_glycol
  - R0b0t1 5y ago
    Wow, you're really going to hate how people mod their cars. At some point we have to ignore hypotheticals because they are too divorced from what is actually happening. Case in point, when someone mods their car it is not somehow the manufacturer's responsibility for a crash. It fails the pre-hearing test of "can we even have a lawsuit about this" if someone even tries to bring it up.
  - tfvlrue 5y ago
    Again, I have no first-hand experience with this device so I can only infer things from the articles and documents we have available. I fear I am being overly pedantic here, but to me, "override" implies that the device is circumventing sensor readings or physical interlocks or something similar to manipulate the machine's mechanisms to doing something they weren't intended to. However, I've see no indication of that. The device is described as, essentially, a second control panel. Anything the Kytch device can do is something an operator could already do by pushing buttons on the factory-installed control panel. The difference is that it interprets the data to be easier to understand, and provides remote monitoring. It's really no different than plugging a ScanGauge into a car's ODB-II port. The ScanGauge can tell you all sorts of things about the state of the engine, but it isn't going to stop the brakes from working. I remember reading that Wired article when it first came out. Near the beginning, it says: > As O'Sullivan says, this menu isn’t documented in any owner's manual for the Taylor digital ice cream machines This is demonstrably false. It's clearly documented on page 22 of the service manual: https://static-pt.com/modelManual/TAF-C602_spm.pdf https://static-pt.com/modelManual/TAF-C602_spm.pdf Frankly, the manuals Taylor has made for these machines are quite thorough and well written. The claims from the article about how this is "secret" and "undisclosed" seem disingenuous when a simple Google search reveals evidence to the contrary. I suppose one could argue that a "service manual" is not an "owner's manual", but that seems overly pedantic (even to me!).
josefx 5y ago
> Wouldn't that mean, though, that the Kytch device could be working around the issue in detriment of the patron's, or "end user", safety? From what I understand the issue the Kytch device solves is the cryptic error code displayed by the machines. It tells the user what is wrong and how to fix it, which may just be restarting the machines heating cycle with the correct amount of liquid. > a PR nightmare and endless lawsuits. Not that McDonalds would have any issues managing actual health problems, just set the same people on it like they did in the McCoffee case and they can spin the families of a few dozen deadly ill children trying to pay hospital bills into a group of hypochondriacs trying to make billions.

tfvlrue 5y ago

I don't have any first-hand knowledge of what the Kytch device did. But nothing I've read about it ever gave me the impression that it was overriding lockouts. It was intended as a remote monitoring device and troubleshooting tool. For example, instead of an employee having to read a pattern of blinking lights on the machine itself, a franchise owner might receive an email that says "soft serve machine cleaning required" and send somebody to take care of it.

ojosilva 5y ago
Regardless, like I said, the Kytch box (a Raspberry Pi) is overriding the code that accesses the secret menu of the ice-cream machines [1]. That's outside the intended operation. And that's liability if McD knows about it and says nothing. The machine produces food that goes into people's bodies. Ie, if it were to produce a poisonous glycol ice-cream (glycol one of the pasteurization ingredients) all of a sudden, even if it has nothing to do with what Kytch is intended to do, could you really 100% discard in front of a judge that a glitch or a hack in the Kytch's linux computer, which is btw connected to the internet, didn't order the ice-cream machine to do that which, as a consequence, killed a hypothetical 5-year old kid from food poisoning? Imagine McD is now Boeing and the Kytch box is something airlines found that make 737-MAX fly safer by plugging into and overriding the system codes so that it can warn pilots of possible 737-MAX issues... Does it make sense for Boeing to allow such thing even if it makes planes safer? [1] https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-makers-started-cold-war/ https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-...
- stickfigure 5y ago
  Wow, you are going to be horrified when you find out what goes on inside a family-run restaurant or food cart. They actually make food using humans.
  - mbg721 5y ago
    If they like you, they mostly keep humans out of the ingredients, though.
  - sandworm101 5y ago
    That is the difference between family business and industrial food production. The cleaning products used in small restaurants are basically harmless. A little bleach residue in someone's food will taste horrible but probably won't kill anyone. Glycol tastes like sugar. It very much will do harm if it leaks into the food. But using glycol allows a food producer to reduce labor costs via automation, automation being a bright line between mom-and-pop burger bars serving perhaps 10 customers per hour and a busy MacDonald's location serving 500.
    - stickfigure 5y ago
      As a sibling comment mentioned, polypropylene glycol <> ethylene glycol. Polypropylene glycol is an FDA approved food additive and one of the main ingredients of vape fluid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propylene_glycol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propylene_glycol
- R0b0t1 5y ago
  Wow, you're really going to hate how people mod their cars. At some point we have to ignore hypotheticals because they are too divorced from what is actually happening. Case in point, when someone mods their car it is not somehow the manufacturer's responsibility for a crash. It fails the pre-hearing test of "can we even have a lawsuit about this" if someone even tries to bring it up.
- tfvlrue 5y ago
  Again, I have no first-hand experience with this device so I can only infer things from the articles and documents we have available. I fear I am being overly pedantic here, but to me, "override" implies that the device is circumventing sensor readings or physical interlocks or something similar to manipulate the machine's mechanisms to doing something they weren't intended to. However, I've see no indication of that. The device is described as, essentially, a second control panel. Anything the Kytch device can do is something an operator could already do by pushing buttons on the factory-installed control panel. The difference is that it interprets the data to be easier to understand, and provides remote monitoring. It's really no different than plugging a ScanGauge into a car's ODB-II port. The ScanGauge can tell you all sorts of things about the state of the engine, but it isn't going to stop the brakes from working. I remember reading that Wired article when it first came out. Near the beginning, it says: > As O'Sullivan says, this menu isn’t documented in any owner's manual for the Taylor digital ice cream machines This is demonstrably false. It's clearly documented on page 22 of the service manual: https://static-pt.com/modelManual/TAF-C602_spm.pdf https://static-pt.com/modelManual/TAF-C602_spm.pdf Frankly, the manuals Taylor has made for these machines are quite thorough and well written. The claims from the article about how this is "secret" and "undisclosed" seem disingenuous when a simple Google search reveals evidence to the contrary. I suppose one could argue that a "service manual" is not an "owner's manual", but that seems overly pedantic (even to me!).

josefx 5y ago

> Wouldn't that mean, though, that the Kytch device could be working around the issue in detriment of the patron's, or "end user", safety? From what I understand the issue the Kytch device solves is the cryptic error code displayed by the machines. It tells the user what is wrong and how to fix it, which may just be restarting the machines heating cycle with the correct amount of liquid. > a PR nightmare and endless lawsuits. Not that McDonalds would have any issues managing actual health problems, just set the same people on it like they did in the McCoffee case and they can spin the families of a few dozen deadly ill children trying to pay hospital bills into a group of hypochondriacs trying to make billions.