Best done solo, in the dark, and never spoken of, eh?
Fair point.
> To get started, I first had to register my washing machine to my email address with Miele's app.
Yeah, Nah.
Central registration by apps on NAS appliances, IoT devices, etc. makes for a great one stop shop for the evil hacker ransomware gangs looking for precious data to steal | encrypt or (in these cases) needle holes that can be potentially threaded to gain network or social access.
Even if it's a simple case of email us to recieve a custom key to access your machine (no other network access required) it's still opening the door to marketing mail and potential phishing vectors.
For all that I love having access to mains water logging, power stats, irrigation timing, pump and tank stats etc. on a local secure LAN .. washing machines can fit in there for the notifications and tie in to task specific water use breakdowns.
The other side of the coin is that IoT stuff that accepts anyone's connection from anywhere is vulnerable to hack attacks.
Sure, you could secure it with a FIDO2 key or PKI or something, if you made it so that the crypto didn't rely on PII/contact info.
But you see, this is consumer equipment. Nobody will purchase FIDO keys or buy in to PKI, with all the joys of manual certificate management. Nobody in the IoT field wants to support that stuff even if hobbyists were into it.
The laundry room here is managed by a very large service company. They previously had web pages where anyone on the Internet could watch washers and dryers count down until they were finished. It was simple, it didn't use Flash, it worked for me from any device.
Then they "upgraded" and ruined everything. The laundry room is now full of Bluetooth signals, QR codes, mobile app posters, funny money that you reload into the app to pay for your laundry. It's a nightmare. Thank God they still accept coins.
But laundry rooms are high-profile targets for vandalism, abuse, inept usage, and all sorts of opportunities for breakage. I welcome central registration. A stable email address is the least I can do if it means that the machines can be serviced, and there is recourse for vandals and thieves.
At first I'm like "yeah sure, let me do the laundry in the laundry room", but then they're like "we'll need your phone number and email, please accept the terms and conditions, the deposit for card/token/key is 20 EUR, minimum recharge amount is 40 EUR, please enable Bluetooth (no, we're serious you have to enable Bluetooth), happy laundrying!"
Sysadmin here, with vehement hate for JS: Just use fucking Python, hell even fucking Perl, bash is a disease of the mind; every time I try to debug some complex legacy bash script I start thinking JS might not be so bad of a language and no language should make you think that.
I do use python, when bash doesn't make sense. Perhaps in this case dealing with API's Python was the better choice...but, the parent comment just blanket bashed Bash, and so did you. ;)
I have no issue with bash, it's simple to use even for complex scripts.
