In the Internet of Shit, Grosseries Department, a colleague and friend of this reporter who requested anonymity for themselves and their client relayed a story of a Samsung fridge that had a distinct odor about it — not of rotten food, but of a subverted Internet-connected Family Hub.
Samsung envisioned this $3,200 refrigerator as a kind of dashboard for families — even though every individual might have their own devices — that could share information, calendars, notes, and drawings, and surf the Web. This is part of the practice of turning a family into a kind of little corporation.
What Samsung may not have thought of is how to advise people setting up the Family Hub in a shared area. In which many unrelated people pass through. At different times of the day. Without anyone else being there.
My friend, who dealt with the clean-up, says that it might have been construction workers or other folks who were responsible, but somebody — somebody! — drew dicks all over virtual sticky notes across all the swipe-through screens. This was discovered when the organization’s head toured a visitor through the office, and wanted to show off a streaming feature on the Samsung fridge. My friend writes:
dicks
swipes
dicks.
swipes
dicks
The head finally gets past the dicks, brings up the browser, and it starts streaming high-definition porn from a Web site.
My colleague didn’t see the dicks, which were deleted by the time they arrived, but they did see the porn history. Their solution, after looking into proxies, content-filtering, and other options was to enable parental controls.
Innocent Screen or Invitation to Dick Doodles?
This isn’t the first case of fridge porn, though that term usually refers to excessively overfeatured expensive hulking stainless-steel fronted masterpieces of modern consumerism. Last October, a visitor to Home Depot posted a photo of visiting PornHub on a Samsung Family Hub browser, though you’d think the store would have parentally controlled that fridge to avoid just such a possibility.
In a normal household setting, it might be easier to track down whether little Tommy drew the sticky-note penises and was surfing the Web while fondling cucumbers and radishes in the crisper drawer; less so in these uncontrolled environments.
Previously: Pornhub on a refrigerator in Home Depot