this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2025
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Chapotraphouse
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The stories my dad used to tell me about factory machinery used to keep me up at night
Horrifying stuff
And most of those stories started with people not using/fucking with the lock-out shit
There's a particularly horrifying story from a local dairy farm where a worker
spoiler
climbed into some kind of mixer to unclog it, didn't lock it out, and for some reason it was controllable via WiFi and the boss decided the mixer should be running.WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO WIRELESSLY CONTROL HEAVY MACHINERY WHAT THE FUCK
It's incredibly common in industrial automation to control things over networking. Usually it's an Ethernet connection to a computer or laptop interfacing with a PLC that's running code, but same idea. I've built and installed control rooms in steel mills, they're mostly computers running Siemens or Allen Bradley (Rockwell) software, monitors hooked up to cameras around the mill, and operator stations with push buttons, joysticks, lights, e-stops, etc. And plenty of HMI's (big touch screens). Think Homer Simpson's job
Networking is different than wireless.
Are least a cable connection means something is nearby. A wireless connection that can be accessed over WAN is what I was freaking out about.
You're not wrong, in mfg and similar I've personally only ever seen wireless anything used for measurement instrumentation, explicitly not control, and that was even using a more proprietary wireless than 802.11 / typical WLAN.
I've been out of those industries for a while and to be fair the ones I serviced were on the more expensive process side (which does translate to better equipment but even just better safety expectations), so idk how accurate my experiences are. But yeah wireless control was def considered unacceptably risky, your instincts are correct.
As soon as JavaScript gets involved all bets are off
You're thinking cellular wireless. It was likely just wifi or some other RF protocol
Yeah, I was thinking the boss did the activation remotely like from their home or something.