WIRED: They Hacked McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines—and Started a Cold War

[Deleted member 16657]

Press the cone icon on the screen of the Taylor C602 digital ice cream machine, he explains, then tap the buttons that show a snowflake and a milkshake to set the digits on the screen to 5, then 2, then 3, then 1. After that precise series of no fewer than 16 button presses, a menu magically unlocks. Only with this cheat code can you access the machine's vital signs: everything from the viscosity setting for its milk and sugar ingredients to the temperature of the glycol flowing through its heating element to the meanings of its many sphinxlike error messages.

"No one at McDonald's or Taylor will explain why there's a secret, undisclosed menu," O'Sullivan wrote in one of the first, cryptic text messages I received from him earlier this year.

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The secret menu reveals a business model that goes beyond a right-to-repair issue, O'Sullivan argues. It represents, as he describes it, nothing short of a milkshake shakedown: Sell franchisees a complicated and fragile machine. Prevent them from figuring out why it constantly breaks. Take a cut of the distributors' profit from the repairs. "It's a huge money maker to have a customer that's purposefully, intentionally blind and unable to make very fundamental changes to their own equipment," O'Sullivan says.

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So two years ago, after their own strange and painful travails with Taylor's devices, 34-year-old O'Sullivan and his partner, 33-year-old Melissa Nelson, began selling a gadget about the size of a small paperback book, which they call Kytch. Install it inside your Taylor ice cream machine and connect it to your Wi-Fi, and it essentially hacks your hostile dairy extrusion appliance and offers access to its forbidden secrets. Kytch acts as a surveillance bug inside the machine, intercepting and eavesdropping on communications between its components and sending them to a far friendlier user interface than the one Taylor intended. The device not only displays all of the machine's hidden internal data but logs it over time and even suggests troubleshooting solutions, all via the web or an app.

The result, once McDonald's and Taylor became aware of Kytch's early success, has been a two-year-long cold war—one that is only now turning hot. At one point, Kytch's creators believe Taylor hired private detectives to obtain their devices. Taylor recently unveiled its own competing internet-connected monitoring product. And McDonald's has gone so far as to send emails to McDonald's franchisees, warning them that Kytch devices breach a Taylor machine's "confidential information" and can even cause "serious human injury."

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"There's the ice cream machine," O'Sullivan says darkly, "and then there's the machine behind the machine."

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The Cold War Over Hacking McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines

Secret codes. Legal threats. Betrayal. How one couple built a device to fix McDonald’s notoriously broken soft-serve machines—and how the fast-food giant froze them out.

www.wired.com

 

[Joshua]

They Hacked McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines—and Started a Cold War (a.k.a. "Why is the McDonald's ice cream machine always broken?")

https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-makers-started-cold-war/ It's a great and very interesting story that you should probably read all of, but here is the TLDR: McDonald's ice cream machines offer unparalleled performance and speed when working correctly, but they are...

www.resetera.com

 

[Deleted member 16657]

They Hacked McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines—and Started a Cold War (a.k.a. "Why is the McDonald's ice cream machine always broken?")

https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-makers-started-cold-war/ It's a great and very interesting story that you should probably read all of, but here is the TLDR: McDonald's ice cream machines offer unparalleled performance and speed when working correctly, but they are...

www.resetera.com

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Oof, I even thought about searching first but then I thought "Surely I would have seen a thread about the notorious ice cream machine"

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