Tech News

The McDonald’s Ice Cream Machine Hacking Saga Has New Distortions

Six months ago, a small founder named Kytch sued Taylor, a $ billion billion producer Well-known McDonald’s ice cream machine. For years Kytch sold a small device that disrupted ice cream machines, allowing McDonald’s restaurant owners to diagnose their condition and help them work more efficiently – just to find, according to Kytch’s complaints, that Taylor had conspired to copy his device and destroy it. his business.

Now Kytch’s case has revealed another aspect of the story: Taylor’s internal connection. Recent court records show that Taylor’s executives saw Kytch as a business threat and worked to mimic the device’s image in the competition – all of which failed to cure McDonald’s ice cream head.

In a notable part of the Kytch lawsuit filed in May, Taylor was forced to post more than 800 pages of internal emails and descriptions that refer to his approach to Kytch. It shows how, in contrast to what Taylor had previously said in WIRED, the company re-evaluated and tried to replicate the Kytch model. The emails also indicate that sometimes McDonald’s, not Taylor, led the way for the restaurant not to take Kytch’s equipment.

“There was a gradual effort to not only find and copy our device and track everything we do, but also, when it gets too difficult, to get us out of business,” says fellow Kytch co-founder Melissa Nelson.

The ongoing war began with Kytch’s attempt, starting in 2019, to build and sell a device that could process data on Taylor C602 ice cream machines used by McDonald’s franchisees. McDonald’s ice cream machines have broken down nearly 10 percent of its restaurants, according to data collected by the ice cream machine. McBroken, and McDonald’s franchisees tell WIRED that good research can lead to faster repairs. (Some areas often have more machines: McBroken found that McDonald’s ice cream machines in New York City were down between 20 and 40 percent of the time last week, for example.) The Wall Street Journal reports in September that even the Federal Trade Commission recently asked McDonald’s franchisees about ice cream machines’ failure on a regular basis.

McDonald’s responded to Kytch’s growing sales by sending a memo by the end of 2020 to all who warned them not to use the device, saying it posed a physical security risk, disrupted Taylor ‘s machine guarantees, and accessed “much of it.” and the internet called Taylor Shake Sundae Connectivity. Even so far, next-generation machines have not yet hit the market beyond a few tests.

Kytch responded by suing Taylor in May, as well as Taylor distributor TFG and McDonald’s lender Tyler Gamble, who allegedly gave Taylor and TFG access to Kytch’s device. The lawsuit alleges that in doing so, Gamble violated Kytch’s contract, and Taylor violated his trade secrets. Founders of Kytch told WIRED last spring that he believes Taylor even hired a private research firm to try to buy the Kytch device secretly in an attempt to analyze and copy it.


Source link

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Back to top button