Ice cream machine hackers sue McDonald's
I've been following this story for a while. When people say the soft serve machine is "broken", they really mean "unavailable to serve ice cream to customers". That could mean something as innocuous as performing a pasteurization cycle during the day (because it failed to run at night for some reason, perhaps the machine's clock is set wrong). It could also mean there is a physical problem with some part of the machine. The word "broken" implies the latter, but I'm pretty sure the former situation is far more common.<p>In other words, the machine has determined it's unsafe to serve the contents (because soft serve needs to be pasteurized at certain intervals), not that it's physically incapable of doing so. Therefore it's "broken".<p>(Disclaimer: I've never used one of these soft serve machines, just read through manuals and stories about them.)