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Home Assistant. Offline smart home automation you can control.
Home doesn't have to be 100% dumb in 2023. But you have to do a little work for it.
Bonus: your smart home will be more capable and interconnected than any of the commercial smart home options because they are all busy trying to control the entire ecosystem and sue each other. (maybe Matter changes that but I'm not holding my breath)
Also for security cameras, connect them to something like a Synology NAS so you have the recordings locally and then configure a firewall to block the cameras from any internet access.
Viewing the cams remotely just means using a VPN to connect to your network and then connecting to the NAS.
It's possible to maintain privacy/control and still use modern tech.
Software developer. Having my home constantly phoning home to megacorporations sounds creepy, but more importantly, none of these smart home products solve a problem. They just add additional points of failure to appliances that have historically been sufficiently reliable.
Software developer. The frequency of stupid features that PMs request, followed by our urgency to implement it as fast as possible has opened up so many bugs and issues. Knowing that, why the hell would I want to open up potential failure to things I expect to work 100% of the time, like a toaster?
I can confirm. I don't want technology in my house I don't have full control over. All these "smart devices" that run through smartphone apps in the cloud can fuck themselves. The amount of access most people give these corporations into their lives is insane to me.
Agree. That's why I use ZigBee devices, they have their own offline network.
Softwares like Home Assistant are the only acceptable smart home solution.
This post feels like more than just the privacy aspect. Every day I read about some connected devices going brick because they are no longer supported. Shit, my Roku 4 went brick because they need me to buy a Roku HD, and I suckered up. What're you going to do when your doors won't open because some company decides they don't want to support them, or worse they go under? I am not IT, but why would I want to come home from a day of answering tickets and have to reprogram some proprietary hardware so I can make dinner?
thats why the F in FOSS means free as in freedom
I know some software engineers like that. Some of it is knowing that the companies that make iot devices don’t give a crap about security. Some of it is plain ol paranoia. Mechanical door locks can be picked does that mean you invest in guard dogs? Crime is a thing but so is misanthropy. I think we should take reasonable precautions but believe that there are more good ppl than bad.
Mechanical door locks can be picked, but it must be done at the lock in plain view rather than at a distance sitting in a car while you do the majority of the work and then casually walking up and opening the door. Locks are more of an inconvenience than a deterrent, so it should be made as inconvenient as possible. Connecting them to the internet is the exact opposite of that.
But more realistically someone robbing your house is going to ring your doorbell to see if someone is home, then just walk around checking for unlocked windows.
True, but again it's about making it as inconvenient as possible. Manually locking windows and making sure they are locked is effective. In some places they put security bars on the windows. Tall fences can also create obstacles as well.
You won't stop everyone that wants to break in, but you can create enough trouble to keep out most people. Making it convenient for yourself by connecting everything to the internet just makes it convenient for everyone else too.
The idea of a smart home? Fck yeah. Having it connected to some elses computer (cloud), fck no!
Having a home server only accessible by tailscale vpn, smart vacuum cleaner connected to it, not exposed to the internet, oh boy i love it!
I've had roomies that were in IT, and generally most things weren't "smart" appliances. I think the fanciest thing they had was a plex server. We all know how insecure the IoT is.
I've also had non-IT roomies and yeah, they were putting up surveillance cameras and shit and being super-creepy with monitoring.
I once very, very quietly tried to wash a dish at 1am in the kitchen (and most roomies conclude I'm a ninja as I'm generally extremely quiet to anyone who isn't hyper-aware of noises already), and my roommate charged out trying to find the water leak.
I realized later she had some sort of monitoring alert on the water heater that woke her up, and because the house was dark because I didn't want to wake anyone up with lights so her cameras were dark too, she went into a panic instead of using her common sense. I'd accidentally evaded half her surveillance trying to be a considerate roomie while I washed something quietly in the dark and she lost her frickin' mind.
The guy I rent a room from has an app on his garage door that alerts him every time it opens so now I have to answer for it every time I fucking do anything in the garage (which is the quickest way for me to go in and out of the house). It's so annoying. I got home 15 minutes early the other day and had a text from him 5 minutes later asking if I got home early. Like... Yea, fuck off dude. I'm about to start going in and out via my window.
Image Transcription: Social Media
🖖 Jochen Mader 🇪🇺
I work in IT, which is the reason our house has:
association-of-free-people
🤔
elpatron56
Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!
Programmers/Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
firstdegreeliberty
Best part though?
Security technicians: *takes a deep swig of whiskey* I wish I had been born in the neolithic.
Nah, I have a bunch of stuff and couldn't care less. If someone wants in my home they'll take out a window. Nobody is zero daying their way past a lock 🤣
"im not actually too worried about my privacy and data being misused, im worried about everyone's being misused, and that it's being normalized"
I use Home Assistant, but none of my “smart-things” is cloud-based, so it all runs locally. Which also makes it much faster and reliable.
I work in IT which is the reason: I self-host my smart home crap with strict firewall between it and my home assistant server.
And by strict firewall they mean a Faraday cage around the entire house
I like that my dishwasher tells me when it's done via app, and I can't live without my robot vacuum cleaner.
Still, they're on a separate vlan so if they get infected, the malware will look around like the John Travolta meme.
Keeping internet of shit devices on separate vlan is a good practice, but the apps on your phone still gather your data.
For the robot vacuum, when it brakes, you can look into valetudo supported models. It's a firmware hack that kills the cloud component and exposes it through a local http server, works very well. As for the dishwasher you could probably use a localy controlled smart socket with power monitoring to send a notification via home assistant when the power draw goes below certain threshold. Either zigbee/z-wave socket if you have other smart devices on these protocols, or a wifi tasmota device can work.
This may be a bit too far for some, but I believe we should keep our data safe, and if this is what it takes, then I am doing it.
as engineer with almost 6 years of experience: 90% of people in general don't give a damn, persoanlly I'm like that
Been in IT for 18 years. I have smart home stuff because i got tired of sitting down on the couch with my beer, que poped for my game and then realizing i forgot to turn off the kitchen light. So yup, smart house, cameras, locks etc because it's fun. Can someone hack my house? Sure, but they could just as easily put a brick through the window and come in. A lot more people are qualified to do that than hack my voice controlled lights.
You know what they say, the S in IoT stands for Security!
I'm an IT professional, specifically in infosec, and it's silly to go to those extremes. I have tons of smart home devices, and they're all perfectly secure since I run Home Assistant and block them from the internet with a firewall.
I work in IT and things only need to be connected to the internet if there is a truly compelling reason for it
I'm in cyber and I don't give a shit, I have smart home stuff
I don't keep the secure stuff accessible to it though
Confirming the opposite here. Network is properly separated and locked down. IoT devices do their thing while I enjoy all the benefits.
In IT for almost 30 years.
I have a couple Google Minis, and an OG Nest thermostat. I do what I can to minimize leaks of personal info, but face it, Google already knows almost everything about you unless you also still use a landline, and pay cash for everything.
I have some cameras and am getting a video doorbell, but those are self-hosted, not a Ring or anything. The video never leaves the house.
ALL that said , I absolutely refuse to get a smart Garage door opener or Door lock. I definitely draw the line at making physical access to my home available to the Internet.
Confirmed.
When you understand how things work, you say no.
And not in my car too. Less crap to malfunction.
I've been in tech my whole life, first in IT, now I'm a software developer and educated as an engineer. I have an IoT setup because it makes life easier, the security stuff also is a big time deterrent for would-be thieves. I know the stuff isn't super secure in itself but I don't get the paranoia, you tote your phone around everywhere, what do you think that's doing? Also, they only use your data to try to sell you shit, it's nothing nefarious and if it ever becomes so, it's time to dump everything and live in the woods.
For me, it's mostly the principle of the thing. It is none of a company's business what I do and where I go and what I buy, and the more smart devices you have, the more information they can gather.
You can't stop it, but personally, I see no reason to make it easy for them.
I have a train line up the road from me. It has warning lights and automatic barriers and there has never been an accident there as far as I know.
I work in IT so I look both ways before I cross it.
I also didn’t give my stove the WiFi password to enable the ability to remotely burn down the house.
But yeah, I work in IT and avoid smart home and IoT stuff because it’s understood to be insecure and expected to have a shorter life than simpler tech.
As an engineer married to a programmer listen we all make our choices in convenience vs security. My loaded gun is aimed at my smart bulbs for when I decide they’ve been listening in on me. The wife doesn’t like that I bought them.
I have a "smart home" but all of those IoT devices are on an isolated VLAN with no WAN or ability to reach other VLANS. Only the necessary ports are exposed so that home assistant can see them.
The real challenge is finding devices that work without the need to phone home.
If you avoid cloud based systems and self host everything yourself, you can have all that fancy stuff just fine.
Yeah gotta be awesome to get your whole house turned off because some dump delivery guy though he might have heard would be racist word via ring bell. Gotta love self entitlement of these "smart" corpos.
Not to mention :
I'm sure there are more....