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)
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?
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.
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.
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.
Image Transcription: Social Media
🖖 Jochen Mader 🇪🇺
I work in IT, which is the reason our house has:
- mechanical locks
- mechanical windows
- routers using OpenWRT
- no smart home crap
- no Alexa/Google Assistant/...
- no internet connected thermostats
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.
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.
You know what they say, the S in IoT stands for Security!
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.
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 :
- stuff stops getting supported all of sudden
- privacy concerns
- subscriptions
- handing over security to untrustworthy corpo
I'm sure there are more....
Confirmed.
When you understand how things work, you say no.
And not in my car too. Less crap to malfunction.
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.
just make sure the gun is not near the printer so it doesn't shoot you
Freelance IT tech here. I can totally relate to this.
IT professional of 15 years here. I have all the smart home shit and I love it. It's all on a separate VLAN, I have MAC address filtering network-wide and I have a firewall. I understand being burnt out by your job and not wanting to deal with it when you get home, but I love my work and my smart home stuff is robust enough that all I ever have to do is replace alarm sensor batteries once or twice a year. You can have both.
When you see how the sausage is made you don't want it. Software engineers know how many corners are cut
IoT is terrible, and typically proprietary. I prefer the FOSS and SelfHosted route. But as it turns out, I too prefer a less online set of home items.
I have very minimal smarts in my home. I'm jaded and over it all, and you can guarantee the shitty devs producing this stuff couldn't care less, while working for actively hostile mega-corps.
Fuck that. Having said that, there are compromises - my TV does get out to the internet and I have a win 11 PC in the lounge as the primary machine.
If I had the emotional energy I'd start fiddling with nessus or whatever the new flavour is, to confirm my suspicions but I just don't need the burnout
Can confirm. Technology is a disaster waiting to happen.
Unless you want to live like a luddite, you can find ways to have the best of both worlds.
As a fairly seasoned IT veteran I think it boils down to the tradeoffs between security, privacy, and convenience--just like at work. I'm sure most of us have implemented things in less secure ways to accomodate a business need. When you do that at work, you just try to mitigate that risk as best you can by putting other measures or controls in place. I do that at home.
Everyones tradeoff decision will be different, but at some point, for me, the convenience of some IOT and smarthome devices outweighs the security and privacy concerns. Or at the very least I realized its a weird hill to die on as we use our android phones, google for searches, gmail, instagram, etc. I am sure some of you have completely divested yourself of all of those services and have GrapheneOS installed on your phone and use OpenStreetMaps to get yourself lost. Most of use still use a few of those.
That said, I think the nerdiest and most security privacy saavy among us in the IT field can implement it in a fairly secure way. Pfsense,Ubnt, ofsense,openwrt routers with vlan segregation for traffic. IDS/IPS, pihole local dns, etc. You can absolutely make it so devices only communicate in ways that you approve. With things like VPNs (tailscale), Cloudflare tunnels, etc you can access your stuff securely without exposing any admin things to the public web.
Digital locks are fine, just get one with a mechanical lock too. I have a digital lock on my front door that I can program with keycodes but it also has a key. I can give the cleaners a temp code if I need to. I can give my neighbors a code if they watch the house while I am away for a long time, then I can get expire it when I return. The analogue alternative is arguably less secure.
That is basically my requirement for smarthome or connected devices. I need to be able to control it to a level that I feel comfortable and if it fails or isn't connected it still needs to work. IE no smart light switches that don't function if the wifi is down--they still need to be a switch. My nest thermostat still works without wifi. My smart plugs still work without wifi. If any of those things was hacked or compromised, they are completely segregated from anything of actual value on my network--and depending on the device it wouldn't be able to see anything else at all.
For major appliances, I dont see the value of any 'smart' features built in (yet), so I won't be buying them anytime soon but if I did they'd still have to meet the "still needs to work in 'dumb' mode" requirement--smart, connected features are extra not required to function.
I work in retail, which is the reason why my house is shit.
Your network is only as secure as it's weakest link, IoT devices are a liability unless they are on their own isolated network and who has the time to set that shit up to open their blinds from a phone?
DDI engineer here. I use smart home stuff. Fully kitted out locks, cameras, Google home, smart lights, etc. that said, I also use pfsense, a dmvpn, and run a private caching name server. If someone hacks into my shit, then I deserve it and will learn from the experience. Also yes, I know the Google home, smart tv, FBI, and the Zoroaster prophet are listening to me, and no, I don't care.
Goddamn right.
Actually, I hadn't thought about the router and I'm panicking now. My router is some MR9600, and the speeds through it are great, but I feel like I over paid for something that I can't install my own firmware on. I think my pi.hole is the DCHP anyway, and now I'm really thinking I need to find a new router
My strategy is just be unpredictable af. Use FOSS as much as possible. Dont use google services except maybe google maps. Make an active effort to decouple accounts. Treat phone number 2fa like the plague.
Sr IT engineer here. I've somehow come full circle and now have an entire smarthome setup. It's running on a IoT network so it can't see my other devices, but I'm sure that some poor Amazon employee has to watch me walk around in my underwear from my robot vacuum camera. I just don't care anymore.
My entire family, 20+ people, multiple generations, are pretty much all CS/engineers. We all have smart home shit that depends on wifi etc.
Maybe. I'm in cyber security, people tell me I'm pretty decent at it. I have smart everything in my house, but I also use opnSense in my hardware router, have a span port to Security Onion and laugh at the logs, repurpose old desktops as servers for media or whatever, keep most things local except for a few backups, and have battery/UPS backups for my intranet and critical systems.
At some point, you just realize that in no project, there is enough budget to do even just mediocre security or correctness. And the few projects that actually require certifications for that, they rely on technology so old that it's hard to believe they'd actually fulfill these criteria either.
And then you realize that you're already considered an expensive expert. That companies try to further cut down on costs by outsourcing to basically untrained workers or, hell, LLMs.
Yes to all of the above
I use ZWave with Home Assistant for every light switch and fan in my house. It integrates with Google Assistant, but not bound to it. Google's server connects to my Home Assistant device for control, not the other way around.
The most troublesome devices I have are are some light+fan modules that use WiFi because they run on Tuya. There is really no other alternative and it fails all the time.
Avoid WiFi devices as much as possible, especially those that require Internet. Even Bluetooth is better.
Never use SmartThings. Samsung's AWS-based servers may go down in Europe and lock you out of control. They're just overall flaky to the point I've had to reverse engineer some protocols to control my previous home's mini-splits locally. My current Samsung fridge stops reporting to Home Assistant randomly and I've given up trying to maintain it.
You avoid smart home crap because they're insecure.
I avoid smart home crap because i'm poor.
We're not the same.
I think of the cost. My smart home stuff gets hacked on it's own network and then? Oh no, you can turn my lights off
Mechanical lock manufacturers are a fucking clown show and the very concept is fundamentally flawed. I don't know if I hate it more than the IoT/cloud bullshit, but it's up there.
Work IT. Can confirm given the current hackability state of both tech chips and human brains, I'd rather be in the cretaceous.
I mean, what's the worst that could happen?
My security is simply not keeping anything important on my computer/phone so if anything goes wrong, it ain't no thing to just wipe the drives and start over from scratch.
15+ year sysadmin, I don't have smart home anything cause I don't want more shit to manage when I'm not working.
I barely touch my home network and servers cause I wait til something is obsolete or broken, then I replace with something that will have a long life and set it up to manage itself wherever possible. Some friends have really cool self hosted smart home setups and they like working on it as a hobby, not for me but I enjoy seeing them soldering boards for it and all that.
No, smart everything, Google everywhere.
We have only one "smart home" tool (except for our smart TV, smartphones and tablets). A Blink camera to watch the aquraium when we are on vacation (when we aren't it's not plugged in). When we went on a 3 week vacation this summer I unplugged the Fritz!Box router just before leaving, because "Ah, why leave it on?" Noticed it 300km later. I don't think we'll ever be a smart home.
Problem is most mechanical locks aren't very good either. See lock picking lawyer on YouTube. Plus, the weakest link in electronic infrastructure is often physical. I can't find it right now, but there are some pretty amusing red team videos on YouTube of various physical vulnerabilities. I think people know more about the shortcomings of their particular area, so are more likely to use the things they don't specialize in.
The only reason I got rid of all of my smart home stuff (besides Google Home and ONE smart plug) was because of how unreliable that shit was. Not because of the "spying". Otherwise I might as well destroy my phone and unplug my internet line.
I'd ask Google to turn something on/off, and it wouldn't. Sometimes just straight up ignore me, or tell me it did it, but it didn't. Or when I'd tell it to turn something off and it would instead turn something else ON.
I just got to the point where I was screaming and getting angry all the time, and realized it's not worth it. I may be annoyed to get out of bed or walk downstairs to turn something off, but at least it's only momentarily, not an internal fucking rage.
It used to be great. They somehow got worse over the years. I tried using Home Assistant, but it just doesn't hit the same, especially since it doesn't fix the voice command problem. If I have to grab my phone to control stuff, I might as well just take a few steps, too.
The only smart plug I have left is to charge my eBike battery. Turns on when I plug it in, and turns off when it's charged.
Yep, completely true for me at least. I have a colleague who has everything smart though, so it's certainly not everyone, but I keep my house intentionally as dumb as possible. The only household thing I have that is "smart" is my robot vacuum, but we hardly ever use it anymore because doing it with a good old fashioned vacuum cleaner is so much quicker.
Edit: I do have a smart tv as well, actually, but with google assistant and the microphone disabled.
You can't just shoot a printer if it makes "unexpected noise".
It's a printer for crying out loud. That's what it does.
I mean, my laser printer has pretty regular sound patterns and usually just does weird maintenance noises sometimes. But I remember the era when everyone had an inkjet, hoo boy, you tried to print a page and then there was a bunch of really incomprehensible noises and then you might get a printout, maybe.
Kind of, but with OPNsense for the router.
My wife and I don't use smartphones but use alexa devices. Im not sure at what point convenience wins over the privacy I would want. Wish I had more time to work out better solutions. Sorta funny that in general younger folk tend to accept more than older given that older folk have less to lose. I mean the closer death is the less you need to worry much about what they are going to get off you.
Can confirm.
I have no home automation stuff. My tech at home is a
disconnected from the Internet wired home security camera.
Dd-wrt on the router.
The only real techy thing I have is a pihole running a raspberry pi. Other than that my house is dumb. I despise my smart tvs because I can't control them (webos).
moved landline to Gvoice 15 years ago and set it to dnd. house phone never rings. get a transcript of any voicemail.
Can indeed confirm. I'm the first (tech enthusiast), slowly becoming the second. My dad is the second. He upgraded from windows 7 to windows 10 a few months ago. Like he knows tech, he just cbf about it. I was the first but then realized that smart home stuff is not worth it for my usecase.
I think anyone with even rudimentary knowledge about computers would agree.
Yes?
Yeah I am so awesome BTW I typed this on an Android smart phone /s
Coward.
