3 ms·

The best parts I found here : > The Ring Doorbell, which is now owned by advertising megacorp Amazon, suffers from all of the same privacy problems described i

The best parts I found here : > The Ring Doorbell, which is now owned by advertising megacorp Amazon, suffers from all of the same privacy problems described in my post about the Nest thermostat, but even worse. Like the Nest thermostat, the client software is a total “race to the bottom” one-size-fits-all garbage iOS app that not only looks bad, but is full of bugs. Also like the Nest, all of your data is hosted in “the cloud”, and a monthly ransom is required before you (“the customer”) are actually allowed to access it. Worse than the Nest, however, is the fact that the Ring doorbell actually has a camera and microphone built-in, so video and audio feeds are also held for ransom in “the cloud”, and are shared with any interested party, sometimes even without your permission. > Just like many other Internet of Things products, the Ring has also been subject to multiple disastrous data breaches, meaning besides law enforcement agencies and advertising partners, many Ring customers’ private data is now also in the hands of malicious hackers, who may in the future offer ransoms that are much harder to refuse than the one offered by Amazon. ____ end quote. Build all the small stuffs yourself, as much as you can. Another reason to learn DIY, even though off the shelf solutions exist.

hellbannedguy 5y ago
You had me at "monthly ransom".
nine_k 5y ago
As someone on HN once quipped, Iinternet of Things is not going to happen until LAN of Things happens". This has the problem of a common controller, though. The router could be it; most modern routers are quite beefy. For those running linux internally a standard to deploy apps, including the LAN smart home controller, should be reasonably easy to devise, unless it already exists.
- rusk 5y ago
  > The router could be it Already seeing various home hubs coming bundled, so this seems to be on the way. Whether you’ll have access to this or if it hosts a “partner” remains to be seen. For now I think we’ll be seeing a profusion of Raspberri Pi based “LoT” devices just because they are so damn easy to work with and they come with a certain amount of sense and control stuff baked in.
- jon-wood 5y ago
  I've got a lot of hope for Home Assistant here. Its just a little bit too involved for a typical end user at the moment but I really don't think its very far from being something that can be sold as an appliance to people who don't know what MQTT is.
  - Sander_Marechal 5y ago
    I love Home Assistant, but it's definitely hobbyist software, not end-user software.
    - gerdesj 5y ago
      So you hire someone to put it in for you. A car analogy is not far behind 9)
      - bluGill 5y ago
        Considering how unique each how is in details that matter to this type of thing I think smart houses will need to evolve to hiring someone to set it up. Sure your device can connect automatically - that is easy - then you need to tell it what room it is in, and what events to respond to. Only some of that can be automated.
        gerdesj 5y ago
        If you hold your nose, you get OK Google and co to act as your intermediary. Home Assistant has one paid for option: "Nabu casa" which includes an intermediated link to Google/Amazon etc. https://www.nabucasa.com/ https://www.nabucasa.com/ I have run up several HAs and it keeps on getting better. Yes, each deployment is different but HA delivers because if you use "supervisored" or the hass.io distro you get all the addons out of the box and that includes Node Red with a shed load of batteries included. Adding more is simply a config entry. I have one customer who needs a way to fire up and shutdown their office PCs when they work from home. These are Catia workstations with some serious grunt that a home machine generally lacks. I deployed HA and LAPS (MS way to deploy local admins on a Windows box.) HA is a VM so it is "free" apart from my time. I recently added an AD account unlock facility involving quite a lot of LDAP triggered by a button press, not to mention a few ACL changes on the AdminSDHolder container. My home HA controls underfloor heating, makes my doorbell speak to us. It turns a water feature off and on depending on sunup and sundown and a few other things. I've recently added a power meter monitor. My office one watches windows, doors and lights amongst other things. That was an easy win. When you lock up at the end of the day you check out the panel and it tells you which windows are still open etc and you sort that out. It will also send MQTT messages and SMS my phone if any smoke or water sensors go off on one. We have 40 windows and a quite a few doors in my office. Most doors are defined as fire doors (UK) so they must be shut. We have a NUC style PC with two LG commercial panels attached and a camera for constant video conferencing with a colleague in another country. A NodeRed routine wakes the lot up in the morning and shuts it down at night. I've barely scratched the surface of what HA and co can do. The real point is that all this stuff is free or nearly free and is documented and there are forums for support. In HA (finally) Zwave, Zigbee and all the rest are finally all useful and very well supported. You still need to take some care but there are very few sharp edges left. Nowadays all I see is a relentless progress, functionality just keeps on appearing. It's quite something to watch.
- neartheplain 5y ago
  Specialized IoT controllers are massively oversold. Most people don't need one, including hobbyists and HN commentors. I've developed this opinion after several years of work in IoT. At the link layer, just use WiFi. If power is an issue, there's 802.15.4 and 6LoWPAN (bridged to WiFi). At the network layer, it's a regular LAN. Lastly, at the application layer, most devices stand on their own. 90% of the value in a smart doorbell is derived from its connection to your smartphone, not whether it can talk to your thermostat or smoke detector. To evaluate the truth of this statement, walk down Home Depot's "Smart Home" aisle and count products which support complex multi-device interactions, or advertise these interactions as core features.
  - gerdesj 5y ago
    You forgot to mention the most important thing. If it is important then it should work despite the internet and ideally, despite the LAN/WLAN. My home doorbell triggers a battery backed chime as well as all the other funky stuff. The chime is always first before our phones and the Sonos thingies go berserk. I monitor the battery on the chime too because the Home Assistant tells me to on a schedule. I use my multimeter. If I am down the garden, I can't hear the chime but I have a phone on me normally and the lights on the summer house blinking in morse is a give away if the mower is drowning out the phone. Tools for the job. ... Yes I do have quite a lot of time on my hands ...
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Home assistant said this better than you from the start: https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/01/19/perfect-home-automation/ https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/01/19/perfect-home-a... Once you realize where you are right and where you are wrong you can start asking if and how automation might help you personally.
  - novok 5y ago
    So what would you recommend as a wifi item? A lot of them seem to be crap, and don't you get issues with having +30 low frequency, low bandwidth wifi items added to your home network, along with the 30 other ones at your home already? How about remote exploits of those devices? The fact that wifi 'can't handle a 100 small devices well' was sold to me as a reason to go z-wave 5 years ago.
- ProZsolt 5y ago
  I hope Thread[0] and Metter[1] will solve that problem [0]: https://www.threadgroup.org/ https://www.threadgroup.org/ [1]: https://buildwithmatter.com/ https://buildwithmatter.com/

hellbannedguy 5y ago

You had me at "monthly ransom".

nine_k 5y ago

As someone on HN once quipped, Iinternet of Things is not going to happen until LAN of Things happens". This has the problem of a common controller, though. The router could be it; most modern routers are quite beefy. For those running linux internally a standard to deploy apps, including the LAN smart home controller, should be reasonably easy to devise, unless it already exists.

rusk 5y ago
> The router could be it Already seeing various home hubs coming bundled, so this seems to be on the way. Whether you’ll have access to this or if it hosts a “partner” remains to be seen. For now I think we’ll be seeing a profusion of Raspberri Pi based “LoT” devices just because they are so damn easy to work with and they come with a certain amount of sense and control stuff baked in.
jon-wood 5y ago
I've got a lot of hope for Home Assistant here. Its just a little bit too involved for a typical end user at the moment but I really don't think its very far from being something that can be sold as an appliance to people who don't know what MQTT is.
- Sander_Marechal 5y ago
  I love Home Assistant, but it's definitely hobbyist software, not end-user software.
  - gerdesj 5y ago
    So you hire someone to put it in for you. A car analogy is not far behind 9)
    - bluGill 5y ago
      Considering how unique each how is in details that matter to this type of thing I think smart houses will need to evolve to hiring someone to set it up. Sure your device can connect automatically - that is easy - then you need to tell it what room it is in, and what events to respond to. Only some of that can be automated.
      - gerdesj 5y ago
        If you hold your nose, you get OK Google and co to act as your intermediary. Home Assistant has one paid for option: "Nabu casa" which includes an intermediated link to Google/Amazon etc. https://www.nabucasa.com/ https://www.nabucasa.com/ I have run up several HAs and it keeps on getting better. Yes, each deployment is different but HA delivers because if you use "supervisored" or the hass.io distro you get all the addons out of the box and that includes Node Red with a shed load of batteries included. Adding more is simply a config entry. I have one customer who needs a way to fire up and shutdown their office PCs when they work from home. These are Catia workstations with some serious grunt that a home machine generally lacks. I deployed HA and LAPS (MS way to deploy local admins on a Windows box.) HA is a VM so it is "free" apart from my time. I recently added an AD account unlock facility involving quite a lot of LDAP triggered by a button press, not to mention a few ACL changes on the AdminSDHolder container. My home HA controls underfloor heating, makes my doorbell speak to us. It turns a water feature off and on depending on sunup and sundown and a few other things. I've recently added a power meter monitor. My office one watches windows, doors and lights amongst other things. That was an easy win. When you lock up at the end of the day you check out the panel and it tells you which windows are still open etc and you sort that out. It will also send MQTT messages and SMS my phone if any smoke or water sensors go off on one. We have 40 windows and a quite a few doors in my office. Most doors are defined as fire doors (UK) so they must be shut. We have a NUC style PC with two LG commercial panels attached and a camera for constant video conferencing with a colleague in another country. A NodeRed routine wakes the lot up in the morning and shuts it down at night. I've barely scratched the surface of what HA and co can do. The real point is that all this stuff is free or nearly free and is documented and there are forums for support. In HA (finally) Zwave, Zigbee and all the rest are finally all useful and very well supported. You still need to take some care but there are very few sharp edges left. Nowadays all I see is a relentless progress, functionality just keeps on appearing. It's quite something to watch.
neartheplain 5y ago
Specialized IoT controllers are massively oversold. Most people don't need one, including hobbyists and HN commentors. I've developed this opinion after several years of work in IoT. At the link layer, just use WiFi. If power is an issue, there's 802.15.4 and 6LoWPAN (bridged to WiFi). At the network layer, it's a regular LAN. Lastly, at the application layer, most devices stand on their own. 90% of the value in a smart doorbell is derived from its connection to your smartphone, not whether it can talk to your thermostat or smoke detector. To evaluate the truth of this statement, walk down Home Depot's "Smart Home" aisle and count products which support complex multi-device interactions, or advertise these interactions as core features.
- gerdesj 5y ago
  You forgot to mention the most important thing. If it is important then it should work despite the internet and ideally, despite the LAN/WLAN. My home doorbell triggers a battery backed chime as well as all the other funky stuff. The chime is always first before our phones and the Sonos thingies go berserk. I monitor the battery on the chime too because the Home Assistant tells me to on a schedule. I use my multimeter. If I am down the garden, I can't hear the chime but I have a phone on me normally and the lights on the summer house blinking in morse is a give away if the mower is drowning out the phone. Tools for the job. ... Yes I do have quite a lot of time on my hands ...
- bluGill 5y ago
  Home assistant said this better than you from the start: https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/01/19/perfect-home-automation/ https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/01/19/perfect-home-a... Once you realize where you are right and where you are wrong you can start asking if and how automation might help you personally.
- novok 5y ago
  So what would you recommend as a wifi item? A lot of them seem to be crap, and don't you get issues with having +30 low frequency, low bandwidth wifi items added to your home network, along with the 30 other ones at your home already? How about remote exploits of those devices? The fact that wifi 'can't handle a 100 small devices well' was sold to me as a reason to go z-wave 5 years ago.
ProZsolt 5y ago
I hope Thread[0] and Metter[1] will solve that problem [0]: https://www.threadgroup.org/ https://www.threadgroup.org/ [1]: https://buildwithmatter.com/ https://buildwithmatter.com/