4 ms·

I'm quite confident my parents and the many people like them in the world would not find running VPN/Tailscale/ZeroTier to be "easy." Nor would they have any id

I'm quite confident my parents and the many people like them in the world would not find running VPN/Tailscale/ZeroTier to be "easy." Nor would they have any idea how to troubleshoot when those services have issues. Nor would they want to play intermediary between Tailscale and myQ customer support to figure out which one is broken and fix it. Having options like this is great for powerusers, but the vast majority of people are not that. They need something that just works. Of course that still doesn't mean they need their garage door collecting telemetry data, but they need something more than a LAN-connected smart device.

iAMkenough 3y ago
Sounds like there's a market for intermediary tech support
- colinmorelli 3y ago
  Perhaps in general, but if the problem here is "I don't want a corporation to have access to when my garage door is open or closed" I can't fathom how "Give another corporation access to my entire network to troubleshoot my VPN and LAN configuration of my devices" is the solution?
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    The solution is to "give my tech whiz kid/neighbor/friend, or a local IT shop two blocks over, the responsibility of managing my home network". This is where ideas like non-shit IoT, Right to Repair, Free (Libre) Software, and even "how to not fuck up foreign aid 101", all converge. The point isn't to make everyone their tech support. The point is to allow local communities to be more self-sufficient, able to manage technology on their own - as opposed to outsourcing everything to some faceless companies that have no attachment to any given community. Note that this doesn't preclude business - on the contrary, local businesses are the fundamental part of any community larger than couple dozen people; the ideas converge not on everyone doing stuff pro bono, but on small, local businesses* doing things for their communities, accumulating and retaining know-how. I wish more people from aforementioned movements realized their ultimate goal (at least in form that's possible in the real world) is the same, and joined forces.
- kube-system 3y ago
  If your mass-market commercial product needs this by design, you will fail. To successfully sell a product to the general public, it must work out of the box.
  - jollyllama 3y ago
    True, but there's contractors for pretty much everything else that can be installed on your home. Why not home automation contractors?
    - kube-system 3y ago
      They exist, but they're expensive. And the products they sell are not really consumer devices, they are B2B products marketed at contractors. They're really two different markets, the bulk of the home automation market doesn't want to spend $10K+ for a contractor to check the same feature boxes that something on the shelf at Home Depot can do for a 3-digit price tag. Labor is really expensive, so home automation contractors operate almost exclusively on the high-end of the market.
epiecs 3y ago
They can just pay for home assistant cloud?
- colinmorelli 3y ago
  1) Home Assistant is not an officially sanctioned option by the devices and will run into technical issues regardless whether it's cloud hosted or not (as seen by the very post we're all commenting on). 2) Even if the above were not true, at that point you're back to an internet enabled smart home device system, and now we're simply picking which vendor to trust over the other. But in both cases, the option for the vendor to collect telemetry data about your usage of the products exists. There is really no viable way for the typical consumer to be able to both have a good product experience for something like this, and to prevent a cloud vendor from having access to their data. Unless I'm missing something obvious.
  - lloeki 3y ago
    > Even if the above were not true, at that point you're back to an internet enabled smart home device system Home Assistant Cloud is essentially a TCP-level proxy (IOW Nabu Casa sees jack squat): > The remote UI encrypts all communication between your browser and your local instance. Encryption is provided by a Let’s Encrypt certificate. Under the hood, your local Home Assistant instance is connected to one of our custom built UI proxy servers. Our UI proxy servers operate at the TCP level and will forward all encrypted data to the local instance. > Routing is made possible by the Server Name Indication (SNI) extension on the TLS handshake. It contains the information for which hostname an incoming request is destined, and we forward this information to the matching local instance. To be able to route multiple simultaneous requests, all data will be routed via a TCP multiplexer. The local Home Assistant instance will receive the TCP packets, demultiplex them, decrypt them with the SSL certificate and forward them to the HTTP component. > The source code is available on GitHub: > SniTun - End-to-End encryption with SNI proxy on top of a TCP multiplexer > hass-nabucasa - Cloud integration in Home Assistant https://www.nabucasa.com/config/remote/#how-it-works https://www.nabucasa.com/config/remote/#how-it-works https://www.nabucasa.com/config/remote/#security https://www.nabucasa.com/config/remote/#security
MadnessASAP 3y ago
My wife doesn't understand what I do on the computer all the time and she's pretty doubtful of my claim that server racks are normal household items. Nevertheless setting up the HA app on her phone with a Wireguard VPN was super simple and she's got a good handle on that. That being said, setting up the HA and Wireguard server is definitely a more demanding experience. Although once setup it's pretty much a once and done sort of thing, and they're are integrated ready to go solutions available. It would be nice to see something like "Geek Squad" offering that sort of service instead of just running AV software while trawling for nudes on customer laptops. No guesses on what's more profitable though.
- nvy 3y ago
  >she's pretty doubtful of my claim that server racks are normal household items. Haha, she's got you there.
  - 20after4 3y ago
    Racks of gear are completely normal if you're a serious musician or computer user.
- Eduard 3y ago
  > Although once setup it's pretty much a once and done sort of thing I guess you started using Home Assistance recently / shortly... and/or you use only a few HA integrations. Otherwise, you would have already run into enough troubles with updates.

iAMkenough 3y ago

Sounds like there's a market for intermediary tech support

colinmorelli 3y ago
Perhaps in general, but if the problem here is "I don't want a corporation to have access to when my garage door is open or closed" I can't fathom how "Give another corporation access to my entire network to troubleshoot my VPN and LAN configuration of my devices" is the solution?
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  The solution is to "give my tech whiz kid/neighbor/friend, or a local IT shop two blocks over, the responsibility of managing my home network". This is where ideas like non-shit IoT, Right to Repair, Free (Libre) Software, and even "how to not fuck up foreign aid 101", all converge. The point isn't to make everyone their tech support. The point is to allow local communities to be more self-sufficient, able to manage technology on their own - as opposed to outsourcing everything to some faceless companies that have no attachment to any given community. Note that this doesn't preclude business - on the contrary, local businesses are the fundamental part of any community larger than couple dozen people; the ideas converge not on everyone doing stuff pro bono, but on small, local businesses* doing things for their communities, accumulating and retaining know-how. I wish more people from aforementioned movements realized their ultimate goal (at least in form that's possible in the real world) is the same, and joined forces.
kube-system 3y ago
If your mass-market commercial product needs this by design, you will fail. To successfully sell a product to the general public, it must work out of the box.
- jollyllama 3y ago
  True, but there's contractors for pretty much everything else that can be installed on your home. Why not home automation contractors?
  - kube-system 3y ago
    They exist, but they're expensive. And the products they sell are not really consumer devices, they are B2B products marketed at contractors. They're really two different markets, the bulk of the home automation market doesn't want to spend $10K+ for a contractor to check the same feature boxes that something on the shelf at Home Depot can do for a 3-digit price tag. Labor is really expensive, so home automation contractors operate almost exclusively on the high-end of the market.

epiecs 3y ago

They can just pay for home assistant cloud?

colinmorelli 3y ago
1) Home Assistant is not an officially sanctioned option by the devices and will run into technical issues regardless whether it's cloud hosted or not (as seen by the very post we're all commenting on). 2) Even if the above were not true, at that point you're back to an internet enabled smart home device system, and now we're simply picking which vendor to trust over the other. But in both cases, the option for the vendor to collect telemetry data about your usage of the products exists. There is really no viable way for the typical consumer to be able to both have a good product experience for something like this, and to prevent a cloud vendor from having access to their data. Unless I'm missing something obvious.
- lloeki 3y ago
  > Even if the above were not true, at that point you're back to an internet enabled smart home device system Home Assistant Cloud is essentially a TCP-level proxy (IOW Nabu Casa sees jack squat): > The remote UI encrypts all communication between your browser and your local instance. Encryption is provided by a Let’s Encrypt certificate. Under the hood, your local Home Assistant instance is connected to one of our custom built UI proxy servers. Our UI proxy servers operate at the TCP level and will forward all encrypted data to the local instance. > Routing is made possible by the Server Name Indication (SNI) extension on the TLS handshake. It contains the information for which hostname an incoming request is destined, and we forward this information to the matching local instance. To be able to route multiple simultaneous requests, all data will be routed via a TCP multiplexer. The local Home Assistant instance will receive the TCP packets, demultiplex them, decrypt them with the SSL certificate and forward them to the HTTP component. > The source code is available on GitHub: > SniTun - End-to-End encryption with SNI proxy on top of a TCP multiplexer > hass-nabucasa - Cloud integration in Home Assistant https://www.nabucasa.com/config/remote/#how-it-works https://www.nabucasa.com/config/remote/#how-it-works https://www.nabucasa.com/config/remote/#security https://www.nabucasa.com/config/remote/#security

MadnessASAP 3y ago

My wife doesn't understand what I do on the computer all the time and she's pretty doubtful of my claim that server racks are normal household items. Nevertheless setting up the HA app on her phone with a Wireguard VPN was super simple and she's got a good handle on that. That being said, setting up the HA and Wireguard server is definitely a more demanding experience. Although once setup it's pretty much a once and done sort of thing, and they're are integrated ready to go solutions available. It would be nice to see something like "Geek Squad" offering that sort of service instead of just running AV software while trawling for nudes on customer laptops. No guesses on what's more profitable though.

nvy 3y ago
>she's pretty doubtful of my claim that server racks are normal household items. Haha, she's got you there.
- 20after4 3y ago
  Racks of gear are completely normal if you're a serious musician or computer user.
Eduard 3y ago
> Although once setup it's pretty much a once and done sort of thing I guess you started using Home Assistance recently / shortly... and/or you use only a few HA integrations. Otherwise, you would have already run into enough troubles with updates.