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)

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.

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.

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.

There is always a relevant XKCD

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.

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.

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 work in IT which is the reason: I self-host my smart home crap with strict firewall between it and my home assistant server.

as engineer with almost 6 years of experience: 90% of people in general don't give a damn, persoanlly I'm like that

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.

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.

Confirming the opposite here. Network is properly separated and locked down. IoT devices do their thing while I enjoy all the benefits.

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.

You know what they say, the S in IoT stands for Security!

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

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.

Home assistant for the win

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 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.

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.

If you avoid cloud based systems and self host everything yourself, you can have all that fancy stuff just fine.

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.

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.

Has OpenWRT but doesn't know how to stop smart home gear from leaking data?

Back to school for this fella

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.

There are selfhosted smart homes fyi

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.