A man who got kicked off a service because of an alleged remark.
This is the reason my house has:
- mechanical locks
- mechanical windows
- routers using OpenWRT
- no smart home crap
- no Alexa/Google Assistant/…
- no internet connected thermostats
Fwiw, I think using a self hosted home automation setup (shout out to home assistant) paired with smart devices that don’t use internet (e.g. zigbee, zwave, or matter once it comes out) can allow you to have a smart home without these kinds of fears.
That said, I would definitely agree to using mechanical locks. Although a monitored smart security system is probably still a good idea - you’re letting a company virtually enter your house, but you can’t rely on a self hosted solution to notify you when your power goes out, for example.
This, I have plenty of smart home stuff all run locally, and every external call is something I can control and disable. Having a smart home isn’t inherently the problem; outsourcing all the computation to cloud servers run by unaccountable corporations is the problem
My experience from watching lockpicking lawyer is that locks are just social niceties that tell others ‘please don’t go here’ and have no real ability to stop anyone who doesn’t care. Other than the owner who gets locked out by forgetting their own key of course.
You definitely still want locks because most people have no idea how to pick a lock and a lot of crime is crimes of opportunity. But I don’t think there’s that much of a difference in most locks. A slightly better lock might dissuade a thief who learned how to pick cheap masterlocks, but someone who truly wants to get in doesn’t even need to pick a lock. I’d hazard a guess that break-ins happen far more often by breaking the window than picking locks.
When I installed digital locks my partner was paranoid about them until I reminded her that we live in a house with a lot of windows. If someone is going to the lengths to crack my lock rather than smashing my windows, we have other problems.
@beaumains @greenskye the problem is, with a broken window it’s pretty obvious that something happened. And for example you can point that out to insurance people. With a digital lock, that has been opened and then locked again without your knowledge, not so much.
Lol this. Everyone’s so paranoid with locks, this only makes sense if you live in a concrete bunker. Also, if they want to get in, they will. Self housing and using devices that are patched and communicate locally is the way. The only issue with this is you have to be on top of your system and ensure it’s patched and up to date, but wouldn’t you oil your manual lock occasionally?
edit: added clarification
My threat model doesn’t need to include people hacking my locks. The average junkie breaking into my house to steal shit isnt doing it with the blessing of some hacking group. There are no cat-burgulars coming for my collection of antique dildos. I can definitely understand not e-locks for a museum or a bank, but they use integrated security systems that are far out of reach of home users. Another point is that the tumblers in most home door locks are trivial to pick, more trivial than hacking an e-lock.
Unless I’m mistaken, don’t HomeKit compatible devices need to be local-first too? I remember reading that if I switch my Ecobee thermostat to HomeKit (via HomeAssistant’s bridge), it will use local control instead. It’s on my todo list but I just haven’t done it yet.
I think this thread about Ecobee and HomeKit was where I started…
deleted by creator
And this is why you shouldn’t allow things essential to your life to be mediated by some faceless tech giant. Self-hosting may be more effort, but you can at least guarantee that any issues won’t be as a result of some bureaucratic nonsense or administrative error. This is not just smart home stuff - there are similar examples affecting email, photo galleries, file storage, etc. etc.
On one side, critics lambasted Jackson as a dupe for having smart devices in the first place; […]
Yah … that.
This is victim blaming. He isn’t at fault for trusting a company to have the bare minimum of respect for his property and autonomy, the company is at fault for not actually having that respect. Whether the company is actually trustworthy is as immaterial as saying someone “deserved” to have their car stolen because they forgot to lock it.
You can criticize him for not being cautious in this low-trust environment, but don’t let it get to the point where the party actually at fault gets off without criticism.
This is victim blaming.
Only to some degree. The guy is a software engineer and should have known better. I’d agree if it was Jenny from accounting. You could just as well point out “victim blaming” when I called someone a moron for jumping from a three storey building and breaking his legs, because it was neither his intention nor was he aware that it could break his legs. For a software engineer to employ cloud based “smart” devices and then wonder if it backfires is borderline moronic.
He may have made a mistake but his heart seems to be in the right place. Even if not before, it is now. His stance is commendable. Let’s allow people to get better than they were before.
If I ever get into smart home crap, I’ll definitely be aiming for a local network solution >_>
Ikea’s line of smart home stuff is the best generally available consumer friendly smart home stuff I’ve seen so far. All zigbee based, hub isn’t required, has local control and open APIs.
Stories like this are why I’ve never really found the concept of a smart home appealing. I’m perfectly content to do it all analog, but hopefully there’s an alternative out there for folks who think differently than I do.
There are very good and fairly easy solutions for self hosting smart home functionality. Im using homeassistant which runs locally on my own hardware, and all my smart functionality is controlled locally so it works even without internet. And should my server crash, everything just defaults to normal “dumb” control.
Oh, this is the same story from June. This can basically happen to anybody who uses their Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, … account for anything important. All of these companies have very limited recourse for customers who got banned. I’m surprised he even found out why they banned him LOL
