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Comment by vannevar | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry, but if you have IoT devices controlling your home and they are connected to the Internet, your "smart home" is open to attack by design. And since IoT devices are optimized for convenience and sales rather than security, those attacks are likely to succeed and your devices co-opted for other purposes.

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I'm not a big fan of the Smart Things architecture. It's designed to allow you to create custom device types for devices they don't support, and custom extensions for new behavior, which is great. The problem is, anything you add outside of the stock code will only run on their cloud, and not on the device itself, meaning my motion sensor has to go to the cloud and back before turning on my basement lights. I'm currently looking into alternatives because this is a terrible way of implementing a home hub.

If you find a good alternative, could you post here? I know homeassistant.io for control, but I am looking for cloudless LoT (LAN of Things) devices which can (and do) have their firmware updated. Open source firmware if possible. I can't find any.

If your familiar with arduino the esp32 and esp8266 and ridiculously cheap and easy to program, have onboard wifi/bluetooth modules, and can easily hook to a relay to make your own smart lamps, switches, etc.

Also MQTT is pretty easy to work with, which many IOT devices use. You could spoof the dns of the mqtt server/broker its trying to reach and run your own.

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