Smart homes will turn dumb overnight as Charter kills security service

I'm not the embedded guy on the project but my thought was to use a domain name and have it check a DNS every hour.

That would solve it?

I've had the exact opposite where devices that could easily have had Ethernet (i.e. enough space on the device) were Wi-Fi only >:(

For stationary devices, Ethernet seems perfectly fine to me. Why force me to use Wi-Fi?

Apparently, Southern Telecom has bought some American brands and sells spyware "cloud" devices to end-users.

You can see the list here: https://southerntelecom.com/brands/

I still haven't found a way how to watch the camera stream without the app. It's possible, but it's a UDP protocol that I do not understand. It works with or without Internet, so I'm sure I could watch it without giving it Internet access...

The fact so few smart devices are HomeKit enables says a lot, unfortunately.

My criteria is: all the logic must be contained within my home, the devices must adhere to some open standard, they must be repairable and modifiable to some degree.

There are of course alternatives that have been around for decades like Control 4 but they cost serious money.

1. https://www.home-assistant.io/

When I leave a room, I turn the light off. When I enter it, I turn it on.

When I leave the house, I turn the heat off. When I enter it, I turn it on. If I had pets, I'd just dial it down to "pet comfort" level while away.

Am I missing something?

EDIT: I do have a Roomba and think it's great. I hit the button when I'm about to go out for an hour, and there's a clean floor when I get back. I appreciate that. No internet required as well.

Such a business might have a chance at the point when the cross over from not caring to caring occur.

You need lan-local protocols so that users can control devices within their network directly without going through the cloud.

The trick is that for a consumer market, the margins are typically much harder to work with -- especially with startups.

In fact, there's a zombieco that took over running Vector's upstream servers when Anki died, so definitely not new.

A better company would be one funded by donations that reverse engineers protocols for these things and provides an open server to keep them alive, similar to what the Pebble community did.

IoTZombieCo: give us x% of your revenue and we’ll acquire you for free when you die. In exchange, you can put our logo on your box as if we’ve already acquired you.

Companies don’t shut down for fun. Usually it means the economics didn’t make sense. Having a large portfolio of failed products wouldn’t change the economics for IoTZombieCo.

The only long-term solution is products that aren’t cloud addicted. Make everything local-first with some progressive (optional) enhancement with cloud functionality that users pay for to keep it sustainable.

Disclaimer: I build local-first IoT products at Hiome (hiome.com)

Some devices might not be possible to update due to hardware/software configuration (perhaps certain variables are hard coded?).

Whilst what you're saying is right it just doesn't work that way. I'd love for all the Android devices to get years of OS and security patches, but it simply doesn't happen.

Any IoT device is pretty much the same. It's not going to change any time soon.

Only invest in products you can be sure of (which is hard these days). Expect them to break, expect nobody to care, and be prepared to lose money or get a terrible ROI - it's why phones don't get updates, the OEM doesn't make money from providing updates which are a direct cost VS selling a new phone.

This is capitalism, produce crap, sell many units, offer no support, rinse and repeat.

You typically already have to provide full hardware schematic when submitting an electronic product to test labs to get various certifications.

It doesn't seem that far fetched that you would also have to submit server software and the certification house would keep it in escrow in case you go bankrupt.

I don't think it's realistic to expect that will happen though.

Exactly, why can’t I still dial in with my 2400 baud modem to get virus definitions for Norton Antivirus for my 386 that I bought in the 80s?

Furthermore, many countries now have some regulations regarding e-waste. Either now or in the making. And I expect "bricking" to be punished in some way. Right to repair comes to mind.

I would go further: IMO, the manufacturer should never be able to sell the device that requires a service to function, period. They should only be able to either a) sell the device that can be optionally tied to a service - not necessarily manufacturer's - but otherwise works fine without it, or b) rent a device as a part of a service, remaining responsible for its maintenance.

Model a) is how cell phones work - you buy a cell phone, a cellular connection is a separate service provided by multiple competing parties that are not the manufacturer. Model b) is how ISPs tend to work - they lend you hardware to connect to their network infrastructure, they replace it if it breaks, they take it away at the end of the contract, and they absolutely refuse to let you use their hardware with a different ISP.

I don't think the Zigbee Alliance requires their members to only market compliant products as certified, so they could be marketing them to consumers as compliant and to companies like Charter as easy to integrate.

A requirement that products carry a clear statement about relying on a service to function, and then some rules about how the end of life for such products and services should be sequenced would not be onerous and would make the situation much better for consumers (even the ones that didn't read the statement would get the minimum period of service specified in the EOL rules).

Solutions like Z-Wave also have a tightly-defined application layer which allows nearly all devices to have some level of meaningful interaction with each other. For example, a Z-Wave motion sensor from Vendor A can turn on a Z-Wave light from Vendor B in response to motion. This was largely possible due to all Z-Wave radios being made by one organization. There are now promises of opening the stack a bit so partners can also develop radios, and it remains to be seen what impact this will have on the interoperability of Z-Wave devices in the future.

However, one mfgr, for the sake of argument, Apple, stuck a MAC address software firewall in their OS 'to ensure a consistent user experience' such that its tablets at the MAC address layer can only communicate with other Apple MAC addressed products.

Older HN readers will recall a vast variety of floppy disk using 80s home computers such that a CP/M Z80 box, a IBM AT 80286, an apple II, a TRS-80 model 4, and a commodore 64, all technically use standards compliant 5 1/4 floppy disks such that any double sided double density disk will work in any drive of all those devices... I assure you the filesystem layer is utterly incompatible and at best you'll need very special utilities.

Somewhat younger HN readers might recall "stupid flash drive tricks" under linux like formatting a USB attached flash drive as ext2 format simply to see if you can do it. And it does work, perfectly. And nothing other than a linux box could mount a ext2 formatted USB flash drive. Technically thats a standards compliant flash drive both at physical interface and firmware layer that will not work on a mac or windows box.

There's essentially an implementation bug in the standards documents for zigbee such that the RF layer will interop but the application layer most certainly does not have to interop and often enough does not, whereas zwave does NOT have the standards document implementation bug and any rando zwave device will mostly pretty much work with any other rando zwave device.

The only technology I'm aware of where 100% of devices will interop is SCADA current loops. Some techs come close like DMX or zwave which never seems to fail. Some semi silo'd tech like insteon is pretty interoperable. Some stuff like zigbee essentially doesn't work IRL unless the mfgr put effort into it, which some do... and some don't.

I've used a "dumb phone" for a long time, and only bought a "smart" one due to work necessity. Even now, I barely use the latter personally, or carry it around with me, since I know it's basically a spying device for third-party apps.

I love the concept of the Internet of Things, and have started studying it deeper as a hobby. If my home is going to be "smart", I want to minimize its dependencies, to understand how it works, what services it's connecting to, what data it's sending, and make sure everything is under my control, repairable and extensible.

Like the HP printers that stop working if they can't phone home (without informed consent, I'm sure) - or these Charter security devices that will simply become useless after the company shut down.. I believe the reluctance on some part of the tech-savvy population is justified, because we/they understand the risks better than naive tech enthusiasts.

Either that, or, we're getting older and suspicious of new things - but for good reasons, as our trust has been betrayed countless times by tech companies.

To use a Raspberry Pi as the hub, you can use Home Assistant and a USB or GPIO Zigbee adapter such as the Conbee or Raspbee. Home Assistant generally requires a Pi 3. Automations are all defined within Home Assistant so they do not depend on having homogeneous vendors.

They have a full list of specific supported devices here: https://www.apple.com/ios/home/accessories

The devices on the list that act as hubs also carry that support across to anything else they control; for example, the Philips Hue Bridge lets you treat a lot of Zigbee 3.0 lights/switches as if they were native HomeKit devices.

There's an old saying that you can't implement a technological solution to a social problem. I'm increasingly of the view that this holds the other way around as well.

Unfortunately, there is a vicious circle here. To support makers of products that can be repaired and upgraded, and that don't depend on remote facilities that can disappear but can't be replaced, and that respect user privacy and control, and that play nicely with other products, we need to buy their stuff. That stuff is likely to be more expensive up-front, even if it might work out better and cheaper in the long term, so buyers need to perceive some advantage to justify the extra cost. But until those buyers have been stung by the deliberate limitations and user-hostile behaviours of the competing products, which typically only happens later, they often won't be very aware of the choices they're really making. They might experience buyer's remorse further down the line, but by then it's too late. This effect makes it difficult to compete if you want to offer good quality, future-proof products, which in turn limits how many people have those products and how many people see that those products can be advantageous.

Then I got generic Chinese IR blasters, and use homebridge to connect it all over the LAN to Apple HomeKit.

If there is a shift in tech, someone will always be selling new IR blasters due to the installed base. Worse case, I'll always have the IR remote controls (or can build something out of an raspberry pi/arduino)

User friendly, and not tied to specific vendor.

There used to be an electronic repair shop in every neighborhood. These were small businesses that would be able to diagnose and repair faults in random electronic devices.

I wonder if at one point this problem of cloud services disappearing will become widespread enough that we'll start to see businesses that will take your bricked device, flash their own firmware to it and provide their own, generalized cloud service as a replacement.

Obviously reverse engineering each device and making a custom firmware would be a large initial investment, but maybe at a point where just about every trivial thing will depend on a network service it would be economically feasible.

Having a usable fallback to smart tech's smartness is nice, but it can propose complications (and dangers) the manufacturer doesn't want to deal with because making the gear to deal with them then becomes cost prohibitive. The best thing is dumb tech, to which smartness can be added if desired by the user.

"Home Appliance"?

I control everything with a Universal Devices ISY-994i controller and have set up a Polyglot node server to tie it all together. This gives me flexibility because I can always expand the isy-994i to support Zigbee or Zwave; and polyglot node server is open source.

It’s very nice to be protected against forced IoT obsolescence due to cloud API Reversioning, Company failures and mergers, etc. some of my smart home IoT devices are over 20 years old; no plans to upgrade them. Best of all, nothing requires the Internet to work.

There’s also (IMO) a serious lack of open source tools for managing IOT devices. Right now a lot of the cheaper ones speak PnPP but there’s only one functional client I was able to find for this (a buggy and obscure GTK app.) There are a lot of good libraries though so maybe that will change.

There's a subgenre of the above where mega-corporations set up and later dissolve an entire department. So any employee who could unlock those devices was probably downsized months or even years ago when the project was internally cancelled and the shutdown was planned. First, fire the engineers because we're cancelling so no possibility of R+D, whoopsie that means no possibility of unlocking, oh well.