The best solution IMO is don’t let your smart devices have access to the internet. Put them on a VLAN, block them at the firewall, whatever method you prefer. Accessing your home network remotely is one thing, but your air conditioner doesn’t need to INITIATE a connection to the outside world.
That’s what I did 🙃 Unfortunately, some devices do not work at all without a connection to the manufacturer’s cloud, this also needs to be taken into account.
I have flashed all the bulbs and ceiling lights in my house and they work locally on FOSS firmware now 😉 It is not a big deal. I have very poor soldering skills, and I did this anyway.
Oh, I could make it worse if you’d like? That tool isn’t made for just the bulbs I got at Costco, it’s made for any device in the Tuya ecosystem. What’s Tuya? They’re a Chinese white-label manufacturer that makes smart devices that other companies can slap their brand on. They’ll throw you together an app too, but all of the API calls go through their infrastructure. Bonus, they also make security cameras that send footage to their servers, and smart locks too. They’re literally everywhere, but I’m in Australia so that’s where I’m basing this list:
I mean, there are still plenty of ways to have smart things that don’t communicate with the internet. Ikea’s stuff is all zigbee, they don’t have wifi at all. You can get one of their hubs to control from your phone, or they sell remotes with zigbee you can pair directly to control a set of bulbs. They never have to see internet at all.
Yeah. As well, if you want to upgrade to a Home Assistant setup down the line, all you need is a $50 Zigbee USB adapter. If you’re more tech-savvy then you can also buy bulbs from somewhere like www.athom.tech that come pre-flashed with open source firmware. Either ESPHome, Tasmota or WLED are available. These are wifi, but everything is local, and you can block them on your router without issues. ESPHome is what I have running on the bulbs I rescued.
Good link for that site. Currently shopping bulbs for my just recently arrived home assistant green and hard to find consistent information on best bulbs to be using. Love that these are flashed with open source already but I think due to the amount of bulbs I need and their location I’ll be better suited with Zigbee. Will definitely check this place for future devices as I build out the system.
Are you new with Home Assistant in general? I’ve got it running in a VM on a rack server, but those HA Green’s sure do look like a tidy little bit of kit. Ikea stuff works well with it Zigbee-wise, I’ve got some of it around. You can get their remotes working via HA to control other things too. Here’s the Blueprint I used: github.com/…/zha_ikea_tradfri_5button_remote_cust…
Thanks for the info! I am somewhat new to HA, my only experience with it was temporarily checking it out on a VM on my windows Plex server but at that time didn’t have my own place was just checking it our for the eventual move. I think I’m going to add Sky Connect for Zigbee and eventually Matter/Thread devices.
The newer version of Ikea’s Tradfri bulbs (they aren’t selling the old ones anymore) have thread/ matter support on the chips. They should be getting a firmware update soon to enable it. You can also check out the Integrations section on Home Assistant to find devices/brands that are private and work well. The Shelly integration is rated Platinum, and has Local Push: www.home-assistant.io/integrations/shelly/
Edit: Also, feel free to hit me up here or on Matrix (link in my profile) if you have any questions or just wanna chat about HA or other self-hosted stuff 😊
A long while ago, my first foray into smart home stuff was a Phillips Hue system. I used to use it exclusively offline, but I got deeper into smart home stuff and wanted to add some integration into my system. I don’t remember what anymore, but it meant setting up a Hue developer account, so I signed up. Gave them my email address. Stopped using the integration, moved, reset the hub, used it offline for years.
This February I logged into the hub for some reason. I think an accessory wasn’t working and Hue user docs said to log in or some such nonsense.
Five days ago, I got an email from Amazon. They told me that one of the batteries in a Hue switch was running low, and they helpfully provided me with a link to buy new ones. Their page for the device indicated that they were being updated with its battery percentage every 4-8 hours - and that I had authorized Alexa access to my Hue system in February.
I checked the Hue app, and it indicated no apps or services connected to my account.
Logged into the Hue website, dug into my settings, and there were a dozen app’s and services that had been “authorized” to access my account - none that showed up in the app.
Every smart device that has been on my network - devices that I never integrated with Hue (on purpose!) were all happily showing very recent access times to my data. Systems I don’t have accounts to anymore. I revoked access, of course.
Three days ago Amazon emailed me to let me know a different device needed a battery, and showed that Hue had shared the battery level of the device with them that day - 2 days after I revoked access.
Yeah… all their products are getting trashed, reflashed, or used with zigbee hubs I’ve built.
You should never fully trust ANY device on your network. Even if it’s not collecting your personal information and sending it off to who-knows-where, there could always be a zero-day exploit just waiting for someone to find it.
I’m 18 and fine with my parents knowing where I am so we can coordinate mealtimes and stuff. I really don’t care for having a third party spy on me 24/7 though. We just Signal each other “I’m at xyz location, be back soon” and that’s plenty enough.
That sounds far more (and acceptably so in my view) stochastic tho, like, do they have on-demand “lets see where lol is right now even though I have zero need to know currently” or is it just like u verbally check-in when they Signal u?
We just verbally check in and I’m totally fine with saying where I am. I believe the important thing here is trust. If, hypothetically, we were able to set up something privacy-respecting that communicated my GPS location to my parents 24/7, I wouldn’t be a fan of it. It’d feel like my parents are monitoring me because they don’t trust me to be truthful about my whereabouts.
If you actually need to, u can “share” as like a thing to attach your actual GPS location in Signal, no different from sharing a pic or file or dictation
Though access is limited, they do have the tech thanks to their friends to the north. I can’t find the link, but they have their own Great Firewall implementation
Lol this country has some of the best state sponsored hacking groups and the ability to build nuclear weapon. Its not like they are living under a rock technologically.
The government just doesn’t provide much of anything to its citizens as a form of control.
I’m not saying the expertise doesn’t exist. The point is that so much of our personal information is given up because of how technology is ingrained in our every day lives, so every move you make is recorded somewhere. If the general population doesn’t have that kind of access to technology, then you can’t record their every movement.
People who use those characters benefit from it. I imagine 點看 is more useful than xn–c1yn36f to a Chinese person. That’s also why Google displays them that way.
It would be nice if browsers warned when International Domain Names were in use, and provided the option to disable punycode when first encountered.
Yes, because the internet is not restricted to English letters.
Just imagine you had to visit アップル instead of apple.com! And most importantly, would you trust yourself to see the difference that and say プッアル consistently without seeing the real reference?
Just to be clear, I hate it when the browsers hides part of the url too. Show me the https god damn! But internationalization is a good thing, as it makes the internet accessible to more people.
It's almost like the incessant marketing of standard optimisation algorithms as artificial intelligence has diluted the tech industry with meaningless buzzwords.
AI has been used to refer to all kinds of dynamic programming in the history of computation. Algebraic solvers, edge detection, fuzzy decision systems, player programs for video games and tabletop games. So when you say AI is this or that you are being rather prescriptivist about it.
The problem with AI and ML is more one of it being presented to the public by grifters as a magical one stop solution to almost any problem. What term was used hardly matters, it was the propaganda that carried the term. It would be like saying the name Nike is the reason for the shoe brand’s success and not it’s marketing.
So discredit the grifters, and if you want to destroy the term then look to dilute it by using it to describe even more things. It was never really a useful term to begin with. I’ll leave you with this quote
A lot of cutting edge AI has filtered into general applications, often without being called AI because once something becomes useful enough and common enough it’s not labelled AI anymore.
It’s pretty normal for the company you work for to have your name, address and DOB.
I’m all for protecting your privacy and online anonymity to the max but when it’s literally the company you work for that need the most basic information, which they do need for a variety of reasons to keep you employed, that’s a little too far IMO.
My man if you think the US government don’t already know (or at a minimum could easily find out) your name, age, address & where you work if you’re not a goat farming hermit in Tibet or something then I have bad news for you
First, I am not a male. Second, I do believe the US gov has my data. Every single piece that is floating out there. I will still not share it with them, may there be the odd chance they do not yet have it.
it depends on where she lives. This is not the U.S. and it’s not that easy to fire people with unjustifiable reasons.
She may not want her information to be stored on servers in U.S. and if she’s fired for refusing to do just that, it may easily become a problem for the company.
if op can prove that her apprenticeship is terminated for refusing to share her personal information on U.S. servers, like i wrote, it would turn into a greater problem than keeping op’s apprenticeship and respecting her European rights
did i just write the same comment with modified wording?
she just needs to “know her rights” and remind what her rights are
Nope. At least not in my country. There is 3 months “apprenticeship” where either employer or employee can terminate the contract without any reasoning. One hour you’re employed, the other you are not. Is it because boss did not like your face? Could be and it still would be legal… So the same also applies to refusing to share info to US, no need to prove anything to anyone, you’re just fired.
I think you’re reading too much into this. They are likely legally required to hand over a list of their employees to the US government. Like, if sou really don’t want them to do that, your only other option is quitting on the spot (or refusing and being let go, in case that makes a difference for things like unemployment benefits in your country).
They admit to be sending your IP to Bing with every search too.
“For example, when you do a search on Ecosia we forward the following information to our partner, Bing: IP address, user agent string, search term, and some settings like your country and language setting”
Isn’t one of the chief selling points of the Fediverse that you can’t be censored because there’s always some instance that will welcome you? Another USP is that the rest of us don’t have to read it if we don’t want to.
You get freedom of speech and we get freedom from that speech (assuming it’s objectionable, and I have yet to see one of these posts where some complains about being stopped from posting funny cat memes).
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