[turtle]

Insteon was one I almost did business with. They were who my Uncle went with long before "connected" was a thing. Their method was pretty cool for the day.

These days it isn't as appealing as the conglomeration with Z-wave, Zigbee and Thread. There is much greater flexibility with the other options so I'm not really surprised to hear they didn't make it. What surprises me is that they just "disappeared". I was able to browse their website still, but I don't have any devices so I'm unaffected.

I will say though, this is why I would really rather something that is decentralized like Thread where we don't have to have a supporting "hub" to control. Even still I am currently running two hubs in my house for various connections to HomeKit.

[psmith2.0]

Gee, I’m shocked.

[kscherer]

Yipes. That's a bad one.

[PB PM]

People lie and cheat when it comes to everything else, why not when it comes to getting data from companies? People have been pretending to be law enforcement for as long as it has existed. It was just a matter of time.

[kscherer]

Amazon is killing its Cloud Cams.

This is going to happen with increasing frequency as one company or another decides their devices just aren't worth supporting any longer.

I remember years ago being able to buy lifetime memberships at gyms. That is, until the gyms had sold so many lifetime memberships that they didn't have space inside the gyms, and there was no longer any way to make any money. So, they all went out of business and were replaced by "subscription" (monthly fee) gyms.

The way forward for these stupid things is going to be subscriptions and data harvesting to pay for the cloud services. Hardware fees alone are not enough to support massive monitoring servers.

Buy these things at your own risk.

[PB PM]

Now Home Depot is in on the show. Sharing user purchase data with Meta. Just another reason to never give your email address to a store.

https://globalnews.ca/news/9436369/h...rivacy-report/

[turtle]

I've love to be surprised... but I'm not. Privacy is a thing of the past and we have to work so hard to retain it. Even when we think we have it locked down another organization shares our data and we are out that much more.

I'm still not going to just hand out my data willingly. Heck, I'm ready to move back to cash for most purchases so there is little digital record.

[drewprops]

Alexa discovered our printer then added it to its list of devices then printed out a helpful list of print things it could do for us, completely on its own. I am pissed. This behavior is what will get it completely ripped out of the house.


...

[psmith2.0]

Ooh, that’s kinda weird/off-putting. I don’t need any of my devices deciding/doing shit on their own like that, beyond automatically resetting their DST clock so I don’t have to. That’s about the extent of it for me. That’s just a little too “the machines are taking over and coming to get us!” for me. I’d throw that thing in the backyard and shoot bottle rockets at it.

Funny thing, if you’d WANTED to configure Alexa to access/use your printer, you would’ve spent 2-3 hours screwing with it with no success and endless error messages.

[drewprops]

Originally Posted by psmith2.0 Funny thing, if you’d WANTED to configure Alexa to access/use your printer, you would’ve spent 2-3 hours screwing with it with no success and endless error messages.

Exactly!! This was my first thought!

...

[psmith2.0]

Yep, I have such trouble anymore doing tech/computer-y stuff I used to do effortlessly 10+ years ago. Things have gotten more complex, I think. I usually just have a devil of a time fooling with anything printer- or WiFi-related. I try to get out of it or find someone else who’s better at it, more patient, etc.

[turtle]

I'm gonna say, I've never trusted Alexa or Google in my home. Now think about the fact that Amazon knows what kind of printer you have. It will start recommending ink for you I'm sure.

[Ebby]

I set up home assistant on a Raspberry Pi for a fun project and I was shocked at all the stuff it found, identified, and interface with on my network. Printers, lights (Govee/hue), smart plugs, security cameras, computers, servers, Plex, TV's, AppleTV's, Rokus, heck even my sprinkler timer. I trust Home Assistant a lot more than Alexa, but I'm sure Amazon/google/Apple do exactly that too.

I had a free eero router form my ISP for a while. It was fast but very limited and more advanced features were paywalled. That was odd. I looked it up, and turns out that is an Amazon.com product. I can only imagine how much data that thing sent, watching my entire network 24/7 and bypassing my Pihole. The Amazon Sidewalk network sort of bothered me so I disabled it. From my understanding it's a low bandwidth/longer range hidden network that opens up some privacy/tracking concerns.

By the time we get wise to data leaks, they're old news. I am trusting open source software more and more now and love the progress its made over the years.

[turtle]

There is no way I would allow the Amazon stuff for reasons like their private Sidewalk network. Great in concept... horrible in application from a privacy perspective.

I too have moved more to Home Assistant... though in the end many of my "smart gear" items still connect to their brand for controls. I have some Tuya items because it allows me to have a single switch controlled by two different "homes". It is a little bit of a pain and I know the tradeoff is I'm sending that switch data to china. On the other hand, a common outside light is able to be controlled by the two homes.

[PB PM]

Originally Posted by Ebby . By the time we get wise to data leaks, they're old news. I am trusting open source software more and more now and love the progress it’s made over the years.

Even open source is suspect. Just last week an editor caught a group of individuals who were working on some Unix code that is used by a number of the bigger Linux distributions. Turns out those people were disabling and creating back doors in some of the most important security features.

[turtle]

Originally Posted by PB PM Even open source is suspect. Just last week an editor caught a group of individuals who were working on some Unix code that is used by a number of the bigger Linux distributions. Turns out those people were disabling and creating back doors in some of the most important security features.

Yeah, this is becoming more common. While the concept is that open source mean more people looking and preventing it from becoming a problem... realistically we all assume someone else looked and just install/upgrade.

I'm typically a few updates behind now.