- cross-posted to:
- xkcd@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- xkcd@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/32265822
xkcd #3109: Dehumidifier
Title text:
It’s important for devices to have internet connectivity so the manufacturer can patch remote exploits.
Transcript:
[A store salesman, Hairy, is showing Cueball a dehumidifier, with a “SALE” label on it. Several other unidentified devices, possibly other dehumidifier models, are shown in the store as well.]
Salesman: This dehumidifier model features built-in WiFi for remote updates.
Cueball: Great! That will be really useful if they discover a new kind of water.Source: https://xkcd.com/3109/
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I have a rule that “Nothing will be automated that cannot be manually overridden.”
Well, actually it’s my wife’s rule but it’s a good rule nonetheless. As a result, there’s a big panel full of relays in the basement that is the “last mile” for anything climate control or security related.
There have been a few times when it’s been handy. Like when the exhaust fan isn’t working and I don’t want to debug the ESP32 controller today so I just flip it over to “Manual”.
That’s a great rule of thumb. So setup two switches. One for manual and one with a ESP32.
KNX.
Everything is decentrally programmed, and you can do extra automations and stuff from home assistant, but KNX devices are wired (generally) and will always Just Work™. More expensive that the cheaper retrofit options, but if you factor in manual overrides or getting the “better” wireless smart devices it is comparable. They generally also have a manual override at the panel. For core functions like lights, HVAC, roll shutters or blinds, etc… That is honestly the best option (unless you want every light to be an RGB light for some reason, then you still need smart bulbs)
Internet of things sucks, but lan of things is pretty cool
you must have lots of LoTs
Lord of the Trackers!
I just bought my first home and as soon as I’m decently unpacked I’m going to start my journey on self hosting.
Currently planning:
- Small i5 HP Pro SFF PC for hosting large apps (going to config for Linux and power it off until I get more mature
- Raspberry Pi4: pihole and home assistant
- Raspberry Pi4: NextCloud, Deck
- ZigBee router thing:
- Nest thermostat came with the house
- adding light bulbs and switches
- want a smart doorknob but the security bothers me. Schlage Connect™ Smart Deadbolt, Z-Wave Plus
- NAS
- Jellyfin
- JBOD on SFF?
- flashing old Netgear nighthawk into wwdrt
- OS Ticket to replace NextCloud Deck for a JIRA type solution to manage projects and major house items.
- ZigBee thermometers for better Nest accuracy
- ZigBee motion sensors for entry ways and bathroom
- smart plugs and motion sensors for basement TV lights
Not sure what else to add. Open to advice or suggestions.
I’ve watched enough Lock Picking Lawyer never to want a consumer ‘smart lock.’ Half of them can be opened with a magnet. Maybe commercial grade is better, but I’ve been locked out of my job after every power failure for the last 10 years, until someone comes along with a physical key.
Re homeassistant on a Pi: homeassistant does a lot of database transactions, so you may want to have db storage on something other than an SD card.
Good call. I was thinking of trying a 128GB usb3 stick I got. Maybe a ssd/nvme on a USB3 controller.
I have an old 2.5inch 500GB laptop HDD plugged into a USB/sata adaptor into my rasberry pi.
that’s been running flawlessly for 3 years and drops every concern with running HA on a pi
I have tentative plans to make my own smart lock by way of electric motor and commercial deadbolts with an RF scanner and a back up battery for emergency. It won’t be amazingly secure in a tech way, but I figure the combination of novelty and DIY should make it reliable.
That said, I gotta be that guy and remind everyone that all locks are security theatre and are not going to protect your house from the persistent or prepared. Your best defense is a combination of foresight and social engineering.
I’ve watched enough Lock Picking Lawyer never to want a consumer ‘smart lock.’
I’m gonna differ on this. The point of a lock is to control law-abiding access to your house. If someone wants in your house, they can attack your windows, doors, or even a wall if the lock is too strong. A smart lock let’s you open the door for a family member remotely, or set one time-access for your in-laws to come over and pickup a tool.
I wouldn’t use a smart lock for something hardened, like a bunker or a vault, but for a house and garage, it’s okay not to have the most bullet proof lock in the world.
Part of the function of the lock should be to indicate of forced entry.
Sure they could attack a window, but then you know something happened.
A magnet attack on a smart lock usually leaves no indication of bypass. So you still think everything is as you left it, untill you need that one thing and it’s gone.
Of course this is more for specific targeted attacks, but still, if you report to insurance that things are missing and they ask if you locked the door, but then there’s no indication of forced entry. How likely are they to pay out, or keep you as a client?
Well, I guess I could point to my snake enclosure camera (which conveniently covers the front door) showing an entry, or if the perps walk through the house, they would trigger the bunny cams, the other snake cam, or the lizard cam. Plus I have my outdoor cameras, although that is my specific scenario.
I’m sure there is an electronic lock on the market that logs when the door is opened, even if not locked. It would be trivial to look at the lock/unlock log and determine that the door was opened without unlocking. A regular tumbler lock isn’t going to give you that kind of info.
I wish I had setup an identity management system sooner. Been self-hosting for years and about a year ago took the full plunge into setting up all my services behind Authentik. Its a game changer not having to deal with all the usernames and passwords.
In a similar vein, before Authentik, I used Vaultwarden to manage all my credentials. That was also a huge game changer with my significant other. Being able to have them setup their own account and then share credentials as an organization is super handy.
My SO is already using keepass locally. Used to be only a paper notebook. Data breach paranoia.
I plan to setup vaultwarden or keepassXC
I use keepass, it’s a little more work than many closed source ones, but it’s only as online as you want it to be, and runs on anything
If it’s something that’s vital, my mantra is pay to have someone else professional host it.
I’ll pay the $10/year for Bitwarden.
if you have a garage, design a method to basically ensure your garage door is closed without you needing to go back to check.
of course if you trust yourself with never making that mistake.
last thing you want to feel is if you remembered to close the door or not and youre already far off
I agree, I set my grandparents doors up on a timer, if its still open at 11 PM it auto closes both doors. I’ve got the ping a few times now saying “emergency door schedule activated” meaning that they were open and had not been closed prior.
I have a controller that plugs right into my opener with a magnetic sensor for if the door is open or not. Running Homebridge I can see it and open and close it from anywhere. Did it all the way from Thailand a while back just for shits and giggles. I gotta see if I can configure it to auto shut if it’s still open at night, have had a couple of whoopsies there.
A camera would work too.
No garage sadly.
Get a Meross Garage Door Opener/closer: https://shop.meross.com/products/smart-wifi-garage-door-opener
Fantastic product, works in homeassistant.
And it’ll be bricked when their app shuts down.
I use GarHAge which uses open hardware and software and was pretty easy and cheap too. https://github.com/marthoc/GarHAge
That sounds like the way to do it. It’s under your control and it’ll always work.
Cameras.
Yeah that’s on the list. I want them hard wired though. Gotta hire an electrician to wire up the outside of the house.
Great list! If you already have the Raspberry Pi devices, great. If you were going to buy some, I would look at thin clients instead. Low-power, cheaper, more powerful, can use real hard drives instead of SD cards or adapters, and x86 instead of ARM. I have an HP T630 I like but I hear good things about the Dell Wyse 5070 too.
I have:
- 2x pi4 4gb (bought them previously for octopi and pihole)
- Pi zero
- Several old laptops
- 2x SFF HPs
- 2x netbooks
- An old slim workstation
I work as a sysadmin so I’ve picked up a few things that wouldve gone to recycling.
My concern is power draw running 24/7 so I need wattage monitors and going to start with the Pi systems. Until I hit performance issues then migrate to a SFF.
And it probably needs to connect using WEP
wpa2, but password limited to 10 characters. letters and numbers only, trying anything else crashes it, and you have to figure this out yourself
Nah, it will just broadcast a 2.4Ghz noise for no reason
I feel like it’s missing that nifty FCC sticker…
I just shopped for a humidifier, purposely avoided anything “smart”, I ended up with a really fucking simple one, it has a hydrostat and can aim to automatically reach a level you want (40-50-60), has 4 speed,1,2,3,auto and sleep.
And the whole thing is nothing else just a wicking filter sitting in water that has a fan pointed at it, I think Technology Connectios would be proud of my purchase.
I will have to disinfect and change filters, but no need for distilled water like with ultrasonic humidifiers, and I boil my water and let it cool back to room temperature before adding it to the humidifier, hopefully that will help with staving off build up of bacteria
I bought a Venta LW25 and couldn’t be happier. Simple and functional, good old German engineering
deleted by creator
I bought a distiller for €60 capable of distilling 4 liters of water (about 1 gallon) en generates some heat. The electricity cost is way lower than buying 4 liters of distilled water, don’t need to throw away a 4 liter plastic bottles every time and the distiller heats up my room in the winter (when the air is dryest here).
I was an idiot and bought a high end TPLink router, I can’t even use Vlans without signing up for their back door service.
maybe install openwrt/ddwrt?
Yeah. Even my old solid netgear got a firmware update that’s begging me to get the app now. Shobe that shit up your ass.
At least give me a checkbox to stop bothering me
Yeah that’s on my todo list. I’ve got 3 decent but old routers.
Shit, are consumer appliances really getting that bad? ew!
I’d assume all Chinese devices are being backdoored via CCP incentives. Buy Asus perhaps, assuming Taiwan never gets infiltrated.
Don’t buy ASUS, they have a terrible security record. At this point I would trust only MikroTik and Ubiquiti.
Ubiquiti
And they too aggressively push their cloud services and at least some point their management tool gave you ads on their other products.
I was an idiot and bought a high end TPLink router, I can’t even use Vlans without signing up for their back door service.
Hm, at least with their enterprise equipment you can completely disable Omada.
It got hacked and now I’m really, really dry.
Smart, you don’t want some hacker to drown you remotely.
Really you don’t want hackers using your random Internet appliance as a point of attack to access your whole network.
More IoT devices means a greater attack surface. And it’s an appliance you don’t actually want to spend time thinking about. You don’t want to waste time troubleshooting network issues with your dehumidifier… It just needs to work, or you use a different one.
Dehydrate you
New kinds of water, you say? The marketing department is already on it and boy have I got news for you!
Wait… Is that heavy water?? /s
How about I hook you up with a brand new water softener on a 30 year lease but no payments in the first 5 years so it’ll be the next owner’s problem
Omfg it’s like solar panel companies…
So many damn houses with solar leases more expensive than just electricity
Yeah, companies have abused that to release buggy, incomplete products faster and only make the software stable and feature complete if they make a good profit.
Or add new bloat features / brick devices after updating TOS…
Remote device bricking is cheaper than researching part wear for planned obsolescence.
And both make me go with a different company next time so idk what they think they’re gaining.
They gained a cost reduction for a single quarter of a single year. No further thought was put into it.
My house has manual windows, manual locks, and a dumb garage door controller… because I work in IT.
I do have a few smart appliances (environment reporting) but they are only allowed on the banishment VLAN so they don’t get to interact with any single appliance inside my network. All they see is internet and nothing else.
The S in IoT stands for security
We have water, heavy water, hydrogen infused water, nitrogen infused water, ice-9, h2o2…what will they think of next?!
i love it when my vacum makes a remote connction to a other countrye goverment that way i get tracked by mine and theres whatba time we live in
We do have more than one type of water, D20, HD0, HT0, T20, DTO, which are all different mixtures of Hydrogen, Deuterium and Tritium or in other words the hydrogen has more neutrons, there is also a different ionization for each of those, plus there are different phases of ice which are made from different pressure that is ice I-VII, and it’s not impossible for more types we don’t know about, then there is isotopic water that have different mass and reaction rates and it’s not impossible for other types that we just don’t know about or even to create other types.
Tldr: atoms and molecules are more varied and complex than you’d think.
There is more than one type of water, but unless your IoT device is a fusion reactor it’s probably just running off the normal blend.
You lost a bit of credibility when you misspelt atoms
That’s just because I’m using a pH from Like 2008 and it has progressively stupid autocorrect.
Even when I correct it if I don’t spacial go to the next would and then do back it will change what I said.
As an example I just left this how it wasn’t me too.
Right, but none of them are new. They’ve all been around for billions of years.
