Mainstream tech advice treats cheap Wi-Fi smart plugs as harmless convenience, totally glossing over how much telemetry leaks out to overseas cloud servers by default.
Expecting casual users to set up VLANs and firewall drop rules just to stop a £10 light bulb from phoning home is a bit of a joke.
True privacy means local control without corporate middlemen.
Original content by The Unknown Universe, written by a human and not AI generated!
Well I have one room where my budgies roam free. I use Airam programmable GU10 RGB lights to simulate day cycle. It’s the only thing that’s “calling home”. Been too lazy to build a local solution. Everything else is run by ESP32 chips and bunch of raspberrys
Some well-trained bootlickers showing up here.
When you blame exploited users for “volunteering to get exploited”, you’re doing free PR for the exploiters.
My smart plugs were carefully chosen so that I could immediately flash them with ESPHome, but that’s because I am not normal. It shouldn’t have to be that way.
What brand/model do you use?
Another good option if you dont wanna flash the S31 plugs yourself is getting your smart home plugs and things from Athom (athom.tech). They have a bunch of devices that come with ESPHome and Tasmota and other firmware preflashed.
Not affiliated at all, just someone who wanted some private and local smart plugs and didnt wanna have to open up smart plugs and flash them manually or fight these manufacturers who lock down the devices more and more.
Sonoff S31 (and I think this might have been the guide I used to flash them), but I think they’ve been discontinued and the replacement model might be more locked-down.
That was the same guide I used! Bought like 20 of these plugs to integrate with HomeAssistant and espHome, added bonus was the energy monitoring.
I’ve got eight of them and am not using them all, but sometimes I worry I should’ve gotten more when I had the chance, just in case.
I miss the '90s, when you could count on new tech to get better instead of worse.
Not all of us 😏
The Smart Home Trap: Is It Really Too Difficult To Use A Light Switch?
The Internet Person Challenge: imagine a context you haven’t yet experienced.
Impossible.
The internet was supposed to open our minds by letting us see the incredible diversity of how other people live their lives, but all we do 90% of the time is try to dunk on complete strangers (often imaginary ones, at that!) for not living exactly the same way.
I’ve met enough people that need accommodations to know that I have a horrible intuition about what’s going to be easy or hard for someone to do, and what will help or not.
IMO just let people do their thing. They know themselves better than you do.
(And if you see a story about how they’re getting exploited by an evil megacorp, and you feel the impulse to victim-blame, you can always just hit yourself in the dick with a hammer instead.)
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The challenge is not the light switch. The challenge is not stubbing your toe on the way to the bed.
You tell that to my kids 😂
No, but app-controlled lights are probably also the least useful aspect of a smarthome setup.
I just turned on my office light within Snap, an open source environment to teach kid programming, literally minutes ago. I didn’t even know that was possible 1h ago.
As others pointed out the point isn’t to replace a switch, the point is to get efficient or creative or both with your home. Of course if your mind can handle a switch with a light bulb, no need to do more.
PS: no data left my home, no WiFi requirement, no third-party proprietary app. Sure most “Smart Home” setup are horrible in many ways, both privacy and security, but it’s not because the most popular way sucks that all ways do.
the answer is Yes we are.
It’s funny how this refutes Betteridge’s law of headlines
I have people in myblife who say ice already sold out to Google might as well continue using them. I don’t fight them they can do what they want.
I was always tempted by the idea of controlling my house in a more convenient way. But every time I try and plan all the things I’d make smart, I always end up not doing anything because it’s either all or nothing: when I imagine something I use regularly at home that is not “connected” while other stuff is, it frustrates me immensely.
There are some use cases for accessibility or for making a “dumb” appliance piece a bit smarter (like turning on an espresso machine to pre-heat it every workday morning). Or, like others noticed, fixing a very particular problem like turning on only one light bulb from a row at night.
Good to see some progress in this area though, but it’s still the same shit most people don’t really need. At least in a way it’s implemented today. I want my stuff stupid and reliable.
Seems like even more reason to only use something like Z-Wave in an isolated network.
