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/
We have water, heavy water, hydrogen infused water, nitrogen infused water, ice-9, h2o2…what will they think of next?!
FYI I learned About VLANs that it is in no way „locked down“. I can spoof the MAC address of a known device from a specific VLAN and I’m in that VLAN. Yes your devices can’t reach the internet/other devices by default but it won’t stop a bad actor.
and this is why I have a completely separate physical network for my IOT stuff.
Well. The segmentation is to avoid security holes from Rogue third party devices. If you can access my pc vlan that only exists on my wired pcconnection, then you have indeed broken in to my domain. Letting the things that doesn’t give a shit about security have their own network is just sanity/sanitary.
Depends on you hw. That seems rather poor implementation… I believe my TP switch might handle that, because it rejects traffic to its management interface from mac X from vlan 20 because it sees the same mac in vlan 10… (only vlan 20 is allowed for management)
That’s a very cool feature actually but how does it stop a hacker if he has obtained a trusted MAC address from another device and connect to vlan 20 directly while the real device is offline?
You configure vlans per physical port, so in a properly implemented system your attack won’t be possible. When the packet comes to the switch the vlan tag is added to it according to the configuration for the port it was received from.
Or are you talking about mac-vlans?
Yes, VLAN is an IT convenience feature, you don’t need it just because it is a feature of the more expensive hardware.
Instead just establish separate L2s and operate proper L3 firewalls between them. For IoT devices, any kind of reliable potato will do just fine.
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
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
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
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?
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.
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
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
And you must enter password through a 2 character wide menu screen with only up and down arrows
The up arrow moves through the letters, e.g., A->B->C. The down arrow moves to the next character in the sequence, e.g., C->CA->CAA. If you click past the correct letter, you’ll have to click all the way through again. And if you submit the wrong letter, you have to start all over (after it takes twenty seconds attempting to connect with the wrong password and then alerts you that it didn’t work, of course).
And when you press down, the current letter’s value briefly increments to the next letter before being replaced by an asterisk. Z causes the router to crash.
Nah, it will just broadcast a 2.4Ghz noise for no reason
I feel like it’s missing that nifty FCC sticker…
Internet of things sucks, but lan of things is pretty cool
you must have lots of LoTs
Lord of the Trackers!
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
Boiling definitely helps and is a hell of a lot cheaper than constantly buying gallons of distilled
I bought a Venta LW25 and couldn’t be happier. Simple and functional, good old German engineering
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: Adams 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
This has been my approach and it has gone okay so far except for 2 issues that are quite a pain:
1: you have to thoroughly research what you buy. Does it work on an isolated vlan? Just because it works with home assistant does not guarantee this. Many home assistant users are comfortable with some degree of data collection and an integration does not mean that it will work local only (nor does it mean that all features will work). If it does work local only you may sacrifice some features. Cameras are a good example. Most cameras with object/person detection do this in hardware, but not all. If you circumvent the Internet connection and proprietary app you may sacrifice this, or more likely alerts
2: there is 0 regulation binding a vendor to the terms of service agreed to at the point of sale, including making significant and sweeping changes. Case in point: I got a chamberlain myQ garage door opener. It worked well and opened my garage door. Integrated with home assistant via the API. However, chamberlain serves a lot of ads for upsells and services via their shitty app. They decided that users circumventing the app and not seeing that you could give amazon drivers access to your garage to deliver packages (seriously) or buy shitty cameras was unacceptable so they updated the TOS and revoked API access for all users. The only way it works now is via their app. I sold mine and built a ratgdo
Another example is Philips hue: while they have been able to be used local only for over a decade Philips has decided they’re going to start a subscription security service with all the devices that entails based around the hue hub. At some point in the near future if your hub updates it will require you to sign in to a Philips account and be online. This one’s way worse as some people have thousands of dollars invested in hue. I have like $300 in the fancier white hue bulbs but some people on the HA forums and reddit literally have their house decked out with like 80-100 bulbs, many of which are the RGB. Kind of silly but they do work very well, flicker free, good color, and last ages. I still have some from like 2016 going strong. Luckily here if you have the bridge on an isolated vlan it won’t update and worst case the bulbs work with zwave but the principle of the thing is ridiculous. It should be illegal for a company to change the terms this far after the contract of sale
Other examples too. Many car manufacturers (Mazda, Chevrolet, ford) because api access limited data collection for them to sell, some companies are openly hostile to home assistant and when an integration is created they will go out of their way to break it (Ariston, bambu), etc. see https://github.com/unixorn/internet-of-trash
I thought Hue bulbs used Zigbee?
you’re right, my bad
Gahhhh…
Sounds like a total PITA
And yes we need stronger consumer protections.
I follow FUTO so I’m aware of TOS BS.
I’ve been happy with reolink cameras fwiw though not 100% so. They do have some nonsense though
I also prefer Lutron Caseta for lighting. It’s fairly bulletproof (I’ve literally never had any connectivity issues in like 6+ years) and they haven’t pulled any tos nonsense as far as I know. Downside is pricey and the install is more complex than typical iot stuff. And while they can control outlets they are only rated for 10A lighting so keep that in mind.
The only internet requirement for both of these (not always with reolink I think but at least with the cameras I have) is that you have to allow internet once during initial setup to pair devices. Once that is done you can remove internet access and delete the app
The common thread with these is wired too. The further along I go the more I realize that 2.4ghz WiFi iot shit is garbage. going from WiFi cameras that had privacy concerns and disconnected to local only poe cameras that just work was very nice. Learn from my mistake, don’t buy bullshit eufy cameras that you then have to sell at a loss.
And for your own sanity don’t try to get smart smoke detectors. Your options are either Google/nest that apparently does work well (never tried it, fuck Google), the new kidde that is built into amazons ring platform (never tried it, fuck amazon, plus the preceding model had awful reviews), or the new firstalert that is replacing the Google/nest (again, fuck Google, but I did try the preceeding first alert and it was atrociously bad).
I mention this because this brings up a key issue with regulatory compliance in the US (and probably EU, dunno). You can also try a number of off brand detectors as well that apparently work a lot better. If you search amazon for smart detectors you’ll see stuff like x sense and these apparently have somewhat solid reviews and work okay (though getting them to work in HA is mixed).
However, what amazon fails to mention is that these types of detectors have not been submitted for regulatory compliance in the US (unlike Kidde, firstalert, etc that you’d find at a home depot). They “meet UL requirements” but they have not been submitted for testing so they cannot print the UL logo on the box (legally) but they can write “meets UL requirements”, which is misleading. Fuck amazon and fuck the us government for giving them no culpability in selling obscenely dangerous bullshit
This means if you use these and your house burns down your insurance could technically nullify your policy for not having adequate protection. Or they could not work and you could die, of course
There are smart relays you can tie into an interconnected smoke detector circuit using normal smoke detectors that are appropriately rated if you do want alerts on your phone. There are also device that will listen for chirps but these get false positives
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
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.
