I am a simple man. When I see people buy devices with Zigbee, Z-Wave, or other fully local protocols, I nod. When I see people reward vendors that lock in with their money, I shake.
It's not always that simple. I have a bunch of devices in my home that have WiFi IoT: bedroom AC, dehumidifier, refrigerator, and washer/dryer. I bought all of them regardless because they work fine without WiFi and I've never connected them. I'd love it if I could connect them to Home Assistant without data leaving my network. Reverse engineering them is on my list of future projects.
In the meantime they continue to function as "dumb" devices just fine.
> Counterpoint: many vendors with lock-in use the price of the subscription and ads they show you to subsidize the device itself.
What exactly is the subsidy here?
Is it that they plan to meet a bulk of their profit target after the sale, instead of frontloading the profit. The subsidy can be considered a 1000 dollars on a 200 dollar device if their target is 1200 dollars.
It is only really subsidized if the device is actually sold below cost of BOM & essential software needed minus bloat. I'm skeptical that they are giving away hardware below cost based on potential profits.
> Counterpoint: many vendors with lock-in use the price of the subscription and ads they show you to subsidize the device itself.
Vendors want to have their cake and eat it. They are no longer happy with a one-time sale, they want a continuous revenue stream. I have absolutely no qualms about buying "subsidized" devices and liberating them. I am not going to pay five times the price of a "smart TV" for a commercial display with worse specs when I can buy the consumer version and not connect it to the Internet or root it.
I want everyone, everywhere, to do this to TV manufacturers. Root them. Destroy their “smart” software.
There is no competition in the space anymore. Not on that. You either get crudded-up devices or a panel that doesn’t have the fundamental AV capabilities required of a living room TV.
But what if the desire is not to harm some obnoxious company, but instead to reduce their influence in the market? But I agree generally, free any locked down device you happen to find yourself possessing.
I was challenging the assertion that buying and freeing is better than not engaging at all. I think the better comment would have been to indicate there is not likely a general rule. Devils and details and all that.
Subsidizing products does not mean the consumer spends less.
Who pays for those ads/tracking/etc... companies that want to sell stuff to the consumer. Congratulations, subsidization just introduced more middlemen which extract more profit from the consumer.
The simpler things can be, the cheaper things can be.
The goal isn't to pay minimal money. If that was the goal, you strap an air filter to a box fan and use an esp32 to turn the power on and off. Or a solid state relay if you want to get fancy with different power levels.
The goal is to do harm to anti-consumer companies. Buying their (subsidized) hardware, and then breaking their lock-in so you and others aren't shown ads or forced to pay useless subscriptions, harms the company.
I don't believe that they subsidize hardware anymore.
Years ago, this was true. But today, selling your personal information isn't a loss leader. It's additional profit on top of the profit from the product.
What I don’t like about Zigbee though is that it is on the Wifi band so every device with wifi antenna can snoop on it. Even assuming the protocol is secure, anyone can infer patterns and devices based on traffic shape. For example, a motion sensor that sends data whenever someone walks by. In the end, nothing beats physical wires in terms of privacy and reliability if I understand correctly.
The other fun thing about them is because they talk Wi-Fi frequencies, if you break into them they can also be reprogrammed to act like a hotspot, or start commanding _other_ devices.
So if you send a drone up the side of an office building to the executives floor, and can break into one lightbulb wirelessly, you can then make that lightbulb break into all the other lightbulbs, until you reach the secluded inner rooms, and you can make that lightbulb listen for Wi-Fi traffic and can pretend to be a hotspot for the targetted executive's laptop. Like in the movies!
How do you feel about Matter [1]? Asking as someone all in on Home Assistant, open local protocols, and ready to reverse engineer and spend whatever is needed for digital sovereignty, for both myself and the community.
In my experience, Matter is okay except that it’s built over IP and manufacturers seem to be unable to resist using that juicy IP connection to talk to the Internet.
Thread should not have allowed Internet connectivity by default.
(Not the OP, but want to spread awareness, sorry.) The Wikipedia page already lists the greatest disadvantage:
> (..) the ability to commission a finished product into a Matter network in the field mandates certification and membership fees, entailing both one-time, recurring, and per-product costs. This is enforced using a public key infrastructure (PKI) and so-called device attestation certificates.
Matter is designed to necessitate phoning into the internet for certification, which allows all manufacturers to just easily add-in phoning into the internet for telemetry. Furthermore, it does not define exactly which functionality must remain if a device is disconnected from the internet for a long time (assuming the user is trying to avoid sending out telemetry, not even bypassing certification).
> The Matter devices (a smart bulb or a sensor) have no Internet access required by the spec, and no way to send telemetry to the Internet.
That's a little disingenuous... All Matter-over-WiFi devices inherently have Internet access unless you're blocking it through router policy, and most Matter-over-Thread border routers commercially available today give Thread devices Internet access by default if they want it (to avoid this you need to self-host your own OTBR instance).
I am a simple man. I don't buy smart devices, mostly. Offline only is completely acceptable.
The connected home was an idealistic dream that has been made perverse by the Zucks and Elons of the world. It is not accessible for normal people and it might never be - at least, not without the blood sacrifice of your privacy.
In the larger picture, it's because the tech industry started packaging every imaginable piece of hardware as a loss leader for subscription services. That's a big reason why it's really hard to get a high quality dumb TV.
Hopefully, hopefully this new trend can break the cycle of using software to turn things into subscription services that should never be subscription services. I'm terrified that manufactures will respond with hardware encryption and legal maneuvering, but perhaps by then there will be an even larger and thriving ecosystem of open hardware as the ease of setting it up and integrating it with AI accelerates its adoption.
Sometimes manufacturers bake in the expected revenue from snooping into the price of the device. That can lead to better hardware at cheaper prices, that then you can liberate and use offline.
I used to have a small counter-top dishwasher that relied on proprietary soap cartridges. The dishwasher itself was fairly good and effective, and after hacking the cartridges to allow them to be refilled the overall price was quite acceptable!
I don't mind the app functionality of my air purifier. I get a push notification when air quality degrades, and I can see data and charts of air quality over time. I can change the settings remotely, which is nice because I have a small child and keep the "lock" function set for the actual controls.
It's easier to setup and maintain schedules, routines, or more complex functionality.
It's certainly not critical functionality, but it's nice. Same with my laundry machine and dryer sending a push notification when the cycle ends. Unnecessary, but nice.
It's one of those things quite interesting to see the difference in response from one consumer to another. I can't stand the washer/dryer notifications and finally turned them off a few weeks ago. Especially when I'm on the road half the time, why should I care my wife did 8 loads of laundry in a day? When I'm home, the chime is enough to hear from the other room anyway and the notification on the phone usually just backlogs and gives me a load of red badges I need to clear at the end and beginning of every day for notifications I didn't even get because the phone wasn't with me and I changed the laundry anyway.
For an air purifier, I feel like I'd probably want to see outcome-level statistics convincing me it actually matters to lifespan, healthspan, quality of life, something, anything at all, to know and adjust minute-by-minute the exact air quality going through a purifier, or for that matter what the purifier is able to detect even reflects the quality of air elsewhere in a house with a whole lot of air volume not going through that purifier very regularly.
I really can't understand why the hell these manufacturers don't just provide open source firmware. Nobody is buying a Conway purifier for the software and there are no trade secrets there.
> The fan downloads its root CA cert over plain HTTP. It was always MitM-able.
The most fascinating part of this wave of LLM reverse engineering is seeing how many weird and poor choices were lying in plain sight.
Any number of people could have discovered and exploited this, but it’s tedious work. Most people who can do this are busy with their job and other things. Now LLMs enable people who understand these things to quickly get through the tedious parts, so they can do a lot more of this work in their free time than they could before.
"The fan downloads its root CA cert over plain HTTP"
Would love to understand the decision-making behind this at Coway (or their firmware contractor). Anyone care to guess why someone would make this choice?
Similarly, how easy things are for more people to do. I'm certainly not advocating for pulling in a root CA over HTTP, but before LLMs could make this knowledge trivial, how many people would even think to look at that angle. It's democratizing in an interesting way.
Don't go hepa because it slows down the filtering too much. I use this technique in my house and it cuts down on pollen, smoke and mold. You'll feel a lot better than a tiny expensive hepa that has proprietary filters.
Jeez. I've had a Coway for about eight years, such a good device that my whole perception was “good product == good company”. If I had known their IOT offering was such a POS I would think very differently.
That said, the non-wifi model works perfectly with a simple HomeKit compatible on/off plug, so all this work — despite being very, very cool — seems a little pointless?
It is great to see another cloud mandatory device set free. I noticed lately several such entries in HN and personally it is a good trend.
I am wondering how the big corporate will respond sooner or later. Because it is clear and they know that as well with the every rising capability of LLM more people will find ways to liberate their hardware from such unnecessary dependency and accept less the money drain.
I took a Vornado TRANSOM, a Broadlink RM4, and a Shelly Smart Plug, a Qingping Air Quality Monitor Gen 2 + claude and HASS, and now I have a fan that turns itself on when the CO2 level gets too high.
And I can override or change it from Apple Home.
The smart plug lets it verify that the fan is actually running, (because it measures usage) and we worked out that after a power cycle the Vornado goes back to a known state, and we can find the speed by forcing it all the way to 4 and then stepping back.
Nice! I have a similar setup. You might like the custom visualization or temperature and humidity offsets I’ve made for that air monitor. Its screen and battery cause excess heat to throw off readings and the calibration is rough from the factory, I used a cheap bluetooth govee thermo-hygrometer as reference to build a better cal curve.
I wanted to do the same with Phillips air purifier that uses AWS IoT. Unfortunately, it seems the engineers did their job: an eMudhra-signed certificate was not accepted and the AWS endpoint also uses mTLS, so I wasn't able to MITM the connection.
Their ESP also uses Secure Boot... I don't know that there isn't a way to break in, but I wasn't able to find one short of hardware notification :/
I have 2 Coway air purifiers, they have no cloud stuff. They work really well.
While this is impressive: Why not just get a not-cloud one in the first place? Why does an air purifier need to be controlled via wi-fi?
I'm against a lot of smart home things because its actually more maintenance, not less, to have to think about an object connecting to wifi, to have to decide whether or not to control it (what are you even doing to it?) And I suppose to have to write your own drivers or app. Why allow it to occupy this much mental space for you?
It’s just a remote control. Why did the tv started coming with a remote control. It’s convenient.
Setting up almost never takes more than a few seconds for me. I have Apple home, it’s almost always scan a QR code, wait a few seconds for wifi and done.
>> Why not just get a not-cloud one in the first place? Why does an air purifier need to be controlled via wi-fi?
It is convenient to be able to monitor air quality from your phone, sourced from a device that is designed to improve it. Because then you can see how much of an impact it is actually making, move it to a different location with better airflow, etc.
I have the non-wifi version, and have to use a separate device for it.
I just occasionally move them. I know it is working because the pre-filter needs cleaning often enough. Does it really need "monitoring"?
One of the nice things about air purifiers, unlike owning a boat or leaving a stove on, is that its never going to surprise you in a bad way. You don't need to really monitor anything, it will just purify some air. Do you really want to be bringing that under the umbrella of the stuff you monitor? Maybe this is an irreconcilable difference and we cannot see it the other person's way.
I love how it has become a trend now to take some device that required a cloud subscription, reverse engineer it, then connect it to your own server you control.
Suddenly there are so many products to play with that would have previously been undesirable! This is one of the good things AI has enabled.
Enjoy it while you can. You can see the AI companies have already started the process of locking us out of this, with Opus 5.5.
God forbid our fans, our fans of all things, might be broken of their dependencies on the internet. The plebians can't be allowed to do that. Every relay must be cloud-connected so it can be monetized and disabled for whatever dumb ass reasons someone might want to disable it.
Just use abliterated/uncensored self-hosted models. This is why we need them and the hardware to run them. Yes, the API models which will further close the walled gardens will evolve faster than the open-weights ones, but I'm hopeful about the community as a hole rejecting this status quo.
An RTX4090 or a 128gb macbook can generate a pretty reasonable number of tok/sec. Those are not cheap, but within the realm of serious hobbyist. I really hope the AI bubble deflates a bit so consumers can get more powerful hardware at the low thousand $ range.
Opus 5.5 will absolutely refuse to touch anti-cheat systems in video games, even when the end game isn't to cheat but to work on Linux compatibility or to bypass/spoof the checks to enable gameplay.
> So this only works on products that was developed before ~now.
You're under the assumption that the companies producing these give a shit about security. It'll probably increase a bit but I doubt it will be by much. If they have shipped devices that leave the doors wide open for almost any intrusion, they won't invest engineering/AI time and money to make these better than before and certainly won't review the code that the model spit out beyond a quick check if the promised base functionality still works.
OpenAI and Anthropic models seem to be the most affected by these barriers, from my own experience.
Mistral, QWEN, and other models (read non-American) tend to have little to no restrictions. There were some tasks where I was actively trying to sabotage my own local network and Mistral had no issue helping. Anthropic and OpenAI refused outright or had to be "convinced" but would often hit further barricades along the way.
All that to control one of 3 fan speeds. An extra slap in the face when it seems the motor used (at least in a similar model) appears to be continuously variable.
Unironically a gift. On your own home network, the one most likely to MITM you is yourself. And eMudhra's fuckup allows for a nice attack on a few devices you'd otherwise have to disassemble to pwn.
I have a light with a controller on the cord: brightness up/down, power. I can't use a smart plug with it because it always defaults to off. Any ideas?
Cut the controller off and use the smart plug to control brightness. You might need to open it up and replace the power supply.
I'm going to guess that you will spend more money on this than just buying a light that has smart features compatible with your smart home ecosystem. You can't mix two smart systems on one cord - this has never worked. Where to put the smart is a tricky question as there are pros and cons to every answer, but in general the smarts need to be in exactly one place or things won't work.
Coway are some of the best, and there are many dumb models without internet access at all
If you don't mind the hum of fans, it's hard to beat a Corsi-Rosenthal box... there are kits from cleanairkits.com or cybernightmarket.com to build quiet PC fan based boxes that in my experience work excellent and can use off-the shelf filters and parts
In the meantime they continue to function as "dumb" devices just fine.
Apple's HomeKit allows you to firewall your IoT devices, if you have a Wifi router that supports it.
Since that kind of privacy cuts into the profits of shady IoT companies, they don't support HomeKit.
I'm not interested in trading my privacy for the pithy convenience of moving the dishwasher start button from the machine to my phone.
By buying the device and then breaking the lock-in, one does more harm to the anti-consumer device manufacturer than had they done nothing at all.
What exactly is the subsidy here?
Is it that they plan to meet a bulk of their profit target after the sale, instead of frontloading the profit. The subsidy can be considered a 1000 dollars on a 200 dollar device if their target is 1200 dollars.
It is only really subsidized if the device is actually sold below cost of BOM & essential software needed minus bloat. I'm skeptical that they are giving away hardware below cost based on potential profits.
Vendors want to have their cake and eat it. They are no longer happy with a one-time sale, they want a continuous revenue stream. I have absolutely no qualms about buying "subsidized" devices and liberating them. I am not going to pay five times the price of a "smart TV" for a commercial display with worse specs when I can buy the consumer version and not connect it to the Internet or root it.
There is no competition in the space anymore. Not on that. You either get crudded-up devices or a panel that doesn’t have the fundamental AV capabilities required of a living room TV.
I don't see the difference. How would you reduce their influence without harming them?
Who pays for those ads/tracking/etc... companies that want to sell stuff to the consumer. Congratulations, subsidization just introduced more middlemen which extract more profit from the consumer.
The simpler things can be, the cheaper things can be.
The goal is to do harm to anti-consumer companies. Buying their (subsidized) hardware, and then breaking their lock-in so you and others aren't shown ads or forced to pay useless subscriptions, harms the company.
Only if you can guarantee that the vendor is going to remain in business forever, and provide service and support for the product forever.
Neither of those things happen. Ever.
If the manufacturer subsidizes the hardware purchase, that loss is realized at hardware purchase time.
Years ago, this was true. But today, selling your personal information isn't a loss leader. It's additional profit on top of the profit from the product.
The other fun thing about them is because they talk Wi-Fi frequencies, if you break into them they can also be reprogrammed to act like a hotspot, or start commanding _other_ devices.
So if you send a drone up the side of an office building to the executives floor, and can break into one lightbulb wirelessly, you can then make that lightbulb break into all the other lightbulbs, until you reach the secluded inner rooms, and you can make that lightbulb listen for Wi-Fi traffic and can pretend to be a hotspot for the targetted executive's laptop. Like in the movies!
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322969640_IoT_Goes_...
https://sci-hub.reatk.com/10.1109/MSP.2018.1331033
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard)
Thread should not have allowed Internet connectivity by default.
> (..) the ability to commission a finished product into a Matter network in the field mandates certification and membership fees, entailing both one-time, recurring, and per-product costs. This is enforced using a public key infrastructure (PKI) and so-called device attestation certificates.
Matter is designed to necessitate phoning into the internet for certification, which allows all manufacturers to just easily add-in phoning into the internet for telemetry. Furthermore, it does not define exactly which functionality must remain if a device is disconnected from the internet for a long time (assuming the user is trying to avoid sending out telemetry, not even bypassing certification).
It’s the commissioners that check for the certification: your phone or an open source implementation.
And the commissioners can, explicitly by the specification, commission other devices while completely offline.
That's a little disingenuous... All Matter-over-WiFi devices inherently have Internet access unless you're blocking it through router policy, and most Matter-over-Thread border routers commercially available today give Thread devices Internet access by default if they want it (to avoid this you need to self-host your own OTBR instance).
The connected home was an idealistic dream that has been made perverse by the Zucks and Elons of the world. It is not accessible for normal people and it might never be - at least, not without the blood sacrifice of your privacy.
Hopefully, hopefully this new trend can break the cycle of using software to turn things into subscription services that should never be subscription services. I'm terrified that manufactures will respond with hardware encryption and legal maneuvering, but perhaps by then there will be an even larger and thriving ecosystem of open hardware as the ease of setting it up and integrating it with AI accelerates its adoption.
I used to have a small counter-top dishwasher that relied on proprietary soap cartridges. The dishwasher itself was fairly good and effective, and after hacking the cartridges to allow them to be refilled the overall price was quite acceptable!
My god, this is straight out of a Douglas Adams book.
It's easier to setup and maintain schedules, routines, or more complex functionality.
It's certainly not critical functionality, but it's nice. Same with my laundry machine and dryer sending a push notification when the cycle ends. Unnecessary, but nice.
For an air purifier, I feel like I'd probably want to see outcome-level statistics convincing me it actually matters to lifespan, healthspan, quality of life, something, anything at all, to know and adjust minute-by-minute the exact air quality going through a purifier, or for that matter what the purifier is able to detect even reflects the quality of air elsewhere in a house with a whole lot of air volume not going through that purifier very regularly.
The most fascinating part of this wave of LLM reverse engineering is seeing how many weird and poor choices were lying in plain sight.
Any number of people could have discovered and exploited this, but it’s tedious work. Most people who can do this are busy with their job and other things. Now LLMs enable people who understand these things to quickly get through the tedious parts, so they can do a lot more of this work in their free time than they could before.
Would love to understand the decision-making behind this at Coway (or their firmware contractor). Anyone care to guess why someone would make this choice?
More info Search "Corsi-Rosenthal Box" or click https://filterbuy.com/resources/air-filter-basics/how-to-bui...
Don't go hepa because it slows down the filtering too much. I use this technique in my house and it cuts down on pollen, smoke and mold. You'll feel a lot better than a tiny expensive hepa that has proprietary filters.
That said, the non-wifi model works perfectly with a simple HomeKit compatible on/off plug, so all this work — despite being very, very cool — seems a little pointless?
I am wondering how the big corporate will respond sooner or later. Because it is clear and they know that as well with the every rising capability of LLM more people will find ways to liberate their hardware from such unnecessary dependency and accept less the money drain.
And I can override or change it from Apple Home.
The smart plug lets it verify that the fan is actually running, (because it measures usage) and we worked out that after a power cycle the Vornado goes back to a known state, and we can find the speed by forcing it all the way to 4 and then stepping back.
Need to try to get Sonoff bridge rigged up next but have been busy messing with Hatch alarm
Their ESP also uses Secure Boot... I don't know that there isn't a way to break in, but I wasn't able to find one short of hardware notification :/
While this is impressive: Why not just get a not-cloud one in the first place? Why does an air purifier need to be controlled via wi-fi?
I'm against a lot of smart home things because its actually more maintenance, not less, to have to think about an object connecting to wifi, to have to decide whether or not to control it (what are you even doing to it?) And I suppose to have to write your own drivers or app. Why allow it to occupy this much mental space for you?
Setting up almost never takes more than a few seconds for me. I have Apple home, it’s almost always scan a QR code, wait a few seconds for wifi and done.
Also it’s fun to mess with.
It is convenient to be able to monitor air quality from your phone, sourced from a device that is designed to improve it. Because then you can see how much of an impact it is actually making, move it to a different location with better airflow, etc.
I have the non-wifi version, and have to use a separate device for it.
One of the nice things about air purifiers, unlike owning a boat or leaving a stove on, is that its never going to surprise you in a bad way. You don't need to really monitor anything, it will just purify some air. Do you really want to be bringing that under the umbrella of the stuff you monitor? Maybe this is an irreconcilable difference and we cannot see it the other person's way.
Suddenly there are so many products to play with that would have previously been undesirable! This is one of the good things AI has enabled.
God forbid our fans, our fans of all things, might be broken of their dependencies on the internet. The plebians can't be allowed to do that. Every relay must be cloud-connected so it can be monetized and disabled for whatever dumb ass reasons someone might want to disable it.
I hear this a lot but I've never hit this.
For weeks now I've been working on a shared recompilation project of Switch 1 and 2 games, and Opus 5.5 has handled that with no issue.
Over 10 supported Switch 1 games, and 3 supported Switch 2 games, and never once has Opus 5.5 denied anything
Opus 5.5 will absolutely refuse to touch anti-cheat systems in video games, even when the end game isn't to cheat but to work on Linux compatibility or to bypass/spoof the checks to enable gameplay.
So this only works on products that was developed before ~now.
The solution is to not buy crap regardless if you can make it work or not.
The Home Assistant hackers are some of the most persistent reverse engineers that I have seen. Almost as much as game crackers and cheat developers.
You're under the assumption that the companies producing these give a shit about security. It'll probably increase a bit but I doubt it will be by much. If they have shipped devices that leave the doors wide open for almost any intrusion, they won't invest engineering/AI time and money to make these better than before and certainly won't review the code that the model spit out beyond a quick check if the promised base functionality still works.
Mistral, QWEN, and other models (read non-American) tend to have little to no restrictions. There were some tasks where I was actively trying to sabotage my own local network and Mistral had no issue helping. Anthropic and OpenAI refused outright or had to be "convinced" but would often hit further barricades along the way.
https://github.com/device-teardowns/coway-ap1512hh
I'm going to guess that you will spend more money on this than just buying a light that has smart features compatible with your smart home ecosystem. You can't mix two smart systems on one cord - this has never worked. Where to put the smart is a tricky question as there are pros and cons to every answer, but in general the smarts need to be in exactly one place or things won't work.
The relay clicking is a feature so you can tell the brightness audibly :)
I am tired of having dust everywhere.
If you don't mind the hum of fans, it's hard to beat a Corsi-Rosenthal box... there are kits from cleanairkits.com or cybernightmarket.com to build quiet PC fan based boxes that in my experience work excellent and can use off-the shelf filters and parts