Me too, brother.
And as someone who attended a lockpicking course back during university, the mechanical locks are not the DIY market crap.
IT professional here.
Yup.
Everything is hardwired with multiple layers of security. Everything even remotely personal is on encrypted hard drives. No Alexa/Google. Made sure the smart TV and smartphones (no Apple, vanilla Android) have all data sharing disabled. And I drive a 1999 vehicle that doesn’t make me jump through any hoops.
There’s a fine line between technology making things better and making things worse. We’re definitely starting to drift into the making things worse era.
I have a desktop PC with Linux on it, wired Ethernet only that I can unplug, and a gun in my night stand in case it makes a noise I don’t recognize.
Me too. And no Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, HBO, … just good old Torrent.
The main benefit of sailing the high seas when I was younger was simply having access to things I couldn’t afford that helped make me more cultured. Now the main benefit is so I don’t financially contribute to shitstain corporations.
Building a cheap NAS with shucked drives running Plex on unraid was the best decision ever. I won’t lie it’s not cheaper than just paying for 1-2 subscriptions and I have spent time managing it but having agency over the content available is so nice and if I don’t have disposable income for a time I can just not add new drives
Better quality, don’t need 7 subscriptions to access all content, and don’t have to worry about things getting shelved. It’s funny because Netflix in like 2014 is why I stopped pirating but it was Netflix in 2019 that made me start pirating again. Spotify is getting real close to making me pirate music again too
A couple months ago, my dishwasher stopped working. When the tech showed up to look at it, he said it may need a software update. He then unscrewed the toe plate, plugged a wifi hotspot into the newly revealed network jack, and let the update happen.
I was shocked, and a little alarmed, that my dishwasher even had software to update. Its entire control panel is six buttons, some status LEDs and an LED timer.
HomeAssistant for the win! Not everything needs to be connected but for those things I would like to control I want CONTROL. So only my server (not even the nubucasa servers) control it!
Big difference between “smart home stuff” and stuff compatible with home assistant. You host home assistant yourself on your own hardware and everything is connected in one interface. You only need one app, or one webpage. No shady actors get access to your home, you control everything.
Give it a few years and home assistant will have ai built in, mandatory telemetry, be coded with ai, and have a bunch of angry nerds arguing about every update and censoring everyone they disagree with.
Apache license, source on Github. If they piss off their users, someone will fork it.
Go touch some grass and smell some flowers. Spring is finally here
No
I choose to believe in a brighter future
I’ll get angry if that happens, but they’ve shown no signs of heading that way. Chill out.
I want/need to switch over from Google home to home assistant . So, how difficult would it be to migrate over? We mostly have smart plugs and a Google nest thermostat.
Is a raspberry pi adequate for this, or do I need a mini pc?
It will automatically adopt almost everything. A raspberry pi is ok, but I would recommend a PC depending on how many things you have.
I run quite an extensive home assistant on a Pi. I think just grab whatever is economical, most cheap hardware will run it.
I ran mine on a pi for years. When I upgraded I was very upset I hadn’t done it sooner. Everything responded instantly.
I run mine on an old Razer laptop with an 8th gen Intel CPU and its battery removed. Works a treat.
Oh nice! Okay, thanks!
I did not own a Raspy so i needed new Hardware anyway. I use a Home Assistent Green now. Very easy setup and it does not need that much energy compared to a PC. Works well!
Don’t forget the gun by the printer, you know just in case.
Are you an idiot?
Never have a gun within reach of the printer. Do you want to die?
PC LOAD CHAMBER, fuck around and find out what that means
Do your printers have arms? I don’t understand.
If you put one next to them, yeah
You have far too much trust in your printer
When looking for a mimic, always shoot the printer first… Not because it’s the mimic, but because it deserves it.
The number of appliances that have an app is fucking insane. I’m sorry, but I don’t need my oven to have internet connectivity. We got by just fine before.
Right? Why does my microwave want WiFi access? How bout no
That is what I thought (and still do, for the most part), but being at the grocery store and starting the oven preheat is pretty nice.
Would be super cool if privacy mattered to these companies.
Agreed
Honest question though: what of real value can a company gain by knowing that I turned my oven to 350, or that I switched my air conditioning on? Assuming app permissions match what’s needed and I’m not giving up my contacts or whatever. Or is that a more common issue than I realize?
I could also get more info from your habits and you home type and quality from the thermostat. All at your convenience. I didn’t have to ask for permission to any private information. Just by the oven app alone I would have clues about your personal life-
I would now know about how far you are from home
That you are not home
That there’s no one home or that you don’t trust the people you live with to start the oven
How much you spend on utilities
What’s the average temperature you cook food at
How long you cook
How often you cook
Which part of the oven/stove you use most often
Where your home is located
How often you entertain
Where’s your favorite grocery store
When you start cooking
The fact that you are at the grocery buying food to cook that night and how often you do that
Not to mention the companion app itself is scraping telemetry data:
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What phone you use
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What network it’s connected to
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What times you use your phone
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Approximate location
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A list of other apps you have installed
And that’s all before we get into the nitty gritty of how the user actually engages with the app content, or other device permissions the app might request. Maybe “Location” for recommending preheat times based on distance, maybe “Camera” to check doneness, maybe “Nearby devices” to pair with first-party accessories, or maybe “Photos and video” for some shoehorned social media component.
They can ask for any permission for ostensibly innocuous/justified reasons, but once those permissions are granted, they have full access to that data to do whatever else they want with it. They’ll know who you are, where you are, when you’re there, what you’re doing there, and who else you’re with.
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Would you be comfortable if there were cameras set up in your house feeding to an unknown entity somewhere higher up the economic food chain whose mission is to find ways to extort you for money? Privacy used to be something many people wanted purely for the sake of privacy without any ulterior motive
To me, it’s rather surprising that people don’t just have an instinctual desire to maintain a degree of privacy in their lives. I dont really want people watching and tracking how often I use my air fryer what times I go grocery shopping etc as it literally feels like I’m being spied on. It’s not about having something to hide it’s about protecting something that’s core to the American identity and has been for centuries. Plus these companies are notorious for data breaches and running psychological experiments on people based on personal data collected on them. I’d rather not be a lab rat for some reptilian tech billionaire and I’ll just preheat my oven manually
You can’t think about what this information does right now to your eye. You have to remember that this data is someday going to be completely categorized via AI and same as we couldn’t predict life post-internet, there’s no telling how problematic it might be to your life to have a more robust profile of your personal information than a more private person once AI has fully taken over society. Your life patterns likely tell a lot more about you as a person than you realize which means they are getting way more from you than merely the temperature of your thermostat. Humans are way more patterned in their behavior than our grade school teachers telling us we are unique and special might lead us to believe
Well, I’m not talking about cameras. I’m asking about my oven not because I think I shouldn’t care about it, but because I genuinely want to know why I should. Like, I can’t imagine some algorithm is saying “guys, this guy set his oven to 350 an hour before dinner, we got him!”
Yeah like I explained, you can’t comprehend the degree of how much of your personal life is exposed by data points deemed trivial. The data collectors believe in the value of your privacy as a marketable commodity so to me that’s enough reason. If Palantir thinks harvesting data on how and when I cook can provide them with even more valuable private information then that’s probably the case
For all you know, people who use lemmy and preheat their oven to 350 on tuesdays and listen to XYZ music fall into a category of humans that allows them to also know your romance life and how to best target you in vulnerable areas of your life in ways you don’t immediately identify
The reason to value your privacy isn’t “what is the first order effect of giving this information”. Privacy should be valued because you can’t ever get it back and can’t know the future so why bother giving up something that tech companies spend billions gathering from you just to save a 10sec walk to the kitchen. It’s never been about having things to hide or the mundane of what time you turn on your lights
What time you usually cook, so the best time to show you other advertisements, or if you’re in the store once super targeted customer by customer pricing gets implemented (it’s already in place in many locations) then the price raises just for you since you turned your oven on (or will turn your oven on in a few minutes).
What time you usually cook, so the best time to show you other advertisements
I guess I can grant you that they would learn that I eat dinner around dinner time, maybe a little later than most but also not abnormally so.
or if you’re in the store once super targeted customer by customer pricing gets implemented (it’s already in place in many locations)
I’ve seen that stores want to be able to adjust prices based on time of day or whatever, and my store has mostly switched to eink price labels so it’s a matter of time… But per person? How are they supposed to offer one price to me and another to someone reaching for the gallon of milk at the same time?
Probably not at the same time, but stores are adding cameras everywhere. Target has tracked customers using phone signals for over a decade now. I can’t imagine the legal minefield this will be but I’m just saying those are possibilities.
The app on your phone is likely data mining you
being at the grocery store and starting the oven preheat is a pretty nice way to burn the house down
Ftfy.
Especially if you forgot that “X” was still in the oven, for various values of “X”.
Then again, a well designed smart oven might include a burn sensor that would shut the thing off if the smoke got too bad.
Easy rule, don’t put anything in the oven that doesn’t belong in the oven. Plus it is a double oven, so I know the lower is always empty while there might be a cast iron in the top oven.
IDK about smoke detection, but it does shut itself off after a certain amount of time. Years ago I had an ancient GAS oven that I forgot on for THREE DAYS at like 150. I think that was much more dangerous, lol. Those were the best damn pumpkin seeds I ever made though.
Easy rule, don’t put anything in the oven that doesn’t belong in the oven
Who’s to say what belongs in the oven?
For example, bread recipes sometimes tell you to proof the bread by putting it in the oven with the heat off but the light on. There are similar recipes for making yogourt. Or it can be a good place to dry seeds.
Those things “belong” in the oven. But if you turn on the oven without taking them out you might be very sad. That can happen if you’re turning on the oven in person, but it’s easier to verify the oven is empty when you’re doing that.
I’ve lost faith in all tech
I have some smart home stuff, but if it needs the Internet to function, it’s not going into my house. And if any of it fails, the house reverts to its old, dumb self.
This here. Home automation is cool, but only as long as it works locally with something like home assistant.
I read the last line that wrapped as “no internet connected” and thought, that’s hard core, man.
Yeah, I get it and I share much of the sentiment, but I bet this guy uses Facebook. Everybody should have some level of paranoia, but it’s the rare individual that can beat them all. Me, I’m not on Facebook or any other non-anonymous social media, but I use Gmail. Almost everybody trades off a little somewhere.
I believe you can still get rid of google
I have a Google doorbell camera connected to a guest network, and that is it.
I have a couple of online things that I find useful, but they have their own network
Don’t work in IT but, I do all of them
