- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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Huehuehue
Thankfully, while I have a smart plug from them, I’ve made sure that it’s a Zigbee powered one, meaning it’s directly connected to my Home Assistant server over it’s own frequency/protocol, no app required. Guess that choice is paying off now.
Also, someone should tell whoever is managing that Twitter support account that you should never use the phrase “We’re sorry you feel that way”, even when you’re going for a non-apology.
Isn’t the “take it or leave it” approach to consent considered consent bundling? Didn’t google get fined for doing a similar thing?
After they make the change, someone with an old Hue bulb should go to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Making this decision retroactive is clearly false advertising and anti-consumer. I don’t really give a shit what their terms of use were.
They can do what they want with their future bulbs. The old ones need to be grandfathered in.
reason: "your data isnt secure in your home, we need to control it. trust us. "
uh huh.
5 months later: “We had a data breach, but we believe they didn’t get all personal data”
This is immensely frustrating. Feels like a rug pull for anyone that cares about their data, privacy and (ironically) security.
Welp, their products are completely out of the running for our setup then.
and RIP to anyone who invested thousands into them. Those lights were NOT cheap.
Hopefully this spurs someone to go to the CFPB or something and sue. These companies need to stop pulling this retroactive change bullshit, like Unity, Wizards, ad now Hue.
Anyone have a good resource for connecting existing bulbs to zigbee and moving off the hue app?
To start off, you’ll want to have Home Assistant running on a local server or Raspberry Pi and a Zigbee USB dongle, like the Conbee II or SkyConnect. If you’ve never worked with Home Assistant, their Getting Started guide is pretty comprehensive.
To migrate the apps off the Hue gateway, there’s a section describing various methods to do so in the Home Assistant Zigbee guide.
I’ll mention that there’s also a whole bunch of other Zigbee gateways out there that work similar to the Hue Bridge, but these could all eventually share the same fate as Hue, if they aren’t already forced to be online.
Cool… I got a Phillips hue hub, but already have a Pi as well, Just never thought of using it this way. So I just need the Conbee II, and I should be able to make things work off the Pi. One less device to have plugged in.
Besides the stupid login stuff, I’ve noticed a lot of my stuff just isn’t as reliable as it used to be. It seems Phillips is just enshittifying things generally.
Thanks for the links!
I’ve been very happy with Home Assistant. There are zigbee USB sticks such as ConBee that work well with it, and home assistant runs on many different types of computers including Raspberry pi.
Ah yes to make your lights work, we need all your data. Stuff like this is why I don’t have “smart” anything.
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You can have plenty of smart home stuff without this junk using stuff like home assistant and keeping devices like this from phoning home. Some products won’t work at all without an internet connection but plenty still do.
It’s perfectly possible to have a smart home that does not call home. Home Assistant is an amazing piece of software that can allow smart devices from different manufacturers talk to each other without connecting to a cloud service — all done locally.
If i understand correctly this is Home Assistant saying that Hue is taking away that ability on devices people have already bought and installed.
That’s about the hue hub. The bulbs are still Zigbee and can be controlled 100% remotely with HA and a Zigbee dongle.
How
Put home assistant on a raspberry pi, plug a Zigbee dongle to it, and start connecting smart gadgets to it. Or better yet buy a home assistant Green. You can check the home assistant docs to see if a smart device requires cloud connectivity to work — in general if it connects through Zigbee (or ZWave or Matter) then you’re good, but if it connects through WiFi then it probably is cloud based.
https://www.home-assistant.io/
https://www.seeedstudio.com/Home-Assistant-Green-p-5792.html
Can confirm. I run Home Assistant and Rhasspy with Sengled bulbs and none of transmits info. The devices themselves aren’t generally the issue, it’s the hub that operates them that would be collecting and sending the info. Remove that, and you don’t have to worry.
wow so Rhasspy is local voice assistant! do you have microphones places throughout your pad or do you go to a website first to speak or what?
You can use microphones wherever with HA and Rhasspy. Rhasspy is just the local voice and intent recognition portion, and HA executes the commands. This means you can have one Rpi in your place managing devices, and then have many different microphone-attached Rpi all over your house forwarding voice recognition intents to do whatever you want it to do. Whatever the mic is attached to will send to the HA instance and tell it what to do. No cloud.
Why do I need a RaspberryPi? I can’t use my regular Linux PC? What is a Zigbee dongle and why is it mandatory? What do I do if he device is cloud based?
Your Zigbee light switches won’t do anything unless the machine running Home Assistant is on. Being able to control your lights while the computer isn’t running is really convenient.
You can use your regular PC if you want, but having an always-on server (the pi) makes it more convenient to use from, say, your phone.
Zigbee is a popular wireless communication protocol used by iot devices. Without the dongle you won’t have any way to talk to them.
If it’s cloud based, buy something else that isn’t.
Perfectly valid to ask how to protect your data using the tools the other user mentioned. Not sure why you were downvoted for asking simply how.
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@tjhart85 care to explain?
Sure! Click the link at the very top of the page! You know, what this entire conversation is theoretically talking about? It takes you to a Home Assistant page and even has some details on their philosophy and links to even more details about their privacy focused philosophy! I thought saying essentially “read the fucking article” would be pretty asshole-ish and wouldn’t contribute anything to the conversation, but I also thought that your question contributed nothing, so I downvoted.
Did that answer your question sufficiently?
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This is the only way I would go about it. Maybe in the future if I really want it but really, the more tech, the more vulnerabilities. I’m fine with manually turning things on and off even if it’s self hosted.
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I don’t want to be annoyed
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It opens up another vector for attacking other sensitive devices on my network. I haven’t segregated my network so I don’t feel safe doing this.
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The LIFX bulbs announced your WiFi password to anyone who asked. This is not a breach of the bulb itself, it’s a gateway to your LAN.
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Unfortunately, no. Ultimately it’s a tiny computer that happens to produce light when a certain gpio pin is enabled. The light bulb is the portion you see, but inside, it’s an internet-connected microcontroller. I’ve even seen smart devices that internally run a full Linux distro complete with a shell session you can access if you know what you’re doing.
The problem is that some of these firmwares and/or exploits for these firmwares actively scan your local network and report things. Further, they can be used as a jumping off point for attacks deeper in your network.
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And what about the zigbee hub, assuming you didn’t know enough to use homeassistant or some such?
Or a wifi bulb?
Point is, consumer smart electronics don’t have the same attention to security paid to them.
Fwiw, I’m not anti-smart device. I run HA and have all kinds of smart crap, so clearly I accept at least part of the risk.
But saying “it’s just a light bulb” is disingenuous as best.
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Pi-hole.
My two top-blocked domains are related to TP-Link.
While I can’t always get local-only devices, I can at least separate their traffic and block the shit out of them.
There is esphome too, it’s not used a lot by fabricant yet, but still exist and compatiblr with all devices using an esp as chip.
Why do they do this shit? Is “User A turned their lights on at 9 AM” that valuable of data that they’d disable third party shit?
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Many years ago i bought an RGB LED and naively thought the remote signal must have some standard protocol, because it is so simple commands that would allow for some cool shit if automated. Oh boy was i wrong. Proprietary smart home software is the most insane. How on earth should your home become “smart” when it is locked into some ideology (manufacturer) or worse yet you have multiple “parties” fighting over the government causing a shutdown.
NGL you kinda went into left field at the end there, but I still agree.
i wanted to compare the issue with the principles of government and the structures needed,because that what smart home should be, organizing your home to certain effect.
And like with state government that requires transparent and consistent rules, cooperation of the different branches and accountability.
The update was impossible to revert (though TP-Link said “Ok write to our support and we’ll give you the downgrade file” no fuck you).
That doesn’t sound like it was impossible, it sounds like you just didn’t want to do it.
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Tasmota is great but I’ve found the number of available devices is limited. For instance Tasmota smart dimmer plugs do not exist, nor could I find a stand alone controller.
Z-wave or Zigbee integration dramatically expand the number of available options and work with local controllers.
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Zigbee does work with a generic controller on Home Assistant and other platforms, and there are >3100 devices that are compatible with zigbee2mqtt, a Zigbee to MQTT bridge that exists to bypass the need for proprietary Zigbee bridges. No proprietary app or Internet access required either, but it was not easy to set up. Here’s a list of supported devices: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/
The list of Tasmota devices is extremely limited if you don’t want to flash it yourself, but a bit less so if you use Tuya Convert which is done via WiFi. It seems the device list is getting shorter all the time as vendors switch to other hardware implementations, but I seem to remember reading that a new Tasmota version will be coming that supports additional hardware.
To get plug-in dimmer and smart button functionality (Shelly Button 1 didn’t exist at the time) I had to put in Z-Wave. and I’ve since added a few new devices. Z-wave works pretty well, but not flawlessly. My Tasmota stuff just works and works much better than the original firmware on my smart bulbs and plugs.
Just getting my feet wet with Zigbee because I need yet another dimmer plug for a different location, but my understanding is most (but not all) Zigbee devices are not proprietary and work with most controllers. I’ll know next week.
Lutron FTW
Man fuck this. I use my lights in sync with my Philips tv when I watch movies so I can’t even switch to a zigbee thing or anything.
Hue stuff sucks anyway. If you own a home or rent and have access to your breaker box, Lutron Caseta is a much better option.
Please note in many places it’s very illegal to do electrical work for yourself
Where is it illegal for someone to change a light switch?
Australia for one
Interesting. TIL
IoT stuff isn’t safe to use unless it’s flashed with a third-party Free Software firmware like Tasmota or ESPHome.
I mean IKEA is fine.
It’s entirely ZigBee, there’s no internet.
But the green part of RGB only works if you’re using their app
Edit: downvoter, please let me know what’s bothering you about this?
Really? Huh.
I’m just using the PM2.5 and temperature sensors.
Unfortunately yeah. We’ve tried the E27 and green just didn’t work. Thought it was broken and returned it, told them why. “Oh, you used the remote, right? It only works with the app, it’s been like that for years and hasn’t been fixed yet”
Oh so that’s just a bug rather than a feature lock.
Im only using mine in home assistant that should act as an app anyway.
No, that’s just the problem. We only use ours in home assistant as well and it didn’t work. It’s got to be the Ikea app.
Oh okay, I’ll be sure to avoid then until they fix that.
From what I read, it’s not a bug.
Many bulbs trade on the green LED for more variation in white. Red/Blue serve a function to make whites warmer or cooler, green has no such function.
And because most people use white, they ditched the green LED. That’s why the green it has is more yellowish than you would expect.
It probably also means the bulb API has no dedicated green setting, which is why the remote and 3rd party apps don’t have proper green settings.
It’s a bit of speculation though, not entirely sure. Apparently older Hue bulbs also do this.
That’s interesting. Funnily enough, we did try the one color GU10 we have today and this one does work perfectly.
ESPhome for the win! I have like 12 smart plugs with power monitoring flashed with ESPhome
I have 8! (They’re literally the only smart home devices I have so far, although Home Assistant automatically detected my Roku and my printer.)
Edit: If this is actionable, I would be interested in participating in a class action suit against Philips for materially altering a product’s functionality after purchase. This is like buying a normal car and being told a year later it was given a remote update and now can only use Ford ™ brand gasoline which costs $10/gallon.
If you do have an existing investment in Hue products, I suggest reaching out to them to request a refund because your purchase was made under a different policy, and this policy change is going to render your products useless without consent on your part. If they’re going to force a significant change that compromises the functionality of what might be hundreds of dollars worth of equipment without permitting recourse for legacy users, they should have to accept returns on what essentially is now a product you did not purchase and would not have purchased.
Or just get a ZigBee hub and keep using the bulbs without the Hue hub
Indeed I’ve never even installed the hue app, always assumed it was just a zigbee thing anyway. The hardware is just a basic zigbee bulb.
Mostly I’ve been moving to using the ikea ones though as they’re much cheaper.
Any recommendations for a Zigbee hub to use with HomeAssistant? I’m planning to make the switch now that Hue is doing this
If you have home assistant, you don’t need a zigbee hub, just a ZigBee USB stick. There’s a whole bunch of them, I think they’re all pretty similar, a few have Z-Wave also. I’m 100% Z-Wave so I can’t say personally what is the best stick to use… Just check the forums and whatnot.
hundreds of dollars worth of equipment
More like thousands, Hue is way overpriced
I started the email thread with them on Friday. So far I’ve only received canned messages like they told the HA folks.
Guess I can sell that Hue hub after I move my Hue devices over to my HA/Zigbee config — what wasn’t broke and didn’t need fixing… will now finally be fixed and finished.
If someone does this let me know. Every bulb in my house is hue.
