2/22/2026 at 4:52:55 PM
> he soon discovered that the same credentials that allowed him to see and control his own device also provided access to live camera feeds, microphone audio, maps, and status data from nearly 7,000 other vacuums across 24 countries.This is extremely similar to what I accidentally discovered and disclosed about Mysa smart thermostats last year: the same credentials could be used to access, inspect, and control all of them, anywhere in the world.
by dlenski
2/23/2026 at 9:20:44 AM
The old joke: people who are into tech have an Alexa, a smart thermostat, a fridge connected to the internet.People who work in tech keep an axe next to the toaster.
by vintagedave
2/23/2026 at 3:44:17 PM
No way I'm putting an axe near an appliance like that. I need to sleep at night.by projektfu
2/23/2026 at 9:52:45 AM
Do you want a slice of toast?....by alt227
2/23/2026 at 10:54:17 AM
i dont want any smegging toast!by blarg1
2/23/2026 at 1:31:56 PM
Smeg actually makes a toaster. It's expensive, looks cute, and doesn't work that well when compared to a far cheaper toaster oven.by fullstop
2/23/2026 at 2:13:18 PM
This applies to most Smeg products. Which is a shame, they used to be really good and long-lasting.by HugoTea
2/23/2026 at 3:14:44 PM
I can't speak to their quality, but every time I see their name, I wonder about how they're received in England: Americans might generally be unaware, but "smeg" as a name doesn't land well there, as I understand it.by zhengyi13
2/23/2026 at 3:55:27 PM
A UK comedy called RedDwarf used variations of smeg as a mild expletive quite liberally. When asked some of the producers claimed they made it up to get around broadcast rules, but most people think it's a shortening of smegma.by DrScientist
2/23/2026 at 2:47:31 PM
Aaaah, so you're a waffle man.by GJim
2/23/2026 at 3:09:07 PM
No. I don't want no waffles. No toast. No crumpets. No scones. No smegging heated bread products of any kind.by bena
2/23/2026 at 4:11:35 PM
So, do you want a slice of toast?by alt227
2/23/2026 at 5:01:48 PM
I'm sorry Dave, I can't toast that.by Ir0nMan
2/22/2026 at 6:26:06 PM
The ideal spy army. Nobody expects the spanish inquisition I mean, being able to spy into households via cheap house-cleaning devices.by shevy-java
2/23/2026 at 12:38:43 AM
Some of us do. I specifically picked a device that (supposedly) lacked cameras and microphones. LIDAR seemed okay.by lysace
2/23/2026 at 7:10:05 AM
I picked something that can be rooted and made cloud-free with Valetudo for the same reasonby gattilorenz
2/23/2026 at 8:45:27 AM
Why can't I pay to express my consumer preferences? Why must I deliberately buy broken stuff and fix it myself?There's enough broken stuff to fix at work.
by eptcyka
2/23/2026 at 6:22:08 PM
> Why can't I pay to express my consumer preferences? Why must I deliberately buy broken stuff and fix it myself?I guess it comes down to "market failure."
Many people would probably say that they care about security/privacy/maintainability of their electronic devices, but in practice they buy based on cost and features, and they remain oblivious to security/privacy/maintainability unless and until there's a major problem.
This is probably rational behavior for most consumers:
There's no real way for them to evaluate claims about security/privacy/maintainability of their devices. Basically every Internet-connected device advertises an enormous list of security-flavored bullet points. "Supports IEEE 802.11g/n/ac/ax, including Wi-Fi Easy Connect for secure passwordless connections", "Secure Boot to ensure only authorized firmware runs on the device", "Hardware cryptographic acceleration", "24/7 monitoring by our dedicated security incident team", yadda yadda.
But those claims don't in any way cover the massive attack surface of a cloud-connected device where the server and client sides have been co-developed with a bunch of rushed and dangerous assumptions about how neither the client to the server will ever talk to any misconfigured or adversarial peer. Finding those kinds of security vulnerabilities is basically my stock in trade.
<elmo_on_fire.gif>
by dlenski
2/23/2026 at 10:08:33 AM
>Why can't I pay to express my consumer preferences?Cool, I'll start a HW-FOSS robo-vac company in California tailored to your consumer preferences, that will be profitable without selling your data. Buy one for only $4,999. Orders start now.
...fast forward 12 months ...
Damn, why did we already go out of business, I thought according to consumer preferences, people would pay 10x markup for privacy compared to spyware Chinese models?
by joe_mamba
2/23/2026 at 5:18:42 PM
You'd deserve to go out of business for charging customers $4,999.You could make a healthy profit selling a robot vacuum for under $200 although you'd probably want models that cost a bit more for customers who wanted something more fancy (https://cookierobotics.com/060/)
by autoexec
2/23/2026 at 8:41:40 AM
"Nobody expects the spanish inquisition…"Why not? They bought roving cameras that surveil their homes and connected them to internet servers they neither own nor control.
They obviously don't give a shit about privacy or they've room-temperature IQs.
by hilbert42
2/23/2026 at 9:55:16 AM
Ordinary users don't know. They bought a robo-vac, they do not necessarily know it comes with a microphone or camera.I work in tech, I never thought about buying one, so I never looked into them. Still, I am surprised they come with microphones.
by iSnow
2/23/2026 at 10:49:56 AM
IoT, internet privacy, spyware, etc. have been repeatedly in the news ad nauseam since about 2000. If they don't know by now where have they been for the past quarter century?The first and most obvious question an owner should ask "why does a vacuum cleaner need to talk with the internet?" It's hard to have sympathy for people who go out of their way to act dumb.
by hilbert42
2/23/2026 at 2:30:04 PM
This is a failure of regulation, not personal responsibility. Consumers should not have to threat-model their vacuum cleaner. That should be on the manufacturer, and when they fail like this they should be punished severely.by jcgrillo
2/23/2026 at 5:29:31 PM
You are correct that a sane government would protect their customers from being secretly surveilled by companies who will do whatever they want with their customer's most private data including selling it to others. Americans should also know that we don't have a government that protects consumers from products that harm them even when that harm is well known. It's unfortunate, but until that changes people do have to threat-model their internet connected devices, just like they have to threat-model their food, their children's toys, their cosmetics, their health supplements, their cookware, their clothing, and just about everything else we buy.by autoexec
2/23/2026 at 5:37:01 PM
Fair point.by jcgrillo
2/23/2026 at 10:08:37 AM
> Still, I am surprised they come with microphones.Me too, what are they for?
by ninalanyon
2/23/2026 at 11:12:47 AM
well spying, probably.But let's suppose you are designing RoboVac vers. 1.0 OS, 1.0 OS does not use microphone, but one of our smart fellows wrote a document suggesting that we might want to have RoboVac be voice controlled! Maybe we can roll that out by 1.4, with some simple commands!! Let's put a Microphone in so we can add that feature later.
Later on you get fired, and smart fellow who wrote document gets fired, and OS 1.4 rolls out with spy tech to mark common product names and send them back to Amazon with your location data.
RoboVac 2.2 is out now, still no voice control, and you wonder why whenever you go to buy all your favorite products online there is 10% inflation on prices although news suggests inflation should actually be decreasing for the next half year.
by bryanrasmussen
2/22/2026 at 5:59:12 PM
The "smart" thermostat stuff is scary. I have Haier minisplits in my house and they have some "smarts" built into each head unit. The way it works from the user's perspective is you connect to the device in the GE Home app via Bluetooth, enter your WiFi network's credentials, then the minisplit joins your wifi network and phones home to GE Cloud. Then your GE Home app can monitor and control your minisplit via GE Cloud.I haven't done anything to analyze it further, instead after trying that out once I promptly changed my WiFi password and never looked back. The long term solution will involve some ESP32s, AHT20 temp/humidity sensors, and IR rx/tx.
But it just occurred to me reading this that if there's a similar vulnerability in HVAC system controls an attacker could cause one hell of an unanticipated power demand spike.
by jcgrillo
2/23/2026 at 4:34:33 AM
My problem with smart thermostats is the user interface couldn't be more awful. It's just nuts. You cannot do anything without the squinty manual in one hand and the squinty touchscreen in the other. So, you finally get it programmed. Then you want to change something, and boom, start all over.I gave up.
I use a simple dial the temperature, turn on/off thermostat. I turn it off when going to bed, turn it on in the morning. Very happy.
by WalterBright
2/23/2026 at 4:35:33 AM
I had a similar problem with the water sprinkler. The user manual was something like 50 pages. Utter madness. Now I just water the lawn manually, when I get around to it.by WalterBright
2/23/2026 at 5:00:07 PM
> But it just occurred to me reading this that if there's a similar vulnerability in HVAC system controls an attacker could cause one hell of an unanticipated power demand spike.Absolutely. This was one of the things I realized could be a substantial risk when I discovered the Mysa vulnerability. https://snowpatch.org/posts/i-can-completely-control-your-sm...
Thankfully, Mysa responded very rapidly to fix it, but if they hadn't I was planning to notify the BC provincial electric utilities which were cross-subsidizing these devices.
by dlenski
2/23/2026 at 8:10:41 PM
This is an awesome writeup, thanks for sharing. And good on Mysa for responding so favorably to your research.by jcgrillo
2/22/2026 at 6:39:29 PM
This is honestly why it's important to insist on Z-wave or Zigbee if you don't have control over the device firmware and must have smart controls. Why people don't seem to understand now that if it's "WiFi" it's suspect at best, I'll never understand.by rpcope1
2/22/2026 at 7:41:13 PM
This, pretty much.The ideal setup is having a separate vlan for your IoT things, that has no internet access. You then bridge specific hubs into it, so the hubs can control them and update their firmware.
If you have IoT devices that are unsafe but cannot be updated any other way, you can temporarily bridge the IoT VLAN to WAN.
Honestly, what IoT stuff needs is something similar to LVFS. Make it so all the hubs can grab updates from there, and can update any IoT device that supports Matter. It would also serve as a crapware filter because only brands that care about their products would upload the firmwares.
by jorvi
2/23/2026 at 3:50:45 AM
Many WiFi-based "smart" devices can run locally without Internet access just fine and are supported by HA or other such platforms, which then doesn't require you using the vendor's app, which might have you need to be on the same broadcast domain as the device. They can use multicast (few home users will have multicast routing between VLANs), or direct broadcast - meaning you will likely give them Internet access because your phone needs it - well unless your WiFi is smart enough to limit individual clients. So a restricted VLAN plus HA or some such solves this.The real problem is those devices that actually don't let you control the device locally - Tuya being one notable example. There are thousands of products that just went and dropped in a Tuya board.
Tuya is completely cloud-controled. To control these locally you need a "local key" that is buried deep in their developer platform, and changes every time you re-pair the device, and getting it without registering the device is, on purpose, near-impossible without tricks like using an Android emulator with an old version of their app that stores the key, and even then requires effort to exfil the file out of Android. Horror. A device you physically own, only responds to control from the mothership.
So yes, you don't get those kinds of issues with RF protocols, of course unless you put the vendor's "bridge" on your network...
A friend of mine found Zigbee unreliable where he was, and just wired the home for 1-Wire. Temperature sensors, relays, heating PIDs etc. Not only it just won't die, but good luck to anyone hacking it without extra equipment and ripping wires from walls, and firstly being inside, unsupervised and undetected.
by wowczarek
2/23/2026 at 1:37:29 PM
Mine is Z-Wave, the next model up required an internet connection and a subscription if you wanted to access it from remote.The HVAC guy probably thought that I was nuts for wanting the one that I got, since the price was similar. Six years later and I'm still controlling it from Z-Wave.
by fullstop
2/22/2026 at 7:39:47 PM
I replaced all my thermostats for both of my homes with Sinopé products. Here's the hardware, software, and setup:by thangalin
2/22/2026 at 7:48:28 PM
None of the existing smart controls stuff I've found really does it for me. I'm trying to build a hybrid heating system with 4 hydronic zones and 8 minisplits. For my HVAC controls the design is converging to a round mechanical Honeywell thermostat for each hydronic zone with a "smart" thermostat (no cloud) wired in parallel--TBD whether buy vs build. For the minisplits I'm building my own thing that can speak their IR protocol, which will also double as a per-room temperature sensor. It all gets tied together with outdoor temp sensor via HomeAssistant. So if all the "smart" stuff fails, the trusty mechanical guy will keep the house from freezing.There are halfway decent hybrid controls available for ducted systems but you can't afaik buy anything off the shelf to merge hydronic + minisplits. And as far as I can tell, none of the off-the-shelf smart thermostats has any built in analog backup. I view that as absolutely critical for my use, if the power goes out and I'm not around I need to be 100% certain that when the power comes back on the heat will also.
EDIT: Digging around a little more it seems that Mitsubishi H2i minisplit systems don't speak zwave or zigbee, neither does Haier Arctic. I'm not 100% sure if that's accurate, but I haven't been able to find any documentation in the affirmative or negative. Those are the two heat pump options available locally. I'll be remodeling a small barn into an ADU this summer, that project will be more amenable to a forced air hybrid system, so maybe I'll be able to get away with a Honeywell smart zigbee capable thermostat that can drive it.
by jcgrillo
2/23/2026 at 4:14:54 AM
An analog fallback is a good idea, to be sure your house doesn't freeze when you're away.> EDIT: Digging around a little more it seems that Mitsubishi H2i minisplit systems don't speak zwave or zigbee, neither does Haier Arctic
There are no mini-splits in the US that speak anything remotely standard. If you want to go with ducted systems, TRANE and others have smart AC units that use "communicating thermostats". The protocol is based on Envirocom system and it's pretty basic.
Good news is that you can still control them by shorting the wires with a traditional thermostat, so you still can have an analog backup in case the regular digital thermostat fails.
by cyberax
2/23/2026 at 4:02:47 PM
The Honeywell thing I bought on amazon turned out to not be analog after all. It's got an Atmel Atmega something or other in it. It obviously can't connect to the internet through its 24VAC 3 wire interface but it's running software I can't inspect and therefore assume to be completely riddled with bugs. It's going back to be replaced with Whites-Rodgers Emerson unit.by jcgrillo
2/23/2026 at 9:10:12 PM
Yet, it's common. They typically are drop-in replacements for classic mercury switch thermostats. Mercury is not available anymore (for a good reason), and gallium alloys wet almost everything.Bare bi-metallic strips don't work as well because contacts tend to get oxidized and/or stuck. They are also a pain to calibrate.
A small microcontroller with a relay tends to be more reliable.
by cyberax
2/23/2026 at 10:54:32 PM
> A small microcontroller with a relay tends to be more reliable.Until some bug surfaces that requires a reboot to -fix- work around, but since the device is powered by a battery (EDIT: still puzzling through what might happen when this battery runs out..) which isn't user serviceable and has no reset switch... The device I tore down this morning fits that description. I'll take my chances with a bit of calibration and some yearly maintenance. My vehicles all have grease points and maintenance schedules, I can handle also greasing my thermostat contacts ;)
That said, the regulators taking away the mercury switch isn't an excuse for the user hostility. They could have made a device that is less sketchy. Even if they actually did a great job and it's in fact much safer and more reliable than the analog device (in which case they should show data), I know I can open up the analog one and make it work. I can figure out how to keep it working. I can look at it and evaluate whether I trust it. I cannot do that with some proprietary blob on an MCU.
by jcgrillo
2/23/2026 at 4:46:45 PM
I have an old zen thermostat with home assistant support but no WiFi. They don't make them anymore sadly but it was the perfect balance.by Induane
2/23/2026 at 4:31:20 AM
UniFi has ppsk setup where you can put an EU on a separate vlan with a separate password. Seems ideal for thisby dilyevsky
2/22/2026 at 7:02:12 PM
Edit: misread.by irishcoffee
2/23/2026 at 12:10:33 PM
Why does a robot vacuum have a microphone? Voice control?by PatronBernard
2/23/2026 at 12:40:01 PM
Voice control is the claim. In my experience the voice control is entirely unusable, and can’t be fully turned off.by Filligree
2/22/2026 at 5:08:16 PM
Is this cutting corners on manufacturing/assembly where they're skipping installing a unique set of keys on each device?by morkalork
2/22/2026 at 6:24:33 PM
The vulnerability was in their backend cloud structure. The backend wasn't restricting access to only devices associated with your account.> Out of sheer laziness, I connected to the Mysa MQTT server and subscribed to the match-everything wildcard topic, #. I was hoping I’d see messages from a few more MQTT topics, giving me more information about my Mysa devices.
> Instead, I started receiving a torrent of messages from every single Internet-connected production Mysa device in the whole world.
The devices had unique IDs, but they were all connected to one big MQTT pub/sub system that didn't even try to isolate anything.
It's lazy backend development. This happens often in IoT products where they hire some consultant or agency to develop a proof of concept, the agency makes a prototype without any security considerations, and then they call it done because it looks like it works. To an uninformed tester who only looks at the app it appears secure because they had to type in their password.
by Aurornis
2/22/2026 at 6:57:08 PM
> The vulnerability was in their backend cloud structure.The vulnerability is in having a backend cloud structure.
(There are plenty of ways to provide remote access without that, and no other feature warrants it.)
by JoshTriplett
2/22/2026 at 9:07:42 PM
Not sure why this is being downvoted, it's a pervasive flaw across all these IoT products. See my description elsewhere here about how Haier "smart" controls work. It's completely insane, and pointless. For systems that can't fail--I include heating systems in the winter--this kind of "move fast and break shit" way of doing it is malpractice. The last thing in the entire world I want my furnace controls doing is an automatic OTA firmware update. Ever.by jcgrillo
2/22/2026 at 9:10:36 PM
Exactly. I want a "smart thermostat" that's entirely under my control, not the manufacturer's.by JoshTriplett
2/23/2026 at 2:53:35 AM
And the manufacturer wants something that's under their control, not your.by MarkusQ
2/23/2026 at 1:07:23 AM
But then you would have to configure something on your router and have dynamic dns for remote access and that’s too hard.by bethekidyouwant
2/23/2026 at 8:56:29 PM
I'm hoping that things like Matter and Thread will help with this, but in the meantime, I have no problem with "optional remote-access service that you don't have to use and have to explicitly enable, or you can use it entirely locally".by JoshTriplett
2/23/2026 at 1:34:24 AM
Sell an additional $200 box containing a Raspberry Pi with Home Assistant on it and a cheap capacitive touchscreen and pre-configure it with Tailscale. Would be reasonably consumer-friendly. Give it a fancy name and start slapping "{$HOME_ASSISTANT} Compatible" branding logos on partners boxes.If it's not quite as consumer-friendly as you want it to be, contribute your engineering hours to the Home Assistant product until it is.
Bonus points for giving it 25-250W audio output to power speakers and letting you pair them together to play music in sync across different rooms of your house connected to speakers of your choice.
by nerdsniper
2/23/2026 at 2:28:15 PM
Market size: approximately zero.The number of people who 1) really want local-only control and 2) can deal with Home Assistant and Tailscale but 3) don't actually have the skill set to put together a Raspberry Pi or other small Linux box and set up HA and TS themselves is tiny.
The cloud systems are insecure and invasive, but it's really hard to get Normal People to understand why it's a problem. "So someone can tell if I'm not home; so what? I live in a gated community, they can't just drive in at night and burgle the house." They're not entirely wrong about that; it is unlikely. The hard push for subscription services by these companies has turned out to be the best way to push people into locally hosted alternatives, because they don't want to pay for another service, but the usual approach is just to do without the service when they realize that the "smart" functions are not that useful. Most people don't have the free time, knowledge, or inclination to set up and maintain Home Assistant. They can appreciate it when they see it done well, but they aren't going to pay for a professional installation and maintenance and they aren't able to do it themselves.
by devilbunny
2/23/2026 at 11:32:27 PM
I see no reason why a fork of Home Assistant couldn’t be as user friendly as a Google Home thoughby nerdsniper
2/23/2026 at 11:58:03 PM
Agreed, and with open, auditable design it's far more trustworthy. So you can satisfy both the paranoid tech nerds (guilty as charged) and the folks who just want to get it running with the least amount of effort are safer--whether they know it or not--because it's audited.by jcgrillo
2/23/2026 at 10:19:23 PM
> The cloud systems are insecure and invasive, but it's really hard to get Normal People to understand why it's a problem.In the case of HVAC systems the danger is a collective one not individual. Sure if someone really wanted to they could watch you and wait until you're not home then turn your heat off and freeze your pipes. But they're not gonna do that, probably. Instead the kind of havoc they'll wreak with this access is to wait until some off-peak time and instantaneously fire up all the AC units and shut them down simultaneously, repeatedly, causing a huge demand spike. If supply doesn't ramp up fast enough then frequency will drop and then the grid will start trimming off branches to self-correct (or something like that? I'm not a power grid expert someone correct me) and you basically have chaos.
So you don't need to get individuals to care about it, and there's some argument to be made that they shouldn't, or at least shouldn't have to. But the power company damn well should, and governments damn well should.
https://snowpatch.org/posts/i-can-completely-control-your-sm...
EDIT: the major issue here is the people who are affected by a vulnerability like that aren't the people who purchased and installed the attack vector. They're everyone on the same power distribution network. So it's not like "oh well, they did a dumb thing and trusted a tech company" it's far bigger than that.
by jcgrillo
2/23/2026 at 8:16:33 AM
I already have homeassistant configured for that. Why would I want a shitty vendor-provided version of it in the cloud?by swiftcoder
2/23/2026 at 12:44:38 PM
In that case you would just simply not buy their box and hook up the device to yours. That's the beauty of open interfaces.by jcgrillo
2/23/2026 at 11:44:20 PM
Quite ironically, they do install a unique TLS cert and key on each thermostat, although it's done on first-wifi-connection of each thermostat, rather than pre-installed at the factory.And then the thermostat uses those keys to mutually authenticate itself with the MQTT server. It actually makes it quite tedious (not impossible :-D) to 2-way-MITM the device's connection to the server.
It's just that, as @Aurornis wrote, the MQTT server itself did not have any checks to prevent sending and receiving messages to other owners' thermostats. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[ I've actually discovered a whole lot more details about the Mysa thermostats than what I published. Many of them can be used to subvert and reconfigure the devices in interesting ways, but only with a witting/willing device owner who has local access. So I don't feel any obligation to disclose them, although I might eventually get around to building a de-cloud-ifying tool using them: https://github.com/dlenski/mysotherm/blob/main/README.md#fut... ]
by dlenski
2/22/2026 at 5:24:28 PM
I think it's about being a configuration management nightmare. If every device has a unique password, you need the decoder ring for serial number to password. However, not all processors have unique IDs. So you either need to find a way to reliably serialize each board during manufacturing and hope it stays (like a sticker/laser/printer/etc) or add a serial number chip which is cost and complexity. It's not impossible, it's just extra work that usually goes unrewarded.by Neywiny
2/22/2026 at 5:28:06 PM
I'm a long way from embedded development. But I was under the impression a lot of microcontrollers these days have some ID capability built in, even some relatively low-end ones. This strikes me more as laziness than anything.by HFguy
2/22/2026 at 6:13:02 PM
This is true, for example many stm32 series have a 96 bit unique id which is derived from the lot number, wafer id and position [1]. Even the low cost stm32g0b1 series I am using has them, but they are missing from some older series.[1] https://community.st.com/t5/stm32-mcus/how-to-obtain-and-use...
by peterus
2/22/2026 at 7:03:48 PM
Moreover, on any device that is connected to Internet you already have a unique MAC address on its Ethernet or WiFi interface.You can hash this unique MAC address, together with other data that may be shared with the other devices of the same kind, to generate unique keys or other kinds of credentials.
by adrian_b
2/22/2026 at 6:36:52 PM
Surprisingly it's not everywhere. I'm very in embedded development and cannot count the amount of time I look for "unique" "id" etc in a reference manual and come up short. It's certainly more common than not, but you often have to design systems for the lowest common denominator.by Neywiny
2/22/2026 at 7:08:44 PM
> It's not impossible, it's just extra work that usually goes unrewarded.That sounds like profit motivated negligence, and it sounds like a standard justification for why Europe is going to hold companies liable.
by NegativeK
2/22/2026 at 7:26:54 PM
It is indeed. And that sucks but that's what it is. Product design is about calculated risks and trades. It's a good thing regulators are here to help because companies won't do it on their own and the general public doesn't care enough.by Neywiny
2/22/2026 at 10:07:33 PM
We will all owe the EU a massive debt of gratitude. Hopefully USB C was just the tip of the iceberg.by jcgrillo
2/22/2026 at 5:46:55 PM
I have not knowledge of this kind of software dev/hw production, so can you please explain why the units cant just be born with a default pass and then have the setup process (which is always there) Force the owner to set a new password?Knowledge or not, this..
> It's not impossible, it's just extra work that usually goes unrewarded.
.. is just not an acceptable way for business to think and operate i 2026, especially not when it comes to internet connected video enabled devices
by Msurrow
2/22/2026 at 6:41:20 PM
I'll answer your question with a question: how often do you see people complaining about needing setup processes vs the old way of just plug and play? There's no perfect answer that placates all sides. Things can certainly be better, but when those people win and you no longer need to have a setup process, then what?While true that in $current_year it would be nice if things were more secure, the sad truth is that most people don't care.
by Neywiny
2/22/2026 at 7:52:25 PM
I agree that yes most just want PnP and basically don’t care about security. But it seemed on the posts above that there was an engineering complexity, and a robot vaccum needs local WiFi, so there will be a setup flow. Whats preventing a password selection just be part of that?by Msurrow
2/23/2026 at 4:18:44 AM
> a robot vaccum needs local WiFiNo, it doesn't. Unless it's supposed to spy on you (or "harvest training data") there's no reason it needs to phone home at all (c.f. Roombas).
by MarkusQ
2/23/2026 at 4:51:32 PM
Well it needs to talk to either a web frontend (internet) or app (bluetooth or wifi). If you're worried about it spying, well, the app could always relay data for it.Anyway regardless of wifi, bluetooth, or something else there will be a setup process.
by fc417fc802
2/23/2026 at 11:22:13 PM
You're begging the question. Why does it need to talk to a web front end or app? Why does any appliance need this? (I know they all claim to need it, but it isn't at all clear why this (supposedly) needs to be the case.)For that matter, I'm unclear why there needs to be a setup process. I understand that this may be key to the vendor's business model, but that's their need, not something the products needs, and certainly nothing I need.
by MarkusQ
2/23/2026 at 11:46:25 PM
I'm not begging the question although I am implicitly assuming that the vast majority of consumers will want to control a robot vacuum via their phone. I suppose including a touchscreen on the unit itself is not entirely unreasonable but I expect that would be an uphill battle for various disparate reasons (expense, durability, and ease of use at minimum).Once you introduce control via phone the most straightforward approach is either wifi or bluetooth which requires a setup process.
by fc417fc802
2/22/2026 at 6:17:45 PM
I am shocked really, i think this is actual law in China.by thenthenthen
2/22/2026 at 6:11:36 PM
This is just people working 24/7 for 50 dollars a month? Because we want cheap shitby thenthenthen
2/23/2026 at 12:57:42 PM
One thing people don't realize with regard to smart thermometers is that they're a goldmine to people who break into houses.A 51 straight weeks of 70 degree temperate followed by a week > 70 might imply they're on vacation. People who turn down the heat/ac and turn it back on when they come home from work is also a pattern pretty apparent by that info.
by mexicocitinluez
2/23/2026 at 1:35:23 PM
Couldn't they get that information by pointing a thermal camera at the house? Most windows and doors would leak enough to show this information.Or they could watch the air conditioner fans to know if it's on.
by fullstop
2/23/2026 at 1:46:37 PM
Not having to go the house for that specific info and being able to create a shortlist of houses beforehand would be preferable I would think.by sillyfluke
2/23/2026 at 1:50:24 PM
You would need an army of thieves going around and physically pointing thermometers and the ROI isn't there.VS. just checking your computer once and going to the correct place. Heck, set up alerts and get notified where to break in next.
by tharkun__
2/23/2026 at 2:39:54 PM
The odds of a house with a smart thermostat also containing cameras is pretty high, though.by fullstop
2/23/2026 at 3:24:28 PM
This is probably true, though I think the most important part of planning a break in is just ensuring people aren't there.Sure, there are cameras and the cops can respond and that's certainly a deterrent, but a few masks and a quick getaway renders them moot.
by mexicocitinluez
2/23/2026 at 2:57:06 PM
Instead of going around pointing thermal cameras they simply have a dashbord, by neighborhoods, property taxes, maybe even incomes and all that.by tartoran
2/23/2026 at 3:07:11 PM
> A 51 straight weeks of 70 degree temperate followed by a week > 70 might imply they're on vacation. People who turn down the heat/ac and turn it back on when they come home from work is also a pattern pretty apparent by that info.Yes, exactly. I made this point in my write-up: if you can a home's thermostats, you can probably figure out when people are away. https://snowpatch.org/posts/i-can-completely-control-your-sm...
by dlenski
2/23/2026 at 10:25:35 AM
[dead]by science_casual