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0 pointslvh2y ago0 comments

That helps, but a remote integration doesn't _have_ to be hostile. I get that it's different from IoT, and most of my stuff is local Zigbee after learning the hard way, but my Home Assistant also talks to the Norwegian meteorological institute and Tailscale :)

One reason this is tricky to do is because up until let's say the last 6 months or so, myQ _wasn't_ hostile, even if it was Cloud-based. (I get that that aligns with your point! I'm not arguing with you there.)

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egberts12y ago

All remote are more potentially hostile than any local will ever be.

justin_oaks2y ago

And the company doesn't even have to be actively hostile for remote to be risky.

The company could go out of business and shut down their servers. Or shut down the servers because they're no longer selling the product.

Sometimes incompetence is as bad or worse than malice. The company could break an API accidentally. Or the API only works intermittently. Or they could add poorly-implemented rate limiting that unintentionally affects multiple users when they share an IP via NAT.

egberts12y ago

Or worse, someone else spins up a server in its place.

rjmunro2y ago

And a local integration can be hostile if it's not publicly documented and they can update it / make it go away with an over the air update.

What matters is that they provide proper documentation for their APIs, encourage devs to use them, and don't have a history of breaking old clients with new firmware updates (without very good security reasons).

lawn2y ago

Yes, but some can't be local. For instance an integration that scrapes news from a website.

TeMPOraL2y ago

Sure it can be local - in the sense that all control and scrapping lives on your machine.

But in general, OK - some things are better done via an on-line service. But it's the minority of cases - almost none of IoT devices have a legitimate reason to route control and diagnostics through the cloud.

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0 pointslvh2y ago0 comments

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egberts12y ago

All remote are more potentially hostile than any local will ever be.

justin_oaks2y ago

And the company doesn't even have to be actively hostile for remote to be risky.

The company could go out of business and shut down their servers. Or shut down the servers because they're no longer selling the product.

egberts12y ago

Or worse, someone else spins up a server in its place.

rjmunro2y ago

And a local integration can be hostile if it's not publicly documented and they can update it / make it go away with an over the air update.

lawn2y ago

Yes, but some can't be local. For instance an integration that scrapes news from a website.

TeMPOraL2y ago

Sure it can be local - in the sense that all control and scrapping lives on your machine.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse