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Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

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Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#111

Post by ViViDboarder »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #11
StavrosK wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason I can say my smarthome is relatively secure is because I don't allow any of the devices to access the internet. IP or not seems irrelevant.

The high level of sophistication of IP networking and the fact that one small mistake could mean your devices access the Internet is why a network that doesn't talk IP is almost inherently safer than one that does.

There is a great point here you haven’t made yet.

It may seem trivial for those of us on HN to block IP devices from the internet, but the average user will not know how to do that effectively. They are also the ones who’s devices probably remain on a botnet undetected by their owners.

That said, most hubs (required for these types of devices) connect to the internet by default anyway. It does reduce risk a bit as vulnerability in a node isn’t exploitable remotely.

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#112

Post by kbumsik »

For someone who thinks Zigbee already is an open standard, well, it is NOT really open though. A standard being publicity available does not always make it open-source friendly.

Linux considers it a proprietary protocol [1] so Zigbee driver cannot be part of Linux kernel. Although Zigbee spec allows non-commercial individuals to freely use it, a commercial organization must be a member of the Zigbee Alliance in order to use Zigbee, which violates the GPL standard. [2]

At least the article speaks out "an open-source approach", let's see if things will get better.

[1]: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/networking/ieee802154...

[2]: https://archive.freaklabs.org/index.php/blog/zigbee/zigbee-l...

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#113

Post by andrewksl »

lgleason wrote: post #51

Zigbee is already an open standard, but some Zigbee devices don't work with others. Yet, with Z-Wave they all tend to work and there isn't that much of a price difference (between Zigbee and Z-Wave devices). The biggest problem with Zigbee is that is uses 2.4 GHZ which doesn't travel long distances or through walls very well. Z-Wave uses a lower frequency that does. (edited for clarity)

I have about 20 Z-Wave switches in my home, spread across 4 models and 2 brands. There were noticeable differences in response time, both from the physical button and over Z-Wave, when comparing brands. And even the most reliable brand for me (Aeotec) has had issues with the network being a little laggy. That's still a success in my books, though; I have bought Z-Wave devices that do not play nicely at all.

On the other hand, my Philips Hue lights have all been absolutely flawless. They fire on time, every time.

I think implementation of the standards matters a lot more than the standard itself, in practice.

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#114

Post by chasd00 »

cek wrote: post #49

Smart home is the poster child for "The good thing about standards is there are so many to choose from." Randall gets it [1]. [1] https://xkcd.com/927/

i wish the harder i pressed the trackpad the more votes you would get. I remember smart home standards being talked about and published around 1999. Like another poster mentioned, X10 was a big thing around then even though it came out in the 70s.

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#115

Post by oflannabhra »

m-p-3 wrote: post #63

> The project is built around a shared belief that smart home devices should be secure, reliable, and seamless to use. By building upon Internet Protocol (IP), the project aims to enable communication across smart home devices, mobile apps, and cloud services and to define a specific set of IP-based networking technologies for device certification. Yet I don't see any mention of making those being able to work comple…

I'm not sure what you are expecting here. CHoIP would define messaging that certified products must implement, meaning that an Amazon device and an Apple device would send the same message to a Phillips light to turn it on, and that message would be carried over IP.

The messaging would be agnostic of where the source is. It could be a device in the local network, or it could be a cloud-based service (assuming you open up your network).

HomeKit, for example, works locally, either over BLE or WiFi.

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#116

Post by aequitas »

jdsnape wrote: post #80
aequitas wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems fair indeed. I did a quick search and HomeKit seems to work without an internet connection (on lan at least, not remote), what's your experience with that?

Yeah, it works completely locally on the lan - there's a MDNS discovery and then pairing process between devices and the phone. You can access stuff remotely if you have an Apple device which is paired to the homekit stuff and connected to the internet (e.g. an Apple TV, we use an iPad which is always at home). I've deliberately designed my system to work offline as while our connection's pretty reliable I don't see…

> I don't see why I should need an internet connection to turn on a light!

I hope manufacturers see it the same way.

I don't mind devices having to be certified, I mostly want to buy hardware of the shelve anyways for safety and convenience reasons and build the controlling/automation part myself. So my biggest worries are not having a local API, data exposure and having to invest in a ecosystem and having the manufacturer brick it remotely, wasting my money.

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#117

Post by shadowgovt »

If they actually pull it off, it'd be huge. The single greatest thing holding back home automation is a lack of compatible standards (coupled with the fact that when an automation company dies, its proprietary standards die with it).

I used Z-wave for my home, but I'm not doing it "on the up and up;" my hub is homebrewed and using an unlicensed radio. It's a pain in the ass to maintain, but since I can't trust any hub company to survive past five years, it seemed the right call.

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#118

Post by mr__y »

armagon wrote: post #85
mr__y wrote: post #72

It would be nice if such standard supported Publisher-Subscriber style of messaging. For example alarm could subscribe to events from motion sensors and security cams (a camera in addition to providing a stream could push events like motion detection) or heating controller could subscribe to temperature change events. To make security of that realistic this would need some form of ACL, probably centrally[0] controlle…

I expect that MQTT is that standard. ( http://mqtt.org/ ) I have just been playing around with IoT devices and was just trying to set it up.

Thanks, it looks really interesting and seems to do what I just described. The thing it lacks though is - in my opinion - RPC-style messages. For example an alarm controller could subscribe to motion events, but when such an event occur it should be able to turn on sound-device immediately or shut some locks. The one-to-one communication as described here: https://github.com/mqtt/mqtt.github.io/wiki/one_to_one seems more like a hack than a proper solution.

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#119

Post by oflannabhra »

jes5199 wrote: post #92
mattferderer wrote: post #62

I hope security is at the top of their list. I want a super secure hub that everything connects to. The hub is the only thing that speaks to my router. The hub is super secure & doesn't let devices send data back to their manufacturer. If I buy cheap devices off a flea market like Amazon, I want to sleep safe & know that the hub is preventing that device from messing with any other devices or accessing the internet.…

Apple, Amazon, and Google are fundamentally opposed to a model that sells devices that don’t phone home - their whole purpose is to capture value by creating lock-in for surveillable hosted services

This is not exactly the case for HomeKit. Apple didn't even add the ability to control devices when you are off your home network until recently.

Re: Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

#120

Post by JediWing »

As someone who is perfectly happy with Home Assistant and Z-Wave, I worry that a bunch of mega corps getting together to create a standard will crowd out the market, and prevent non-local, privacy-honoring options from continuing to be manufactured.

If average consumers are told to simply "look for the CHIP logo", and the CHIP standard includes facilities for must-phone-home messages akin to streaming DRM, I'm afraid we'll just get pulled further into the corporate surveillance dystopia.

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