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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

#131

Post by weberc2 »

aequitas wrote: post #103
weberc2 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> any existing SBCs will need to be replaced/extended to support new type of network and due to bloated protocol specs with a myriad of abstraction levels will render it almost impossible to implement it on your own and the open source library that can do that will implement the standard as specified whereas all proprietary solutions will have some quirks and little differences from official standard making it very h…

BT v1 to v3 maybe, but BTLE/v4 solved a lot of the problems afaik.

You're probably right. It's been a while since I had the misfortune of working with BT.

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

#132

Post by rgovostes »

sjwright wrote: post #88
ArmandGrillet wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trivia: I had never seen this Apple logo used before, looks like the name of the company using a San Francisco font. I wonder if it's official or just a workaround due to the fact that all the other logos have names and not just an icon like the standard Apple logo.

Apple doesn’t tend to hand out their logo for industry groups and open source projects. That’s fine, it’s their support that matters. And it’s not like their name lacks brand recognition! Here’s another example; same idea, different font: https://aomedia.org/membership/members/

They have been a principal organizer and sponsor of the LLVM Developers Meeting for years and even then they did not use their own logo.

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

#133

Post by baybal2 »

jdsnape wrote: post #60
aequitas wrote: post #20

> The goal of the Connected Home over IP project is to simplify development for manufacturers... > The industry working group will take an open-source approach for the development and implementation of a new, unified connectivity protocol and increase compatibility for consumers. Curious if I as a hobbyist will benefit from this? Or if this will become a: it works perfectly, but only if all your devices connect to ou…

Apple's existing standard (HomeKit) is relatively 'open' - the specification is published, and several open source implementations exist. I've used the Python one to implement automation on the smart-home devices I've built myself. However, you do need to be certified to distribute a product otherwise you get a warning in the app when you add the device. This seems like a fair compromise to me.

FYI: Homekit requires you to by a DRM chip from Apple to basically do a hanshake with Iphone and nothing else.

Not a good idea with OEMs, and that's why I believe they gave up the white flag now: no adoption.

They are either jump on the smart home bandwagon now, or never.

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

#134

Post by mattferderer »

Angostura wrote: post #107
chasd00 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what do people mean when they say security for smart home devices? if the "launch ICBM" port is open on a device on your LAN doesn't an attacker still have to traverse your router to get to it? Otherwise, an attacker would have to get access to your LAN. Is something like that what you mean?

People would prefer 1. Their lightbulbs to not be co-opted into DDoS attacks 2. That their cameras are only used by them 3. That others can't control their devices 4. That their devices receive security updates 5. That their devices don't contain back-doors 6. That their devices can be used when isolated from the Internet ... I imagine.

Well said

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

#135

Post by themagician »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #128

What we really need is a legislation for those devices, that force all manufacturer to: - have a hardware switch for everything - have 2 microphones. One is always on, and only listens to the keyword, and is not linked to the rest of the device. If it detects the keyword, it triggers a hardware switch that activate the second microphone. - text recognition is done from a local unit, not a remote server. This local un…

We don’t need that.

You’re right that technology isn’t going to save us though. You can just, you know, not use Alexa. Normal light switches continue to work. Windows still exist for checking the local weather and are probably more reliable than Alexa is.

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

#136

Post by rgovostes »

Strategically this works out best for Apple whose HomeKit seems to have the fewest compatible products. Everything seems to integrate with Alexa, even a microwave that can order popcorn. I wonder what Amazon and Google gain from this, though.

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

#137

Post by snops »

H1Supreme wrote: post #17

Why not openthread? It's already there, it's open source, and from my somewhat limited experience, works well.

The licensing is a bit poor. While openthread is open source, and the spec is public: > "Membership in Thread Group is necessary to implement, practice, and ship Thread technology and Thread Group specifications."[1]. This seems to be a similar limitation to what prevents Zigbee from being in the Linux kernel, as commented elsewhere[2] in this thread.

In contrast, the Bluetooth SIG only requires a fee to be paid when you actually ship, as a once off not a yearly fee. The cost is roughly similar.

[1] https://www.threadgroup.org/ThreadSpec [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21825822

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

#138

Post by rsync »

We are building a new house right now.

All subcontractors know the rules - no "smart" devices or "wifi enabled" appliances or mechanicals. All lightswitches are plain-old hi-voltage only switches. Thermostats are dumb, unprogrammable, with no memory or scheduling or timing. The locks on the doors use physical keys.

The smartest thing we have are the sonos speakers and we pug those in with ethernet.

Everyone will be pleasantly surprised when they interact with our house. This is what luxury will come to look like as time goes on ...

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

#139

Post by mattferderer »

mr__y wrote: post #81
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.…

Even if the hub was actually secure this still does not prevent from someone near to your house to talk to the devices directly (this applies especially to wireless devices). The hub you described would prevent from the remote attacks only

Security is a never ending rabbit hole. I am more concerned about the bigger threat, global attacks.

I get if you live in a densely populated area that drive-by type attacks would be very concerning.

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

#140

Post by eunoia »

baybal2 wrote: post #133
jdsnape wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's existing standard (HomeKit) is relatively 'open' - the specification is published, and several open source implementations exist. I've used the Python one to implement automation on the smart-home devices I've built myself. However, you do need to be certified to distribute a product otherwise you get a warning in the app when you add the device. This seems like a fair compromise to me.

FYI: Homekit requires you to by a DRM chip from Apple to basically do a hanshake with Iphone and nothing else. Not a good idea with OEMs, and that's why I believe they gave up the white flag now: no adoption. They are either jump on the smart home bandwagon now, or never.

It was a hardware auth chip, not DRM and it hasn’t been required for 2 years now. Software auth went live in iOS 11.3. Apple doesn’t encourage the chip anymore and AFAIK no one uses it (except legacy devices obviously). Software auth rules the day.
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