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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

#171

Post by mackey »

aequitas wrote: post #116
jdsnape wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 manufa…

At least for HomeKit, manufacturers have no choice but to support local network access to get certified. This has cause issues, especially with Cameras since HomeKit requires that camera streams not go through the cloud first.

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

#172

Post by ogre_codes »

They talk about this being secure by default, but the standard will only ensure the communications is secure. This won't fix the bigger issues with IoT devices which is that many are built on crappy/ insecure software stacks. If your wifi video camera gets hacked, it doesn't matter if it's using https to communicate securely with your phone or cloud storage provider.

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

#173

Post by mackey »

baybal2 wrote: post #167
eunoia wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well too late now, the boat has sailed. Most OEMs chose APP + own protocol approach

I think most major HA hardware providers support Homekit at this point, with the exception of ones that don't because of competitive reasons (Nest, maybe Ring, etc) or because of strict certification requirements (like camera streams being local, $$$).

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

#174

Post by marcosdumay »

armagon wrote: post #91
czbond wrote: post #71

Can anyone recommend a method* without Wifi? Isn't there a method for "smart outlets", main scheduler, etc over electrical lines rather than bluetooth, wifi, etc? Method* == standard, or product line. [yes i used pointer and equality symbols oddly] Edit: basically looking for a way to avoid more wireless transmitters in the house. Or are all outlets "receive only"?

The previous generation of smart home devices was called X10, and it used signals over power lines. I gather it was: - slow - might have required you to make a connection in your circuit breaker - and was designed in the 1970s, when home electrical systems weren't very noisy (apparently all the switching power adapters we have today make a ton of noise and make it hard for the signal). I don't see why something newer…

> - slow

Yep, that's inherent.

> - might have required you to make a connection in your circuit breaker

That's one way to do it. Another way just requires a bypass and filter at your circuit breaker what is much simpler and doesn't have to connect anywhere else.

> - and was designed in the 1970s, when home electrical systems weren't very noisy

This is where things got worse, and then they got better. Yes, electrical lines are very noisy, but the 200Hz - 100kHz band is only getting cleaner. Electric motors will interfere with it, so you may need a filter on your blender (but even it is much better now), but this is the prime band for electrical wiring.

Also, on chasd00 comment that it requires capacitors bypasses on transformers, that's only true on the higher bands, and only on devices you want connected to the network. So only the smart devices need to adapt.

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

#175

Post by moduspol »

oflannabhra wrote: post #119
jes5199 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep. And it's Apple that's pushing for a HomeKit router [1].

Reading between the lines of how Apple's been handling the "smart home" business, they've been focusing on privacy and security relative to competitors, but it's been holding them back.

I think the market has kind of shown that privacy (e.g. devices that aren't streaming to / dependent on the cloud) and security have not been primary concerns of the people who buy smart home devices, but solving those problems better may be key to enlarging the "smart home" market to include normal people.

[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3446197/why-we-need-ap...

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

#176

Post by zackmorris »

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…

Another thing I'd like to see is a distributed shared state standard (not just for IoT):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_shared_memory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_transactional_memory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_algorithm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_(computer_science)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table

The current trend of using async logic via message passing to maintain state is extremely error-prone and I personally consider it nondeterministic if it uses timeouts (which is pretty much the entire internet currently).

A much better system works more like Firebase, where clients can subscribe to change events but also have access to a single tree that holds the latest agreed-upon state. I'd recommend something like a distributed hash table (DHT) so that the entire state doesn't have to be downloaded by each client. The state itself should probably be binary JSON to start with, but the standard should be loose and allow for XML or anything else. This would take us to something more UNIX-like, where devices can be thought of as processes interacting via a single shared memory, and abstract away the tedious/brittle/insecure interconnect layer. It should also support unreliable message passing like UDP for realtime support, which is required for simulations and gaming (there is a higher than 50% risk of the protocol omitting this or getting it wrong).

After writing this out, I just realized that what I really want is an Actor model for IoT, where each device is completely isolated but communicates over channels like Elixir/Erlang or Go. I've come to reject both async and concurrent shared mutable memory because they each have major drawbacks. But I think that synchronous functional programming with primarily immutable variables and no shared mutable memory, building up a last known-good state inspectable by anyone with privileges is the future. The state could/should have something like an access control lists (ACL) and/or a permissions system. Ideally this should be hierarchical just like Firebase, and probably use a similar rule-based logic, to facilitate assigning roles to each client.

It's trivial to demonstrate that once you have this, you can build any other seemingly complex abstraction above it like a database or game server. We have been missing this abstraction for several decades so we keep witnessing company after company reinvent the wheel. As far as I know, the only attempt to do this is RethinkDB:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RethinkDB

Unfortunately, I'm not sure if it's still supported:

https://rethinkdb.com/blog/rethinkdb-shutdown/

https://lwn.net/Articles/713716/

As usual, I would gladly work on a project like this, but there is currently no funding mechanism to support foundational open source projects like this with market-rate pay.

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

#177

Post by baybal2 »

exikyut wrote: post #158
kbumsik wrote: post #112

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…

Well, it also talks about using Thread, which I just learned has the same "must be a member of blahblahblah" restrictions ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_(network_protocol) ).

It reminds me of the old "FireWire vs USB."

Firewire was an originally open standard, but there came Apple and demanded to exact a symbolic 1$ per device payment.

Despite FireWire being an indisputably better standard from technical standpoint, that 1$ completely ruined the mood with OEMs, and they lost the market.

USB on the other hand, was not really open, but Intel's central leadership in it guaranteed that there were no disarray with association peers throwing random capricious demands.

Most USB implementers were random Taiwanese OEMs who never formally joined the USB-IF, but nevertheless Intel was smart enough to close eyes on that.

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

#178

Post by pen2l »

FussyZeus wrote: post #77
baybal2 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe me, they will it will never find adoption. How to say, they are free to make whatever standards, but they will not matter much if nobody will use them. Their entire ecosystem together have less devices shipped than even some OEM nonames, not to say of Xiaomi or Huawei or Tuya who tower over them. All kinds of "smart assistants" like Alexa end up in drawers very quickly after initial novelty passes, and it cre…

Can confirm. My alexa went in the drawer after she was offering to call the crisis line for me during a spirited session of gaming. I genuinely think the Amazon team (at least in that particular regard) want to do some good. But until they can teach their machines how to understand context, I just don't want my unfiltered conversations going around potentially to medical institutions or law enforcement.

> Can confirm. My alexa went in the drawer after she was offering to call the crisis line for me during a spirited session of gaming.

Wait, what? Please explain more.

It feels like you're saying Alexa heard you being ... passionate, and got concerned. But my understanding was that Alexa listens only after the trigger word. I'm really confused by what you've said and wish to know more context.

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

#179

Post by smhinsey »

ludamad wrote: post #83
FussyZeus wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm. My alexa went in the drawer after she was offering to call the crisis line for me during a spirited session of gaming. I genuinely think the Amazon team (at least in that particular regard) want to do some good. But until they can teach their machines how to understand context, I just don't want my unfiltered conversations going around potentially to medical institutions or law enforcement.

Has anyone found Alexa way too easy to trigger? As someone who frequently talks about people with a similar name, I'm amazed at how often Alexa chimes in. I think 'OK Google' is at a sweet spot (although my parents for ages were convinced 'hi google' would work if they tried enough :)

"Hey Google" is a valid trigger for some versions of the assistant, so they weren't that far off and may have seen that in action before.

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

#180

Post by ak217 »

JediWing wrote: post #159
ak217 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people who expect Home Assistant to be useful to the general consumer are delusional. Home Assistant is an amateur piece of software with severe UX shortcomings and broken auto-update functionality (it phones home continuously and often bricks itself after auto-updates). I appreciate the enthusiasm in the home automation community, and I agree there's a need for an offline solution, but Home Assistant is not…

You're focusing too much on the home assistant part, and not enough on the local control part. There are solutions with hubs such as some parts of the Wink hub that do work locally without internet. I'm sure there are professional-grade installers who install various pieces of software that use Z-Wave and/or Zigbee to setup a locally controlled home automation solution. Needing connected to the internet (and all the…

Sorry if I wasn't clear. I agree with you that local-only solutions are needed. Home Assistant is sucking up too much of the air in the room. I don't think it will ever be accessible or usable to the general population. If not for Home Assistant, I think the community would have developed better local-only solutions by now.
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