Mainstream tech advice treats cheap Wi-Fi smart plugs as harmless convenience, totally glossing over how much telemetry leaks out to overseas cloud servers by default.
Expecting casual users to set up VLANs and firewall drop rules just to stop a £10 light bulb from phoning home is a bit of a joke.
True privacy means local control without corporate middlemen.
Original content by The Unknown Universe, written by a human and not AI generated!
Some well-trained bootlickers showing up here.
When you blame exploited users for “volunteering to get exploited”, you’re doing free PR for the exploiters.
My smart plugs were carefully chosen so that I could immediately flash them with ESPHome, but that’s because I am not normal. It shouldn’t have to be that way.
What brand/model do you use?
Sonoff S31 (and I think this might have been the guide I used to flash them), but I think they’ve been discontinued and the replacement model might be more locked-down.
That was the same guide I used! Bought like 20 of these plugs to integrate with HomeAssistant and espHome, added bonus was the energy monitoring.
I’ve got eight of them and am not using them all, but sometimes I worry I should’ve gotten more when I had the chance, just in case.
I miss the '90s, when you could count on new tech to get better instead of worse.
the answer is Yes we are.
It’s funny how this refutes Betteridge’s law of headlines
Well I have one room where my budgies roam free. I use Airam programmable GU10 RGB lights to simulate day cycle. It’s the only thing that’s “calling home”. Been too lazy to build a local solution. Everything else is run by ESP32 chips and bunch of raspberrys
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I have people in myblife who say ice already sold out to Google might as well continue using them. I don’t fight them they can do what they want.
Casual users don’t need to setup vlans, because they simply don’t care.
There is no point hand-wringing about this, they don’t care, they don’t need our help for this.
