Ah yes to make your lights work, we need all your data. Stuff like this is why I don't have "smart" anything.
It’s perfectly possible to have a smart home that does not call home. Home Assistant is an amazing piece of software that can allow smart devices from different manufacturers talk to each other without connecting to a cloud service — all done locally.
This is the only way I would go about it. Maybe in the future if I really want it but really, the more tech, the more vulnerabilities. I'm fine with manually turning things on and off even if it's self hosted.
Put home assistant on a raspberry pi, plug a Zigbee dongle to it, and start connecting smart gadgets to it. Or better yet buy a home assistant Green. You can check the home assistant docs to see if a smart device requires cloud connectivity to work — in general if it connects through Zigbee (or ZWave or Matter) then you’re good, but if it connects through WiFi then it probably is cloud based.
Can confirm. I run Home Assistant and Rhasspy with Sengled bulbs and none of transmits info. The devices themselves aren't generally the issue, it's the hub that operates them that would be collecting and sending the info. Remove that, and you don't have to worry.
wow so Rhasspy is local voice assistant! do you have microphones places throughout your pad or do you go to a website first to speak or what?
You can use microphones wherever with HA and Rhasspy. Rhasspy is just the local voice and intent recognition portion, and HA executes the commands. This means you can have one Rpi in your place managing devices, and then have many different microphone-attached Rpi all over your house forwarding voice recognition intents to do whatever you want it to do. Whatever the mic is attached to will send to the HA instance and tell it what to do. No cloud.
Why do I need a RaspberryPi? I can't use my regular Linux PC? What is a Zigbee dongle and why is it mandatory? What do I do if he device is cloud based?
You can use your regular PC if you want, but having an always-on server (the pi) makes it more convenient to use from, say, your phone.
Zigbee is a popular wireless communication protocol used by iot devices. Without the dongle you won't have any way to talk to them.
If it's cloud based, buy something else that isn't.
Your Zigbee light switches won’t do anything unless the machine running Home Assistant is on. Being able to control your lights while the computer isn’t running is really convenient.
Perfectly valid to ask how to protect your data using the tools the other user mentioned. Not sure why you were downvoted for asking simply how.
Sure! Click the link at the very top of the page! You know, what this entire conversation is theoretically talking about? It takes you to a Home Assistant page and even has some details on their philosophy and links to even more details about their privacy focused philosophy! I thought saying essentially "read the fucking article" would be pretty asshole-ish and wouldn't contribute anything to the conversation, but I also thought that your question contributed nothing, so I downvoted.
Did that answer your question sufficiently?
Yikes... I read the fucking article, and it explained nothing. I read your comment and understand why you down voted. There you go, @b3an it seems that @tjhart85 simply has a stick up their ass
You can have plenty of smart home stuff without this junk using stuff like home assistant and keeping devices like this from phoning home. Some products won't work at all without an internet connection but plenty still do.
Edit: If this is actionable, I would be interested in participating in a class action suit against Philips for materially altering a product’s functionality after purchase. This is like buying a normal car and being told a year later it was given a remote update and now can only use Ford (tm) brand gasoline which costs $10/gallon.
If you do have an existing investment in Hue products, I suggest reaching out to them to request a refund because your purchase was made under a different policy, and this policy change is going to render your products useless without consent on your part. If they’re going to force a significant change that compromises the functionality of what might be hundreds of dollars worth of equipment without permitting recourse for legacy users, they should have to accept returns on what essentially is now a product you did not purchase and would not have purchased.
Or just get a ZigBee hub and keep using the bulbs without the Hue hub
Indeed I've never even installed the hue app, always assumed it was just a zigbee thing anyway. The hardware is just a basic zigbee bulb.
Mostly I've been moving to using the ikea ones though as they're much cheaper.
Any recommendations for a Zigbee hub to use with HomeAssistant? I'm planning to make the switch now that Hue is doing this
If you have home assistant, you don't need a zigbee hub, just a ZigBee USB stick. There's a whole bunch of them, I think they're all pretty similar, a few have Z-Wave also.
I'm 100% Z-Wave so I can't say personally what is the best stick to use... Just check the forums and whatnot.
hundreds of dollars worth of equipment
More like thousands, Hue is way overpriced
If someone does this let me know. Every bulb in my house is hue.
I started the email thread with them on Friday. So far I’ve only received canned messages like they told the HA folks.
Guess I can sell that Hue hub after I move my Hue devices over to my HA/Zigbee config — what wasn’t broke and didn’t need fixing… will now finally be fixed and finished.
After they make the change, someone with an old Hue bulb should go to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Making this decision retroactive is clearly false advertising and anti-consumer. I don't really give a shit what their terms of use were.
They can do what they want with their future bulbs. The old ones need to be grandfathered in.
IoT stuff isn't safe to use unless it's flashed with a third-party Free Software firmware like Tasmota or ESPHome.
I mean IKEA is fine.
It's entirely ZigBee, there's no internet.
But the green part of RGB only works if you're using their app
Edit: downvoter, please let me know what's bothering you about this?
From what I read, it's not a bug.
Many bulbs trade on the green LED for more variation in white. Red/Blue serve a function to make whites warmer or cooler, green has no such function.
And because most people use white, they ditched the green LED. That's why the green it has is more yellowish than you would expect.
It probably also means the bulb API has no dedicated green setting, which is why the remote and 3rd party apps don't have proper green settings.
It's a bit of speculation though, not entirely sure. Apparently older Hue bulbs also do this.
That's interesting. Funnily enough, we did try the one color GU10 we have today and this one does work perfectly.
Really? Huh.
I'm just using the PM2.5 and temperature sensors.
Unfortunately yeah. We've tried the E27 and green just didn't work. Thought it was broken and returned it, told them why. "Oh, you used the remote, right? It only works with the app, it's been like that for years and hasn't been fixed yet"
Oh so that's just a bug rather than a feature lock.
Im only using mine in home assistant that should act as an app anyway.
No, that's just the problem. We only use ours in home assistant as well and it didn't work. It's got to be the Ikea app.
Oh okay, I'll be sure to avoid then until they fix that.
ESPhome for the win! I have like 12 smart plugs with power monitoring flashed with ESPhome
I have 8! (They're literally the only smart home devices I have so far, although Home Assistant automatically detected my Roku and my printer.)
Thankfully, while I have a smart plug from them, I've made sure that it's a Zigbee powered one, meaning it's directly connected to my Home Assistant server over it's own frequency/protocol, no app required. Guess that choice is paying off now.
Also, someone should tell whoever is managing that Twitter support account that you should never use the phrase "We're sorry you feel that way", even when you're going for a non-apology.
Isn’t the “take it or leave it” approach to consent considered consent bundling? Didn’t google get fined for doing a similar thing?
Awesome timing, was about to add a whole lot of them to my new house, guess that ain’t happening
Any recommendations for what next? I'm in the same situation? I want to avoid WiFi lights - ZigBee, Zwave or Matter only
I’m adding the ones I have to home assistant, which is what I was planning all along. Maybe add some other brand smart lights, not sure yet which
Start leaving 1 star reviews in the app stores from Google and Apple complaining about this.
They read those because stakeholders who understands nothing about tech only care for more stars.
I'm definitely starting to find a way out of hue and freezing my plans to buy more bulbs from them.
I was forced to move (landlord sold house) and when I got to my new place, I just never got around to setting up any of my smart home devices. Thermostat, cameras, lights, assistants, sensors, monitors, etc, and weirdly enough I am somehow happier now.
The random issues, glitches, delays between asking an assistant/pressing buttons before an action went through, fixing integrations, fixing Home Assistant, fixing random unpairs, etc. was driving me nuts. Especially when you have invested hundreds/thousands of dollars into premium devices.
Worst was when you'd ask assistant to do something, and it somehow misheard you and does something else. Fried an aquarium thermometer that way. Turned on ALL lights when everyone was sleeping, despite me asking to turn OFF a very specific light..
The only thing I truly miss is being able to turn off my bedroom light when I am in bed. But the stress I save is worth getting up and turning it off.
Huh, sounds like a very unreliable setup. Admittedly mine is much simpler and I refuse to use voice control for anything at all, but I experience zero glitches with my Shelly switches and HA integration.
Put a lamp on your nightstand, it's a fucking game changer. We have a ceiling fan with the main lights, but lamps on both nightstands. It rules, always within arm reach, light immediately if you need it, but much softer light than the main light, and not pointed into your eyes when you lay down.
The only thing I truly miss is being able to turn off my bedroom light when I am in bed. But the stress I save is worth getting up and turning it off.
It is possible to just install the one smart light, you know.
You can get remote controlles for lights and keep it on your bedside table
I'm reading this thread thinking "people are jumping through hoops just to do this stuff? Why?"
"because you can" evidently.
No wait, someone's going to come in and whinge about Seasonal Affected Disorder, circadian rhythms and blue light or some other shit, aren't they.
When it works, it's great. But no matter how much you spend, which brands you go with, how you have it set it, eventually something is going to fuck up, and you'll spend half your day fixing it all.
Fried an aquarium thermometer that way.
How did that happen?
Asked assistant to turn off basement light and instead it turned ON "10 gallon aquarium heater".
However it heard that, no idea.
My girlfriend was cleaning her tank, and the water level was below the heater. I was somewhere else in the house, and so she never noticed, and within 60 seconds the thing shattered from being turned on and not submerged.
Companies these days: “help us think of products we can sell to procure data. No, we don’t care what the product is; we just want the data.”
I often wonder are we in some sort of "data bubble"? all this obsession over collecting it but not actually providing stuff people will pay for surely has an endgame
I think the endgame is to speedrun getting filthy rich and buying up a chunk of the earth before it’s completely destroyed.
reason: "your data isnt secure in your home, we need to control it. trust us. "
uh huh.
5 months later: "We had a data breach, but we believe they didn't get all personal data"
They're light bulbs. What data can they possibly hold on the users beyond how bright they like their bulbs.
What times your lights are on or off can expose more than you might think over time. It reveals when you're gone for work, your sleep schedule, how many days a year you spend at home vs traveling/elsewhere, when you stay up late, etc.
But it gets worse. If you give Hue your email or install the app then now you can be uniquely id'd across other products. Hue will sell that data to some advertising agency, who also buys data from Google, Facebook, etc. Now your usage data from other systems can be combined with the Hue data and used to more even more accurately track your day and behaviors.
Big data is a fascinating field, if not completely horrifying.
Also when the keys are inevitably discovered on an unsecured S3 bucket, everyone will have it! In addition to your billing information and other PII.
In addition to what the other commenters have said: They don't just sell light bulbs but also motion sensors that can even measure temperature.
So they wouldn't just be able to tell which room you're in at any given time but may also be able to tell when and for how long you shower or how often you cook food in the kitchen based on slight temperature changes.
And if you wanna get really paranoid: Hue Sync analyzes what's on your screen and synchronizes lights accordingly. Who knows what is really going on there if they pull this kinda shit lol
It’s also not about what data they hold, but what data they have access to.
To you, it’s a light bulb, but internally, it’s a network-connected microcontroller, meaning it’s also connected to everything else in your network.
It theoretically could scan and exploit any number of security holes in other devices, including but not limited to phones and desktops.
Even if the manufacturer is ethical with it, other nefarious actors can use it as an attack point to try to gain deeper access. Some of these devices run a full Linux install internally, and if you know how, you can even get a shell session open on them.
This is immensely frustrating. Feels like a rug pull for anyone that cares about their data, privacy and (ironically) security.
Welp, their products are completely out of the running for our setup then.
and RIP to anyone who invested thousands into them. Those lights were NOT cheap.
Hopefully this spurs someone to go to the CFPB or something and sue. These companies need to stop pulling this retroactive change bullshit, like Unity, Wizards, ad now Hue.
Anyone have a good resource for connecting existing bulbs to zigbee and moving off the hue app?
I've been very happy with Home Assistant. There are zigbee USB sticks such as ConBee that work well with it, and home assistant runs on many different types of computers including Raspberry pi.
To start off, you'll want to have Home Assistant running on a local server or Raspberry Pi and a Zigbee USB dongle, like the Conbee II or SkyConnect. If you've never worked with Home Assistant, their Getting Started guide is pretty comprehensive.
I'll mention that there's also a whole bunch of other Zigbee gateways out there that work similar to the Hue Bridge, but these could all eventually share the same fate as Hue, if they aren't already forced to be online.
Cool.. I got a Phillips hue hub, but already have a Pi as well, Just never thought of using it this way. So I just need the Conbee II, and I should be able to make things work off the Pi. One less device to have plugged in.
Besides the stupid login stuff, I've noticed a lot of my stuff just isn't as reliable as it used to be. It seems Phillips is just enshittifying things generally.
Thanks for the links!
Lutron FTW
If I use Home Assistant for control and block the Hue hub from the internet, will things keep functioning as they are today?
I like how my stuff works and don't want them to mess me up.
I would make sure the firmware can't be updated. Uninstall the Hue app for sure.
To be safe long-term I would probably suggest to throw away the Hue hub entirely and get a Zigbee USB dongle for your Home Assistant server.
Personally I've had no issues with the ConBee II. Home Assistant also released their own dongle earlier this year, called SkyConnect, which I've heard is pretty good as well.
(This is assuming that all Hue devices are based on ZigBee, which I believe they all are, based on this useful database.)
That's likely the path that I'll end up taking. Everything hue related that I have is Zigbee.
Home assistant should shield me from this right?
Huehuehue
Hue stuff sucks anyway. If you own a home or rent and have access to your breaker box, Lutron Caseta is a much better option.
Please note in many places it's very illegal to do electrical work for yourself
Where is it illegal for someone to change a light switch?
Australia for one
Interesting. TIL
Man fuck this. I use my lights in sync with my Philips tv when I watch movies so I can't even switch to a zigbee thing or anything.
Ah yes to make your lights work, we need all your data. Stuff like this is why I don't have "smart" anything.
It’s perfectly possible to have a smart home that does not call home. Home Assistant is an amazing piece of software that can allow smart devices from different manufacturers talk to each other without connecting to a cloud service — all done locally.
This is the only way I would go about it. Maybe in the future if I really want it but really, the more tech, the more vulnerabilities. I'm fine with manually turning things on and off even if it's self hosted.
How
Put home assistant on a raspberry pi, plug a Zigbee dongle to it, and start connecting smart gadgets to it. Or better yet buy a home assistant Green. You can check the home assistant docs to see if a smart device requires cloud connectivity to work — in general if it connects through Zigbee (or ZWave or Matter) then you’re good, but if it connects through WiFi then it probably is cloud based.
https://www.home-assistant.io/
https://www.seeedstudio.com/Home-Assistant-Green-p-5792.html
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/
Can confirm. I run Home Assistant and Rhasspy with Sengled bulbs and none of transmits info. The devices themselves aren't generally the issue, it's the hub that operates them that would be collecting and sending the info. Remove that, and you don't have to worry.
wow so Rhasspy is local voice assistant! do you have microphones places throughout your pad or do you go to a website first to speak or what?
You can use microphones wherever with HA and Rhasspy. Rhasspy is just the local voice and intent recognition portion, and HA executes the commands. This means you can have one Rpi in your place managing devices, and then have many different microphone-attached Rpi all over your house forwarding voice recognition intents to do whatever you want it to do. Whatever the mic is attached to will send to the HA instance and tell it what to do. No cloud.
Why do I need a RaspberryPi? I can't use my regular Linux PC? What is a Zigbee dongle and why is it mandatory? What do I do if he device is cloud based?
You can use your regular PC if you want, but having an always-on server (the pi) makes it more convenient to use from, say, your phone.
Zigbee is a popular wireless communication protocol used by iot devices. Without the dongle you won't have any way to talk to them.
If it's cloud based, buy something else that isn't.
Your Zigbee light switches won’t do anything unless the machine running Home Assistant is on. Being able to control your lights while the computer isn’t running is really convenient.
Perfectly valid to ask how to protect your data using the tools the other user mentioned. Not sure why you were downvoted for asking simply how.
@tjhart85 care to explain?
Sure! Click the link at the very top of the page! You know, what this entire conversation is theoretically talking about? It takes you to a Home Assistant page and even has some details on their philosophy and links to even more details about their privacy focused philosophy! I thought saying essentially "read the fucking article" would be pretty asshole-ish and wouldn't contribute anything to the conversation, but I also thought that your question contributed nothing, so I downvoted.
Did that answer your question sufficiently?
Yikes... I read the fucking article, and it explained nothing. I read your comment and understand why you down voted. There you go, @b3an it seems that @tjhart85 simply has a stick up their ass
If i understand correctly this is Home Assistant saying that Hue is taking away that ability on devices people have already bought and installed.
That’s about the hue hub. The bulbs are still Zigbee and can be controlled 100% remotely with HA and a Zigbee dongle.
You can have plenty of smart home stuff without this junk using stuff like home assistant and keeping devices like this from phoning home. Some products won't work at all without an internet connection but plenty still do.
Edit: If this is actionable, I would be interested in participating in a class action suit against Philips for materially altering a product’s functionality after purchase. This is like buying a normal car and being told a year later it was given a remote update and now can only use Ford (tm) brand gasoline which costs $10/gallon.
If you do have an existing investment in Hue products, I suggest reaching out to them to request a refund because your purchase was made under a different policy, and this policy change is going to render your products useless without consent on your part. If they’re going to force a significant change that compromises the functionality of what might be hundreds of dollars worth of equipment without permitting recourse for legacy users, they should have to accept returns on what essentially is now a product you did not purchase and would not have purchased.
Or just get a ZigBee hub and keep using the bulbs without the Hue hub
Indeed I've never even installed the hue app, always assumed it was just a zigbee thing anyway. The hardware is just a basic zigbee bulb.
Mostly I've been moving to using the ikea ones though as they're much cheaper.
Any recommendations for a Zigbee hub to use with HomeAssistant? I'm planning to make the switch now that Hue is doing this
If you have home assistant, you don't need a zigbee hub, just a ZigBee USB stick. There's a whole bunch of them, I think they're all pretty similar, a few have Z-Wave also. I'm 100% Z-Wave so I can't say personally what is the best stick to use... Just check the forums and whatnot.
More like thousands, Hue is way overpriced
If someone does this let me know. Every bulb in my house is hue.
I started the email thread with them on Friday. So far I’ve only received canned messages like they told the HA folks.
Guess I can sell that Hue hub after I move my Hue devices over to my HA/Zigbee config — what wasn’t broke and didn’t need fixing… will now finally be fixed and finished.
After they make the change, someone with an old Hue bulb should go to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Making this decision retroactive is clearly false advertising and anti-consumer. I don't really give a shit what their terms of use were.
They can do what they want with their future bulbs. The old ones need to be grandfathered in.
IoT stuff isn't safe to use unless it's flashed with a third-party Free Software firmware like Tasmota or ESPHome.
I mean IKEA is fine.
It's entirely ZigBee, there's no internet.
But the green part of RGB only works if you're using their app
Edit: downvoter, please let me know what's bothering you about this?
From what I read, it's not a bug.
Many bulbs trade on the green LED for more variation in white. Red/Blue serve a function to make whites warmer or cooler, green has no such function.
And because most people use white, they ditched the green LED. That's why the green it has is more yellowish than you would expect.
It probably also means the bulb API has no dedicated green setting, which is why the remote and 3rd party apps don't have proper green settings.
It's a bit of speculation though, not entirely sure. Apparently older Hue bulbs also do this.
That's interesting. Funnily enough, we did try the one color GU10 we have today and this one does work perfectly.
Really? Huh.
I'm just using the PM2.5 and temperature sensors.
Unfortunately yeah. We've tried the E27 and green just didn't work. Thought it was broken and returned it, told them why. "Oh, you used the remote, right? It only works with the app, it's been like that for years and hasn't been fixed yet"
Oh so that's just a bug rather than a feature lock.
Im only using mine in home assistant that should act as an app anyway.
No, that's just the problem. We only use ours in home assistant as well and it didn't work. It's got to be the Ikea app.
Oh okay, I'll be sure to avoid then until they fix that.
ESPhome for the win! I have like 12 smart plugs with power monitoring flashed with ESPhome
I have 8! (They're literally the only smart home devices I have so far, although Home Assistant automatically detected my Roku and my printer.)
Thankfully, while I have a smart plug from them, I've made sure that it's a Zigbee powered one, meaning it's directly connected to my Home Assistant server over it's own frequency/protocol, no app required. Guess that choice is paying off now.
Also, someone should tell whoever is managing that Twitter support account that you should never use the phrase "We're sorry you feel that way", even when you're going for a non-apology.
Isn’t the “take it or leave it” approach to consent considered consent bundling? Didn’t google get fined for doing a similar thing?
Awesome timing, was about to add a whole lot of them to my new house, guess that ain’t happening
Any recommendations for what next? I'm in the same situation? I want to avoid WiFi lights - ZigBee, Zwave or Matter only
I’m adding the ones I have to home assistant, which is what I was planning all along. Maybe add some other brand smart lights, not sure yet which
Start leaving 1 star reviews in the app stores from Google and Apple complaining about this.
They read those because stakeholders who understands nothing about tech only care for more stars.
I'm definitely starting to find a way out of hue and freezing my plans to buy more bulbs from them.
I was forced to move (landlord sold house) and when I got to my new place, I just never got around to setting up any of my smart home devices. Thermostat, cameras, lights, assistants, sensors, monitors, etc, and weirdly enough I am somehow happier now.
The random issues, glitches, delays between asking an assistant/pressing buttons before an action went through, fixing integrations, fixing Home Assistant, fixing random unpairs, etc. was driving me nuts. Especially when you have invested hundreds/thousands of dollars into premium devices.
Worst was when you'd ask assistant to do something, and it somehow misheard you and does something else. Fried an aquarium thermometer that way. Turned on ALL lights when everyone was sleeping, despite me asking to turn OFF a very specific light..
The only thing I truly miss is being able to turn off my bedroom light when I am in bed. But the stress I save is worth getting up and turning it off.
Huh, sounds like a very unreliable setup. Admittedly mine is much simpler and I refuse to use voice control for anything at all, but I experience zero glitches with my Shelly switches and HA integration.
Put a lamp on your nightstand, it's a fucking game changer. We have a ceiling fan with the main lights, but lamps on both nightstands. It rules, always within arm reach, light immediately if you need it, but much softer light than the main light, and not pointed into your eyes when you lay down.
It is possible to just install the one smart light, you know.
You can get remote controlles for lights and keep it on your bedside table
I'm reading this thread thinking "people are jumping through hoops just to do this stuff? Why?"
"because you can" evidently.
No wait, someone's going to come in and whinge about Seasonal Affected Disorder, circadian rhythms and blue light or some other shit, aren't they.
When it works, it's great. But no matter how much you spend, which brands you go with, how you have it set it, eventually something is going to fuck up, and you'll spend half your day fixing it all.
How did that happen?
Asked assistant to turn off basement light and instead it turned ON "10 gallon aquarium heater".
However it heard that, no idea.
My girlfriend was cleaning her tank, and the water level was below the heater. I was somewhere else in the house, and so she never noticed, and within 60 seconds the thing shattered from being turned on and not submerged.
Companies these days: “help us think of products we can sell to procure data. No, we don’t care what the product is; we just want the data.”
I often wonder are we in some sort of "data bubble"? all this obsession over collecting it but not actually providing stuff people will pay for surely has an endgame
I think the endgame is to speedrun getting filthy rich and buying up a chunk of the earth before it’s completely destroyed.
reason: "your data isnt secure in your home, we need to control it. trust us. "
uh huh.
5 months later: "We had a data breach, but we believe they didn't get all personal data"
They're light bulbs. What data can they possibly hold on the users beyond how bright they like their bulbs.
What times your lights are on or off can expose more than you might think over time. It reveals when you're gone for work, your sleep schedule, how many days a year you spend at home vs traveling/elsewhere, when you stay up late, etc.
But it gets worse. If you give Hue your email or install the app then now you can be uniquely id'd across other products. Hue will sell that data to some advertising agency, who also buys data from Google, Facebook, etc. Now your usage data from other systems can be combined with the Hue data and used to more even more accurately track your day and behaviors.
Big data is a fascinating field, if not completely horrifying.
Also when the keys are inevitably discovered on an unsecured S3 bucket, everyone will have it! In addition to your billing information and other PII.
In addition to what the other commenters have said: They don't just sell light bulbs but also motion sensors that can even measure temperature.
So they wouldn't just be able to tell which room you're in at any given time but may also be able to tell when and for how long you shower or how often you cook food in the kitchen based on slight temperature changes.
And if you wanna get really paranoid: Hue Sync analyzes what's on your screen and synchronizes lights accordingly. Who knows what is really going on there if they pull this kinda shit lol
It’s also not about what data they hold, but what data they have access to.
To you, it’s a light bulb, but internally, it’s a network-connected microcontroller, meaning it’s also connected to everything else in your network.
It theoretically could scan and exploit any number of security holes in other devices, including but not limited to phones and desktops.
Even if the manufacturer is ethical with it, other nefarious actors can use it as an attack point to try to gain deeper access. Some of these devices run a full Linux install internally, and if you know how, you can even get a shell session open on them.
This is immensely frustrating. Feels like a rug pull for anyone that cares about their data, privacy and (ironically) security.
Welp, their products are completely out of the running for our setup then.
and RIP to anyone who invested thousands into them. Those lights were NOT cheap.
Hopefully this spurs someone to go to the CFPB or something and sue. These companies need to stop pulling this retroactive change bullshit, like Unity, Wizards, ad now Hue.
Anyone have a good resource for connecting existing bulbs to zigbee and moving off the hue app?
I've been very happy with Home Assistant. There are zigbee USB sticks such as ConBee that work well with it, and home assistant runs on many different types of computers including Raspberry pi.
To start off, you'll want to have Home Assistant running on a local server or Raspberry Pi and a Zigbee USB dongle, like the Conbee II or SkyConnect. If you've never worked with Home Assistant, their Getting Started guide is pretty comprehensive.
To migrate the apps off the Hue gateway, there's a section describing various methods to do so in the Home Assistant Zigbee guide.
I'll mention that there's also a whole bunch of other Zigbee gateways out there that work similar to the Hue Bridge, but these could all eventually share the same fate as Hue, if they aren't already forced to be online.
Cool.. I got a Phillips hue hub, but already have a Pi as well, Just never thought of using it this way. So I just need the Conbee II, and I should be able to make things work off the Pi. One less device to have plugged in.
Besides the stupid login stuff, I've noticed a lot of my stuff just isn't as reliable as it used to be. It seems Phillips is just enshittifying things generally.
Thanks for the links!
Lutron FTW
If I use Home Assistant for control and block the Hue hub from the internet, will things keep functioning as they are today?
I like how my stuff works and don't want them to mess me up.
I would make sure the firmware can't be updated. Uninstall the Hue app for sure.
To be safe long-term I would probably suggest to throw away the Hue hub entirely and get a Zigbee USB dongle for your Home Assistant server. Personally I've had no issues with the ConBee II. Home Assistant also released their own dongle earlier this year, called SkyConnect, which I've heard is pretty good as well.
(This is assuming that all Hue devices are based on ZigBee, which I believe they all are, based on this useful database.)
That's likely the path that I'll end up taking. Everything hue related that I have is Zigbee.
Home assistant should shield me from this right?
Huehuehue
Hue stuff sucks anyway. If you own a home or rent and have access to your breaker box, Lutron Caseta is a much better option.
Please note in many places it's very illegal to do electrical work for yourself
Where is it illegal for someone to change a light switch?
Australia for one
Interesting. TIL
Man fuck this. I use my lights in sync with my Philips tv when I watch movies so I can't even switch to a zigbee thing or anything.