Long Strange Trip

  • IoT madness: Xiaomi gateway

    Purists say that IoT should be things too small to really be IP, that they should have a gateway. One late night trip to aliexpress, one credit card, and some months later, its all over my desk. A Xiaomi Smart Home Multifunctional Gateway. And, to make my life simple, it walks you through the enrollment…

  • I’m still the enemy in the Internet of Things security, but I now have more reasons

    So i’m upgrading a few of the lights from ‘hack-mode’ IP-enablement to MQTT. The ‘hack-mode’ was a small json cgi running on them, below. This allowed HomeAssistant to set/read their state. It reads their state by polling. So far so good right? But the problem is scaling this out. What if they have more to say than…

  • Harden a home: how hard!

    So on last nights security scan of my home, I found a new and interesting thing. Specifically, a TFTP server running. Huh. That is normally something I bring up to rescue some widget that is old-school almost-bricked. Now, where is it. Its on the ring1. (ring0 is the hard-wire between my 3 larger servers, doesn’t go anywhere.…

  • Do you remember when electricity was a little less smart?

    Another day, another Internet widget dissected. This time its the Kankun smart plug. Now with English APP. For between $10-$20 you can make any electrical outlet in your home into a smart one, and turn it off via the power of the Internet! Sounds easy. And there was some Eglish’s good clicky here! in the…

  • I’ve found the 1 Internet of Things wifi-enabled gadget even I won’t buy!

    The smart hair brush. You know you need to live-stream the wetness of your hair, the amount of brush strokes it takes, but you are just too lazy to keep a log? The hair coach is for you. it provides a holistic hair assessment. You know the shark is jumped when you can’t even convince…