Freelance IT tech here. I can totally relate to this.

There are selfhosted smart homes fyi

IT professional of 15 years here. I have all the smart home shit and I love it. It's all on a separate VLAN, I have MAC address filtering network-wide and I have a firewall. I understand being burnt out by your job and not wanting to deal with it when you get home, but I love my work and my smart home stuff is robust enough that all I ever have to do is replace alarm sensor batteries once or twice a year. You can have both.

I have very minimal smarts in my home. I'm jaded and over it all, and you can guarantee the shitty devs producing this stuff couldn't care less, while working for actively hostile mega-corps.

Fuck that. Having said that, there are compromises - my TV does get out to the internet and I have a win 11 PC in the lounge as the primary machine.

If I had the emotional energy I'd start fiddling with nessus or whatever the new flavour is, to confirm my suspicions but I just don't need the burnout

IoT is terrible, and typically proprietary. I prefer the FOSS and SelfHosted route. But as it turns out, I too prefer a less online set of home items.

Your network is only as secure as it's weakest link, IoT devices are a liability unless they are on their own isolated network and who has the time to set that shit up to open their blinds from a phone?

Can confirm. Technology is a disaster waiting to happen.

Has OpenWRT but doesn't know how to stop smart home gear from leaking data?

Back to school for this fella

I work in retail, which is the reason why my house is shit.

When you see how the sausage is made you don't want it. Software engineers know how many corners are cut

Goddamn right.

Actually, I hadn't thought about the router and I'm panicking now. My router is some MR9600, and the speeds through it are great, but I feel like I over paid for something that I can't install my own firmware on. I think my pi.hole is the DCHP anyway, and now I'm really thinking I need to find a new router

My strategy is just be unpredictable af. Use FOSS as much as possible. Dont use google services except maybe google maps. Make an active effort to decouple accounts. Treat phone number 2fa like the plague.

IT since the 90's.

I have all those things and more, and 6 seperate VLAN's with isolation, strong rules, alerting and honeypots in all the right places.

I can confirm most of the people who say and believe this shit don't have a clue what they're talking about and just want to appear superior to others.

Sr IT engineer here. I've somehow come full circle and now have an entire smarthome setup. It's running on a IoT network so it can't see my other devices, but I'm sure that some poor Amazon employee has to watch me walk around in my underwear from my robot vacuum camera. I just don't care anymore.

Maybe. I'm in cyber security, people tell me I'm pretty decent at it. I have smart everything in my house, but I also use opnSense in my hardware router, have a span port to Security Onion and laugh at the logs, repurpose old desktops as servers for media or whatever, keep most things local except for a few backups, and have battery/UPS backups for my intranet and critical systems.