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

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

Back to school for this fella

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

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.

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

Can confirm. Technology is a disaster waiting to happen.

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.

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?

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.

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.

I have smart lights because I like the light to get warmer throughout the day but that's it, does anyone have a foss solution? Google is unhelpful.

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.

At some point, you just realize that in no project, there is enough budget to do even just mediocre security or correctness. And the few projects that actually require certifications for that, they rely on technology so old that it's hard to believe they'd actually fulfill these criteria either.

And then you realize that you're already considered an expensive expert. That companies try to further cut down on costs by outsourcing to basically untrained workers or, hell, LLMs.

I’m one bad day away from going Amish.