There are a lot of important features to consider when shopping for a new security camera, like power source (battery or hardwired) and installation location. (Good indoor security cameras generally don't need as much reinforcement as outdoor ones.) As far as great outdoor security cameras go, Philips Hue has made a contribution to the home security space.
Google is finally giving us another Nest Learning Thermostat. It's a long-overdue update, with the current generation now nine years old. Rumors say the 4th version of Google's smart thermostat will cost nearly $300, a price that, only a few years ago, I'd only dream of paying for a thermostat if it crooned me lullabies at night or offered a J.A.R.V.I.S-level administrative assistance.
Theft is one of my main fears about using security cameras. Whether it's to disable the device or profit from the camera itself, it's a legitimate, costly concern. And many outdoor security cameras make removal quite easy, attaching to their mounts via a magnet, a simple clip-in mechanism, or one measly screw all methods that could be undone in the blink of an eye.
Smart lights are an essential part of anyone’s smart home ecosystem. They illuminate on demand and fill your abode with ambiance and color. More importantly, they can lean on your existing smart home ecosystem and devices, making them infinitely useful as a part of larger routines.
Perhaps the biggest problem with smart lighting is choosing a brand. There are a dizzying array of options across the segment. While choice is great for a consumer, making the right choice also becomes more important.
That said, if you use smart lights in your home, which brand do you use? We also want to know how you made your decision, so be sure to vote in our poll below and let us know your reasons in the comments.
Some more common brands include Philips Hue, LIFX, and Nanoleaf, but there are a slew of other options that produce great results. Notably, many brands’ products now support Matter, so if you have a product that includes that particular protocol, be sure to cast your vote in that particular poll, too.
Personally, I have one smart light in my entire apartment, which is used mainly as an accent light, although I really should consider grabbing smart grow lights for my indoor plants. In this case, I wouldn’t need to remember to switch them on.
Of course, remember to mention details relating to your setup in the comments section, too; we’re intrigued by your particular arrangement.
© Ben Wilson | Windows Central
If you're shopping for a new home security camera, you won't be stressed by a lack of options. Actually, there would be a surplus of products to choose from that gives you a headache, and just when you think you've done the necessary buying, monthly subscriptions, smart bases, and battery packs peek sheepishly around the corner.
We live in an era of digital transformation, and the concept of a "smart home" is becoming popular due to its convenience and efficiency. From security to lights and temperature, these technologically advanced homes are equipped with interconnected smart devices to make our lives comfortable and easier. Like other electronics, they can have issues.
Nanoleaf is no stranger to RGB lighting in unique form factors. Its line of light panels basically defined the category, and it has since expanded to everything from traditional lightbulbs to ceiling-mounted skylights, making it a go-to brand for smart home goods. While Nanoleaf has made lightstrips in the past, its newest strip offers a slew of new features that Nanoleaf — and most of its competitors — has never offered before. I’ve been using it in my home for about a week and, I gotta say, I’m in love with it.
Unfortunately, this new lightstrip has a doozy of a name: the Nanoleaf Essentials Matter Smart Multicolor HD Lightstrip. For the sake of convenience, I’ll be trimming that down to just HD Lightstrip throughout most of this review!
Smart home gadgets offer many advantages, including safety, comfort, convenience, and automation. The most popular devices include cameras, light bulbs, and speakers, but almost anything can become smart, including curtains. Indeed, the Aqara Curtain Driver E1 allows you to motorize your curtains while adding plenty of smart features and connectivity.
The best smart doorbell camera combines convenience and an advanced feature series to provide a clear view of target areas at all times. These devices include companion apps to track what is happening at your front door, regardless of where you are, for complete peace of mind (especially when you're away). Additionally, a good number of smart doorbell cameras support Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, with others offering more integration options to choose from.
Enlarge / This is essentially the kind of water heater the author has hooked up, minus the Wi-Fi module that led him down a rabbit hole. Also, not 140-degrees F—yikes. (credit: Getty Images)
The hot water took too long to come out of the tap. That is what I was trying to solve. I did not intend to discover that, for a while there, water heaters like mine may have been open to anybody. That, with some API tinkering and an email address, a bad actor could possibly set its temperature or make it run constantly. That’s just how it happened.
Let’s take a step back. My wife and I moved into a new home last year. It had a Rinnai tankless water heater tucked into a utility closet in the garage. The builder and home inspector didn't say much about it, just to run a yearly cleaning cycle on it.
Because it doesn’t keep a big tank of water heated and ready to be delivered to any house tap, tankless water heaters save energy—up to 34 percent, according to the Department of Energy. But they're also, by default, slower. Opening a tap triggers the exchanger, heats up the water (with natural gas, in my case), and the device has to push it through the line to where it's needed.
Whether your Google Nest Thermostat is new or you recently changed your network settings, you must connect your smart thermostat to Wi-Fi to take advantage of its wireless features. It isn't hard to connect Nest smart home devices to your network with help from your phone. The easy setup is one of the reasons Google's Nest Thermostat made it onto our list of the best smart home devices.
Ultenic may not have the household recognition of Roomba or the sheer volume of products like Ecovacs or Roborock, but its T10 Pro is no slouch when it comes to automated cleaning. This midrange robovac packs a few of the modern conveniences youd expect a self-emptying dustbin, mopping mode, and smart mapping but makes a few key compromises to avoid a premium price point.
In an intelligent home ecosystem, smart locks add an extra layer of security and convenience. The SwitchBot Smart Lock Pro aims to bring these to your home without breaking the bank, thanks to its attractive features and price point.
If you're looking to secure your home or office, chances are, you've seen how expensive it can be to set up a security surveillance system. That's because there are generally a lot of moving parts, and getting everything to communicate with each other can be a real headache if you're trying to piece it all together yourself. That's where systems like Blink come into play, offering excellent hardware and software, making it easy to set up your own surveillance system.
If you’ve got an Apple device like an iPhone or Apple Watch, you’ll probably want (or even need) Siri, the company’s voice assistant. Here’s how to set up Siri for the first time and activate Siri on any Apple product.
Enlarge (credit: Open Home Foundation)
Home Assistant, until recently, has been a wide-ranging and hard-to-define project.
The open smart home platform is an open source OS you can run anywhere that aims to connect all your devices together. But it's also bespoke Raspberry Pi hardware, in Yellow and Green. It's entirely free, but it also receives funding through a private cloud services company, Nabu Casa. It contains tiny board project ESPHome and other inter-connected bits. It has wide-ranging voice assistant ambitions, but it doesn't want to be Alexa or Google Assistant. Home Assistant is a lot.
After an announcement this weekend, however, Home Assistant's shape is a bit easier to draw out. All of the project's ambitions now fall under the Open Home Foundation, a non-profit organization that now contains Home Assistant and more than 240 related bits. Its mission statement is refreshing, and refreshingly honest about the state of modern open source projects.
If you’ve got an Apple device like an iPhone or Apple Watch, you’ll probably want (or even need) Siri, the company’s voice assistant. Here’s how to set up Siri for the first time and activate Siri on any Apple product.
Samsung's back at it again, teasing a new event that's going to unveil new TV and sound devices for 2024. While the brand is best known for its amazing smartphones, it also happens to make some fantastic displays as well. The company has a pretty good track record when it comes to TVs, offering some impressive models that seem to continuously push technology to its limits.
Smart thermostats are more popular and effective than ever. Buying and installing one might seem like a complex undertaking on the surface, but it's worth it for one of the most useful smart devices you can add to a home.
At MWC, TP-Link showed me its new Matter-compatible smart home hub, the Tapo H500 Smart HomeBase. And there’s just something about it that reminded me of the Google Pixel Tablet — specifically its charging dock. Just look at it.
In a general way, the Tapo H500 serves the same purpose as the Pixel Tablet: It’s a central place for you to control your smart home. But that’s where the similarities end, really. Everything about the HomeBase is different. For one, you bring the tablet. You can put your iPad, your Galaxy Tab, or even skip the whole tablet part and close down the tablet latch. To control connected devices, I had to open the TP-Link Tapo app installed on the iPad in the demo area.
Last year, Wyze got in some hot water after smart home owners reported they were briefly able to see video feeds from cameras they didn’t own. A week ago, the issue popped up again with co-founder David Crosby stating that at least dozens were affected. We’re now finding out that the number of people affected is far greater than what was initially reported.
Wyze customers were sent an email to explain a recent outage and a subsequent security issue. In the email, the company blames its web hosting provider — AWS — for the outage that prevented users from accessing live cameras or Events. It appears the security issue occurred as Wyze attempted to bring its services back online.
Wyze claims a “third-party caching client library” was the cause of the breach:
The incident was caused by a third-party caching client library that was recently integrated into our system. This client library received unprecedented load conditions caused by devices coming back online all at once. As a result of increased demand, it mixed up device ID and user ID mapping and connected some data to incorrect accounts.
The security issue in question allowed some users to see into the homes of other people. Reportedly, an estimated 13,000 users were allowed to see thumbnails of other homes. On top of that, Wyze says 1,504 people who tapped on those thumbnails were able to view video taken from those homes.
On it’s part, Wyze says it “immediately removed access to the Events tab and started an investigation.” The company adds that to prevent the problem from happening again, it has tacked on “a new layer of verification” for Event Videos. In addition, Wyze says it has “modified our system to bypass caching for checks on user-device relationships until we identify new client libraries that are thoroughly stress tested for extreme events like we experienced on Friday.”
Although the company has owned up to the mistake, that hasn’t stopped users from flocking to Reddit to voice their frustrations.
Last year, Wyze got in some hot water after smart home owners reported they were briefly able to see video feeds from cameras they didn’t own. A week ago, the issue popped up again with co-founder David Crosby stating that at least dozens were affected. We’re now finding out that the number of people affected is far greater than what was initially reported.
Wyze customers were sent an email to explain a recent outage and a subsequent security issue. In the email, the company blames its web hosting provider — AWS — for the outage that prevented users from accessing live cameras or Events. It appears the security issue occurred as Wyze attempted to bring its services back online.
Wyze claims a “third-party caching client library” was the cause of the breach:
The incident was caused by a third-party caching client library that was recently integrated into our system. This client library received unprecedented load conditions caused by devices coming back online all at once. As a result of increased demand, it mixed up device ID and user ID mapping and connected some data to incorrect accounts.
The security issue in question allowed some users to see into the homes of other people. Reportedly, an estimated 13,000 users were allowed to see thumbnails of other homes. On top of that, Wyze says 1,504 people who tapped on those thumbnails were able to view video taken from those homes.
On it’s part, Wyze says it “immediately removed access to the Events tab and started an investigation.” The company adds that to prevent the problem from happening again, it has tacked on “a new layer of verification” for Event Videos. In addition, Wyze says it has “modified our system to bypass caching for checks on user-device relationships until we identify new client libraries that are thoroughly stress tested for extreme events like we experienced on Friday.”
Although the company has owned up to the mistake, that hasn’t stopped users from flocking to Reddit to voice their frustrations.
Enlarge / Wyze's Cam V3 Pro indoor/outdoor smart camera. (credit: Wyze)
Wyze cameras experienced a glitch on Friday that gave 13,000 customers access to images and, in some cases, video, from Wyze cameras that didn't belong to them. The company claims 99.75 percent of accounts weren't affected, but for some, that revelation doesn't eradicate feelings of "disgust" and concern.
Wyze claims that an outage on Friday left customers unable to view camera footage for hours. Wyze has blamed the outage on a problem with an undisclosed Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner but hasn't provided details.
Monday morning, Wyze sent emails to customers, including those Wyze says weren't affected, informing them that the outage led to 13,000 people being able to access data from strangers' cameras, as reported by The Verge.
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