Matter Smart Home Standard Officially Launches (macrumors.com) 78
The Connectivity Standards Alliance and its members that include Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, and other smart home manufacturers, today announced the official launch of the Matter 1.0 smart home accessory standard. MacRumors reports: Companies that have agreed to support Matter now have all of the resources that they need to begin implementing Matter into their platforms, so we could see Apple integrating Matter into HomeKit very soon. In fact, iOS 16.1 is already laying the groundwork for Matter, so Matter could be announced with the launch of the update. With the Matter 1.0 launch, authorized test labs are now available for product certification, tools are available, and the open-source reference design SDK is complete. Alliance members with devices that have already been deployed and with plans to update their products with Matter support can do so as soon as their products are certified. The Connectivity Standards Alliance says that the first release of Matter will support a variety of smart home products such as lighting, HVAC controls, window coverings, safety and security sensors, door locks, media devices, controllers, and bridges. "What started as a mission to unravel the complexities of connectivity has resulted in Matter, a single, global IP-based protocol that will fundamentally change the IoT," said Tobin Richardson, President and CEO of the Connectivity Standards Alliance. "This release is the first step on a journey our community and the industry are taking to make the IoT more simple, secure, and valuable no matter who you are or where you live. With global support from companies large and small, today's Matter 1.0 release is more than a milestone for our organization and our members; it is a celebration of what is possible."
Further reading:
Google Explains Why It's All In On Matter, the First True Smart Home Standard
Amazon Promises Most Echo Speakers Will Support the Matter Smart Home Platform
Further reading:
Google Explains Why It's All In On Matter, the First True Smart Home Standard
Amazon Promises Most Echo Speakers Will Support the Matter Smart Home Platform
And how invasive is it? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm all for automation when it makes sense.
It's just that seeing everything funneled through online for EVERYTHING, with nebulous data sharing and monitoring licenses in place...
Hey! We have video of you coming home Thursday when your wife flew out to Chicago this morning. Who was the lady hanging all over you with her hand in your pants?
Re:And how invasive is it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:And how invasive is it? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is my gripe with the Amazon Eero. If you lose internet connectivity, your in=-house network is out of commission as well i can't connect to my server or NAS at my house because the Internet is down?
That's some premium bullsh#t.
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Re:And how invasive is it? (Score:4, Insightful)
The AI for voice recognition isn't lightweight enough to host locally on most smart devices, and 99% of end (l)users are incompetent to host their own server.
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And what about the percentage of us who ARE?
"Build your own!"
The inevitable refrain.
But when one attempts to do this "This violates our *INSERT HERE*."
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That said, if this requires cloud participation, they can fuck right off.
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The AI for voice recognition isn't lightweight enough to host locally on most smart devices, and 99% of end (l)users are incompetent to host their own server.
It would be easy to make a simple appliance that plugs into the home network to do this work, just like other network appliances that non-techies regularly use. The only problem with that is that it won't share all that juicy private data with the big corporations for their profit.
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I'm still puzzled as to what important insights Amazon is going to get from knowing what time we go to bed, what music we listen to, or that we have a light in the living room and a fishpond pump that are more convenient to turn on by voice. They never sell customer data, and what they can collect via Alexa or Ring is pretty worthless for their internal usage.
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Your listening habits will suggest what other music to recommend you buy. The fact that you have a fishpond pump means they will spam you with fish related crap. Ring is all about the subscription upsell.
The whole purpose of that thing is to make you buy more stuff.
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But we don't buy music, they haven't spammed us with fish related advertising (except for a week or so after we buy more fish food), and we ignore the Ring upsell emails like almost everyone else does.
Re:And how invasive is it? (Score:5, Interesting)
> They never sell customer data, and what they can collect via Alexa or Ring is pretty worthless for their internal usage.
Say what? They *routinely* sell your Ring footage to police forces - it's a major revenue stream for them (so they don't ask for warrants, because if there was one, they'd have to hand it over for free). They're also using Ring footage to make TV shows, which will eventually air on Amazon Prime Video (and no, you don't get to refuse your stuff getting into those shows - you already agreed to allow them to do it in your EULA). Again, TV is another revenue stream for them. It's one of the ways they can sell you a wireless doorbell with camera, cloud storage, app, etc. for such a small amount of money.
I'm not sure what they do with Alexa voice that they receive. I'm sure the police occasionally delve into it, but I'd imagine on a much smaller scale than with Ring footage. They most definitely do use it to train their AIs so that Alexa works better next time around, but that's a more tangential money maker for them. They (reportedly) keep Alexa voice data forever, so it's definitely not "worthless for their internal usage", otherwise they'd be quite vocal about how they delete it.
The other data they collect is all used to figure out what to sell you. If you have a fishpond pump on Alexa, well, maybe you need fish food, or another pump, or whatever else. If you go to bed at 10pm most days, but seem to wake up at weird times... maybe you need some sleep aids? If Alexa mistakenly wakes up in the night because of your snoring, well, maybe some "snore stop" products? So it goes on. Again, if the information wasn't useful to them, they wouldn't be hiving it off and storing it forever. They most definitely make money out of it.
Either way, unless there happens to be an explicit law preventing from doing so, they most definitely are selling anything and everything they can. Maybe not to the point of "cusco, who lives at number 48 has a pond, buys fish food and goes to bed at 10pm", but they'll be selling "63% of the residents of $locality all have fish ponds". Such information is most definitely useful to advertisers, marketeers, researchers and other persons unknown.
Re:And how invasive is it? (Score:4, Informative)
they'll be selling "63% of the residents of $locality all have fish ponds"
Actually they don't. They'll use the data internally to present ads within the Amazon ecosystem, but they don't ever sell that externally. (I used to work there, we had to pass a test yearly on data protections and policies.)
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Re:And how invasive is it? (Score:5, Informative)
The AI for voice recognition isn't lightweight enough to host locally on most smart devices
Sure it is. Pixel phones have had it for a few years now. On-device voice recognition and transcription, with a shockingly low error rate. It even works over the phone network, so your Pixel can screen phone calls for you and you can see what the other person is saying transcribed in real-time on your screen.
The issue is that there isn't anything remotely that good in the open source world. There are projects but none of them come close to the accuracy and ability to deal with poor audio/strong accents that Google demonstrates.
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The market has already shown that people don't want to buy a hub for their home automation, as the parade of failed similar products show. It's also much cheaper and easier for them to update a cloud install of the control software than to update several million standalone units as well.
Re:And how invasive is it? (Score:5, Informative)
My only complaint about home automation is that having ALL the commands go round trip to an internet server and back before doing something as simple as turning a light on is insane. They should do locally what can be done locally -- but then you wouldn't be tied into their servers, and they couldn't charge you a monthly fee! Personally, I don't really care that Google knows what porn I watch.
Home Assistant. Its open source. You can integrate with cloud services but there are a lot of devices that operate just fine locally and some workarounds to access cloud devices locally. You can even access some Tuya devices locally if you know how to run a shell script. Anything that uses ZigBee or Zwave/Zwave+ works locally.
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Home Assistant. Its open source.
And it won't be part of someone's standard service. Home Assistant is great for the very technically minded tinkerers, but it is almost impossible for a standard consumer to setup. It's not an off the shelf solution and as such all home automation products will only ever have Home Assistant functionality as a secondary option.
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They should do locally what can be done locally
It really needs a hybrid approach. Doing locally what can be done locally is great, but people expect things such as phone based control, and the ability to see the state of their smart home remotely. My girlfriend doesn't even put her phone on the wifi so even when she's home she's not on a local network.
When we gave up on end-to-end connectivity and NATted the shit out of our networks connected to other networks which themselves are CgNATed it makes it almost impossible for many to traverse networks witho
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My only complaint about home automation is that having ALL the commands go round trip to an internet server and back before doing something as simple as turning a light on is insane.
That's why light switches exist.
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This is my problem with most every IoT device. How many of those functions really *NEED* the "cloud" connection? It's somewhere in the high nineties percentage wise that could be local and local only. Guaranteed that most of the reason for the internet part of IoT is all about data collection and monthly fees. What I'm trying to figure out is what the fuck good does it do the corporate overlords to know how many times the bathroom light turns on and off every day, or how often the toaster in the kitchen pop
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What I'm trying to figure out is what the fuck good does it do the corporate overlords to know how many times the bathroom light turns on and off every day, or how often the toaster in the kitchen pops up?
Ever keep something around that you have no immediate use for, thinking "I may have a use for this someday"? Well, collectors of personal, private data already have a couple of decades' worth of experience demonstrating that the data collected now with no particular aim in mind is usually useful, or sellable for big bucks, farther down the road.
This reminds me of Bitcoin - in early days you could mine the stuff cheap, and in a few years the payoffs were big. But most people, including me, thought "What am I
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Right. So lots of bits sucking power for transfer and storage for no discernable reason today so that the one and one-point-one percenters can maybe make a buck in the future? Seems about right.
We're a pretty dumb species, but stuff like this would be the call-sign the aliens that discover our remains will hold up and both laugh at and shake their heads at, if they have heads, when they see what brought about our demise.
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A more realistic application would be a Burglar App that notifies you when people near you go on vacation.
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Re:And how invasive is it? (Score:5, Informative)
It's just that seeing everything funneled through online for EVERYTHING, with nebulous data sharing and monitoring licenses in place...
This is actually an advantage of Matter. While obviously the Big Names are likely to implement their own products with phone-home requirements, this is not an inherent requirement of Matter itself. Even the 1.0 specification is designed for local-only mesh communication (via WiFi or Thead [wikipedia.org]). Matter's also open source and royalty-free, so anyone can implement it, and as mentioned in TFS the SDK is now available. So, I expect to see local-only control hub implementations appearing fairly quickly, hosted on Raspberry Pis or the like. End-device nodes can likely be implemented on a simple, cheap Arduino or such.
There's a reasonably decent write-up on Wired, What Is Matter? [wired.com] that covers a fair amount of this.
So tl;dr, yeah, the commercial products will probably be online spymasters, but Matter has a decent chance to be a good local-only DIY standard too. It's like an updated X10.
It's like they read XKCD (Score:4, Insightful)
https://xkcd.com/927/ [xkcd.com]
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It's a bit different with Matter though. Products can use whatever protocols and standards they like, they just need to additionally support Matter on top. So for example you could have a load of Z-Wave devices or 433MHz switches, and the hub they talk to gets a firmware upgrade to support Matter. Or even you add a Raspberry Pi that talks to the hub and provides a Matter interface.
Products can also be Matter only.
I think it has a decent chance of becoming the standard for this stuff, because it allows older
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It's not clear to me though... can thread work WITHOUT the cloud, or is it just for getting your data to the cloud and back.
I don't want vendor cloud shit.
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It works without the cloud.
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It's not clear to me though... can thread work WITHOUT the cloud, or is it just for getting your data to the cloud and back.
I don't want vendor cloud shit.
Thread is the local protocol and not cloud related, but the servers controlling devices might be connected to the internet. Which is good for many use cases, e,g. adjusting the temperature when you're not at home (or for a cabin), warn you about water leaks etc.
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The link ti security appears to be working now: https://csa-iot.org/resources/... [csa-iot.org]
Nope. (Score:5, Interesting)
I will never willingly install any smart appliances in my home. By making critical components responsible for the operation of your home (heating, lighting, locks) smart you inherit all the problems associated with modern software - surveillance/spyware, unexpected updates, unexpected failures, security issues, issues during blackouts and, ultimately, advertising right where you live.
No, thanks.
Re: Nope. (Score:5, Interesting)
I use Home assistant and only buy devices that can use 3rd party firmware. If I can't find an open device, I make one out of an esp32 and whatever it needs. Nothing leaves my internal network.
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I use Home assistant and only buy devices that can use 3rd party firmware. If I can't find an open device, I make one out of an esp32 and whatever it needs. Nothing leaves my internal network.
I second Home Assistant. I use a lot of ZigBee and Zwave devices since they can't do much beyond connecting to my hub.
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I tried ZWave once. Played with the USB dongle for awhile, got my lights to turn on and off but didn't have a way to put the USB dongle in a place where it would reach my switches reliably so it went in the drawer for awhile. When I took it out again, the Windows XP to Windows 7 transition had happened and they wanted me to buy new software + dongle for Windows 7. I never went back to ZWave. Once it works it should keep working, I don't want to keep paying for software so my house will keep working.
Yeah, Windows is garbage for running any kind of home automation software. I've never had this issue on Linux. It also sounds like your last foray was over 10 years ago. Things have vastly improved since then. I have the dongle plugged straight into the front of my server and have never had any issues because Zigbee and Zwave are mesh networks. Any device powered by the mains is a repeater.
Re:Nope. (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't consider a light switch a critical component. I love having the front lights come on at sunset and shut off at a time I've specified. I have a couple of smart plugs that are really useful, including one for holiday lights. If the remote server goes away, I'll buy new ones; no big deal. The information they get is extremely minimal.
I'm hoping that Matter will let me control everything locally, but I'm not really clear on what it does other than replace the protocols for devices that needed a hub because they didn't use WiFi.
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Matter use a local hub to do the work of orchestrating so it should be local provided you have a matter hub.
Re:Nope. (Score:5, Insightful)
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After the lights go out and you or someone you care about gets injured or worse... you'd consider a light switch a critical component. You don't need IoT nor any kind of processor to make the lights come on when it gets dark, that's a problem that was solved in the 1920s.
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After the lights go out and you or someone you care about gets injured or worse... you'd consider a light switch a critical component. You don't need IoT nor any kind of processor to make the lights come on when it gets dark, that's a problem that was solved in the 1920s.
Well then its a good thing that the vast majority of smart light switches still operate as basic light switches even when they lose connectivity to the hub.
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as long as they don't get hacked or bugs, sure. I don't need switches that can have those dangers. Everything doesn't need to be 'computerized', that automatically puts a shorter usable lifespan on something and opens it to many risks.
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You can use entirely open source software, including firmware on all your sensors and devices. Nothing leaves your network, and you can even enforce that just by creating a separate WiFi network with no internet access for IoT stuff.
It's useful because you can do more advanced automation that is typically possible without it, or at least not easily possible on low cost hardware. For example, you might have vents that open only when the temperature inside is getting uncomfortable and the temperature outside
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Matter is supposed to be opensource / standard which anyone can use (at least from my understanding). And it does not have phone home requirements as part of it's standard.
If that's the case, I await the day I can run a Matter "hub" on my on PI or Docker / old system within my home and use Matter products that dont have "phone home" requirements.
If an item has a hard requirement to phone home, it can stay out of my home.
If Matter works without phoning home, I may finally decide it's time to automate stuff i
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There are some advantages though. My washing machine sends an alert to my phone when it's done. Quite useful when doing laund
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My heating means I get per-room settings, and get "app" control, etc. None of it "phones home" or requires cloud servers to operate. I bought it all from Genius Hub - it's got its fair share of problems, but your concerns aren't one of them.
I can (optionally) use a cloud based web/phone app when I'm out of the house. It means it can all work without me having to put holes in firewalls at home, so it's general consumer friendly, and does have its uses. It's optional though - if my heating system never speaks
shove your spyware (Score:2)
Cutting through the marketing fluff (Score:1)
Re:Cutting through the marketing fluff (Score:4, Informative)
Looks like it supports both wifi and Thread which is essentially 802.15.4 Zigbee but ip addressable on ipv6, so the hub unit has it's own network of devices, i think at least.
Also the Connectivity Standards Alliance is just what Zigbee alliance calls itself now so it's just their new form now. Probably helps branding as well as Zigbee was jsut a kinda silly name.
The wonderful thing! (Score:2)
Maybe they have this sorted out finally (Score:2)
I've never really had the itch to go all home automation outside of a wifi thermostat but part of that also was I just found digging into the various options and protocols and putting it all together seemed exhausting.
Maybe with this being both an open standard and has what looks to be every major player onboard home automation and iot in general can finally reach that goal of "buy any device and it will work with your system" and also have the majority of them not be wifi which always felt like a bodge sol
Legit Past Questions (Score:1)
Aaaaand it's cancelled (Score:2)
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Google couldn't cancel it if they wanted. Matter is controlled by the CSA alliance and open source under the Apache license.
Matter is a step back for privacy (Score:2)
Zigbee was well designed, as devices could not autonomously connect to the internet. For example, a zigbee light bulb could not autonomously communicate with a cloud server.
That protection is now being removed, as Matter introduces an IP protocol layer. Matter is designed to increase data extraction, and as such it shouldn't be a suprise it is being pushed by Google.
It's also likely to increase security issues for the very same reason. Most IoT security issues are with devices that use WiFi.
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Zigbee was well designed, as devices could not autonomously connect to the internet. For example, a zigbee light bulb could not autonomously communicate with a cloud server.
That protection is now being removed, as Matter introduces an IP protocol layer.
I don't think thats the case. Your light bulbs can still be Zigbee. The Matter IP layer is added at the Hue Bridge (or Home Assistant, Amazon Echo or whatever you use) in addition to the existing proprietary IP interface, which may or may not be open. So your Hue bulbs (via bridge) or Tuya, or other random wifi devices or cloud services, can all be accessed using the same protocol. In the current situation, Home assistant has to speak a ridiculous number of protocols.
Matter will still be useful even if yo
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My point is that Matter lightbulbs will be able to autonomously communicate with the internet, where Zigbee lightbulbs could not. That makes them more dangerous.
Thanks for the down vote! (Score:1)
Could Use a Unique Name (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember when Arduino was new - there was another very similar board called "Wiring" -Arduino is actually a fork of Wiring
however, the ubiquity of the term "wiring" made searching for documentation/resources/etc quite difficult
The mistake of using such a generic term as a name drove it into the obscurity of history even though it came first and I truly believe that the name confusion - the fact that "Arduino" was a unique term derived from the name of the founder but not in common use or a dictionary - is what made Arduino the defacto winner
https://hackaday.com/2016/03/0... [hackaday.com]
I assume due to widespread industry support "Matter Smart Home" will fare better, but .. if they'd named it something like "MatterSmart" or "MatterHome" etc it would make searching a lot cleaner
maybe I over worry but I just cringe whenever I see such use of generic terms - "Meta" is far too generic where "FaceBook" was totally unque. "Google" not quite unigue - the word existed but "Alphabet" is well, everywhere... though maybe in some sense both Alphabet and Meta want to cloak a bit - I'm guessing FaceBook having such a bad image in many peoples opinion drove some of the company name shift - and perhaps "Meta" is intended to obscure things a bit I don't know.
point is though, I realy want Matter to succeed conceptually... A single common agreed upon protocol would go a long way to helping truly get interoperability without a zillion hubs/etc... and I just worry it's going to be only thebiggest sites with ability to pay for search rankings that will be easily discoverable -
What is the catch (Score:2)
Nothing says (Score:2)
There is nothing saying that one app can control them all, just that they can talk to each other.
It doesn't matter (Score:2)
Yeah, I'm not replacing all my Zigbee and Z-wave sensors and devices with new, more expensive Matter ones.
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MQTT was good enough, but... (Score:2)
Anyhow: I think a hard part of the requirements should be that the consumer can somehow change the server the dievice talks to, if one chooses to.
It would be trivial to implement, and would allow all devices to seomhow keep functioning, even if the company that produced them goes under.