I didn’t take my ADHD medicine today. Went to go get stuff out of my car and ended up with 3 different screwdrivers on the ground trying to unscrew the garage door opener.
The sun-tanning of the plastic was pretty cool. guess it used to be white instead of yellow/tan. Didn’t know that.
I tried that on ours, new battery didn’t help. When I went shopping for a new external panel, I discovered that the internet connected ones cost about the same. Now I can open and close the garage door from my phone, from anywhere, and the app will tell me if the door is open or closed. This solves my “Did I leave the garage door open? I don’t know, have to drive back home now” problem.
Ehh that sounds horrible to me. A simple toggle that grants access to your house, in the hands of an external company doesn’t fill me with joy.
I’m sure the convenience is nice however it’s been proven time and time again that security is an afterthought for many companies, especially when it’s their customers security.
I get it, and no shame on anyone for whom those concerns rise to a level of “Nah, not for me.”
It’s still plenty more secure than the non-rolling code garage door openers I grew up with. Or, frankly, the external keypad that I had before. Way easier for one of my kids, or inlaws, or inlaws kids, to leak my garage door code - and that kind of leak would be to someone local, who has physical access.
With this service, someone would have to A) get into the service’s data to the extent that they could operate an arbitrary garage door, then B) link my account there with my physical address, and C) coordinate physical access to my house, finally D) successfully burgling my house when there is always someone home.
My assessment is that each of those steps is unlikely to happen individually, and even if all four of those steps do happen, the likelihood that I am the arbitrary target isn’t terribly high.
Hell, my first car didn’t have an internal hood release, you could get into it with a coat hanger, and a swift wrenching on the steering wheel would break the steering lock. I wholly agree that security is often an afterthought, but that’s always been the case.
Oh absolutely, my tinfoil hat gets real itchy with devices like this - even with the levels of sanity that you’ve gone through I couldn’t install one on my non existent garage.
My cameras are reolink - running on their own vlan with no internet access. I even host my own time servers for them 😅 Cameras use a local google coral for object / facial recognition and send me alerts via home assistant when I’m not home. They are powered by a POE switch in my rack which has a stupidly large UPS.
My AC have their OEM wifi dongles replaced with ESP32 devices which I manage, my access points run OpenWRT - same with my router.
Any smart globe in my house runs via my own ZigBee network - not the OEMs dongle, same with motion sensors and door sensors.
All the small things I do won’t stop a brick coming through one of my windows and someone stepping through the hole they’ve just made.
There’s always an analog hole.