> They will all have Wi-Fi.
AFAICT, devices that don't need high-data rate connectivity aren't required to have WiFi. IOW a thread camera will have WiFi but a thread light switch doesn't have to.
AFAICT, devices that don't need high-data rate connectivity aren't required to have WiFi. IOW a thread camera will have WiFi but a thread light switch doesn't have to.
And I assume there is no way to make sure that the camera never connects to the internet without setting up firewall rules on my router. Because the announcement specifically calls out the ability for smart devices to phone home as a perk, I imagine blocking devices from phoning home isn't an option, and you have to assume that any device with WiFi will attempt to phone home even if it's not "smart".
If there was a way on hubs to have mobile phone like permissions. "This device can use local WiFi" and "This device can access the internet for Smart stuff" as separate permissions, I might be ok. But since most WiFi IoT devices are dumb and just punch a tunnel through your firewall so you can access them with a mobile app and wind up in botnets, I don't have a lot of faith in IoT companies to do it right, so until I can be assured (and verify myself) that WiFi doesn't mean "can phone home", theres no way in hell Im going to use Matter wifi devices.
Thread is a mesh protocol. They won’t wifi mesh a camera.
> Which makes the WiFi not really a mesh, but a standard WiFi connect to the hub.
Yea.
> Because the announcement specifically calls out the ability for smart devices to phone home as a perk
It is a perk to some.
> until I can be assured (and verify myself) that WiFi doesn't mean "can phone home", theres no way in hell Im going to use Matter wifi devices.
Some devices will some won’t. Surely some devices will advertise being local only. Some companies won’t won’t the expense of a server.
Some matter devices won’t need wifi at all (lights). You might be more comfortable with them instead of writing it all off.
> wind up in botnets
Ironically cheaper devices may bet better off here. They’re probably too cheap to use anything but embedded code instead of embedded Linux so there’s less attack surface (excluding vendor provided).
Matter provides a secure channel to share OTA updates (eg through a thread hub) that is signed by the vendor. So this should be a step in the right direction in terms of security.