This week’s big news is that Amazon, Apple, and Google have agreed to collaborate on the creation of a new smart home standard called the Connected Home over IP (CHIP). We lay out what this is and what it means for consumers, manufacturers, and developers. We then talk about a device for tracking crypto micropayments and the vulnerability with digital certificates in the IoT. We also review the Samsung SmartThings Wi-Fi system, mention Wyze’s new Alexa skill and talk about LIFX testing its bulbs for outdoor use. We end with a listener question about the tradeoff between security and convenience.
Our guest this week is Lee Reiber, COO of Oxygen Forensics, who talks about how law enforcement officers view your connected devices. He shares his perspective on the value of these devices when it comes to solving crimes and explains the current safeguards. The encouraging news is that it’s tough to get most of this data. That, plus the learning curve that police officers have to take judges and prosecutors down makes using it even more difficult. Thus, police officers report to device data only in bigger cases. Enjoy the show.
The CHIP announcement is interesting, but as you pointed out, it will need new devices which are not likely to come out until 2021. But today, don’t we have hubs today that already support multiple technologies and provide the same solution with today’s products? Samsung SmartThings, HomeSeer, dozens of other Smarthome hubs already have support for Z-Wave, Zigbee, Bluetooth, WiFi, etc. and even the derivatives of WiFi (IP) that are proprietary, and then they make the devices using those different technologies available to their voice assistants through their built-in Amazon Echo and Google Home integration, so what is the real advantage here? So today we have a few “universal gateways”, but tomorrow CHIP will provide a “universal technology”. Why wait until tomorrow?
Also, with the recent Z-Wave announcement, it will be easier for gateways to implement Z-Wave as an open standard, but at least the sub-GHz products are being included. When you do a universal gateway, you can include Z-Wave and the sub-GHz version of Zigbee, but when you have an IP based standard like CHIP, you automatically exclude the sub-GHz technologies and those work much better in the Smarthome.
So with sub-GHz technologies like Z-Wave being one of the leading technologies out there, I would rather see companies work toward a universal gateway and allow the technologies to exist and focus on what they are good at than to come up with a new technology that only works with Ethernet or WiFi – making it weak in the Smarthome.