Anthropic published research on 12 October 2026 arguing that small AI models may be months away from self-replicating on commercial IoT devices such as off-brand Android TV boxes and other weakly defended home gadgets. The work is a controlled evaluation, not a report of an active worm in the wild.
Changing an entity ID in Home Assistant has always been heavier than it looks. Behind the scenes the entity was removed and added again under the new ID, and its whole setup ran a second time. From Home Assistant Core 2026.11 that stops: the entity is updated in place. Erik Montnemery announced the change on the Home Assistant developer blog on 12
Ubiquiti has released UniFi Network Application 11.0.83 as a release candidate, and the item smart home users will notice is "Matter Thread Device Monitoring". UniFi can now commission Matter-over-Thread devices and show their status and connectivity next to your Wi-Fi and Ethernet clients. LazyAdmin covered the release on 12 October 2026, and Matt
CNX Software wrote up Meta's Muse Gadgets project on 12 October 2026: open-source SDKs that turn off-the-shelf ESP32 boards or a Linux box (Raspberry Pi and similar) into hardware companions for Muse, Meta's personal AI agent. The code lives in the facebookincubator/muse-gadget-sdk repository under Apache 2.0 for most of the tree. Meta first framed
The Home Assistant Companion app for Android is getting native media controls. A pull request merged on 12 October 2026 lets the app show selected media_player entities in Android's notification shade, using the same media panel that Spotify or YouTube Music use. You can pause a speaker in the kitchen or skip a track on the living room TV without o
ESPHome can now act as a Somfy RTS remote. Pull request #16502 by RobertH1993, merged into the development branch on 12 October 2026, adds a remote_transmitter.transmit_somfy_rts action. With a 433.42 MHz transmitter connected to an ESP32 or ESP8266, an automation or a button in Home Assistant can send Up, Down, My (stop) and Prog commands to Somfy
Three vulnerabilities in LG's webOS can be chained so that an attacker on the same local network gets root on the TV, with no PIN and no action from the owner. SSD Secure Disclosure published the details on 12 October 2026, together with complete proof-of-concept code. LG has released a fix, listed in its security bulletin for TVs.
A Home Assistant community member has published freedo, an open-source coordinator that takes over the job of the tado Internet Bridge for V3+ radiator valves and wall thermostats. Gabriele Turelli (CappyT) announced it on the Home Assistant forum on 12 October 2026, and by 13 October the project had reached version 0.7.2. It needs neither the tado
Withings has changed the terms of its public API, and Home Assistant's Withings integration runs on that API. Since 12 October 2026, an account created after the cutoff needs an active Withings+ membership to share health data with any app on the free "Start for Free" plan, according to Withings' API plans page. That includes apps that are already
