Most home cameras are sold as a pair: the camera and the manufacturer's app, with clips stored in the vendor's cloud. That works until the subscription price goes up, the service shuts down or someone finds a hole in it. In October 2026 CERT-UA warned that attackers were reaching Dahua cameras through the Easy4IP cloud feature by guessing serial nu
TP-Link's Tapo brand has launched the C550WS, an outdoor pan/tilt camera with a 4K sensor. It was announced on 28 October 2026 and is listed in the Tapo UK store at £84.99, with shipping from mid-November. Amazon UK lists it at £89.99 with a release date of 20 November.
On 26 October 2026 CERT Polska published 11 vulnerabilities in boneIO products, CVE-2026-77052 to CVE-2026-77062. They affect the boneIO Black controller software and the black_debian_images system image, and boneIO fixed them in version 1.6.0. The flaws were reported by Mateusz Włodarczak (s3ga), and CERT Polska coordinated the disclosure. The adv
The Template integration in Home Assistant can now build media player entities. The pull request was merged on 27 October 2026 and is part of 2026.11.0b0, the first beta of the November release, published on 28 October at 17:06 CET. Until now, anyone who controlled a TV, amplifier or old receiver through an IR blaster, a smart plug or a set of scri
Plenty of cheap Wi-Fi plugs, relays and switches are built around an Espressif chip and ship with firmware that talks only to the manufacturer's cloud. Tasmota replaces that firmware with an open one that runs entirely on your network: a web page on the device, a console, timers and rules on the device itself, and MQTT for anything bigger. This gui
A smart plug is the cheapest way to automate something and the easiest way to find out what a device really uses. It is also the product category where it is easiest to buy the wrong thing: a plug that only works through an app and a remote server, a relay too weak for a heater, or a metering chip that reports once a minute when you wanted live dat
MQTT is the common language of local smart home devices. Zigbee2MQTT, Tasmota, Shelly, ESP boards and many DIY sensors can all publish to a broker on your own network. Node-RED is a visual tool that listens to those messages and reacts to them. Together they make a small, vendor-neutral automation setup that runs on a Raspberry Pi or any Debian or
Zigbee2MQTT is best known as a Home Assistant add-on, but it does not need Home Assistant at all. At its core it is a bridge: it talks Zigbee to your sensors, bulbs and switches through a USB or network adapter, and publishes everything as MQTT messages. Anything that speaks MQTT can then use those devices: Node-RED, openHAB, a Python script, an ES
Getting a sensor to publish to an MQTT broker takes a few lines of code. Getting a whole house of sensors, switches and scripts to talk over MQTT without stale values, lost commands and devices that look online when they are not takes a little more thought. Four features decide most of it: topic structure, Quality of Service (QoS), retained message
