It&#x27;s not a stupid future at all. People thought home pages and the under construction guy GIF were stupid, now look where we are.<p>There are some very asinine products on the market, there are so very many badly implemented products that throw security and privacy out the window, and there are some that are trying their best with what we have today. All of these are fleshing out the ideas that will stick for tomorrow... and hopefully are getting the user base familiar with the right questions to ask when looking at new stuff.<p>The ability to reduce home energy usage, let people in remotely, get alerted to activity inside your house when you&#x27;re on vacation, detect a leak or flood while away or asleep. These aren&#x27;t stupid. Some of these will genuinely (attempt) to help the world, most of them are nice to have, but not stupid by any means.<p>Where we&#x27;re likely headed is that all of these individual devices don&#x27;t need a direct connection to the Internet, but will have some local&#x2F;mesh communication protocol to get the data to a main hub. Each local protocol will have security so that you can&#x27;t sniff raw data just by being near the house, and the hub would use whatever the latest and greatest &#x27;Internet security&#x27; offers up, a la TLS.<p>This is pretty much how Z-Wave and ZigBee devices work with the more established home hubs from Mi Casa, Samsung (SmartThings), and Wink.<p>We will continue to get burned by manufacturers in the near term. We will get burned by expensive, cheap, no name, and trusted brands. It&#x27;s a growing pain, we don&#x27;t have to accept it, but the majority of the products in the near term are going to be awful. Find reviews and analysis, create them yourself, or sit out, but your &#x27;stupid future&#x27; is not going to magically stop marching into your house.