I'm being slowly sucked back into new ewaste items for the smarter home because the Samsung IP cameras I recently installed appear to be working happily. I was excited that I could bypass their apps trivially without ever downloading them.
The latest device to follow me home is a 'Wi-Fi Smart Plug' from D-Link.
The device is a surprisingly bulky box stuffed with a power board and a daughter board. The power board has the high-voltage side of the power supply for the electronics, a relay for controlling a load, and a PL8331 energy metering IC from Prolific.
The daughter board holds the Atheros AR1311 and the flash that make the box a computer. These parts also make the smart plug essentially indistinguishable from any of a thousand other products from a hundred other vendors all built on the same platform.
A clever soul posted a simple script to bypass all the appery associated with this gizmo but it may have been too much to hope for two purchases in a row to work out. I bought this gizmo at Micro Center. I don't know why I even go in that store. If there are two variants of a product in the wild, Micro Center is guaranteed to have the wrong one. If you want the vulnerable one, they have the patched one. If you want the secure one, they have the vulnerable one. It's all the proof I need that the LHC will find a luck particle someday.
My guess is that only the vulnerable devices were marketable and the demand for these boxes cratered one D-Link shipped one not worth making work. Perhaps Micro Center got someone else's overstock cheap.
Other intrepid souls have pursued the matter further. If I may paraphrase Newton -- if I have seen less far, it is because I could not be bothered to climb up to the shoulders of giants. This box goes straight to recycling.
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