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Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

home-assistant.io

111–120 of 655 posts

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer to have an e-waste law that says that if you stop maintaining the service, you have to open-source it :)

Unfortunately, this is just wishful thinking. Take an example where a company is going under. If such a law existed, it would be unenforceable as the company does not have the resources and know-how how to do such a thing. After they file for bankrupcy, there is no point in punishing them.

Yeah open sourcing code sounds nice but that's the pipe dream of the tech literate. A real workable solution would be regulation defining and banning ewaste creation and consumer protection from vendors rug pulling product support. Penalizing deviant practices and incentivizing open industry standards.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#112

Chamberlain sound like dicks but to be fair, when we're talking about remotely opening doors that give access to people's houses, it seems fair enough IN PRINCIPLE for them to restrict access to the API to 'partners' and for them to have some sort of payment and maybe even approval process around who becomes a 'partner'. Obviously that sucks for open-source projects that can't afford to pay up. But it seems fair enou…

And why does it seem fair enough? The garage door is mine, not Chamberlain's (although that starts to be more and more debatable the farther into enshittification we go).

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#115
post #67
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of devices these days that rely on cloud infrastructure, like Apple devices, Teslas. Its becoming more devices. The same for software. Even Microsoft is going fully Cloud. Just had problems to activate my MS Office for Mac Business 2019, which I bought in physical. They now require on @outlook.com email address to be able to activate. Otherwise I can't use my "box" software.

The same pirated copy of Office 2007 has been doing me fine for well over a decade at this point.

I updated it to version 2010. Much much better. Jack Sparrow ahead:)

Just do it. You won't regret it. I also bought office 2016 cheap at some point in time. That's even better. Faster, nicer UI.. just to give you feedback xD

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#116
post #7

From company statement: > Our customers rely on us to make access simple without sacrificing quality and reliability. Unauthorized app integrations, stemming from only 0.2% of myQ users, previously accounted for more than half of the traffic to and from the myQ system, and at times constituted a substantial DDOS event that consumed high quantities of resources. Yeah, that sounds plausible, because: - Home Assistant u…

The main reason why HA accounted for so many requests is probably because it was a polling integration, requesting data every 30 seconds from the server, while the official app either had push events when something changes, or it updated state when the app gets opened.

Isn't the high road solution here to open your API to enable users to make a less shitty HA integration?

Either way, they'll almost certainly pull the plug on this service sometime before the end of the decade.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#117
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer to have an e-waste law that says that if you stop maintaining the service, you have to open-source it :)

once the company goes bankrupt there might be no one left to open source the leftovers if that's even legally possible due to NDAs, 3rd party licenses, etc.

Then it should be anticipated. Just like a company is required to pay employees what it owes them before it eventual shutdown, even in case of bankruptcy.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#118
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but according to their statement, the official client seems to behave better than the HA-implementation. Maybe HA is brute forcing something, like pulling state every 10 seconds or so. And this is a legit complaint from their side if this is the case.

If pulling the state goes through the cloud app it is their (self-inflicted) problem.

Sure, and because it was their problem, they made it the problem of those who gave them this problem, and pulled the plug.

But let's get real, 0.2 of customers are probably also matching around 0.2% of their income with those products. So it's probably not really a problem, short term.

Long term, they probably have damaged their brand hard, and missed out on some revenue from grassroot marketing. But that's a problem of future chamberlain. Today, the one responsible for this has solved their problems, calls it done and gets their paycheck.

And who knows, maybe next year they switch to Matter, get some good marketing from it, raise the sales and the victims from today are forgotten. That's business..

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#119
Having been impacted by something similar (company changing their cloud and breaking my HA integration), I think that when companies do this, the least they could do is offer refunds/buy-back to impacted customers.

In my case, I bought a slightly-inferior product specifically for its HA integration; now that it's broken it's just an inferior product...

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#120
post #7

From company statement: > Our customers rely on us to make access simple without sacrificing quality and reliability. Unauthorized app integrations, stemming from only 0.2% of myQ users, previously accounted for more than half of the traffic to and from the myQ system, and at times constituted a substantial DDOS event that consumed high quantities of resources. Yeah, that sounds plausible, because: - Home Assistant u…

Unofficial IoT software and integrations are not (much?) better. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this was partly due to a junk integration for this device cobbled together by an amateur and replicated by thousands more amateurs into their own ginormous pile of other junk YAMLs.

Why did that software work mostly fine most of the time since 2017? Even Chamberlain admits their blocking is deliberate. Even Chamberlain's external statements suggest this is part of their corporate strategy.

Why is Chamberlain's API so brittle it can't stand prodding from what they claim is a tiny fraction of users, even if those are misbehaving? Do you agree that comparing that to DDoS is ludicrous, and suggests either dishonesty or a fundamental misunderstanding of what "DDoS" means?

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