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Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

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

#561

Post by NavinF »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #547
NavinF wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait you have to be home for every delivery? How would someone with an on-site day job receive packages? In the US all carriers drop packages at door (or in the building's locker if you live in an apartment complex). Some packages need to be signed (alcohol, nicotine, gun ammo, etc) but the vast majority of deliveries involve zero human interaction

> Wait you have to be home for every delivery? How would someone with an on-site day job receive packages? Sort of. Note that I'm a city dweller, living in a flat in an apartment block. This is a real problem; classical solutions involve having another household member receive the parcel, asking the delivery person to deliver to a neighbor who you know is OK with it (since I started working remotely, I frequently am…

Huh, that's fascinating and bizarre

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

#562

Post by jkestner »

paulgerhardt wrote: post #552
jkestner wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lockitron! I remember chatting with your engineer about the WiFi radio we used in Twine. Good insight. Ah, chokepoint capitalism. The problem with every company becoming a tech company is that they all expect unsustainable tech company growth. The strip mining of customers is also scaling up, so efficient that industries will destroy themselves. Can't wait until private equity owns the radios in my home, and controls…

Twine! You guys single handedly snowballed the Kickstarter revolution! Huge inspiration for us and Pebble in 2012 directly. Your campaign felt like a “butterfly flapping its wings causing a hurricane” kind of moment. You inspired so many entrepreneurs of that time to take a risk and crowd fund which then inspired another generation. Some of whom ended up huge and going public like Peloton. Regarding choke points - I…

The stability is nice, agreed, but it's inevitable that monopoly/monopsony gets abused. Samsung/Hynix were part of a price fixing cabal, Qualcomm's IP has been a boot on the neck of innovation, Western Digital has suffered multiple disasters that caused global storage shortages, and ARM is currently flipping the table with its licensing changes. We can have stability with open standards, too.

That's cool to hear—I didn't consider we had that influence, though should've realized it after chatting with y'all, Ring/Doorbot, Particle/Spark, Pebble, etc.

Guess it took two generations to shake out the hardware startup mistakes. We were early and naïve, but we did ship, and the Twine servers remain up. You learned to focus the use case, and I still haven't. Go figure, I think there's still a space for a general-purpose physical computer, so we're doing it again: https://supermechanical.com/pickup

Funny that Kickstarter's history since is a hindrance, and we might go the Selfstarter route to produce the experience we want next time.

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

#563

Post by TheCapeGreek »

scrps wrote: post #447
paulgerhardt wrote: post #234

Partially responsible for this. (Sold Lockitron to Chamberlain in 2017 which became the basis for Amazon Key integrations.) Contrary to the popular sentiment in a lot of the comments here, there’s not much value in the analytics. As we all painfully found out in the 2010’s, there are only two viable recurring revenue streams in the IoT space - charging for video storage and charging for commercial access. Chamberlain…

Amazon expects me to weaken my physical security posture to help them defend against an activity I don't engage in and is in no way my responsibility? AND Chamberlain expects me to weaken my digital security posture so they can run some opaque crap on my network¹ that I have very little observability into and even less control over so they can make money? Money is one hell of a drug because they are high. How about a…

I find it odd that the standard policy is to leave packages unattended in any form in the first place. This is another one of those things that is not standard globally.

E.g for us in South Africa, this would be unthinkable, regardless of how much time it saves the delivery company. The only time a parcel is left at the door is when it's UberEats. Otherwise delivery is rescheduled if we don't physically collect parcels in person. This is partly an access issue (many houses/apartments/estates have gated access) and largely a trust/crime issue.

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

#564

Post by steamer25 »

jacquesm wrote: post #336
steamer25 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying owners should be completely barred from modifying their systems but there are security implications to bypassing their centralized / cloud-based authentication. It'd be possible for a knows-enough-to-be-dangerous customer to modify their system in such a way that they unwittingly allow unauthenticated local access. From my point of view, Chamberlain/MyQ should be totally indemnified in such scenarios b…

You've got that backwards. Giving a third party control over your garage door is the 'security implication' you want to avoid.

It happens all the time, no tech required, any time someone is foreclosed on.

I agree it's wiser to avoid such situations but a lot of people end up delegating this kind of responsibility. If enough of them end up burning their own fingers, that could go badly for a provider. Even if frivolous lawsuits weren't a thing, a spate of ignorant but angry social media posts could be very damaging.

Again, I'm not saying I necessarily have a solution or that hardware owners should have hurdles placed in their way. I'm just pointing out that in some ways the provider may be damned in one way if they do and damned in another way if they don't.

I suppose the IoT sub-sector will end up in similar proportions to other, older tech: Some vendors, analogous to e.g., Red Hat or Linode, will specialize in catering to enthusiasts / power-users and have fairly noncommittal / at-your-own-risk / no-warranty license agreements. However, if the past is any indication, most people will end up doing a lot of business in walled-garden analogs of Apple or Facebook.

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

#565

Post by loa_in_ »

lopis wrote: post #76
travoc wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On top of the lack of integration support, the MyQ app used to open garage doors is full of advertisements. It's ridiculous. I regret buying their products.

And there you have it folks. That's the number one reason why they are forcing you to use their app.

As discussed elsewhere in the thread, it seems that this would be the number two reason, the number one being trying to be the only service that can profit from in-garage deliveries.

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

#567

Post by vladvasiliu »

TheCapeGreek wrote: post #563
scrps wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon expects me to weaken my physical security posture to help them defend against an activity I don't engage in and is in no way my responsibility? AND Chamberlain expects me to weaken my digital security posture so they can run some opaque crap on my network¹ that I have very little observability into and even less control over so they can make money? Money is one hell of a drug because they are high. How about a…

I find it odd that the standard policy is to leave packages unattended in any form in the first place . This is another one of those things that is not standard globally. E.g for us in South Africa, this would be unthinkable, regardless of how much time it saves the delivery company. The only time a parcel is left at the door is when it's UberEats. Otherwise delivery is rescheduled if we don't physically collect parc…

Here in France that would be unthinkable, too.

But the US still seems to have some remnants of a high trust society, which has been only a temporary thing in many places, if at all.

Not having such a society adds frictions in all kind of interactions. In the end, that means cost. I can understand why people and company try to shift that cost when it comes up in areas where it wasn't present beforehand.

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

#569

Post by sokoloff »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #515
derefr wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about the commercial parcel lockers — the ones that fit a whole neighbourhood's deliveries, that are therefore essentially big sturdy metal storage racks underneath — too big and heavy to just pick up and walk away with. Every country has these to some degree; I imagine they're most popular in places that 1. have colder climates, but 2. where people don't tend to drive (like Poland?) The US has some ,…

Fair enough. I got confused because you mentioned Amazon Lockers, which to my understanding, are the proper brand name of the kind of parcel lockers I mentioned, as deployed by Amazon. I agree that per-household lockers are... tricky at best. But then, if we're talking homes, and thus presumably lawns in front of them, I wonder what are the difficulties of selling a multi-slot locker that would be bolted down to the…

What problem is that solving for the homeowner?

I get hundreds of packages per year (not an exaggeration) and as far as I know, exactly zero have ever been stolen. Missing packages are invariably delivered to someplace else that must have had a better vibe for the driver that day. (I’ll get pics of proof of delivery with a package that is clearly not at my house.)

In that environment, what problem do I have that could be solved by this, and how much effort (and aesthetics) am I willing to spend to solve it?

Now, if my house shared a wall with two other houses and people walked by my front door all the time, maybe I’d have a theft problem due to greater opportunities for it to happen.

Places with lawns probably don’t have nearly as much package theft just due to less foot traffic.

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

#570

Post by sokoloff »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #541
NavinF wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well not all of them, but I'd say half my packages are delivered same-day in the bay area and most of the rest are 1 day. It depends on your shopping habits and what products are popular in your area. "essentials" like cables, snacks, batteries, hot sauce, etc are always same-day while large items like microscopes can take 2 days Regarding missed packages, are you talking about stolen packages? I've had a few cases w…

By missing here I meant missing the delivery, and having the package returned to sender, and/or stashed at the logistics center somewhere in the ass-end of a gravel road far out of town. I've had a single-digit number of packages never delivered, most of them years ago, from Aliexpress (which, at least back then, had a very buyer-favoring dispute process, so I would get my money back with three clicks or so).

If a parcel I ordered to my house gets sent to a pickup point, there’s an extremely good chance that the sender will be taking that parcel back and I’ll do without or order another one.

Only if I really needed that specific thing pretty badly today would I spend a few bucks and 20 minutes to drive over to come get it.

I ordered some physical thing, not that thing and a quest.

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