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Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

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Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#31

Post by jabroni_salad »

Tomte wrote: post #13
MostlyStable wrote: post #11

Per the one tweet in the article that says they only bought one of these appliances because of the HA plugin: the lesson is don't buy smart devices that have cloud control. Whether or not they have local automation plugins (like HA), or just that have apps/cloud services, expecting those capabilities to remain for the life of the device is a fool's errand. We have a host of examples of cloud services being killed and…

Philips Hue did run locally, and now they are rolling out updates where a cloud account is required.

That is only for the Hue app. You can still just put them in pairing mode and use any zigbee controller you like.

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#32

Post by pc86 »

agilob wrote: post #5

>"Specifically, the plug-ins are using our services in an unauthorized manner, which is causing significant economic harm to our Company." Except lots of people wouldn't buy your shit if not for the addon.

It should be a requirement that companies include a good-faith estimate of actual economic damages in a DMCA, or an excellent reason why they cannot come up with such an estimate, and if there is a lawsuit stemming from this later be on the hook for those estimates actually being in good faith and not just "let's assume everyone in the country would have bought our dehumidifer if not for this GitHub repo existing ..."

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#33

Post by jitl »

Unfortunate. I'm not directly affected by this takedown, but I just started using Home Assistant with my GE (owned by Haier) washer and dryer via this repo: https://github.com/simbaja/ha_gehome

I often forget to take clothes out of the dryer in the garage, so I'm working on an automation to flash the lights by my desk with increasing urgency the longer clothes are left in.

I'm very surprised how well Home Assistant works for its kind of hobby project, it's matured quite a bit from when I looked into it a few years back. It's not a huge win if all your devices are already HomeKit and programmable via Shortcuts, but it's that it can bridge my non-Homekit Nest, ECOVACS, and GE devices into HomeKit land, and offer unified WebSocket & REST APIs to program against.

I can see why companies would send the takedown notices if their API service implementation is low quality. The HomeAssistant user has to be a super-expert, the sort of person to set up a Google Cloud project to create OAuth credentials so you can connect your calendar. There can't be a lot of those people, and the integrations are probably quite spammy with API polling.

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#35

Post by devmor »

Tomte wrote: post #13
MostlyStable wrote: post #11

Per the one tweet in the article that says they only bought one of these appliances because of the HA plugin: the lesson is don't buy smart devices that have cloud control. Whether or not they have local automation plugins (like HA), or just that have apps/cloud services, expecting those capabilities to remain for the life of the device is a fool's errand. We have a host of examples of cloud services being killed and…

Philips Hue did run locally, and now they are rolling out updates where a cloud account is required.

I’ve also been annoyed by this but thankfully the local hub still accepts HTTP requests just fine. The first party mobile app is all that’s affected.

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#36

Post by jeroenhd »

sokoloff wrote: post #26
aaomidi wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you fork it, do a proper git clone and git push. Github can and has DMCAed direct forks in the past.

At the risk of asking a dumb question, what does a git push do for you there? (Fully agree on the clone locally point.)

If Github doesn't realise you forked the project, it doesn't appear in the list of forks, which a lot of companies use when sending an actual DMCA notice to Github.

I'm not sure what you'd need to do to disconnect your fork, but clicking the "fork" button will often get your repo automatically taken down if the parent repository gets DMCA'd.

If the commit history is different (say, because you rebased the project onto a slightly different initial state), Github won't auto-detect the fork as easily, so the lawyers would need to find your project and include it in their takedown notice.

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#37

Post by devmor »

jabroni_salad wrote: post #31
Tomte wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Philips Hue did run locally, and now they are rolling out updates where a cloud account is required.

That is only for the Hue app. You can still just put them in pairing mode and use any zigbee controller you like.

You can also still use the Hue hub. It accepts local http requests for all functionality.

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#38

Post by nostrademons »

sokoloff wrote: post #26
aaomidi wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you fork it, do a proper git clone and git push. Github can and has DMCAed direct forks in the past.

At the risk of asking a dumb question, what does a git push do for you there? (Fully agree on the clone locally point.)

It's not marked as a fork in their systems. Instead, it's as if you'd written a bunch of code in a local repository and then pushed it to GitHub.

It could still be identified as the same codebase by eg. comparing commit hashes or content hashes, but that's harder. If you really want to be sure, clone the repository, make a few local edits to files (eg. adding a comment to each file), copy the full source repository to a new directory in the filesystem, git init that as a new repository, commit changes, and push. That blows away all the existing history of commits, and ensures that each file has a different hash. It's still technically possible to detect it as a dupe, but would require an extremely expensive shingling or filesystem diff on every repository in GitHub.

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#39

Post by plagiarist »

MostlyStable wrote: post #11

Per the one tweet in the article that says they only bought one of these appliances because of the HA plugin: the lesson is don't buy smart devices that have cloud control. Whether or not they have local automation plugins (like HA), or just that have apps/cloud services, expecting those capabilities to remain for the life of the device is a fool's errand. We have a host of examples of cloud services being killed and…

Totally correct.

Furthermore: reject them not only when the regular use goes through a cloud, but also anything that needs a specific app download or cloud connection just to change settings. All functionality available on local network and with standard tools or nothing.

I saw that a lot with cameras. "It has ONVIF, you just have to download--," nope, that's it, next candidate.

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#40

Post by nostrademons »

supergeek133 wrote: post #20
elkos wrote: post #3

I wish there would be an appliance manufacturer that would actually hire developers to create and maintain Home Assistant.

Home Assistant users are small minority of many of these companies user bases (including ours), and these integrations being locally focused often poll HEAVILY causing an upside down ratio in API traffic compared to all other users. The solution is to allow local interfaces (matter, HTTP, etc) but most company cybersecurity teams just freak out at this. Oh, and the reason we don't have a full time team managing HA is…

Hah, the staff on Assistant working on home integrations measured in the hundreds (I used to work adjacent to those teams). Of course most of them were either laid off or reassigned to other projects, so it's pretty likely that Assistant will stop working soon, if it hasn't already.
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