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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

#91

Post by smashah »

The tech community as a whole is dropping the ball by not advocating loudly and openly for adversarial interoperability.

It is a fundamental digital right despite what nonsense-ese is present in any service's egregious terms and conditions.

There needs to be an anti-adversarial interop specific complaint department at the EFF.

Otherwise one day, one of these developers will take the lack of support at its face and choose to defend themselves in court without any (legal) resources.

When the precedents are set that billion dollar megacorps can ruin an interop developers life due to overreaching ToS or some bs about copyright then it'll be too late to cry about it.

Invidious (YouTube), beeper (iMessage), Meta Vs many OSS Devs, etc. etc. etc. largely show that tech's freedom loving stance is not much more than lip service.

Interop projects aren't sexy. The Devs behind them get a pittance if anything. It's not VC-able. Yet instead of praise for the dog work they do we have well-actually-niks berating then in situations like this.

We are now becoming digital beings. We should have digital human rights. Interop is a base level digital human right.

I want to thank you for your work Andre0512 and Long Live hon!

P.s if there any EU digital lawyers out here please reach out to Andre0512 and actually help him please!

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#92

Post by asylteltine »

I’m really worried this will become common practice. We MUST fight against this otherwise they will take away open source from us. Making an integration to work with devices you own is NOT ILLEGAL. I’m happy to contribute to a qualified and trustworthy gofundme to protect devs. I myself have a few integrations I made and would refuse to take them down. Granted, I intentionally don’t use any “cloud” api garbage.

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#93

Post by dv_dt »

smashah wrote: post #91

The tech community as a whole is dropping the ball by not advocating loudly and openly for adversarial interoperability. It is a fundamental digital right despite what nonsense-ese is present in any service's egregious terms and conditions. There needs to be an anti-adversarial interop specific complaint department at the EFF. Otherwise one day, one of these developers will take the lack of support at its face and ch…

It could be a part of the push for right to repair. Farmers have pushed similar interface needs for maintaining advanced farming equipment. This seems very similar.

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#94

Post by Arn_Thor »

clintfred wrote: post #54
Arn_Thor wrote: post #34

Just bought a convection heater today. I was willing to spend more for a “smart” one, but on the one condition that I was confident it would work with Home Assistant. Certainly not opening my wallet for the likes of Haier until they change their tune.

Would you be willing to share the one you ended up getting?

Yes! I was a bit cagey because I hadn’t tested it so didn’t know if it worked. It’s a Mill smart convection heater. Their smart stuff works both with their app and with a Home Assistant integration (and via HASS with HomeKit as well). Really neat to use when it’s all set up.

What impressed me particularly is that the generation 3 smart heaters (which is my version) lets you specify to NOT connect to the cloud when it joins WiFi, and instead is accessible only locally—in my case via home assistant. (But I did have to create an account on the first-time setup to update the firmware) The fact their newest products offer this kind of functionality gives me some faith in the future.

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#95

Post by kstrauser »

Scratches Haier off list of household vendors.

I use HomeKit so this probably doesn’t directly affect me at all. But if I stop using HomeKit, I can and will do as I see fit to make the gear I already own work with whatever I’ve switched to. If adversarial companies want to stop people from doing that, then I’ll help them in that mission by not bringing their stuff into my house in the first place.

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#96

Post by alias_neo »

I'm in the process of reverse engineering an appliance myself to allow it to be integrated with Home Assistant, one which requires an mobile app to operate remotely and is connected to the net all of the time, when it doesn't need to be.

I was gifted this particular appliance, but the solution is really to just not give companies like this your money. Unfortunately it's easier said than done, but looking for things with a local API or based on an open and configurable standard are a good start.

I'll add Haier and related companies to my ever growing blacklist because fuck them for this.

I vehemently support people doing what they want with the things they own so long as it's not "interfacing" with other people or their stuff; don't connect to or "abuse" their cloud systems, they can rightfully be upset about that, but removing their crappy smarts (and data collection) and replacing it with local-only is your own business and companies like this can get lost.

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#99

Post by mook »

kstrauser wrote: post #95

Scratches Haier off list of household vendors. I use HomeKit so this probably doesn’t directly affect me at all. But if I stop using HomeKit, I can and will do as I see fit to make the gear I already own work with whatever I’ve switched to. If adversarial companies want to stop people from doing that, then I’ll help them in that mission by not bringing their stuff into my house in the first place.

Scratch off everything that requires internet access (in this case the Home Assistant integration talked to the vendor's API servers).

See also previous discussion on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39044932

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#100

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

asylteltine wrote: post #92

I’m really worried this will become common practice. We MUST fight against this otherwise they will take away open source from us. Making an integration to work with devices you own is NOT ILLEGAL. I’m happy to contribute to a qualified and trustworthy gofundme to protect devs. I myself have a few integrations I made and would refuse to take them down. Granted, I intentionally don’t use any “cloud” api garbage.

not only will it be common practice but likely also the law.

upcoming legislation in Europe mandates secure-boot for any IoT device sold by 2025 in EU. this and the cybersec resilience act will ensure only firmware shipped and signed by the vendor are able to boot :) ... so your comment is spot-on.

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