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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

#131

Post by supergeek133 »

beeboobaa wrote: post #121
supergeek133 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haier (at least this product in the EU) doesn't have a published/public API. The code in question scraped the API off of app/device traffic. Also, Home Assistant is a locally focused platform, and when it uses cloud APIs it creates HUGE amounts of traffic for the amount of users that use it. Source: I run a developer program for a different IoT company

Design a better api, bud. If you can't deal with all of your users using the product you sold them, the product you made is trash and your users deserve a refund. Or, crazy idea, just let users use their devices locally. You won't even have to get your shit together and fix your api then! Now also just design an official home assistant module and you've turned this drama into community goodwill.

> Design a better api, bud. If you can't deal with all of your users using the product you sold them, the product you made is trash and your users deserve a refund.

If 3k home assistant users take up as much traffic as say... 50% of my total population we're just supposed to accept that cost in perpetuity?

> Or, crazy idea, just let users use their devices locally. You won't even have to get your shit together and fix your api then

I advocate for local access internally (to be clear, I don't work for Haier). But I'm here to discuss things I have sphere of influence over as well.

> Now also just design an official home assistant module and you've turned this drama into community goodwill.

That, again, costs money/people/time that can be spent doing things that keep us all getting paid.

All this said, we have lots of API keys in our systems issued that are used in HA, and they DO take up lots of traffic. I sort of let it go because of exactly this (it creates a lot of noise to shut it off for little benefit).

Again, I also agree we should all offer local interfaces, but that's an uphill cybersecurity battle (lots of reasons, some of them not great)

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#132

Post by lxe »

lxe wrote: post #128

I was researching whether there's legal precedent making such uses legal, and ChatGPT pointed out that "Sony Corporation of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.," where it was decided that developing a VCR where users can record Universal's content is legal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive... . I think this applies here as well. Curious how this will play out.

Here's the chat log if you're curious:

https://chat.openai.com/share/6386ad1f-a44d-4cc1-a5d1-0e3c3c...

Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. Accolade, Inc.: In this 1992 case, the court held that Accolade's reverse engineering of Sega's game console for the purpose of developing compatible games without licensing was a fair use.

Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corporation: In 2000, the court ruled that Connectix's reverse engineering of the Sony PlayStation to create a compatible emulator (Virtual Game Station) was fair use.

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#133

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

Isn't it more than settled down on the US? The "tech community", whoever you think has any power there, isn't doing anything because the lawyers already overpowered everybody and mounted some unbeatable defenses.

But yeah, things aren't like this all over the world.

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#135

Post by e44858 »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #103
mook wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

curious, is there a vendor that isn't "cloud-first" today? I've never seen an appliance that doesn't call home

Esphome supports several AC units using a simple dongle: https://static.xtremeownage.com/blog/2023/pioneer-mini-split...

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#136

Post by [deleted] »

supergeek133 wrote: post #131
beeboobaa wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Design a better api, bud. If you can't deal with all of your users using the product you sold them, the product you made is trash and your users deserve a refund. Or, crazy idea, just let users use their devices locally. You won't even have to get your shit together and fix your api then! Now also just design an official home assistant module and you've turned this drama into community goodwill.

> Design a better api, bud. If you can't deal with all of your users using the product you sold them, the product you made is trash and your users deserve a refund. If 3k home assistant users take up as much traffic as say... 50% of my total population we're just supposed to accept that cost in perpetuity? > Or, crazy idea, just let users use their devices locally. You won't even have to get your shit together and fi…

[deleted]

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#137

Post by smashah »

dv_dt wrote: post #93
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.

Interoperability IS right-to-repair for software.

Should Sony decide what you do with your TV? No.

Should Haier decide how you control your AC? NO.

Should Whatsapp decide how you interact with your own account. NO!

Interop devs are the Louis Rossman's/mom & pop repair shops of the software world.

They take whatever redundant software/service you have and enable you to use it as you see fit.

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#138

Post by smashah »

hangonhn wrote: post #107
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…

I am very ignorant about this topic. Can you please explain what "adversarial interoperability" means? The term sounds very intriguing.

You can see "Adversarial Interoperability" on Youtube to see talks on this.

This is a good one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#139

Post by WizardClickBoy »

My advice would be never to purchase anything from Haier, IoT or not. We had a washer drier that had to be repaired three times because of an enormous design flaw causing it to overheat to a dangerous extent. I did eventually somehow manage to persuade them to collect it, after more than a year of back and forth with their nice, hardworking and entirely powerless customer service team. After the device was collected it then took more than six months for me to get my money back. Never again.
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