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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

#141

Post by zdragnar »

WizardClickBoy wrote: post #139

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…

This is too bad. I've got a (dumb) Haier refrigerator that works perfectly well, going on 5 or 6 years now.

It's an odd width because of a stupid home remodel by the previous owner that I can't really undo, and haier was the only vendor that didn't want to charge me "designer" prices because of that.

Hopefully it keeps going strong :/

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#142

Post by unstatusthequo »

I was never impressed by Haier's quality to begin with. I for one wouldn't have bought their junk anyway. You're not missing anything. Take a hard pass and buy something that lasts? Have a Haier already? Sell it and buy something with a chance of longevity. BTW, the US/EU distinction on IoT is interesting, but in the end it's all Haier China. So you know what to expect.

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#143

Post by beeboobaa »

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…

> 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?

Yes, they are your users. They are likely the people who will gush about your product to their friends and result in more sales. If the plugin could be behaved better: Make a PR and improve it. People will love you if you do it under your company name, but if you don't want the potential internal drama just do it anonymously. Wins all around.

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

Power users are some of the best cheap marketing available to device manufacturers. They will post about your product online. They will tell their friends. They will make your product better for no charge to you.

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

I'd love to hear about how this could be considered a cybersecurity issue. It's typically far more secure than a cloud connected solution, but most companies don't like that line of reasoning because it doesn't allow them to track their users.

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#144

Post by kkfx »

For me is a call for boycott on one side, a call for class action in EU because such demand means:

- they plan to trap customers in subscription scheme, that's one of the few logical reasons to oppose ADDING ways to use their devices;

- they surveil and profit from data gathered form their users, to be known if under the respect of GDPR and similar norms or not;

Those reasons suffice to AVOID any vendor who have such track record FOR LIFE, even if they change after a certain backlash. That's is, people simply must understand the concept of subscription trap and the concept of ownership, witch should be known but evidently it's not that understood for the sake of human civilization and evolution.

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#145

Post by KomoD »

paradox460 wrote: post #140

FWIW This is Haier Europe, Haier US supports Home Automation and DIY IOT: https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/19a615l/haie...

Haier Group owns them both so to me it doesn't matter which "region" it is, Haier Europe is still Haier, Haier US is still Haier

Haier US -> GE Appliances -> Haier Group

Haier Europe -> Candy Group -> Haier Group

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#146

Post by supergeek133 »

beeboobaa wrote: post #143
supergeek133 wrote: post #131

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. 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…

> 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? Yes, they are your users. They are likely the people who will gush about your product to their friends and result in more sales. If the plugin could be behaved better: Make a PR and improve it. People will love you if you do it under your company name, but if you don't want…

> Yes, they are your users. They are likely the people who will gush about your product to their friends and result in more sales. If the plugin could be behaved better: Make a PR and improve it. People will love you if you do it under your company name, but if you don't want the potential internal drama just do it anonymously. Wins all around.

Which is why to this point, I let it go and don't actually tell anyone how much traffic it takes up. It isn't worth fighting over. Haha.

> Power users are some of the best cheap marketing available to device manufacturers. They will post about your product online. They will tell their friends. They will make your product better for no charge to you.

If I had some way to quantify that, I'd accept it. But as it sits now the vast majority of our users don't interact with any integration models short of "share data with my installer". Alexa being the most popular aside from that.

> I'd love to hear about how this could be considered a cybersecurity issue. It's typically far more secure than a cloud connected solution, but most companies don't like that line of reasoning because it doesn't allow them to track their users.

Go look at major IoT "security problem" news. It is either "cloud leaked data" or "OEM didn't lock down local interface correctly". See the recent Bosch Thermostat story.

Or the "horror years" of Chinese ODM cameras showing up on shodan with live feed video access.

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#148

Post by ajolly »

throwup238 wrote: post #114
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Pretty much any vendor selling commercial appliances. SpeedQueen even gives you the choice of the old school mechanical controls. I don't know if they even have any smart consumer devices. They can be a bit more expensive but rarely break from household use. For smaller non-appliance stuff there's CloudFree [1] which sells products from other vendors that can be reflashed with ESPHome (no affiliation, just a happy cu…

I've bought from cloud Free before, worked great.

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#149

Post by Gibbon1 »

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.

One of my thoughts is you can have the FTC and IRS issue rules about what qualifies as first sale and doesn't. Anything that fails the company has to count as inventory with a 20 year depreciation schedule. And they're required to pay for disposal.

Re: Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

#150

Post by j1elo »

Just like the recent case of Mazda sending a Cease and Desist to someone writing an integration:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37990990

I would suggest complying. Then, probably, a clone of the repo could maybe show up in some other git host, like Gitee, without authorship information that can reveal who to send further legal threats.

I would of course never do such thing. Just talking about an idea a friend had.

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