Based on my local big box store and garage installer availability, Chamberlain has a de facto monopoly. They also pulled the rug out from under customers: that behavior had been in Home Assistant since 2017, and it's their own recent changes that caused the alleged "DDoS". They say it's to promote official products, but the company previously had a local hub that didn't require their cloud service and discontinued it…
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
#232More discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38186303
Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
All remote are more potentially hostile than any local will ever be.
Yes, but some can't be local. For instance an integration that scrapes news from a website.
But in general, OK - some things are better done via an on-line service. But it's the minority of cases - almost none of IoT devices have a legitimate reason to route control and diagnostics through the cloud.
Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API
#234Contrary 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 does both with the MyQ cameras and with the garage access program to partners like Amazon and Walmart. Both retailers have a fraud problem (discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38176891). “In garage delivery” promises dropping delivery fraud to zero - ie users falsely claiming package theft. That solution is worth millions to retailers, naturally Chamberlain would like a cut but only if they can successfully defend that chokepoint.
For historical reasons having to do with the security of three or four generations of wireless protocols used in garage doors they can’t (and products like ratgdo and OpenSesame exploit this.) Other industries such as automotive have a more secure chain of control over their encryption keys so one has to (for instance) go to the dealer to buy a replacement key fob for your Tesla for $300 and not eBay for $5.
Given the turnover in leadership there I’m not surprised the new guy needs to put their hand on the plate to see it’s hot, but there’s a reason this wasn’t implemented before and it wasn’t because of lack of discussion. I can see the temptation in going for monetization given their market share but I think this approach was ill conceived rather than fix foundational issues which would allow home users to integrate with 3rd party services and still charge industry partners for reducing incidences of fraud.
Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API
#235I built my own HA integration with a tilt sensor and a relay to trigger the button. I have a camera on the door, I wonder if I can use that to validate the switch. I normally leave it disconnected from the switch because I don’t need to open the door remotely and I am afraid that some exploit will have a Russian 13 year old opening and closing my door at 4am.
Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API
#236ratgdo[1] is close.
Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main reason why HA accounted for so many requests is probably because it was a polling integration, requesting data every 30 seconds from the server, while the official app either had push events when something changes, or it updated state when the app gets opened.
Why not... just allow HA receive callback events at that point when things change? I feel like this has an easy resolve that doesn't piss off your power user customers, and makes them encourage others to invest in your products, IE power users, and they'll come back because despite being a little extra engineering effort, they were glad you thought of them.
https://support.nuki.io/hc/en-us/articles/12947926779409-MQT...
Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the updated fairy tale, the 3rd little piggy actually perishes, because his house got bricked by the Big Bad Wolf IoT service.
It's a good thing the piggies invested in light infrastructure and good logs with their previous houses, the next version after brick will be even better!
Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not... just allow HA receive callback events at that point when things change? I feel like this has an easy resolve that doesn't piss off your power user customers, and makes them encourage others to invest in your products, IE power users, and they'll come back because despite being a little extra engineering effort, they were glad you thought of them.
Why not simply allow HA to integrate on site rather than to have to go through some crappy service that likely will not last the lifetime of the doors in the first place?
Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, data collection. And subscriptions. This makes sense (and myQ’s privacy policy is a nightmare: https://www.myq.com/privacy-notice ) but I’ve never understood how this particular bit of data is valuable to anyone. Any ideas?
I buy a garage door opener. That is the end of my transaction. I buy a connected garage door opener. The provider knows my geolocation, my name, email address, socioeconomic status, even the phone I own. Inferences can be made on activity such as "they leave for work at 7am when garage door opens". The collection of data doesn't need to be used specifically for reengaging me with Chamberlain. It is now an asset to th…
Yup. And to make the issue clear: there is no such thing as "anonymized data", there's only "anonymized until correlated with enough related data sets".