homeassistant

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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io

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Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice (www.bleepingcomputer.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

One of the problems with the cloud-polling integrations is that they will frequently poll the back-end APIs to get the current status of that device. A normal user might only open up the app once or twice a day and call the APIs, but these integrations will go 24/7 every 10s-5m. That can add up to a non-trivial amount of traffic. If there's 100 users opening it up once a day, that's not a lot of traffic, but 10 users polling every 1 minute is equivalent to 15k people doing something once a day.

I actually saw one of my integrations I used defaulted to updating every 10 seconds. I decreased that because I didn't want to draw attention to it.

A business will look at their usage and ask why there's more than expected traffic. They could be running their server on a potato. They could go back and support Matter, that costs money, requires skilled engineers, and cuts into profit margins.

While it sucks, that is something they could point to in a court about "economic harm".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

I reckon it's probably not that much. There has to be tens of thousands of customers worldwide that are using their shitty app.

Forks and stars on the original repo numbered only in the hundreds.

Cloud services and API gateways usually charge once you get into the millions of requests. Amazon API Gateway doesn't even charge for having the APIs active - only for the requests that are received and the data transferred out.

I'm finding it very difficult to believe a few hundred HA users even came close to putting a dent in their cloud bill.