Mildly Infuriating

They want to advertise that their stuff is "cloud enabled", while offering the shittiest service possible and putting as many roadblocks as possible to minimize its use.

Having people use their services efficiently is increasing their cloud services bill, can't have that.

Personally, I've restrained myself from buying into IoT, and if I'm going to do so, I'll make sure it can be controlled locally without depending on a cloud service, and through a hub I can fully control. I need to be able to disconnect my modem and operate everything even if the WAN is down.

The tos should only apply to the software and not the hardware, right? Or do you need to sign a waiver when you purchase the damn thing?

Why? Their response showed why: so they can sell your data. There's literally no other reason. And they can't just sell a product for profit, that's not enough, they have to also sell out our privacy for more revenue! Otherwise they would have stayed quiet, maintaining plausible deniability and not taken this step. It's literally never enough for these scumbag companies...

Fuck these guys for real. I had just set up a raspberry pi and nfc tags. I’m not buying their shitty ecosystem even harder now.

LiftMaster/Chamberlain

Get a ratgdo. It's a little ESP8266-powered board that connects to the garage door opener and lets you open/close it and turn the light on and off, and reports the status of the door (opening, open, closing, closed) and obstruction sensor status via MQTT, entirely locally. I installed one on my LiftMaster garage door opener (an old version with no smart features) and it works well! I zip tied mine inside the plastic cover that goes over the light bulb, as per the developer's recommendation.

They have a beta firmware for HomeKit integration too, to directly control it from Apple devices if you don't want to run something like Home Assistant with an MQTT broker.

"ratgdo" stands for "rage against the garage door opener" :D

They just don't want to go through the hassle of securing their api, so they're trying to strong arm the devs into dropping the project.

It would be laughably easy for them to kill this, but maybe their devs aren't competent enough to do it.

I don't even think this is honest, I doubt that a small FOSS project is causing "significant economic damage" to a company of such size. It's just user-hostility and the wish to control the users and the products they bought and paid for. Unfortunately, this is an increasing trend among companies.

Make a project of getting escalated up to an executive through a chain of emails. LinkedIn provides a good starting point with contact information.

A while ago, I expressed my desire to tell a Microsoft executive to fuck themselves over a decision that frustrated me and that idea proved fruitful. (Thanks lemmy) Just stay professional until you earn your prize and, at worst, you’ll waste some of their money as your potential entry point wastes time reading your entirely unrelated message. Change emails if you care to cover your tracks.

That's actually the one thing that Twitter is still good for.

Hmmm..... Like the BBB but better? The better BBB? BBBB perhaps... Or B^4...

It's pretty easy. Download the repo from GitHub as a .zip and upload that to the archive. Pretty simple. Don't forget to do this for both repos.

The problem is it's a script that logs onto Haier's servers with the user's email and password and starts polling for data. Considering that most designed usage is probably based around users every once in a while checking and adjusting their thermostat, just one user with an HACS install doing a poll every minute is 1440x more usage than the next who checks it once a day. If HACS uses were the majority of traffic for these devices I wouldn't be surprised by that metric.

That's what probably meant by the ToS because the users using it are probably violating it, and the addon can be considered as something that makes violating it easier (it doesn't have a secondary purpose other than using a set of credentials that are only given after accepting the ToS).

I've had crappy "Smart" ACs and Samsung was the absolute worst. At random times their AWS instance in Europe would go down or their app wouldn't respond. I gave up and coded my own script to directly interface with the device over the local WiFi. You cut Samsung completely out of the equation. You don't have to worry about their servers not working anymore. That's an ideal way for an add-on to work. Ideally most of the script can be retuned to work directly with the device.

Generally, a lot of companies that add "cloud enabled" to their products don't let you access the local device. Home Assistant isn't talking to the air conditioner, it's logging into their web interface. If it's polling 1/minute, that can be a lot of extra traffic, compared to a normal user.

The better solution is to work with their buyers, not against them. If they provided a local API, then the excess traffic would go away. Theirs no money in that, in the short term, however. So they take the lazy route.

There's a reason I only buy IoT type devices with a local API. They also have a tendency to turn servers off. Suddenly your smart device is bricked, despite working fine.

Not to mention this is being used to control products purchased by individuals. Are they not allowed to use their AC after paying for it because they don't agree to Haiers TOS?

Did OP even agree to their terms?

No, thankfully I don't use any of their products. But I find their statement ridiculous. If I buy something, it's mine, I own it because I paid for it. The manufacturer can fuck off.