I didn't go nasty, but did do my bit to point out how short sighted this move was:
I just wanted to say that your silly take down notice on the Home Assistant developer, who was enabling greater satisfaction for customers who bought your products, was a perfect example of the Streisand effect in action:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
Thanks to you, I (who didn't own - and now probably never will - any of your products), am not only aware of your silly, unethical, and pointless behaviour, but have now taken steps to preserve the developer's code for future use.
You could've fostered this innovation, and gained yourselves the admiration of global, active and thriving community of like-minded people. And potentially gained more paying customers in the process.
Instead, you have achieved the opposite. Well done.
It won't make a lick of difference, but hopefully they get the same sentiment enough times that they at least understand what a fuck-up this was, on their part.
Forked, and mirrored to my Forgejo server. As someone else pointed out on a different community, this is a great example of the Barbra Streisand effect in action.
People like me, without Haier appliances, are now aware of this fuckwittery, and have actively taken steps to preserve the code, before it gets taken down.
They probably can. I'm sure they've covered themselves with some bullshit ToS that governs the use of the cloud service itself, and acceptance is implied when you use the service.
There's a part of me that really wishes it could be challenged, though, by pointing out that leaving the cloud service open to public consumption without some form of authorization should simply be a case of tough titties to them. Lock your shit down if you don't want people like us using it in ways you didn't intend.
But, as we all well know, once lawyers get involved, it's simply too hard to fight this sort of shit.
It depends. My HVAC controller is a similar story to this one, and a dev has put together a plugin for HA that achieves the same thing. But it makes the exact same calls to the cloud service the OEM uses, so I'm certain they're getting the same usage data from me, regardless of the software means I use to make those calls.
This is ridiculous. It is truly ridiculous. How can something that enables the user to efficiently control their AC cause “significant economic harm”???
We're discussing this over in !homeassistant@lemmy.world. This absolutely has to be about them losing access to data they can sell to 3rd parties. The hOn ToS will no doubt have a clause that enables this.
Possibly, but we're talking about appliances here. I know for a fact that my HVAC controller polls their cloud service just as much as my HA does (using a similarly-developed plugin to what we're talking about here).
Of course, that could mean it's doubling the number of times they're being hit, but I somehow doubt there's millions of customers doing that - the forks and stars on the repos are only in the hundreds.
I'm guessing it's what others here have already said - loss of usage data that they've been able to sell.
Looking at the brands they already own, it's not hard to picture a future where they'll own a brand I want to buy.
Although, I'm really interested (and haven't done reading up on hOn yet) - just what level of automation are people looking for on their appliances? I used smart plugs with current measurements, so I can easily get HA to just tell me when my washing machine or dishwasher are finished.
Yeah - in an ideal world, the dev would have the means (and legal standing) to challenge this, just to force the fuckers to admit it in court.
Not that it isn't written into their ToS somewhere - just would love them to admit exactly how that harms them so much, financially speaking. Shine a light on the whole thing.
"Specifically, the plug-ins are using our services in an unauthorized manner, which is causing significant economic harm to our Company."
Presumably, they don't charge customers extra for hOn, so surely the only people using it via HA are the same people that would otherwise have used their (presumably) shitty app that isn't meeting the customers' needs in the first place?
Not clear on how this causes them "significant" economic harm. Dick move.
Lol - not my first rodeo. I'm blocking dns.google as well, and I'm 99.999% certain Google won't have coded Chromecasts to use anyone else's DNS servers.
In fairness, that's just about any tech-connected company nowadays. Social media, streaming services - you name it. They're all bloody doing it.