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Haier, the air conditioner maker, takes down open source third-party Home Assistant integration (lemmy.world)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

70 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/10882099

Thankfully I don't use any of their products, but this really pisses me off. They claim that this open source project "causes significant economic harm to their company"

This is ridiculous. It is truly ridiculous. How can something that enables the user to efficiently control their AC cause "significant economic harm"???

Consider forking the repository or mirroring it to another platform like GitLab, Codeberg or your self-hosted Git server, so the project can continue to exist and someone can maybe fork it and maintain it.

The effected repos are: https://github.com/Andre0512/hOn and https://github.com/Andre0512/pyhOn

If you don't know about Home Assistant, check it out. It's an amazing piece of open-source software, that you can run at home on your own server and use it to control your smart home devices. That way, you don't need to connect them to the manufacturer's (probably insecure) cloud. It gives you sovereignty over your smart home instead of some proprietary vendor-locked garbage. Check out their website and the Lemmy community: [email protected]

I also highly recommend Louis Rossmann's video about this: https://youtu.be/RcSnd3cyti0

He makes awesome videos in general, consider subscribing.

As Rossmann said, don't ever buy anything from such a shitty company that doesn't respect their customers. This move by Haier is nothing other than a slap in the face for everyone, who just wants to comfortably control the product they paid for. This company is actively hostile towards their paying customers. Fuck these bastards!

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Based on the documentation on the GitHub, it looks like it does use Haier's cloud. Which, doesn't make Haier's actions any less shitty, but I can understand a company not wanting a bunch of users using their undocumented API, especially if there's potential to have automations hitting it more frequently than their own app does (not that I have any reason to believe this project was actually being inefficient with API calls).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

EDIT: sorry, I read it wrong, I thought the reply says the addon "doesn't" use the remote API.

I digged a bit on the code, and every command indeed go through the cloud. So even if you use this addon, Haire can still collect a fair bit of data about you, since there is no way to communicate locally and directly to the AC.

But the addon only sends the minimum amount of data to achieve functionality, so definitely not as much data as using Haire's app.

~~Can you link to where the documentation that specify they don't use API?~~

Because I am looking at pyhOn (dependency of hon, and also being taken down), it seems like when executing a command, they do contact the cloud. Specefically

url: str = f"{const.API_URL}/commands/v1/send"
    async with self._hon.post(url, json=data) as response:
        ...

https://github.com/Andre0512/pyhOn/blob/327d4a181484d49ccbef25e470cfc86d2c5d91fa/pyhon/connection/api.py#L215 . The call to API is later used to send command:

result = await self.api.send_command(
                self._appliance,
                self._name,
                params,
                ancillary_params,
                self._category_name,
            )

https://github.com/Andre0512/pyhOn/blob/327d4a181484d49ccbef25e470cfc86d2c5d91fa/pyhon/commands.py#L142

And the API_URL indeed points to a remote API:

API_URL = "https://api-iot.he.services"

https://github.com/Andre0512/pyhOn/blob/327d4a181484d49ccbef25e470cfc86d2c5d91fa/pyhon/const.py#L2

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Yeah, so I can kinda understand Haier's position here though they probably could have just set/quoted some ToC's on using their cloud services.

It also means that IMO the plugins weren't offering much other than integration, and this probably would have been a product I'd have avoided even before they started acting like dicks.

Local control or bust (or ability to reprogrammed with FOSS firmware)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Well then I guess it is pretty obvious