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: !homeassistant@lemmy.world

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!

  • @ShortFuse@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10•6 months ago

    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.