What if you are using Hue bulbs with Home Assistant. Works totally local and not connected to the internet. How are they going to enforce those to go online?
It’s probably enforced through an unnoticed firmware update. However if you have never connected them to the internet, they might have not received the broken update.
Haha, I kinda agree with Rachel’s quote on hass Javascript plus a “curl | sudo sh” attitude to life indeed.
However, as the lesser of two weevils, I know which one I’ll eat.
Home Assistant and its developers may not be perfect, but at least the imperfections are out in the open. We can’t comment on the quality of the commercial black boxes because we can’t see it.
I think that quote is a bit harsh, JavaScript is not inherently bad, or at least no worse than the people writing it. Install script piping is not an officially recommended installation method by HA. Both are also found in projects far more critical than HA.
Giving a kneejerk rejection to Home Assistant to instead adopt another proprietary hub a bit earlier in the enshittification pipeline doesn’t seem a great plan to me.
I agree. The standard nerdsnark can be a bit grating, when the person on the receiving end is, basically, doing the best they can to offer an open solution, while also balancing funding the project without everyone feeling they’re just milking.
HASS hits a really good balance, imho. They offer a paid service on top, but have no problem with people just running locally, or using a VPN to access.
If you’re willing to go the DIY route, ESPHome might be what you’re looking for.
A Sonoff controller on the lamp, linked to a small Home Assistant server (a cheap Raspberry Pi could do) wouldn’t be too expensive and would run locally.
There’s plenty of small cases or even 3D printable stuff available to put them in a nice enclosure. You could also buy something with an enclosure included, like the atom lite which I got some time ago as a cheap bluetooth proxy; shop.m5stack.com/…/atom-lite-esp32-development-ki…
I have a lot of ESPs around the house but they are all in enclosures.
I have used this one every day for 4 years, it is really nice and simple (no internet/bluetooth etc just an old school clock with a light). Great min brightness, great max brightness, and has a good 40+min gradual fade from min to max. I’ve tried other ones as well but they didn’t work quite as well as this one.
The only downside is the beeping, which can be fixed in 5 min by drilling a tiny bit right in the center of the speaker hole on the back. So many people do this, there’s a youtube tutorial for it somewhere.
I know this post didn’t coin the term 'enshitification", but it really is a great way to describe the monetization of everything that was once good on the internet
I have put the huehub in a separate vlan without Internet and use my nuc with hass. Guess I will never hear from Philips again 🤣 ok, and I won’t buy any of their products again. Case closed
Any guides you can point m to for how to replicate this? I’m handy but I meet some technical limits fairly quickly without instruction. Kinda like cooking, I’m great at it a long as I have a recipe to work with.
I am in that group. I have philips hue integrated with an Apple TV for a HomeKit hub. Though I don’t think it cut ties with the Philip services when doing that.
Philips are providing another demonstration of the dangers of using proprietary smart home platforms. If you don’t control the platform, you don’t control your home. The only way to avoid this is to use an open platform such as Home Assistant, which just celebrated it’s 10th birthday and continues to go from strength to strength.
Fortunately, as I happily tested yesterday, my modern-ish Hue bulbs work with standard zigbee integrations now.
I’m certain Philips will now release a new line that do not.
With Matter integration it would be tricky but I imagine someone on the board of directors is pushing for this.
They may just settle on the fact that 99% of their customers won’t do this. However, HA has really worked hard to lower the bar on this - you can buy an HA Green and a ZigBee dongle, then it’s done quite quickly and easily.
Damn I was just thinking of buying some hue lights for my computer monitor since they change color based on the screen. Any non-shitty alternatives for that?
Hue emulator/ diy hue. It runs on Linux or an old router. I have it running on a raspberry pi attached to my network. You can use official hue products or a handful of other WiFi light products like IKEA lights or Xiomi Yeelights. I use Yeelight bulbs and custom led strips connected to programmable WiFi chips. Took a bit of soldering but it works flawlessly now. The yeelights and custom strips cost a fraction of the official hue products.
So let me get this straight. You buy Phillips Hue devices because they work offline. Then they change how the devices you bought function making them only work online forcing you to create an account and allow them to collect data.
This should not be legal. This is a breach of contract, they modified the contract after you already signed it (by buying the device). If they want to do this, they should offer full refunds to anyone that wants to exit the contract, or only apply the changed to new devices.
I’m sure there’s a line somewhere in the ToS that you always read carefully from beginning to the end, saying that they merely rent you the devices infinitely, so they’re actually not your property and they can do whatever they want with them.
There is a bog standard line in nearly every ToS “We have the right to modify this terms of service without notification to the user” blah blah blah. It probably even holds up in court.
The format where they do is when it is a service provider and they simply stop service of the contract. I.e. if you don’t accept the terms and services for say, using reddit, they can just choose to not continue providing you access to those servers.
But it didn’t hold up on contracts involving already rendered services or anything really other then the outcome of declining being ‘everyone exiting the contract’ or simply moving back to the previous contract.
Courts in the us have pretty much universally upheld that contracts cannot be changed without all parties agreeing.
Yeah but the whole tech industry operates as Whatever-as-a-Service now, which means those ToS changes are able to be applied whenever they like. You either continue using the service or you don’t. This apparently applies to lightbulbs now. Lightbulbs as a Service. Sigh.
Does it matter that these ToS aren’t available until after you buy the product? I mean, these agreements are rarely posted right next to the product in-store or online. Right?
No issue here. If you don’t like the new terms, just decline and toss all your smart home appliances that you spent your hard earned money on right into the trash.
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