Luckily I'm insured. I've contacted my legal expenses insurance and they're covering a lawyer for the case. I will seek advice and see how an expert assesses the situation and then proceed.
It's pretty common for freelance developers to have insurance like this - if I screw up and you get ransonwared, insurance pays for a lawyer to explain the contracts indemnity clause to you using small words
If you have already screwed up, you now get to play The Game of Litigation, where their lawyers try to prove that you are liable for billions of dollars in damages, and your lawyer tries to prove that you aren't. The way the game works is whoever spends the most on lawyers wins. You've got more cash to spend than your clients right?
Most professions where action/inaction can result in damages will have similar insurance. Some insurance firms even specialize in coverage for professionals.
If your profession has an association or similar group, they should be able to help you find those firms if they exist.
Not sure if it's really the freelance/professional thing others mentioned. Private legal expense insurance (Rechtsschutzversicherung) is fairly common in Germany, so might just be that.
The developer is German, in Germany it's pretty common to have a Rechtsschutzversicherung. You pay them monthly or yearly and in exchange you can request legal advice from one of their lawyers af any time. It's pretty neat.
Well at least someone managed to get a lawyer to fight my insurance company who’s leveraged AI to auto process claims and it’s issuing unfounded mass claim denials.
Not getting the downvotes, a lot of those are quite stupid. The Rechtsschutz is basically required if you drive for example, only because of game theory, not because it actually brings anything
Wow, and it is a real lawyer? I e had employers with benefits that sound similar but I think only get things like templates for common documents like wills and contracts that you can get anywhere, or “free” co suits like you can get anywhere.
I actually do phage a upcoming minor legal need this year, and they couldn’t even tell me , using that as an example, what would the benefit cover?
Yes, typically you get to talk to real lawyers. They may not be the best lawyers on the planet, but if you just need some advice, you should be perfectly fine.
Most home insurers in Western Europe provide with the coverage additional legal counsel / coverage in case someone claims we are liable for anything non motor related. And house insurance itself costs just a couple hundreds a year.
Amazing. Let's truly take it from their point of view.
The only people who care about this plugin are HomeAssistant users, so a very small subset. Those users then either
A) Already own the product, and thus are not going to cost them anything because they already bought it or
B) Home Assistant users who are in the market for their product, and from experience will only buy a product if there's an HA plugin.
In what way are they losing "millions" to these 2 groups again?
I have literally made decisions on purchases like vehicles on if they have a home assistant plugin or not. For HomeAssitant users it's one of the largest factors.
If they have a good support team they already have a form letter for "you are using this product in an unsupported way" and it takes about 30 seconds to process them.
Yea I don't really contact a company unless someone on a forum specifically says that's the best way to resolve the issue (ex. Account authentication related bugs). Either that or it's specifically related to my purchase
Pretty sure that's the case for my less tech-savvy friends and family too
I literally saw someone in a different thread about this earlier talking about ripping out their Liftmaster garage doors when they pulled a similar move last year.
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.
It is insanely petty. Perhaps they don't want people reverse engineering their APIs, but all their competitors and threat actors likely do it, just not on a public repo.
I'm in nearly B as I usually only buy things with proper protocols, e.g Zigbee, that might not need a dedicated plugin. So obviously Haier is now a company I won't buy anything from and will actively not recommend to anything who cares about my opinion on IoT.
Still a ridiculous move. If I buy an appliance, I pay for it and I own it. I am allowed to do with it whatever I want. If I want to use my own solution for controlling it, hosted on my own server, I should have every right to do so. Fuck corporations and their shitty cloud solutions.
To be clear, I think the company are idiotic in the way they handled this, but I guess the integration probably hooked into the company's cloud-based services - so their servers.
I was this way, then got into home assistant and esphome. Now I have iot things like thermostats, garage door openers, air compressor controller, and know exactly how they work and where their data goes. And none of it leaves it's own network (separate vlan).
The Apple iOS method. See a great app or product on your platform. If they won't sell it or want to much Apple just makes their own version and prohibits the original.
Some are actually welcoming, and provide a local API. That way your air-conditioning control isn't web dependent.
Unfortunately, most are quite stupid about it, and insist on using their app. This voids any usefulness of having smart appliances. E.g. pulse a light in a room when the tumble dryer finishes or turn it on and off dependent on your rooftop solar's output.
Lazy would be a better description. They want the tech cred of having it be an IoT device. They also hope to leverage it to get more money. Unfortunately, the budget, and coherent drive for this isn't there. The end result is a "designed by committee" app. It ticks all the boxes, but also misses all the things that would help actually get people using it.
In a press release, the foundation stated its aim is “to fight against surveillance capitalism, and offer a counterbalance to Big Tech influence, in the smart home — by focusing on privacy, choice, and sustainability for smart home users.”
Happily spending money on my monthly subscription. ✊
@SharkAttak@Dehydrated way to ensure all internet searches on your brand deliver a "not compatible with stuff" impression to all prospective customers.
Isn't there a way to control a Kodi box, including TV controls like volume and brightness through it? If not, I'll have to consider keeping the IR sensor (which I wouldn't want to do in ideal circumstances).
This is the great thing about FOSS. Someone else will just take the code and reupload it. If they want it removed from GitHub, they can deal with Microsoft. At which point it'll just be re-uploaded again. There's nothing illegal about it.
So Haier suffers the Streisand effect and the people who want to simply continue using it.
Right… they claim hosting it is a violation of their TOS, but I’m not one of their customers. How can I violate their TOS if I don’t even use their product.
Sad, isn’t it? For fun, look up Whirlpool, Albertsons, and Kroger on Wikipedia to see all the brands they own. No wonder prices are high when so much competition has been eliminated.
Nope, they are not, at least in terms of household appliances. BUT they still produce quality stuff in Germany and Europe. And they actually never have been separate. And HomeConnect is commited to HAOS, iirc they actually provide some code to the plugin.
I didn't think I was. I got sucked in by sensors to monitor indoor temp, humidity, air quality... A smart switch to turn lights on and off when I'm not home. Now I'm thinking of how to turn the HVAC fan off when IAQ is good and temperature is comfortable. I'm not ready to have the house turn lights on when I enter a room or start the oven when I get within a mile of the end of my commute, but it's been growing, one $30 gadget at a time with no subscriptions and no data leaving my LAN.
I have a ton of east-facing windows on the back of my house. It's a blessing or a curse depending on weather and time of day. I always dreamed about them running automatically, and eventually ordered a bunch of Z-wave controlled motorized shades. Then a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant to control it all.
While I was waiting for those shades to arrive, I got a bunch of Kasa light switches so I didn't have to sweep across the entire house to turn off all the lights every night. Turning the hallway light off after 9:45PM triggers the automation.
Yeah, same. I set it up as it looked like the best way to control my inverter - I wanted to set it to charge from the grid when electricity was free, and discharge during saving sessions without having to do it manually. I then expanded to trying to calculate how much charge I needed overnight in cheap rate based on the solar forecast for the next day...
Anyway, I now have everything on it and keep thinking of things to add.
To each there own, but i think after all is said and done, automatic hallway lights are just a natural fit and the best addition home automation gave me (as simple as it is). I have automatic lights in more spots because motion detection is easy, but I wouldn't really miss them except in the hallway, where taking the time to flip the switch takes as much time as traversing, and then you still have to turn it off after.
I can see that. Most of my house gets enough light - or streetlights at night - to walk through with the lights out at midnight. Add in a lumen sensor, though, to dial lights up when it's cloudy and down when it's sunny...
When I think of automations, it's either things like coordinating big power draws to cheap electricity or trivial quality of life enhancements, like turning out the lights in an empty room. The latter, I have trouble justifying to spend on occupancy sensors and smart switches if it's only going to save 20 Watts of LED or five steps. Once it's become your hobby, it's much easier to say, "I'm going to buy these sensors because they're fun to play with and it gives me joy to see them work."
Yeah you buy the sensors because you enjoy it all. The sensors then become even more useful when you realise they don't just pick up motion, but also temperature, humidity, lumens...
Having my hallway and kitchen lights be motion activated and brighter/dimmer based on ambient light is fucking great. If you get there you might wind up loving it like I do lol.
I love Home Assistant and have been using it for years. It just keeps getting better and better over time! With so many new features added all the time I have just started blowing away my entire VM of it and recreating from scratch to see what's new. It's a good problem to have!
Blue Iris in the other hand... just give me a damn version that runs on Linux natively and not some Wine bullshit.
It can even run in Docker (which is how I'm running it). Not as intuitive as BlueIris but the dev is super-active and responsive to new features and bug fixes. Been running it for a couple of years now and like it.
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