Their latest round of stupidity pops up a new EULA and forces you to take it or, again, you can’t access your stuff. But that’s just more unenforceable garbage, so who cares, right? Well, it’s getting worse.
It seems they are planning on dropping an update which will force you to log in. Yep, no longer will your stuff Just Work across the local network. Now it will have yet another garbage “cloud” “integration” involved, and they certainly will find a way to make things suck even worse for you.
If you ever saw the South Park episode where they try to get the cable company to do something on their behalf and the cable company people just touch themselves inappropriately upon hearing the lamentations of their customers, well, I suspect that’s what’s going on here. The management of these places are fundamentally sadists, and they are going to auger all of these things into the ground to make their short-term money before flying the coop for the next big thing they can destroy.
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.
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.
See, no problem!
/s
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.
They do not.
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.
I swear, these bad EULA updates that basically force users to “accept the agreement, or we’ll brick your device” needs to fucking stop and be made illegal. The price that’s set for a product, especially a damn physical product, should include the acceptance of an existing EULA, and it should be honoured even when new ones come out and the user chooses to not accept the new agreement. You’ve basically never owned the product if companies can just pull the rug underneath you, and render your hardware useless. And you can’t foresee such changes too; a predatory company can acquire one that you’ve trusted and pull this shit. It’s borderline daylight larceny.
In some places you’re legally allowed to reject a product and get a refund if you don’t agree with the EULA. Wonder of there’ll be reforms allowing people to do that of they don’t accept a revised EULA.
Still very annoying if it’s something you installed or got installed, even if fully refunded.
“You’ve basically never owned the product if companies can just pull the rug underneath you, and render your hardware useless”
See, that’s the thing, as far as the companies are concerned this is their product not yours. You’ll own nothing and you will like it
The biggest gripe I have with this is that they are not cheep. Hue is one of the more expensive products smart lamp products.
Why are they chasing pennies? I could buy 3 ikea lamps for price of 1 hue.
Shame I really liked their color accuracy but guess I have to find new fancy lights.
Luckily I use home assistant so my lamps are not ewaste.
Since they are ZigBee, replace the Hue Hub with an agnostic ZigBee one.
Since you already use home assistant I would recommend this one - https://www.home-assistant.io/skyconnect/
https://zigbee.blakadder.com/zha.html - this is lis of supported devices, if you go for the default ZHA setup.
Thanks for the tips but I meant more that I won’t buy any more hue things because their scummy behavior.
I think what they’re saying is that you can buy that hub and continue to use your existing Hue products. Or are you saying that you can currently use them through Home Assistant without that hub? I’m curious because I’ve got a bunch of Hue bulbs and I’m looking into swapping over to Home Assistant because of this license change, and it’s not clear to me what I need in order to do that.
Why are they chasing pennies? Because they can. It’s really simple as that nowadays.
If they remove the ability to Zigbee to other hubs I swear to god I will be the first one on the class action lawsuit train.
Javascript plus a “curl | sudo sh” attitude to life equals “yeah no, I am never touching this thing”.
Assclown take. Buy a HomeAssistant Yellow and boom done.
Would a Home Assistant Green be just as good?
Don’t know about green but I got a Home Assistant Blue and it’s good enough. Tho You can just use a raspberry pi.
Side note I think you were being sarcastic when you said Home Assistant Green, so I wanted to make reply that sounded sarcastic but Home Assistant Blue and Home Assistant Yellow are real things, tho rereading my comment if one isn’t familiar with technology or home assistant talking about Home Assistant, colors, and raspberry pi for controlling light bulbs just sounds like trolling.
Edit: Sorry, Home Assistant Green is also real. It’s every level hardware that is more than enough for running home assistant and Home Assistant Yellow is the next step up in hardware. Home Assistant Blue was a limited edition run of the hardware prior to Home Assistant Yellow being created. To be clear, I am not trying to troll but to one that isn’t familiar with this technology these names might sound like trolling.
No, Green is their latest launch, supposed to be cheaper and easier for newcomers to start.
If that is the attitude that vets take when newcomers ask questions, good luck getting widspread adoption.
My apologies, before now I haven’t heard of green. I legitimately run my instance on the limited edition blue that kinda lead to yellow being created and before that I used a raspberry pi. My original comment was a little bit of me finding the naming for this stuff funny, not trying to discourage anyone that is new to the platform.
I don’t know why you’re being hassled. I legit had never heard of Home Assistant and made a dumb throwaway joke because the colors mentioned were Yellow and Green, which were also flavors of Soylent in the film Soylent Green. (There was also a Soylent Red, but thats immaterial to this)
I honestly thought the person mentioning Home Assistant Green was making a similar joke… So, your misunderstanding is valid, imho.
This is why I downvoted you: I was asking a legit question but was treated as a joke. I was hoping the Fediverse would have less of Reddit’s nonsense replies but I guess not.
I had never heard of any of these things, and am amused by them being real. They sound like parodies of parodies.
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
Tangentially related, but I recently bought a Philips shaver and the thing wanted me to install an app on my phone and connect it to the shaver via bluetooth to send shaving data.
I mean, I guess there’s theoretically value there for some people? I can’t imagine what, but that app’s staying well off my phone.
Just what you need. A popup on your phone reminding you you’re a scruffy git and not shaved in 7 days.
Warning razor blades at 30%, below satisfactory shaving standards, we will auto ship you replacement blades using your phone!
Nobody wants to sell products anymore, they want to sell subscriptions
I bought a Raspberry Pi a few months ago and I feel strangely prepared. I wanted to use Home Assistant to have greater control over my devices since Philips Hue’s app seemed limited.
I feel like a sucker for falling for Philip’s marketing but at least I can use zigbee. I have now decoupled myself from their Hue Hub and app. Unfortunately I now have a wasteful hub sitting around. I have it posted for free on the classifieds in hopes it will disappear.
I want a lamp that fades on as an alarm in the morning, and doesn’t require an internet connection. What options do I have?
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.
https://www.amazon.com/Philips-Wake-Up-Simulation-HF3500-60/dp/B00F0W1RIW
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.
Couple of weeks ago I wanted to change the intensity of the light bulb. I open the hue app and it tells me to download the new app, not allowing me to do anything else. I install the new app and it asks me to register… I still have my bulb at full light :D I’ll either find a compatible open source app or a light bulb that respect my privacy, I got a couple of tplink ones which were cheap and seems to work ok
I’m using TP Link Kasa bulbs at home and they work fine for what I need. They integrate well into Home Assistant.
I bought a kasa power strip for individual switching thinking TPlink kept around the no account local API.
They fuckin trashed it and I need an account to use a goddamn power strip. I’m going to have to rip this apart and see if I can reprogram it or something.
I know you the author doesn’t seem to want to hear about Home Assistant, but it does have the HomeKit integration they want and you have the fine tuned control the want too!
