Fabio ManganielloSep 27, 2023

There we go - the technological #enshittification pandemic has also reached Philips #Hue.

Apparently they weren't making enough money by selling bulbs at $50/70 each. They'll now force you to log in through their app to the bridge too, or all of your bulbs will just stop working.

What this means, among the other things, is that tons of unofficial integrations that have been built over the years (phue being one of them, which I contributed to in the past, and is also used by Platypush to interact with Hue bridges) are also likely to stop working once you upgrade your bridge's firmware. Those integrations leverage the old push-the-pairing-button mechanism to pair with the client, but now in-app authentication through a registered account seems to be a requirement - and I definitely have better things to do with my time than reverse engineer again their shitty authentication flow and push a PR to phue.

Philips Hue (sorry, Signify B.V.; Philips has actually given up on building anything, they're just waiting for everybody who works there to retire) has joined the long wagon of companies that have realized that scooping up as much data as they can from their users (that probably includes at what time you usually wake up and go to sleep, from your bedroom lights patterns, or how often you go to the toilet) and selling it to data brokers provides a much steadier revenue stream than selling actual products that people want (even if those products are already quite pricey). And they don't care if fullfilling their new missions of being a mere data collector rather than a tech company means to literally break overnight the lights in the houses of millions of customers.

Of course, I was kind of prepared for this. I have #Platypush installed on a RPi with a Zigbee dongle and zigbee2mqtt, and it already does the job for a bunch of Hue, Ikea and other cheap Zigbee lights. That's all you need to make your own Zigbee bridge. #HomeAssistant and #OpenHAB are other popular options.

But it'll still take me a while to unpair a few tens of Hue devices in my house that are still connected to my Hue bridge (which I purchased a decade ago btw), and reconfigure tens of groups, scenes and automation routines on my self-managed bridge instead.

I used to love being a software engineer, building things and solving problems. Now being an engineer sucks, even as a hobby, and I don't feel anymore like this is what I want to do with my life.

It's not up to me to decide what to build anymore. It's up to Spotify killing their streaming libraries, Twitter or Reddit killing their API, Hue breaking their products if you don't log in through their app, YouTube coming up with ways to break youtube-dl on a daily basis, Google breaking your browser extensions, Red Hat and Docker turning suddenly hostile towards the FOSS community that made their fortunes, Messenger periodically logging out your alternative clients and locking your account, an increasing number of companies who insult the large community of unpaid volunteers that builds against their ecosystems as "free-riders" and make it their business mission to break their implementations, and the list could go on forever.

I'm no longer working with ecosystems built by companies who genuinely want to build good things that people want to use, who treat the community of developers around them as an asset rather than a liability, and even sport "don't be evil" among their core values. I'm working in an industry that continuously takes hostile stances against the FOSS community, unofficial clients, and anything that doesn't fit neatly into the quarterly vision for profitability outlined in the PowerPoint deck of a sociopath product manager with no tech background, and who couldn't care less if they are selling IoT devices or bricks. And I have to dodge these attacks on a daily basis, one line of code at the time, for the hundreds of integrations available in the projects I maintain or contribute to, just to keep things working without losing features overnight.

I wake up the morning thinking "how will tech companies decide to fuck me up today just to get one more byte about me to sell to data brokers, and which activities will I be forced to put aside in order to write some code that fixes the UX-breaking shitshow that one of their greedy managers has decided to put up today in an effort to beef up their quarterly bonus with a +1% uptick in revenue?"

Congratulations, motherfuckers. Your broken business models have broken tech for everyone.

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2023/09/26/hue/

The Philips Hue ecosystem is collapsing into stupidity

Show threadFree Pietje 🇵🇸 🍉Sep 27, 2023

@blacklight
This has been on my mind a LOT since I read it:
"The essence of capitalist “private” property is *sabotage.* Block access to something useful and then charge for that access."
src: https://kolektiva.social/@HeavenlyPossum/110999967883256578

It's sad to see that all my cynical thoughts/predictions have or are becoming true.
I had already actively avoided using Netflix, Spotify and Hue because it was soo predictable what was coming.

It boils down that I only use FOSS (based) things as all companies will fsck you over.

HeavenlyPossum (@[email protected])

The essence of capitalist “private” property is *sabotage.* Block access to something useful and then charge for that access. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/sep/03/an-absolute-mess-learner-drivers-forced-to-buy-tests-on-black-market-as-companies-block-book-slots

kolektiva.social
Show threadFabio Manganiello

@FreePietje the problem is that it's hard to be FOSS all the way down even when hardware is involved - like in IoT.

Look no further than #HomeAssistant: it's an amazing FOSS platform, but 90% of the integrations that it provides are for closed gardens. Whenever something changes in one of the closed gardens, all they can do is to rely on a large community of volunteers that will adapt the integration.

This is the reason why I kept working on #Platypush. I realized that you don't need 1000 integrations (often the result of reverse engineering efforts) with closed products developed by companies that are unlikely to keep those APIs running in 2-3 years time (or companies that probably won't even be around in the next 2-3 years).

You don't need 20 different integrations for 20 different Zigbee bridges when you can run your bridge with zigbee2mqtt and get them all for free.

(That's also another thing: even though the products developed by most of these companies act like their own beasts in their own closed environments, the protocols they are based on, mostly Zigbee and Z-Wave, are actually open, and anybody with a USB dongle can create a bridge; and that's also why some of these companies have been pushing for years for Matter, so they can have full control over the protocol too, and lock people out even of the physical hardware with a simple unsolicited firmware upgrade, no intermediate bridge required; and that's the reason why Platypush hasn't embraced Matter yet, while HomeAssistant has).

The thing is: how many people are willing to go completely pure also on the hardware side - which usually means flashing a Zigbee dongle with custom firmware, or debugging Platypush/OpenHAB logs, or building your own devices based on ESP/Arduino, or getting the hands dirty with I2C, SPI, UART and TTL? If the entries barriers for alternative FOSS software products and services are already high, those for hardware products are even higher.

Even in my case, even though I've tried to be as pure as I could, Hue was still my Achille's heel.

I invested ~$1000 a decade ago to buy tens of Hue lights, switches and sensors in my house. Mostly because there was nothing like Hue around 10 years ago, until Ikea came up with its cheaper Zigbee lights a couple of years ago. Even though I could pair them to my zigbee2mqtt bridge, I have never actually done so - I have some other cheap Zigbee appliances connected to my RPi bridge, but those 50+ Hue lights, tens of switches and sensors and their hundreds of configured scenes and rules have always been living on my Hue bridge for the past 10 years.

Sure, I should have expected that at some point Hue would enshittify as well (Signify B.V. has given plenty of signals in that direction in the past few years), but I didn't expect them to do that so fast and so drastically. It's literally been like "hey, tomorrow y'all will get a new firmware upgrade for your bridge, it'll instantly kill any integration that doesn't support the new (undocumented) login flow, and who f*** cares about the hundreds of apps, integrations and all that hundreds of developers have built against our ecosystem in the past nearly 20 years".

Sep 27, 2023 at 11:14amWeb
Show threadFree Pietje 🇵🇸 🍉Sep 27, 2023

@blacklight
I'm aware that I'm WAY more radical then most. I will *never* give an external party control of what happens or what I can do (with the equipment) in my house.
If that means that I'm missing out on "cool feature X", so be it.

Maybe to (also) rationalize it, I wonder whether I'd actually need it. My (initial) problem with Hue was that we've made enormous progress in saving energy wrt lightning. Throw that away for datacenters so people can change lights when they're not at home? 🤔

Show threadFree Pietje 🇵🇸 🍉Sep 27, 2023

@blacklight
I can see the fun and am ok with 'gadgets' when it's 100% under my control and does not need an external network connection (not under my control). Using my Wi-Fi network? That's fine.

I never 'dug into' Home Assistent as I wasn't sure it was actually all FLOSS as I just saw too many references to proprietary systems.
Wrt 'Matter', I see Amazon/Apple/G👀gle and I'm immediately extremely skeptical. They're all about them having control. Well, not in my house they won't.

Show threadFree Pietje 🇵🇸 🍉Sep 27, 2023

@blacklight
I'm not particularly a fan of IoT (the 'S' in IoT stands for Security), which helps.
But I try to contribute as much as I can so that people can (in time?) use Free alternatives, where they are in full control.
There's a LONG way to go before we can, so it's best to contribute ASAP.

Unfortunately too many people don't know they need it and/or don't care. Enshittification never stops, so I expect that in time more ppl get as angry as you are now. And switch to Free alternatives.

Show threadFabio ManganielloSep 27, 2023

@FreePietje a smart home (and automation in general) comes with many advantages. I have saved countless hours in years by not having to worry about turning the lights on/off when I arrive/leave home, switching off TVs and media players when I go out, turning the lights on/off when I move around the house, turning off the TV from the bed with a voice command or a smart button, controlling anything I want in my house with an Arduino and a few old IR remotes...

But I see your point about energy consumption - the savings of a smart home probably don't outweigh the cost of somebody having to run fat servers in fat data centers to serve all those requests. That's why all the automation in my house is managed by a RPi with Platypush with all the integrations running there, and one more "lightweight" RPi per room, rather than having a dozen of bridges that communicate with a dozen of different data centers (which, unfortunately, is still the case in most of the smart home installations).

I also share your concerns with HASS. I've also never bought into it because, behind the FOSS layer, I've always seen it as a shiny window for proprietary products that don't deserve the efforts that the community invests to integrate them. Again, that's why I've decided to keep Platypush alive rather than converging my efforts over there.

IMHO we need *real* open solutions for IoT and home automation and we need them soon. The answer I often get from the FOSS community ("IoT and home assistants are proprietary land, and they have scarce added value, so we shouldn't bother too much with them") is one of the reasons why people are stuck with closed ecosystems that can literally turn off the lights in their homes overnight if their board decides to implement a new monetization strategy. And I can't even tell these folks "just don't use these proprietary systems", because the alternative currently involves picking a soldering iron and flashing custom firmware.

Show threadFree Pietje 🇵🇸 🍉Sep 28, 2023

@blacklight
Maybe I'm just simple and/or I'm in the 'scarce added value' camp, but to me a lot of the things you mentioned a nice gimmicks. Or solutions in search of a problem. When I enter a room with no light, I press the light switch nicely located close to the entrance. When I leave that room, I press that same switch to turn off the light. When I want to watch TV, I press a button on my remote to turn it on. When I'm done watching, I press that button again to turn it off. Etc.

Security..

Show threadFree Pietje 🇵🇸 🍉Sep 28, 2023

@blacklight
cameras are sold to make you feel 'safe', while they accomplish the opposite. They cause anxiety, which makes you buy more cameras. Perfect for cos, but not for users.

Some things are actually useful. Like monitoring your energy usage or air quality or humidity etc. Connecting those to a low-power SBC ('RPi') in your own house/LAN sounds like a good idea and insofar a FLOSS solution doesn't exist, we should make them. And HW for those things which run on FLOSS.

Show threadFree Pietje 🇵🇸 🍉Sep 28, 2023

@blacklight
Will that convince 'average Joe'? Unlikely, as IMO most people only care about (perceived) convenience and don't give a shit about Freedom. And a good Enshittification strategy may annoy people, but not enough that they will actually stop using those products/services. I haven't seen signs that that's about to change anytime soon.

There's a LOT of work to be done to make Free alternatives viable, so we could use some time ;-)

Show threadChance 'UmNov 4, 2023
@FreePietje @blacklight I'm radical in the same way; I only wish my family agreed. I had to put my foot down on cameras in the house.