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#openhab

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Continued thread

Ending the rant with actual useful information. Openhab is excellent...

openhab.org/

For years I was hosting this on my NAS box but eventually I bought a tiny little raspberry pi and installed openhab there. I can connect to loads of different kinds of smart devices without the security risk of authentication outside my home.

Some smart bulbs require you to connect to the manufacturer service. So I don't buy those ones!

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.

rachelbythebay.com/w/2023/09/2

rachelbythebay.comThe Philips Hue ecosystem is collapsing into stupidity

Ich bin vielleicht nicht mehr ganz so #neuhier - aber vielleicht doch eine #introduction.

Beruflich betreibe ich #SoftwareArchitecture im Versicherungsumfeld, mit Fokus auf Weiterentwicklung vorhandener #Java - Systeme. Eine eigene Herausforderung bleibt das #Zeitmanagement.

Privat habe ich Familie, bin gerne mit dem #Fahrrad am #Niederrhein unterwegs, stecke Aufwand in #HomeAutomation mit #OpenHAB und habe Spaß an Strategiespielen - digital oder als #Brettspiel.

It's time for an #introduction

- #father of 2 great little kids and #husband to an amazing wife

- I work in the tech industry at a large #OpenSource company.

- I am an avid #triathlete, #runner, and #cyclist

- I am a #gamer whether it's #pcgaming or #ttrgps or #boardgames

- I love #scifi and #reading

- I'm a #homeautomation enthusist running #openhab

- I love #scubadiving and #skiing

- General collector of hobbies to cover all the things I've definitely forgotten!

So after moving my profile it is time for a small #introduction

First of all a big thank you to @jerry for taking care of this instance.

I was running my own Mastodon instance for about four or five years. As I decided to switch it off (it was a single user instance) I moved here to infosec.exchange and it feels like moving to the right neighborhood 😉
It is hard to discover new stuff on a small instance and as I am pretty much into #InfoSec (damn, I *love* this crap) it makes thanks to move here to find new content. Unfortunately my old toots are not being moved.

I am into security for about 25 years now and started with the "technical stuff". About 15 years ago I became data protection officer and discovered the technical and organizational stuff. Today I work in Information Security and Data Protection (technical-organizational measures, not the legal part) at a supplier for the German car industry.

I am still have a high affinity for IT: I rented 2 VPS at a hoster, 1 Desktop, 2 laptops (of course one with Kali), 1 media center, 1 home server and I keep 4 Raspberry PIs busy.

Besides that I am pretty much into #smarthome with #openHAB and I love playing #boardgames. I enjoy cooking and making #BBQ.

I think that's all for a start...

Long overdue #introduction post:

Hi, I'm Keith, I live in the #ChicagoSuburbs. I'm a #Husband, #Dad, #Scoutmaster, and a Principal Engineer at an #EdTech company.

I've been using #Linux since 94 and enjoy tech like #ruby, #openhab, #openwrt, #tasmota, #PS5, #SteamDeck.

Other things I do: personal tech projects, #VideoGames, #Camping, #Reading, #Photography, #BikeTooter, #CraftBeer, #HomeAutomation, #Lego, #Comics, #ScienceFiction #Fantasy and wondering why I feel busy constantly