Philips Hue products are about to get a whole lot worse – even the ones you already own.
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.
This should be illegal.
This is the kind of bovine excrement that boils my blood. I recently tried to find a simple offline budgeting app for my iPhone, only to find that it simply doesn’t exist. Every single budgeting app in the Apple App Store requires you to create an account with them. The last thing I want is some nameless, faceless, dude-living-in-his-mom’s-basement developer to have is any sort of access to my financial information, and the same goes for any corporation as well. There is no such thing as privacy anymore when it comes to modern apps and services; everything has to have a data-harvesting angle to it. I barely trust my bank with my money, I damn sure don’t trust some rando person or data-hungry corporation with it.
Unfortunately, developers are so scared of piracy that ones that aims profit found Jesus on server-side now that internet is pervasive. Instead creating a local application that will last forever being useful for their users, they hide the real application between layers of firewalls on a remote server running a mess of a backend coded in 20 different languages, interpreters and VMs, that not even who created it can recreate the stack if it ever collapses.
I find funny that we have PCs and smartphones that are more powerful than ever, with a high-end PC today rivaling supercomputers of 20 years ago, and… we regressed to the 70s with dumb terminals. Because all these “cloud” dependent applications are exactly that: dedicated interfaces to use the PC and smartphone as a dumb terminal.
This problem of owners not controlling devices, rather services control them, is all too familiar these days. I genuinely want to know how to avoid these products and find products that are controlled directly by the owner.
The reason I ask is that I’ve bought multiple programmable light strips only to learn after the fact that they are locked to and controlled by a remote service. I feel I should be able to buy products where no remote account is needed, but even after trawling through hundreds of listing I never seem to find them. It seems like every single product vendor is guilty of doing this today. Is there even a single alternative that works off the shelf and you don’t have to build yourself? If so I haven’t managed to find it.
@Alfman,
I would pitch that idea to owncloud devs or a startup that would develop on a self hosted and pay cloud type, both with APIs to smart speakers like Echo, Apple, and Google HOME.. I wished I thought in your same line of thinking, but that is also the imoetus of my issues with so-called smart devices as a whole.
IoT is truly a garbage category.
The Clapper is still undisputed king. 🙂
IoT / IIoT is a very broad category, a lot of well made devices are quite useful, and a lot of new medical or sensor tech will fall in this IoT category that will improve the quality of life for millions of people or save lives.
The problem is really the trivial stuff, it is awful and it needs a new category. I propose the IoG, Internet of Gimmicks / Internet of Garbage! I suppose cynics could argue the Internet of Garbage is pretty much the bulk of it!
This sort of nonsense is why I avoid “smart” things, refuse to use any IoT stuff I haven’t built myself, and am in no hurry to upgrade off the X10 modules I bought over a decade ago.
The manufacturers of the devices should have to pay carbon credits for every bit of data they force across the web.
It’s a shame because hardware wise, they push out excellent products…
It could get worse though: Imagine if they ever drove around the zigbee protocol, making it less standard, and forcing you to use their closed hubs…
For the moment, I’ve been able to avoid Hue cr*p using a zigbee dongle + Zigbee2MQTT and HomeBridge … and have Ikea, Livarno(LIDL) and some other brands using Zibgee working along… (though Ikea remotes chew through coin cell batteries a bit too fast to my liking) … Let’s hope it stays that way.
Now if Tuya based wifi devices could be easier to hack, I’d be more than happy, they are kinda worse than Philips in some sense
Re: Home Assistant, I completely share the article’s distaste for the curl | sudo sh pattern and add a massive hate for the whole docker/flatpak/snap/other crap that end runs the operating system’s usual package management and requires a separate effort to maintain. Home Assistant manages to be even worse in this regard, because Docker is their “*weary sigh* if you must be such a luddite” solution. What they _really_ want you to do is run a virtual machine with their operating system in it. That’s the biggest no of them all.
I did bite the bullet and install Home Assistant though and, while I have some general issues with the way it works, I am at least secure from the horrid ecosystem of ever changing vendor apps and the call a cloud service to talk to a local device antipattern.
I’ve been using a Zigbee USB-Gateway called ConBee and running phoscon/deconz service on a raspberry pi 3. German stuff, no cloud.
Paired with “Hue Essentials” android app, this works for me, controlling smart bulbs (hue or ikea) and some sensors (ikea). Wake-up timers in the morning during wintertime etc.
Been running for 4 years now, without a hickup.
indridi,
I want SBCs with good availability and long term support, unfortunately RPI doesn’t fit the bill. I’ve been trying to source raspberry pi’s but the official distributors in the US have been completely out of stock for years now. The only sources I see in the US are scalpers. Is there more availability in europe?
RPI would be great for so many cool projects, but since it’s inception availability here has been atrocious to the point where RPI just can’t be reliably sourced when needed. Some of the alternatives like banana pi work, but you don’t have the same community and support is much worse.
I do similar conbee ii with ZHA through home assistant. The only problem is that the mesh doesn’t report some state reliably in some cases, and my HA automations get confused. The Hue Bridge has been more reliable. Now’s the time to address that I suppose.
it’s already partially in place, they are enforcing the creation of a cloud account and you already cannot remove it if you used one for external services (I used the out of home before moving to home assistant, and recently tried the spotify integration)
The idiot thing is that the bridge is still working locally for api requests, and via zigbee (naturally) so the enforcement is only for the app and to do the initial setup of the bridge.
This can be only harvesting data and/or planned paywalls so I’m moving my bulbs to my zigbee2mqtt installation
I never purchased Phillips Hue lights, but the trials of what is described, would have me to first return them all for refunds, and next, if that doesnt work out, destroy them all as I purchase new, cheaper, non-phillips smart lights.
I was planning to swap over to my local Home Assistant ZHA/conbee II mesh at some time – looks like that time is now.
It’s a shame, no other zigbee bulbs that I’ve tried produce the same quality of light. They all have various flaws in the spectrum. The only bulbs that seem to to come close are even more hampered by idiotic cloud services, like GE Cync bulbs.
I have a philips screen… it does no longer support miracast or chrome cast. meh. fuck’m
NaGERST,
Why did it stop working?
I really wish miracast could have been a universal standard such that every wifi device could broadcast a screen to any display. I don’t think it was royalty free though. Chromecast sucks because connection have to be initiated via google servers, which is not how local hardware should be engineered. Google and Philips are both guilty of “your hardware belongs to us”-itis.
<snarky sarcasm>At least all our hardware supports HDMI</snarky sarcasm>
https://support.google.com/pixelphone/thread/16922573/will-the-pixel-4-support-hdmi-output?hl=en
HDMI used to work on pixel phones before google patched it out of their firmware. I’m sure it helped them sell more chromecasts but damn it guys did you really have to soft-blocked working hardware features? Ugh corporations.
Side note: screens are made by a different company which has licensed the brand name.
Philips themselves have long ago left the consumer electronics space.
It’s beyond infuriating that you’d need to log into anything to use lights. More useless garbage accounts to create to use things that don’t need/shouldn’t have wan access in the first place. I wouldn’t be surprised if “smart” lightbulbs come with a mic and webcam so they can record audio & video, log all the devices connected to your network, and send hourly reports to a mothership somewhere. I thought technology was supposed to make life easier and seem like magic, … not make you enraged and feel under surveillance 24/7.