Definitely not. you cant have T&C that are against the law, event if consumer has agreed to that. Like you cant sell your kidney even if you want to. Its illegal.
They don’t. Majority of users don’t care, and some middle manager shmuck, working on MySkoda, can report how “we” prevented a huge security risk and funneled valuable ~~cattle~~ user data where it belongs.
For better or worse, most devices don't have local interfaces. Some matter devices exist in the past year or two, but not all data/functions are available via matter. Older devices likely won't ever be updated to support matter.
Also lump in the fact that HA is a locally run/focused application, it isn't super compatible with a cloud based API/data delivery system without some additional development from the OEM end.
Last I did the math for an internal system.. in 24 hours HA traffic was ~20% of total, for less than 1% of users. That's wild. Mostly because each instance is pinging the API directly every X or less minutes.
If an executive here heard that math, they'd likely ask to block it as well. Right or wrong that's how people react.
Most executives make commercially disadvantageous decisions in exchange for more power.
It's practically a law of business: executives prioritize their power first and their company's profit margins second. This is one reason why outsourcing coding was so popular despite not saving money and being so commercially disastrous - execs were in the driving seat with that relationship much more than they were with us.
Despite what some people will tell you about how the home assistant consumer segment "doesn't matter" (it does) it really is more about the tangibility of control over data vs the intangibility of lost consumer goodwill.
Companies are not profit maximizing at all costs. The shareholders and the executives are not a singular body they have different and sometimes wildly divergent interests.
I haven't seen anyone put this dynamic in such a clear and succinct description - the fact is that a lot of people (especially corporate managers) just hate the loss of control and will go out of their way to ban people accessing their things "wrong" - even if it's counterproductive for their larger corporation or a goal.
Yea, I don't really see the revenue potential here. They seem to be doing this purely to force developers to have a "formal relationship" with them, and to grief all other developers who don't.
Same mentality behind companies who insist users have an "account" to use their otherwise-unconnected products.
By the way, regarding additional profit stream, to access VW data before you still needed WeConnect subscription (100€ a year), just that before you could use another app or automation to access the data. Now you MUST use exclusively WeConnect and partners to access same data even though you paying already for subscription.
Dieselgate should have been enough reason already IMO. And VW's response to it. Throwing some low level employees under the bus (transporter?) so that the big bosses could walk free
Unfortunately I think they're right on #1. In the grand scheme of things the lost sales because of this change are a drop in the bucket. HA and similar tools are not that popular, very few people who have their mind set on buying a VW will change their minds because of this alone.
What's worse is that other manufacturers are starting to do the same thing. They all see unofficial integrations as lost revenue (less of your data to sell because you don't use their app), and higher costs because the usage still comes on their cloud spend bill.
I was talking to my gadget-passionate (but not techie) best friend when the company making our cars made it more difficult to authenticate using the HA integration. He looked at me like I switched to an alien language. "Who cares? Don't you use the app?".
How is this a tangible income stream? I suspect that the amount of customers willing to pay for some weird API access or We Connect offering is rather limited. It would have to be bundled into some other solution, which again I'd guess have a limited customer base.
I have VW and I suppose We Connect, there's not a single thing that's worth paying for, not when you have CarPlay and Android Auto (or whatever that's called). If anything I'd prefer that they'd just drop the personalization they do with users. Our car will forever assume that my wife is driving, because that what the dealer configured and none of us care to mess around with it.
But yeah, people will buy the cars anyway, because all the automation is something that only an incredibly small segment has any interest in. It's just weird that those who actually care about connected cars are the only one VW is punishing with this move.
> I suspect that the amount of customers willing to pay for some weird API access or We Connect offering is rather limited
I tend to agree. But the counterpoint is Tesla. They charge for API access, and there are several businesses that exist to make that data available to customers. I don’t know how valuable it really is, but it’s working. My wife would pay Ford for the level of data she was getting from TeslaFi but instead she gives it to MileIQ. It’s not huge but that adds up.
That's my line of thinking with the "bundled into some other solution". It doesn't make a ton of sense for an individual to buy API access, but other companies could provide a service built in the API, and they are the ones paying VW.
Agree. Its like in some countries you put a sticker on the mail box "no advertisement, please" and its illegal tor postman to deliver you ad brochures. Same could have been possible with browsers, but oh no, now you have to go out to each postman ant tell him explicitly that you do not want ads, and postman has no memory, if you tel him that you don't want ads. He can come back ten minutes later and you have to tell him again.
Fun fact: in the US, the Supreme Court ruled that postal workers cannot filter out mail by the owner’s request.
It makes a bit of sense, since the mailer had already paid, but the main justification (iirc; it was years ago that I read the opinion) was that a postal service should be neutral and trusted to deliver.
Sure, the ISP _should_ deliver the packets. No worries.
The user agent should... be an agent for the user, and be able to perform actions on their behalf.
(The legality of those actions is of course assumed by the user here... if I add an automated flamethrower to my mailbox and burn my bills, well the debt collectors may come regardless if I read them or not - we cannot shift blame to the USPS here).
Not terribly persuasive because the first argument could just as well be seen as the postal service selling a service it can't deliver.
The second argument has the problem that for the whole thing to work the recipient must also have reason to trust the post office, but here their interests are not considered at all.
Fair enough. Most advertising isn't individually posted to each address because that's expensive - they hire their own guy, who isn't a postal worker, to go around and put it in everyone's mailbox. It's like paying one cent per email to prove it isn't spam.
At least in the states, the postman is almost assuredly doing the end delivery of the mail, and is often given a stack of advert materials to mix into the delivery for a certain delivery area. The use of a mailbox by anyone who isn't a USPS employee delivering paid mail is prohibited by law. https://about.usps.com/news/state-releases/tx/2010/tx_2010_0...
No, 99.9% of the mail I get is trash and is delivered by USPS. You can't even recycle most of it because of the paper they are printed on. It's a huge, disgusting waste of resources on multiple levels.
> It's a huge, disgusting waste of resources on multiple levels.
The companies on the ads wouldn't do it that way if they were not getting a positive ROI from it. They probably only need to get 2 maybe 3 new customers to offset the cost of mass mailings.
This isn't true. Proctor and Gamble cancelled $200m of advertising and saw no change in sales. And companies using AI are costing more money to produce worse quality stuff more slowly. Facts don't matter, only how well you can convince a CEO.
I don't care if the are local or national. I don't want it, I'm not interested. Most of what I get is not local, it's credit card offers. There's also the fake missed package notices that are actually home warranty companies trying trick you into calling them.
I don't care. Its still garbage I didn't ask for that is now in my mailbox so I have to deal with it. They have plenty of other ways to advertise. Everywhere I turn in public there's more ads.
The new owner's plan is...to sunset the paid product immediately and give customers access to tooling to be able to continue generating SDKs on their own. From Stainless's post:
As we focus on Claude Platform capabilities and connecting agents to APIs, we’ll be winding down all hosted Stainless products, including our SDK generator. Starting today, new signups, projects, and SDKs will not be available.
If you’re a Stainless customer, visit app.stainless.com/transition for help transitioning from Stainless-managed products to other options. As always, you own the SDKs you’ve generated to date, and have full rights to modify and extend them however you wish.
As a customer, all-in-all, we were pretty pleased with the outcome. Stainless was a great partner to us, even in "the end," and I'm really happy for the team.
well it is. what if you found out that your wife is actually a robot that you cant tell apart from real human. your real wife. well at least not by cutting her open. would you feel the same being with here?
when job of ceo is to make sure that policies around the globe don't interfere with business: "Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world."
- efficient vaccuums
- efficient bulbs
- no roaming costs if somebody leaves a message on your voicemail
- insurance companies and banks can't charge you as they see fit
- toxic free food
- toxic free meat
- farming without killing the rest of the living things
- Best of all: China and USA can't dictate the rules everytime
Like the experience of opening any website for the last decade and being greeted with a cookie popup is more the direction the parent comment was intending I'm assuming.
Some regulations are good, some are bad, all have second and third order effects that need to be weighed against benefits.
and you comfortably ignore all the adds that get in your face when opening any news or commerce site. you would not need these popups with agree and list of third party data aggregators if you were not selling all that visitor information to anyone. alas eu requires you to notify visitors about it. its not like eu says "you must show annoying popups" its page authors choose to do so to be able to sell the data. even knowing that this will annoy the visitors. and then blame EU
Unified charging cable: what if the standard had been set much earlier? For example, in 2008? We'd all be on Micro-USB, far inferior to USB-C. Right now USB-C feels great, but do you really think this is the end-all, be-all? I think the cost of this mandatory standardization will become apparent a few years from now.
how long are you willing to be without your phone? banking apps, public transit tickets, calls, messages, digital signatures. this is luxury not many can afford these days to be offline for days.
With Apple, at least in Germany, you schedule an appointment online, you walk in at that time, and you can come pick it up an hour later. Many independent shops offer basically the same for Android and Apple phones.
When I did it two months ago it took them an hour. Be generous and say they’re backed up and sometimes it takes two hours. Is that too long to be without your phone?
i was referring more to this part "Mail-in battery replacement". good to know that they can do this so fast. but it would be even faster when battery would be user serviceable. and not everyone is living driving distance away from certified workshops.
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