Hacker News

4123 readers

2 users here now

This community serves to share top posts on Hacker News with the wider fediverse.

Rules

0. Keep it legal

Keep it civil and SFW
Keep it safe for members of marginalised groups

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Chamberlain blocks smart garage door opener from working with smart homes (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

10 comments fedilink hide all child comments

There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The company recently issued a statement decrying "unauthorized usage" of its smart garage door openers.

Chamberlain Group recently made the decision to prevent unauthorized usage of our myQ ecosystem through third-party apps.

Other one-star reviews mention things like, "I clicked door open/close event and it popped up the video storage subscription dialog to ask me to subscribe," and, "Most of the app is dedicated to trying to upsell you on services and devices you don't need."

Another part of this is probably the plug at the end of Chamberlain's statement to "check out our authorized partners," which includes companies like Amazon and Alarm.com.

This connects the garage door button wires to your Wi-Fi—something Chamberlain presumably can't break on purpose—and freely communicates with everything.

We'll leave you with some consumer advocacy from Schoutsen and the Home Assistant team: "Once a company decides to be hostile to its customers, the only way we can win is by not playing their game at all.

The original article contains 764 words, the summary contains 161 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!