Ask HN: Now That Phillips Is Enshittified, How Can I Run My Phillips Hue Lights?
For those of you that don’t know, the Phillips Hue app will soon be requiring you to sign up for an account to control Phillips Hue lights. Previously, they sold a Zigabee router specially for the use case of local control over WiFi, which is why I bought overpriced Hue lights over their cheaper competitor to begin with, but I guess that sweet data stream to make an AI based on light switching patterns was just too tempting.
The real kicker is they’re billing this as a “security requirement”, as though adding an additional cloud boundary to my threat model, all for a set of fucking light bulbs, could possibly increase my security.
I hate the future.
Now that my ranting is out of the way, how can I continue to control my lights without the proprietary app? I know they’re Zigabee and thus it’s an open standard so it should be possible, what are my options?
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Anyway as soon as you configure the phillips hue lights through homekit you never have to use their app ever.
They just work.
Another popular solution is to place a lamp near the bed, such that the light controlled by the wall switch can be turned off before entering the bed and the lamp nearer the bed can be turned off while in bed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clapper
otherwise we have bigger problems.
Beautiful.
You chose this future.
But you can choose a better one: use mechanical switches. No cloud, no complexity, no need to pay homage to some malevolent centralized authority just to turn on a lamp.
Do you generate your own electricity, too?
[I too use mechanical switches and am wary of most smart tech. And I buy my electricity from the power company.]
Not only do you get less complexity, the wizards of the EE world have created a capability based secure system called the "circuit breaker" that prevents all of the authority of the power grid flowing through your end user application and taking out the local system (i.e. burning down your house)
If only we had such security in the IT world. ;-)
Case in point: LIFX (https://www.lifx.com/)