Mazda is angry a customer used an API in a manner they couldn’t control. You can read the DMCA takedown notice here.
Just start charging exorbitant amounts of money for every API call; problem solved! —Spez
(Also: Fuck Spez)
Sadly it would end the same like with reddit or netflix: The loss due to the amount of pissed-off and leaving customers is obviously way less than the gain due to the ignorant or root-problem-agnostics. Makes me a sad panda…
This will be over soon. When the EU’s Data Act comes into force, car manufacturers will be obliged to allow access to vehicle data.
Also isn’t it Mazda’s fault for creating an API that anyone can access and get information from? Someone in Mazda IT is probably frantically looking for the email chain where he was told to “just make it public” so our outside analysts can use it.
I think yes, assuming nobody grabbed an API key out of the Mazda app or something.
A huge project at my work got pushed back because a company we are working with decided to make the API public…
Isn’t that a good thing?
It’s a good thing it is getting changed, not a good thing it got pushed back farther because of them. Already been pushed back 4 months
They’ll always find new ways to fuck you over
And then they’ll get sued, when that leads to cars getting hacked. I don’t know if that’s gonna work out in the long run. Car companies are likely to band together to prevent this or make lawful exceptions for themselves in the space.
This doesn’t make any sense. API requests are not proprietary.
Yep, this looks like a blatant abuse of the DMCA by Mazda. Either Mazda is engaging in scummy behavior or they need better lawyers. Either way, it makes me want to never buy another Mazda.
I’ve already added them to my internal list of bad actors I won’t work with.
That doesn’t stop anybody. Just this morning Amazon sent out a wave of C&Ds because people were using their public APIs to access “proprietary data.”
So, they mad b/c of an internal skill issue.
O they mad
“How dare you use our public APIs that we made available publicly for others to use!”
looks sternly at Amazon
Then why is it available?
Because fuck you, that’s why it’s available.
Hahahahha holy shit how did that get past legal
It reads to me like: “this app does the same thing as our app therefore they must have copied our code; there is no other possible explanation”. Cool story, bro. I hope the developers will fight back but that takes lots of money.
The article states this was a hobby of his and he won’t be defending it as it would entail financial cost of mounting a legal defense.
There goes that rigged system again.
So what? They have more money, they decide what is legal or not.
I didn’t really get it until I read the article (shut up 😃), but it seems pretty clear that Mazda’s primary concern here appears to be access to this API through Home Assistant cutting off future (maybe current) owners’ requirement to subscribe to their app for features.
man, remember when you could buy a car and it wasnt connected to the internet?
Remember when you could buy a car and it was yours?
John Deere doesn’t
Remember when you could download a car?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Pepperidge farms remembers.
What a load of horse shit.
Just like with hue, and Chromecast, and Android TV, and a million other smart devices, it’s perfectly lawful (and IMHO necessary) for individuals to launch their own integrations with their the products they own. People don’t need their bullshit “service”, and by buying the vehicle they have a legally protected right to alter it and it’s software for their own use.
That they bullied this guy into taking down the repo despite what the law protects him to do is disgusting, if not also predictable.
I hope someone with the time and resources goes to the matt with one of these shit companies and make them own up to their exploitative practices.
I for one will be altering my Mazda how I want and sharing my alterations to get around their shit subscription model with everyone I can.
God forbid. Wouldn’t want users to find any of this useful in novel ways. Because that never makes a product popular or anything. And Mazda might lose hundreds of dollars or something. Gasp.
Then charge me 5€/month and give me an access token. Fuckers.
But likely, having whatever data the app collects is deemed more valuable than that.
Pretty soon we’ll have to subscribe to our car’s trunk.
BMW on the line for you, sir.
How far can americans go in their struggle against small mailboxes? I mean, what other solution is there, with their huge, largely-empty front lawns, than to use a car to accept the packages?
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DMCA is broken, intellectual property is a scam.
It seems to be working exactly as intended. It protects the OP of the rich while not giving a shit about the poor.
I don’t get it. People are working for free to add a feature to your product which might move more people to buy said product. Make users who use external features acknowledge some waiver that your company is not responsible for damage. If it turns out to be really good, you can fork it, hire the original inventor and turn it into a paid product. Isn’t that a risk-free win? Am I missing something?
Most likely they do not appreciate people adding features to their products for free because these are features that could be sold on future models. This is why right to repair is so important.
Or, it’s something they want you to subscribe to. I bought a Subaru, and only later found out the only way to use remote-start was by subscribing to roadside assistance and using an app on my phone.
On the bright side, I can start my car from anywhere in the world…
They probably want you to pay a subscription for extra features and homeboy went and made it free for life.
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Lol no it wouldn’t. The guy doesn’t want to commit resources to fight this, since it’s a hobby project and this sucked away his motivation to continue.
Unless y’all give him enough money to mount a legal defense, no amount of fancy tech will help.
While not exactly this situation, it has similar vibes to this: https://xkcd.com/538/
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Isn’t Git kind of naturally federated in a broad sense, just by the way it works? As long as someone has the source code they can always create another Git repo and share it.
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Oh okay, how cool. You have piqued my interest, I will check out Gitea for now for sure. Thanks for the explanation.
Kids these days…
Linus Torvalds rather famously managed Linux patches for decades without a centralized server.
Only if anonymous. Eventually they’d get a court to order their domain be cancelled and they’d be offline anyway.
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Whack a mole I guess. Are we back to playing with Napster?
Well then, anyone have this code archived? Time to make sure it makes it to torrent networks. The only way we render the DMCA irrelevant is to make it useless.
Make sure to keep the checksums in place.
Without a somewhat centralized codebase, development will be an absolute nightmare. Old versions floating about with bugs or so old there has been breaking changes in the API, and did you make your additions to the latest version…no wait, 4 people made different additions around the same time, but each released their own versions, and they were not based on the same version either. With no single place to report and collect fixes and development it’ll be a fragmented pile of crap real fast.
Maybe host somewhere in Russia or Finland/Sweeeden.
What a fucking joke. Let me tell you, these car OEMs are fucking SHIT at API development in general. Shit, it’s a fuckin miracle when they actually have APIs. A major OEM (won’t mention as it’s work related for me) just recently published their APIs and MY GOD are they fucking trash, inconsistent, and throw 5xx for fucking any reason (this is absolutely NOT a small or new OEM by any fucking means… Luxury brand)
This is simply a shit company trying to punish people because of their own incompetencies when it comes to API design and management. Oh and just anti-consumer in general, just like how they attack right-to-repair at every fuckin turn possible.
FUCK capitalism, it’s fucking broken; instead of ensuring that competition drives innovation we instead get… LESS control LESS features for MORE across the board (subscriptions, anyone?). Anyone talking about the free market’s inherent innovation is a FUCKING GODDAMN MORON
Well, without the free market innovation, I guess you’d just be complaining about the quality of your horse and cart on the way to church instead
So … is there a copy of the repo left that we can replicate endlessly?
- https://web.archive.org/web/20220717224306/https://github.com/bdr99/pymazda
- https://web.archive.org/web/20221119232837/https://github.com/bdr99/node-mymazda
If you make copies, make a torrent file and share that as well.
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It won’t go obsolete per se. It will just have lots of security vulnerabilities after they stop patching the 10,000,000+ lines of code used in all the microcontrollers and microprocessor.
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Should be legally protected and these companies should receive heavy fines for false DMCA claims
Call me crazy but you think there’d be some kind of reviewing body that reads dmca claims heard by both parties prior to entering a court room rather than people with money fucking the average person.
I’ll be buying a new car soon. Fuck Mazda.
Never buy Mazda. Gotcha.
Never buy car works better
Well I’m already living across the street from a subway station and don’t even want to own a car. This was more based on principle than anything.
I already thought Mazda sucked and made shit products, so it’s nice that they confirmed it’s not just their products that are mediocre at best, it’s their whole business.
Edit: Turns out my long standing perception of Mazda is woefully incorrect. I could have sworn they had a string of bad reliability issues in the early 2000’s and 2010’s but it turns out that’s just plain wrong. Couldn’t tell you what I was thinking of. Leaving the OG comment to laugh at my mistake.
They can still eat a bag of dicks though for this DMCA abuse though.
Can you elaborate? All the people I know had good experiences with mazda
Yea, not sure what hes comparing Mazdas to.
As someone who’s turned wrenches since the late 70’s, Mazda is in my top 3 for reliability: Honda, Toyota, Mazda, in that order.
Every other brand you get to fix the same thing more than once, have weird failures, mixture of Metric and ACU bolts (looking at you American Manufacturers), over-designed systems making trouble-shooting and repair more difficult and costly (like VW tying the door lock ECU to the air conditioning), crappy electrics (Chrysler/Dodge wins on this one, they’re almost as bad as as 70’s British car with Lucas electrics), weird and problematic mixtures of vendor sources (again, Chrysler, since the days they bought AMC they’ve continued to have hodge-podge vehicles, like the Chryslers with Mercedes diesel engines, but modified so they don’t always use the exact same parts), etc, etc.
I could go on for days listing each manufacturer’s pain points.
Far less so with the 3 Japanese listed. For the most part, their vehicles are all their own (some exceptions with Mazda when they were owned by Ford, and Toyota had some GM ties over the years), and even those cars are more Japanese design/engineering/manufacturing than Big 3.
Tried to search up what I could have sworn was bad quality control problems. Turns out I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.
I appreciate your response. With the amount of negativity, doomers and tankies in the fediverse i have started to get suspicious about people.
My cx-50 is awesome, I got it because my old Mazda3 was awesome and super reliable. (as far as cars go, which are all dirty death machines)
I have a Mazda6 estate 2.2 diesel and pretty happy with it. Compared to other cars in the same class it’s no worse regarding reliability as far as I could research
