I've worked for a large OEM, dealing with a large Japanese megacorp that is not Mazda for about two years (actually Mazda was one of our customers too, but I didn't get to work with them directly). This does not amaze me anymore.
We spent months agonizing over an interior temperature sensor, which was only used to display the information to the user on a smartphone app. We built both the hardware and software, and it was offered as an add-on at the dealerships. After months of negotiations, after the hardware was already built and the packages assembles, they decided temperature sensors were too inaccurate (+/- 5 degrees F) to use, and that it could present a legal liability. Again, this was nothing else but displaying the information on the app - and the user could then make a decision whether to remote start the car to cool it or heat it (no automatic process took place either).
This was at the height of "unintended accelerator" issue in Toyotas, so everyone was walking on egg shells playing it ultra safe to not invite any more lawsuits.
What surprises me is that this culture of "playing it safe" remained to this day, some 10 years later (but maybe it shouldn't).
Idk about everyone else but when it comes to anything running in my car, _anything_, there is no such thing as excessive "playing it safe". It's a 2 ton mass of steel barreling down the highway at 70+ mph next to other unpredictable 2 ton masses, please for the love of God, fight to maintain that culture of "playing it safe", regardless of what you're working on and for what purpose.
It should always be tempered with common sense. The older I get the more I just want a basic car. I just need gauges and a radio with bluetooth. I don't need to integrate everything into my car or have an 18" center console. A reliable car (electric or gas), decent interior space, with no surveillance and just basic features and I'll walk into your dealorship and pay cash. Closest I've gotten so far is my base model corolla with 4G antenna disabled (after market).
Would you be willing to pay millions for your car to make it safer? The pope has bullet proof glass, different body materials can protect your life. How would you define excessive?
R&D is already baked into the final price of everything we buy so that has no argument.
And the bullet proof glass thing I shouldn't even respond to because of the ridiculous extreme you've had to go to, trying to argue against me saying the companies should play it safe, but I'll reply this one time. I'm not asking the car company to protect me from an assassin's bullets. That is not something they control. I'm asking them to "play it safe" when developing components for the car so the car doesn't kill me while I'm in the car. They are responsible for their domain and are not producing armored vehicles for war time. So ridiculous lol
Your comment was nothing is too excessive. The truth is, everything has a level where we try to balance cost/safety. Having Mazda spend millions more puts the base stickier price up. It might be $100, $500, $5000, $50,000 $5,000,000. How much more are you willing to pay and if you really cared wouldn't you buy a Volvo over a Mazda?
This really isn’t helping. Cars are very safe at the moment, with the driver being the key factor in accidents. They are very safe at the current price point. GP was arguing we should keep fighting to keep them safe. That means we keep doing whatever it is we’re doing, which is making cars safe, at a reasonable cost.
People roll their cars on the highway and walk away these days. That wasn't a thing that happened in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and even 90s. Some people don't survive, but a vast majority do. You're instantly surrounded by airbags from all sides these days and have a sort of forcefield to absorb the energy of the crash so you don't have to. The same concept has safely dropped rovers onto other planets. Engines nosedive downward into the ground instead of back into the firewall and then into your legs, crumple zones take the impact and absorb the energy instead of transferring it through the solid steel bumper, solid steel frame, solid steal dashboard, solid steal steering column, and solid steel steering where, where your skull is next in line to absorb that energy which up to that point has hardly dissipated. In the 60s a fender bender often messed up people's necks for life, yet people today can often flip their car and walk away with scratches, never to complain about any life long issues stemming from the accident. Automatic collision detechion systems can notice a stopped object and apply the brakes faster than our meat cpus can even process the eyeball input and notice what is going on, and then dealing with the latency of brain to muscle signals and muscle speed and accuracy. When you're about to hit a brick wall at highway speeds, 250ms more of brakes on full can shed an insane amount of speed/momentum/energy. And let's not forget about all the people who text and drive who would rear end or cross the lane and hit someone head on if it wasn't for collision detection stopping them or lane keep yanking the car back into the lane it should be in. Cars are safer than they have ever been.
I’m guessing it’s arguable, but in the top 25 causes of accidents (in the US), I only found 2 that are linked to the car itself. Cars themselves seem fairly safe.
Indeed, in a car accident, the car itself is rarely to blame.
But that was not my point.
At the end of the day, no matter how well it's built, a car is a several tons lump of steel launched at significant speed. It's an inherently deadly machine.
Having a lapse of attention while driving a car? you might easily cause a someone to die.
Having the same lapse on a bike? you might cause some broken bones.
Having the same lapse while walking? you are good for some "Oh... I'm sorry".
If you live in the US, getting shot while driving (or at school, or at work) at is something that happens from time to time, so if you value safety, you really do need armor and bullet-resistant glass on your car to drive in America.
Are you denying that there's more guns than people in the US, or that tens of thousands of people are killed by guns there every year? Strange how Americans are so in denial of the war-like state of their country and daily life in it.
Where did I deny anything? I called the comment edgy. I was stating my opinion regarding the edginess of the parent comment. My opinion, on the comment I replied to, was that it was edgy. That was my conclusion, regarding my opinion, on the topic of the parent comment.
Strange how HNs assume what country others reside in and apply their opinions, projecting them even, onto anything possible, whether or not the thing they are applying them to is at all related to what they reply with, and how they like to put words into the mouths of others with absolutely zero context to be able to make such assumptions, and are in denial about the ignorant-like state of their psyche and daily life as an idiot.
Never said "X at all costs" but thanks for trying to speak for me. Going forward, please note that my preference is to speak for myself, as should you.
I'm not sure why you took such offense; it's a reasonable interpretation of the words you spoke for yourself:
> there is no such thing as excessive "playing it safe"
As you noted in your other comment:
> I'm asking them to "play it safe" when developing components for the car so the car doesn't kill me while I'm in the car.
As in the old adage in computing ("the only unhackable computer is one that isn't connected to anything"), there's no way to ensure that the components of a car don't fail, even while in routine use. There is only more or less likely that they won't fail, and of course, less and less likely to fail is more and more expensive.
We might say that the only uncrashable car is one that sits in the garage and never goes anywhere. Obviously, that would be playing it safe excessively, since it would defeat the purpose of having a car to begin with. But what about less obvious cases? Toyota recalled millions of cars for their "unintended acceleration" issue. The merits of that particular case aside, how much more would someone pay for a Corolla that would be progressively less likely to have safety issues? At some point before infinity, it would be considered excessive.
I think the sliding scale of how safe is playing it too safe is a discussion very much worth having.
Yes, I just don't want to pay all of it myself. I just want to pay the marginal cost of making it. Let the automaker invest said millions (really billions over all the individual components) into the design and manufacture.
Just further proves my point. You should probably then take out any floor mats, cup holders, temperature controls, radio, or anything else that could potentially impede, obstruct, or otherwise distract from driving safely.
This comment was meant for the normal folks who spend a lot of time in our vehicles and are willing to accept a level of risk that comes along with having some sense of comfort.
Yes because the obvious line to draw from me saying keep the playing it safe culture is that I wish car manufactures remove cup holders and floor mats because death is going to find me final destination style and use any object it can to facilitate my demise.
I forget the term for this, but it’s the same as me stating I like pancakes and you coming at me saying I hate waffles, when I wasn’t talking about waffles at any point. Those types of arguments are insane and I won’t engage with them. I wasn’t saying those things, I’m not defending against your claims that I did.
If you are accusing me of being absurdist or reductionist, know this: floor mats were the official cause of "sudden acceleration", where they would slip off their pegs that were holding them to the floor (usually due to human error), and would jam the pedal to the floor. Or sometimes between the brake pedal and the floor preventing correct operation of the brake. In fact, Toyota and NHTSA issued an urgent recall in 2009 to remove all floor mats from vehicles due to this very issue: https://www.safetyresearch.net/toyota-and-nhtsa-issue-urgent...
So yes, the line was very obvious because these are events that happen in real life, risk that you say you wanted to eliminate by absolutely playing it safe: "_anything_, there is no such thing as excessive 'playing it safe'"
I can only assume that your original comment was reactionary and hyperbolic, but then got upset over where that kind of hyperbole lead in the past.
Woah I'd have guessed that temperature sensors would be more accurate than that! Is it just an issue of cost, or are most affordable temp sensors that inaccurate and I've never realised it? That would explain a lot though!
No, it's pretty easy to get better sensors than that. E.g. a cheap-ass SHT20 will do +-0.3C. In fact, my own automotive parts recommendations are the next grades up (SHT21/SHT3x) as standard for my employer's boards because the cost difference is justified.
Never underestimate the ability of a manufacturer to select subpar parts to save 25 cents on the BOM and spend 6 figures elsewhere trying to fix the resulting issues though.
I think the problem is not the accuracy of the sensors themselves but that its difficult to have a placement inside the car such that the measurement is minimally influenced. Many factors influence temperature: heat from the motor, from heating and from the sun shining on the car and perhaps others.
And it also depends what exactly you want to measure: air, motor or inside temperature? People might get confused. And inside temperature might differ a lot: behind the windscreen it might be a lot hotter than at the floor.
It's undoubtedly more than that, depending on where you measure. The gradient between e.g. the roof lining and the AC vent could easily be 20C+ degrees on a hot day. Most boards on a vehicle will have their own temperature sensors to measure enclosure temps, and there will be zonal sensors at various points in the cabin as well. The climate control loop will be defined in terms of those zonal sensors.
Measuring temperature is not trivial. There's convective, conductive and radiative heat transfer and they all factor into the measurement. And that may not accurately reflect the "cabin temperature," particularly in a parked car.
If you just buy a bare sensor, yes, it's going to be +/-5. They also have a non-linear response which needs to be dealt with as well.
If you are only concerned about a 20 or so degree temperature range it's not an issue, but if you are trying to read over a 100 degree range, you'll want to account for non-linearity as well.
Also, accurate and precise to 10ths of a degree isn't really attainable unless you do fancy math as the sensor will heat each time you read it. The idea is to take multiple readings and average them but unless you are accounting for the heating of the sensor, your numbers will be garbage.
This is for consumer grade sub $50 sensors. Of course you can go fancier but you have to pay for it.
This isn't something I know anything about, but I know that 1-Wire exists and so on so am able to locate something like https://www.analog.com/en/products/max30207.html pretty easily. $2 in quantity, reports a temperature digitally, accurate to 0.3 C between 0 and 70 C.
What is it about that device (or similar) that would put it out of scope?
It's probably not that the sensor is bad. It's the location of the sensor that is tucked away in the interior foam so that it's not reading the air inside the cabin
Depends on the sensor, depends on its calibration (or its lack of such functionality). Often a function of cost and/or size, as well as the means by which it measures temp.
Scientific sensors are highly accurate and can also be small, but you have a steep cost increase of course.
Now that I think back, I believe you are correct. The decision was based on making a previously-unavailable feature available, which meant people could potentially (be irresponsible and) leave pets/children in the vehicle while relying on an inaccurate sensor, which could open them up to lawsuits.
lol… it’s also a hint that google will evaluate the reported conversion as one of pure scaling without any of the transformation that occurs in converting 5 Fahrenheit to 5 Celsius.
I work at a network hardware vendor who has a large Japanese customer base.
After Fukushima we were asked to provide specifications for acceptable operating environment radiation levels, after some negotiation they relented and gave us a figure we could test at, so engineers drove hardware to a spot with high background radiation and ran it for a couple of days off a generator to test.
The Japanese customers also insisted that each display on the hardware be the same shade of white, so they would all look nice in a datacenter, so our LCD displays have specifically graded white LEDs.
I am curious what an "expensive" one would actually cost, too... It is a car so already a large purchase. I'd pay a bit more for an accurate thermostat.
It's not just material cost, probably different interface to the sensor so factor in some R&D, approvals, etc. Any time anything, no matter how small or innocuous (bracket, cable, screw, some piece of plastic cover, etc), was changed on a vehicle, it meant a different part number, which meant 6-12 months delay. This is because it has to go through all the testing - usability, fatigue, safety, etc all over again. This is why they pick cheap parts - not because they're cheap, but because they are old and got cheaper over the years, because old = already approved, which makes the lead time a lot less.
This has been discussed a couple of times: "Removal of Mazda Connected Services integration" (270 points, 78 comments, 10 days ago)[0], "Mazda's DMCA takedown kills a hobbyist's smart car API tool" (83 points, 27 comments, 6 days ago)[1] - the first being the original blog post on Home Assistant, the second referencing that blog post, maybe adding more content and this article referencing both sources (but adding little)
Thank you for the links. I've been traveling recently and missed those previous discussions. I'm glad this one was in my purview as the topic at hand is near to me.
I can only imagine Mazda's stake in this is that the OSS project is doing something that Mazda would like to monetize. Otherwise why limit a project that's making people fell better about their car purchase?
The worst thing to happen to home automation was companies trying to lock customers into their ecosystem without greater interoperability.
It's not about monetization - that can be done just fine with this third-party client as it calls the same APIs as the official mobile app (thus if the mobile app requires a paid account for a certain action, so will this).
This is about "engagement". There are a lot of oxygen wasters out there whose careers and paychecks depend on "engagement" metrics aka how much time has been collectively wasted wading through the cesspool that their software is. The annoyance and wasted time is the point, and an alternative client (or other way of automating it) goes against that.
People often talk about "bullshit jobs" around here, but what everyone overlooks (or refuses to acknowledge as it's uncomfortable) are all the bullshit jobs in the tech/software industry who derive their careers out of end-user annoyance and misery.
> but what everyone overlooks (or refuses to acknowledge as it's uncomfortable) are all the bullshit jobs in the tech/software industry who derive their careers out of end-user annoyance and misery.
I think this is because Graeber had little familiarity with this industry so it doesn't appear in the source text.
Why almost all companies make their systems difficult to customize and introperate with?
Lately I've been fighting with things like iOS, Chromecast, "smart" lightbulbs, vacuum robots and smartwatches and all of these go out of their way to lock these down and force their shitty and buggy and probably illegal spyware on me.
I'm honestly asking why this is the default. What do the companies have to lose in people making their products suck less?
Its all about control. Easy to customize, easy to integrate means that you need to spend more time on these tasks and you can't just remove, change anything without thinking about influence of this change on customization and integration.
Basically - customization and integration is a limiting factors and whats the point to have these limits when customization and integration is not your goal?
I get that they may not care to make nice documented APIs or follow standards, but they clearly use a lot of money to actively prevent you from even reverse engineering etc.
I'd guess it's part just some knee-jerk business ideology and attempts at vendor lock-in and SaaS scams. Lock-in is clearly anticompetitive, and probably illegal, but law enforcement cares more about people smoking weed etc.
The upcoming EU data act seems to try to tackle some of these. But I have very little hope it will amount to much. EU doesn't regulate business, business regulates EU.
Mazda (and any big company for that matter) isn't a single entity, but thousands of people, teams and interests. Maybe this is a long term business decision, maybe legal doesn't differentiate between an open source or an commercial product, or maybe one manager is an idiot. The result is often something incomprehensible from the outside.
It's amazing to me that companies can control their messaging so tightly when it comes to marketing and publicity, but suddenly can't get the horse in front of the cart when it comes to legal processes.
It's understandable, but it fails to be an excuse for the behavior.
> The worst thing to happen to home automation was companies trying to lock customers into their ecosystem without greater interoperability.
It’s not just home automation, commercial automation is full of single source vendor ‘solutions’.
Building automation: Johnson Controls, Carrier, Siemens, Honeywell, Trane (and others) all provide proprietary controllers and software. There are some ‘open’ systems where multiple dealers sell a product line, Distech and Alerton are the big ones that I’ve seen.
Fire alarm: Johnson Controls (Simplex), Siemens, Honeywell, Bosch. Honeywell has their own internal product line that they sell, as well as two other lines that they have dealers sell (Notifier and Silent Knight).
Nurse call, duress, security, surveillance (and probably other low-voltage/control systems I’m not familiar with) have the same problems with proprietary systems.
The same also extends into media systems and commercial AV. There’s a disturbingly large portion of the product space across domains that’s actively hostile to any form of integration outside of their own shambles of a product ecosystem.
I can't even use the android auto touchscreen in my miata because you can't make it disabled enough at speed so they just disabled the entire thing. Even the android auto dongles that hack that kind of thing I haven't had success with.
I would bet this is some overzealous safety executive somewhere.
ND2 Miata owner here, exact same complaints. I believe there are several models in Mazda's range with the frankly staggeringly annoying behaviour of disabling the touch screen once the car is moving.
In lieu of the touchscreen while cars wheels are rolling, Mazda expect you to use this odd rotary controller in the center console, on the assumption it will be safer.
It's not safer at all though - you have to turn the rotary controller and watch CarPlay or android auto do the equivalent of a tab key in the browser until it highlights the correct field, then press it in to select. It genuinely takes my eyes off the road longer than just stabbing a touch screen with my finger, as you have to make sure you have got the rotary controller to highlight the right button etc - you can overshoot just like tab in a browser.
What's even funnier to me is that Mazda have no qualms about putting a switch to disable stability and traction control instantly right next to the steering wheel on a light weight rear wheel drive sports car; burnouts and oversteer are apparently perfectly acceptable usecases for a Miata, but selecting a song from the touch screen while moving? No way guys...
I just rented a Mazda with one of those terrible rotary dials. Something as simple as finding the nearest gas station, which takes like 2 touches on a touch screen, takes several pushes and inaccurate turns of the dial. It turns a 3-second affair into a 30 second nightmare requiring constant distractions and squinting to see which button or field is currently highlighted. It's the worst car UX I've ever experienced, even worse than a Tesla. I'll never buy a car with a system like this. It's suicide.
That entirely depends on what other interactions you've done recently. If you've moved the dial to any other control, you have to carefully scroll it back to the right place. The highlighting showing which control currently has focus isn't very obvious, especially once Android Auto starts showing two or three apps in split screen. If you want to mute the speech, change the compass heading, go to the Spotify section, etc, it all takes careful dialing.
The dial itself also sucks. It has both a rotary spinner that's too easy to turn and a 4-way joystick that's too easy to nudge. If you happen to drive across a tiny bump (especially with the stock shocks, which are really stiff), you can entirely lose your place and have to hunt for the highlighted control before you can resume. I have to lean forward because my eyesight isn't that great compared to before. It's not bad enough to stop driving, but not good enough to see Android Auto on that tiny screen, of which Maps is only like 2/3, and each button is tiny.
Touch screens don't really have that problem because there's not a control that has focus at any given time. You just poke whatever you want, regardless of current context.
Touch screens (like on Teslas) are worse than traditional buttons. But the Mazda spinner is even worse than touch screens. It is far far more distracting, IMO, and a life-threatening dealbreaker for me.
It's cool if you like them though... I just won't be buying a Mazda anymore, but that car (to my surprise) got pretty high reviews and nobody even mentioned the infotainment UX. Shrug. I'm just picky about these things.
Sorry but I agree with previous poster too - it's often many rotations, and you have to correct for misses if you overshoot, during which time your eyes are entirely off the road, for longer than just stabbing the touchscreen with a finger would take. Its objectively one of the worst car UIs I've experienced.
I daily miss items with the rotary controller in a way that I never do in any other car with a reasonably implemented touch screen for CarPlay/Android Auto (effectively almost every single new non-Mazda/Tesla vehicle on sale across the entire car industry). I know people who have refused to buy a Mazda that otherwise met their needs solely due to this issue - sectors like the CX-5/CX-9 etc compete in are staggeringly competitive nowadays and customers have a ton of options that all have working touch screens for carplay/android auto on the move.
The Miata, you just have to put up with it, given the cheap roadster market currently consists of the Miata and nothing else.
The CX90 has two screen sizes. Bizarrely, only the larger screen is a touch screen, and even then, only when using CarPlay! For Mazda system settings, you need to use the dial.
I imagine they are testing this out as a higher end/cost feature that isn’t fully implemented, and based on sales/feedback, they’ll roll it out to other models in a couple of years.
Depending on my specific need, I may use the touchscreen or the wheel. My kids in the passenger seat strongly prefer the touchscreen.
The Miata is called an MX5 in the UK. I used to own another variant, the Abarth Spider - which is best known here as an MX5 in Italian clothing as it had a few improvements, but was based on an MX5.
The headunit was trivially easy to hack iirc - was based on an old version of Android obviously without security fixes, think it was from a website called mazdahacks? From there I had full AA without restrictions.
Too late, BMW was already in our blindspot when we bought a new car. Just like how no one reads the newspaper retraction, no one sees you walk back a bad decision once they've written you off. So don't make dumb decisions in the first place, even if it's "just to see if it sticks".
As a result of the BS in TFA, I'd put Mazda in the same corner, except they were never a contender because they don't build cars that I might buy (well, okay, maybe a Miata).
>Otherwise why limit a project that's making people fell better about their car purchase?
It could be argued Mazda doesn't want to be on the hook for end-user customizations that may potentially jeopardize safety.
Now yes, if a driver modifies his car's code or the results of that code and causes an accident that's on him and not Mazda. But you and I and everyone here all know the media will jump at the chance to plaster sensational headlines for click monies.
Except that this library just calls the same APIs as the official app, using the user's own credentials. Any subscription-gated features would just surface through the API as they would in the app, i.e. "this operation isn't supported on your plan" etc. so there is no paywall bypass going on here.
I am now pissed that I have a Mazda. Mission accomplished, legal team, you undid all the efforts of the engineering and marketing departments in one single action.
Which is ironic for Mazda, because at least like model year 2019 and prior you could literally telnet into the CMU and do all sorts of hacks to it. Whether it was intentional or not, Mazda has enjoyed a bit of a sheen of being kinda hack/maker friendly if you play in that space.
They didn't intend it, but they should have since they'd probably end up with a better end-user experience ala Rockbox/LineageOS. The community added some cool features and worked around some glaring bugs until Mazda clamped down by specifically nuking the mods on updates. God forbid anyone embarrass them by making their crappy software better, like pausing a stream when "Mute" was hit instead of letting the stream run while muted. How about this? If you used a USB stick full of music it showed the files in FAT order, not sorted by filename or ID3 tags. It would also just randomly forget the resume point, and revert to playing the "first" file on the disk. So instead of Amon Amarth blasting my ears in this case, I had to both create a file named "0000Silence.mp3", and run a special command after every disk update to rewrite the FAT so the FAT order equaled alphabetical order.
Just dont put your name on projects like this. Had to learn myself the hard way 15 years ago. Just do it, fly under the radar, stay pseudonymous, go the hacker way.
I mean, if I were the author, had put my effort and time into solving my own itch and released it as FOSS, only to receive a Cease and Desist, my itch would still probably be there, but GitHub would probably comply and close the repo.
So I'd just cease, desist, and my project would suddenly appear again in some other Git server. Surely, without my name on it, and hosted from whatever country seeming less likely to follow up on similar requests.
I just happen to read about DMCA exemptions legalities recently (which I submitted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37961007). Turns out that exemptions to DMCA are recommended every three years. I noticed one especially relevant to this one under the section category of "Proposed New or Expanded Exemptions":
> Proposed Class 7: Computer Programs— Vehicle Operational Data
> MEMA petitions for a new exemption to ‘‘access, store, and share vehicle operational data, including diagnostic and telematics data’’ from ‘‘a lawfully acquired motorized land vehicle or marine vessel such as a personal automobile or boat, commercial vehicle or vessel, or mechanized agricultural vehicle or vessel.’’ 182 The petition limits circumvention to ‘‘lawful vehicle owners and lessees, or those acting on their behalf.’’
> The Office encourages proponents to develop the legal and factual administrative record in their initial submissions, including describing with specificity the relevant TPMs and whether their presence is adversely affecting noninfringing uses, whether eligible users may access such data through alternate channels that do not require circumvention, and the legal basis for concluding that the proposed uses are likely to be noninfringing. In general, the Office seeks comment on whether the proposed exemption should be adopted, including any proposed regulatory language.
The US Copyright Office goes on to say *they want feedback on this potential exemption*:
> The Office encourages proponents to develop the legal and factual administrative record in their initial submissions, including describing with specificity the relevant TPMs and whether their presence is adversely affecting noninfringing uses, whether eligible users may access such data through alternate channels that do not require circumvention, and the legal basis for concluding that the proposed uses are likely to be noninfringing. In general, the Office seeks comment on whether the proposed exemption should be adopted, including any proposed regulatory language.
> It's unclear what legal basis Mazda has to order a DMCA takedown
There's probably none. They're probably just leveraging the high costs of a legal defense to bully individuals into submission. Corporations have armies of lawyers and can afford to spend years fighting in court, this guy can't. The threat of lawsuits is equivalent to a threat to set his money on fire.
Check out their "justifications":
> The automaker argued that Rothweiler's work contained code that violated its copyrights; used its "proprietary API information" to create more code
Seriously doubt that. It's not like they gave this guy access to their source code or internal documents.
> and that the integrations provided functionality identical to what currently exists in Mazda's own mobile apps
Man, this enrages me so much. But I'm glad I live in a third world country where access to legal defense is relatively cheap. Here I would just tell them to piss off and get on with my life.
I run a rather large API program for an Residential IoT manufacturer.
We have multiple systems, some with a public API some not.
The biggest problem is simply support. We'd LOVE to have more public ability to interact but I simply can't support every independent developer out there.
Also, people agree to a legal terms of service to get access BUT don't always follow it (e.g., data storage agreements, use case agreements, etc).
Coming at it from Mazda's POV, it could be that but it also could very well be the monetization aspect.
Cue TV commercial from Mazda competitors: Own The Road with shots of winding scenic roads, auto dashboard and tripped-out Home Assistant dashboard.
Many manufacturers appear to be OK with especially resourceful owners optimizing their cars in this way. Home Assistant's integration library features at least six automakers, including BMW and Volvo, while Tesla recently published details of its new, official, open API for third-party developers to employ.
The judicial system is utterly broken when by using it, intimidation from a wealthier party is enough to achieve their wanted outcome.
Perhaps we shouldn't allow people that have no (realistic) means to defend themselves from being sued. Of course this would be ridiculous and open up a myriad of abuses. OTOH what we have now is a tipped scale towards wealth, where justice loses its meaning.
Wasn't the "prioritary API" but resolved in Oracle vs Google? I was under the impression that an API is like a phone book and a you cannot copyright a collection of phone numbers. How is the API claim legally defensible?
I'm in the market for a new car and I'm deciding between Mazda, Acura, and Toyota. I'm quite curious to see how these other manufacturers are treating developers.
"Even if I believe that what I'm doing is morally correct and legally protected, legal processes still have a financial cost. I can't afford to take on that financial risk for something that I do in my spare time to help others." - this is very logical and exactly what I would have done but it still makes me very sad that this is the way the world works right now :(
The process is the punishment. Average Joe cannot go toe-to-toe in the legal system as it stands right now. The one with the most money nearly always wins, and - as in this case - the threat of financially ruinous litigation is enough.
This is true in American elections too. I can’t remember the exact number, but something like 80% (or more) of elections are won by the candidate with more money.
When everything is tied to money like this - legal, democracy etc, the little guy is always going to lose
Of course you would. For example, thanks to copyright law, Linksys was forced to share their Linux customizations to run on router hardware, which led to the creation of the OpenWRT project.
Without copyright law, any actor can take your open system and close it.
> You wouldn't need it if copyright didn't exist in the first place
No popular open source license that I am aware of attempts to emulate a no-copyright situation:
If there was no copyright, you could not force anybody to provide the source code of any derivative work (situation for copyleft licenses). On the other hand, in a no-copyright situation, you are not able to sue anybody who attempts to reverse-engineer such a derived binary blob and publish the reverse-engineered source code.
Thus, an open-source license that attempts to emulate a no-copyright situation would in my opinion have clauses like the following:
- you are allowed to create binary-only derived works, and are allowed to sell copies of it
- you must not sue anybody who redistributes these copies (even for money)
- you must not disallow any licensees to reverse-engineer these executables
- you must not disallow any owner of a copy to create any derivative work (even using reverse-engineering techni, as long as this work is licenses under this license. This in particular means that, if you create a derivative work, you have to take care that you cannot redistribute copies that (statically) link the work with parts for which this is disallowed
"Free Software" requires making source code available to users. If copyright didn't exist, there would not even be a hypothetical mechanism to require that of publishers.
> The problem is that companies generally know more than customers about an arbitrator’s record and thus are likely to strike out arbitrators who are more inclined to rule in favor of consumers. On average, each securities firm in the study had been involved in 81 other arbitrations. In non-securities disputes, such as those with cellular carriers, the average company had been in 133 hearings. By contrast, most consumers have never been involved in a previous arbitration and tend to strike arbitrators randomly. As a result, the firms’ informational advantage leads to systematically biased outcomes.
> the company still has a big advantage in arbitration
Not as big as in litigation. Yes, companies have familiarity. But the win rates in arbitration are way more favourable. Because you can’t starve your opponent as a strategy.
> Win rates are one aspect. Win amounts are another
For JAMS and AAA, compared to federal courts, after accounting for litigation costs, on average, no. (At the tails, yes. But this doesn't apply if you can pull off federal litigation.) Do you have research to the contrary?
If the arbiter is publicly funded and therefore without bias, sure. In the UK that is ACAS. If the business you have a problem with is paying for its own arbitration service then you are automatically on the back foot.
The problem is more firms having a voice in selecting the arbitrator than them paying for it [1]. TL; DR If you're going into arbitration, don't be passive about the selection process.
The DMCA has been a net negative for America. It didn't actually afford any of the intended protections to the industries that bought it and it has destroyed the concept of "ownership" in an increasingly digital world.
The EFF would still need a defendant to defend. It sounds like that person is not interested in pursuing a legal battle, so we have already met the end of this road.
I see this attitude a lot where legal is involved (which is a lot of places). It's a very peculiar sort of "if this then that" which seems to subvert normal human communication. E.g. in this case, a standard human train of thought would be that, because one of the reasons given for not pursuing it is funding, the EFF might offer to fund this person, who, circumstances now being different, might then agree to be the defendant. Now maybe there is a problem with that, but my point is that your response seems to choose not to acknowledge it. I don't think it's malicious - I think there is just something about the way legal works that trains people to think and speak in this slightly non-human way.
In my perspective, it's less about the presentation, and more about the motivations involved.
If the EFF is motivated to reach out to the original DMCA recipient, then they could definitely present this avenue. That leads us to the next question, is the original DMCA recipient interested in pursuing a (now funded) defense? If not, are they interested in handing it off to someone else? Who? Would that person be an effective defendant?
Really, what we are doing here is speculating on one person's level of disinterest in pursuing the legal defense of their work.
Transfer of ownership isn't even required, since it was open source code hosted on github. All someone needs to do is re-host the files, and wait for the DMCA notice to push back on it.
True. It should also be possible to maintain it outside of the US, where the DMCA doesn't apply. In some European countries Mazda probably wouldn't have a lot of options to take it down.
Usually you can't go after people for creating content, even if it's a copyright violation. They also can't "uncreate" it, they can't delete the concepts from their brain. You can only stop them from publishing/selling it.
In this case the code was on GitHub before, so they wouldn't even need to give the code to the new target entity, this entity could just copy it from an undisclosed person who has a copy.
The tool Mazda is using is DMCA. That applies explicitly to whomever is hosting the content. More specifically, it applies to whomever Mazda sends the DMCA notice to.
They could reach out to him and offer to pay his legal expenses. They could even offer the services of lawyers they are familiar with. IIRC they have done that in similar cases in the past.
I think we've made a mistake by linking our real world identities to the software we write. If the author released this under a pseudonym, and hosted the git servers in a country without strong copyright enforcement, there's very little Mazda could do to take it down. It's too late for that now since Mazda knows who he really is.
It's not too late for that; the author just doesn't want to be bothered. If he really wanted to, he could move the code to that other country, and put it up under a pseudonym. If anyone asks, he can just claim he doesn't know who that person is, and he has nothing to do with it: how can they disprove him without literally spying on him? The code is open-source: literally anyone could have made a fork of the repo while it was still up, and then posted it somewhere else.
It's too late for that to be a realistic defense. The Mazda legal team already has a target that they can go after for any further developments with the source code. This post acknowledges that he received the cease and desist letter. The issue isn't just whether you win in court, it's also how much of your time and money is wasted fighting a corporate legal operation. Arguably, a random person publishing the source code would create additional problems for him.
An effective defense has to protect your time and money. One such defense is to never let your real identity be plucked from obscurity and fixated on by a legal team.
Right or wrong, the legal system (in the US and elsewhere) is to be feared and avoided. I've served jury duty several times in the US, and each time it looked like we might be empaneled, the defendant settled with the DA. I've no idea if they were actually guilty of what they were accused of, but in any case they decided that being deemed guilty was less onerous than going through (and paying for counsel in) a jury trial.
I wish GitHub would do more to protect developers from this bullshit.
I know they aren’t required to, but I remember the olden days when more companies would fight dmca requests. But I suppose they were much less common then.
The EFF might help, but even expecting individuals to appeal to the EFF is probably too much work and too much risk.
I’d like to see GitHub partner with EFF to have first look at these requests and choose to fight ones that seem invalid. I’d donate to they cause.
What's it look like? The next step to fight this is for the user of the Github service to file a counter notice and wait to see if Mazda files a copyright infringement lawsuit against them.
It probably doesn't make sense for Github to indemnify them, and short of that, there's not really a lot of convincing they can do if someone isn't interested in engaging in litigation with some huge company.
They could auto file a counter notice. They could provide free legal council to help the user file. They could route to EFF or others to file counter notices.
They could even sue for damages from false claims since API can’t be copyrighted.
There’s tons they could do. Microsoft has immense resources and far greater than Mazda.
They don't have standing to auto file a counter notice. And then if someone accidentally publishes something copyrighted to github, they probably don't want to go through a lawsuit.
I looked at the code some, there are some app secrets stored and used, so they probably have at least a thin claim.
They can certainly evaluate the request and deem it spurious, as long as they are willing to defend their decision.
They can also autogenerate the counter claim so an author just needs to click “dispute.”
I’m sure there are lots of valid dmca complaints against GitHub repos, like any site that allows hosting random files. But I think if GitHub wants to encourage programming, they need to invest and be more proactive in supporting programmers from people like the jerk lawyer at Mazda (or probably some stupid “ip protection” consultant) who filed this spurious seeming complaint.
> this is very logical and exactly what I would have done
I made a comment regarding this, before realizing yours, so I'm kinda repeating myself here, but it's something that piques my curiosity:
What would stop you from just continuing in a different repo (even different host like Gitee), with a pseudonymous, and claim that you have no idea who's that mysterious person that forked and continued working on the project?
My freedom and financial future aren't the kinds of things I'd like to test their enforcement with. We need laws that prevent this type of bullying behavior.
So why don't you do this then? The author doesn't have to be the one to take the risk: YOU can do it yourself! Just get a copy of the code and post it up on your own account, under your own name.
> Mazda has invested tremendous time and resources to develop confidential and proprietary information including computer code used by company. Recently certain Mazda Information, including proprietary API information, was used to create code and information posted to GitHub.com identified in repository of bdr99 ([private]). This repository contains code developed in python (https://github.com/bdr99/pymazda) and javascript (https://github.com/bdr99/node-mymazda), and appears to have been uploaded and used to create computer code associated with home-assistant.io and mobile applications. MNAO analyzed some of the code and determined that the code provides functionality same as what is currently in Apple App Store and Google Play App Store. We are requesting immediate removal of code from Github, brd99.
Since when is an API call proprietary information? Can they even claim a DMCA against it? That's like claiming DMCA for telling someone how to flick a light switch.
It’s almost certainly not a legal takedown request, but this is always been an issue with the DMCA… it’s far too easy to make fraudulent requests, and there is almost never real punishment for them because they require financial harm, which is going to exclude anything except other companies.
That money you could be making, yeah we don't like you getting it instead of us, so cough it up!
Also, while we're at it, cool idea...thanks for the work! Here's nice thankful lawsuit for your hard work.
We'll go ahead and privately fork that repo and totally not rip your functionality off and somehow manage to mess it up while overcharging for it! :)
We spent months agonizing over an interior temperature sensor, which was only used to display the information to the user on a smartphone app. We built both the hardware and software, and it was offered as an add-on at the dealerships. After months of negotiations, after the hardware was already built and the packages assembles, they decided temperature sensors were too inaccurate (+/- 5 degrees F) to use, and that it could present a legal liability. Again, this was nothing else but displaying the information on the app - and the user could then make a decision whether to remote start the car to cool it or heat it (no automatic process took place either).
This was at the height of "unintended accelerator" issue in Toyotas, so everyone was walking on egg shells playing it ultra safe to not invite any more lawsuits.
What surprises me is that this culture of "playing it safe" remained to this day, some 10 years later (but maybe it shouldn't).