Big Tech ruined the cloud, so we're renaming ours

mococa

Only the cloud they ruined? :-)

robbiet480

The Verge also has an interview with Paulus about this https://www.theverge.com/tech/1003936/home-assistant-says-bi...

voidnullvalue

Nabu Kasa keeps ignoring the elephant in the room of security and permissions. They have no native ability to set user groups and permissions. There is no serious RBAC. I guess it doesn't sell cloud subscriptions. I cant keep my children from affecting devices they shouldn't. I ended up replacing my automation with mqtt

bitpush

Unless they have their own data centers, they are still hosting it on top of AWS or something. I get that they are trying to market this but it is a bit disingenuous.

TwoNineA

(H)ome (A)ssistant (L)ink. Might as well add 9000 at the end of it.

maxrmk

What was the cloud before big tech?

paimapi

I'll wait for someone to do a network call audit before I trust something like this I've been working on a small project running mitmproxy on a lot of 'privacy-focused' baby-tracking apps and only one of the ones I've tested doesn't send back a bevy of analytics data (none of which they openly promise to anonymize) some of the worst culprits had things like the Facebook SDK and Google Ads installed and sending data in spite of literally promising not to generate an Ad ID and three (Baby+, Nanit, and Pregnancy+) straight up had Microsoft Clarity sending data (ie basically screen recordings and full input logs)

echelon

We're going to take back the internet and own tech forever. I know I have a few anti-AI haters on HN, but hear me out. I'm currently using Opus 5.5 to create 100% pure-Rust, immediate mode rendering, open source implementations of Adobe's entire suite: https://github.com/storytold/photocraft (Photoshop) https://github.com/storytold/vectorcraft (Illustrator) https://github.com/storytold/filmcraft (Premiere) https://github.com/storytold/lightcraft (Lightroom) https://github.com/storytold/printcraft (Acrobat Pro) https://github.com/storytold/effectcraft (After Effects) https://github.com/storytold/designcraft (InDesign) I got bit by the dark pattern "cancellation fee" one too many times. AI lets us take back tech and set the clock back to the pre-shitty era. But now you can just create 1:1 functional equivalents, clean room, that are highly performant and cross-platform. Nothing is stopping you. We'll replace Google Search, we'll build our own smartphones, we'll build better infra. We'll remove all the ads and de-enshittify the entire tech world. Big tech sowed the seeds of their own commodification with AI. It's all going to come down now that we can rebuild everything without toiling for years to even get close to scaling software capability moats. The internet is going to reset to 1990-2004 (pre-facebook / "web 2.0" era). The indie web era. Everything is going to be reborn as open source. We're going to own it all.

jmward01

Rebranding is the right thing and way over due. I honestly hadn't checked them out before but this has made me read through the site a bit. I am intrigued by their privacy claims. I will definitely be looking into them more if those claims hold up.

benabus

I feel like Cloud means something now, and as part of the general lexicon, it's okay to use it for what it means. At this point, Cloud kind of means that it's a service hosted somewhere on the Internet, that you don't control directly, usually that you pay for. Sounds like they're still doing that. Changing the name to distance yourself from AWS and Google Cloud is fine, but "Link" doesn't really tell you anything about where it's hosted or that you still have to pay for it. In fact, by announcing this change with the specific goal of distancing yourself from Big Tech it kind of implies that you're no longer a paid service that happens in some remote data center. But whatevs. Words don't actually mean anything anymore anyway.

pkulak

Guys, you don't have to use it. That's the _entire_ point. Every comment in here is some version of "But it's still a cloud". Sure. But if the entire thing can be replaced with a Tailscale free account, or a Cloudflare tunnel, or a port forward at your router (in descending order of "should you do it"), is it really the same thing? Hence the name change.

aenis

Huh? I am using cloud compute for 15 years now, I haven't noticed anything being 'ruined' about it. You pay some people money and they run your workloads, it mostly works, same as with local compute. Not sure why they dramatise it so much. Want a corporate rebrand, have at it. The like changing things, I get that.

plpbs

Oh the glory of virtue signaling...

tamimio

I loved it! 4 years ago I built a platform for robotics and one portion of it was a cloud side, we got into the discussion what kinda name to have, silly names catchy names etc., but eventually after none was selected, I went with the “XYZ link” name, because indeed the actual function was a link between operator and a robot in the field, and I think it also fits home assistant as well. Love HA been using it for around 2years now and integrating everything into it!

sneak

> For example, there were times when Paulus, founder of Home Assistant and President of the Open Home Foundation, was on stage saying “don’t buy products that require the cloud to work,” then in the next breath having to explain how Home Assistant Cloud is different, despite the name. That created unnecessary friction. You can’t install Home Assistant without DockerHub, and it fetches all sorts of stuff from cloud hosters during use. HA is offline first, but they don’t really take privacy or data hygiene seriously; it shouldn’t talk to the internet at all until and unless you configure it to do something that needs internet. That isn’t the case today, you can’t even install it without internet.

4gotunameagain

Given the predatory pricing model the "cloud" has become, this makes perfect sense. Azure and AWS have become practically a racket. I haven't seen a single "cloud native" company yet that is not leaking hundreds of thousands of dollars per month to the US digital monopolists. Cloud capitalism at its finest..

acrinimiril

...so they're naming it "HAL"? Really? Stanley Kubrick must be chortling in his grave.

RobotToaster

It's still a proprietary SaaS, whatever they call it.

crawshaw

From a pure branding perspective, I think there is something to this. We are building a new "cloud" at exe.dev (everything from racking machines, building a global load balancer, and new APIs onto VMs) and yet it is very hard to bring ourselves to use the word cloud. We don't really want to be associated with the experience or mindset that "cloud" implies. I certainly wish there were a better way to describe this.

billfor

OpenHAB cloud is free, https://www.myopenhab.org/ , but I think for most technical people, just reverse proxy what you have (HA, OH, etc...) and put something like vouch proxy or oauth2-proxy in front of the endpoint. I don't want any cloud standing in the way of my door lock opening.