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)
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.
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.
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.
Quite often these integrations just take the authentication token or cookie during OAuth or the normal login process.
Actions like that would be impossible with WEI.
A huge project at my work got pushed back because a company we are working with decided to make the API public…
In Europe.
And if available in Europe, do you think that information will not appear elsewhere? Mazda is not going to create a separate API for them alone.
Content providers already block access to content based on locale. It won’t be hard to have a flag in the API that turns off functionality based on the callers location.
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.
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.
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.
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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Eh, it’s preferable when companies go ahead and self-identify as being comprehensively dog shit and worthless.
Just another company to throw on the list who will never receive a single dollar of my money as long as I live.
Won’t lose a wink of sleep over it. Good luck, Mazda.
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Motorcycle?
SYM MaxSym 600i ABS, this 565cc maxi-scooter is the first to launch from a green light in cities and has nothing to be ashamed of on highways since it can do 160 kph with some spare power still remaining.
I’ll move closer to the city and walk or use public transit.
Frankly, that’s unlikely. The free market will always make sure someone is there to disrupt, and I’ll always support the disruptor.
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Here’s a citation for your statement, mate.
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🤷♂️ I’m just trying to spread some knowledge to anyone who missed that report from Mozilla.
Perhaps for chapter consumer products, but starting a car company that produces normal mass produced cars is not really done overnight. And Tesla produces the most shite cars of all of them only really disrupting by cutting out customer service at this point.
You’re probably referring to that study showing Tesla with 250 problems-on-delivery per 100 cars… I don’t own a Tesla or know anyone who does, but it’s worth noting the vast, vast majority of those problems are cosmetic, and fixed before the car leaves the customer service facility. If you see the graphic for that study, there are some pretty huge names way down on the list just above Tesla - and those are not mostly cosmetic issues.
No it was in Norway. Tesla sold 21303 new cars in Norway in 2022. Total new car sales for Norway in 2022 was 174329. Tesla Model Y is the most sold new car in Norway and Tesla is the largest brand. Totally electric cars is 79.3% of all new cars (Norway has pretty generous tax incentives on electric cars making even high end Teslas pretty cheap)
83 out of 168 cases that ended up in “consumer court” (that is they have not been resolved without mediation) was Tesla. These cases are mostly not cosmetic but more serious issues that has not been resolved.
Edit: you can argue that with more sold cars they get more complaints. But Tesla has approximately 12 % of the market but 49% of the cases so they are over represented in Norway at least
It might be it’s because of Teslas business model. They protract the cases, and gamle on it not going to mediation. (Customer gives up) and that the US head office is required to evaluate the case, rather than the local or national dealer. In either case I don’t want shite US late stage capitalist business practices in Norway so Tesla can fuck right off.
Careful, now… We’re not allowed to say that a higher percent of bad things are the fault of a tiny percent of the total group of actors, even if the data is objectively true! 😉
I supported the disruptor to cable so hard they became the thing they disrupted and now I don’t have netflix
Really? The most expensive Netflix plan available is still 1/5th what the TV portion of my cable bill was…
I still have it, but honestly probably not for long because I just don’t use it. Sail the high seas and don’t support the culture-destroying shit!
When that happens, someone appears to make their version of the product without it.
Yep. I wouldn’t want to make it into a list but bmw and mazda are already on my blacklist
Yep Mazda is my first auto maker blacklist… I’ve got Sony at the top from numerous incidents around 2004-2006, and Google since 2016. (obvs can’t get 100% away from Google because they keep buying companies, but I only need to get rid of my Nest and Fitbit shit to be completely google-free!)
DMCA is broken, intellectual property is a scam.
Intellectual “property” shouldn’t exist. The property system was designed to solve the scarcity of physical goods. Information doesn’t have this problem since it can be replicated forever as long as you have a medium to copy it to. That’s why you can’t own information. Once created, it lives its own life, whenever you like it or not.
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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.
Absolutely false.
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.
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
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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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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.
This is like sueing someone for knocking on your door. Just lawyers and business vampires tripping over their own dicks.
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
