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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?