Thanks, I missed that detail. It’s probably because of the “no class action” clause that this is a “mass arbitration”.

Unfortunately that usually means that Google is paying a specific company to decide on the outcome of the case. in this case it looks like American Arbitration Association has a contract with Google.

They’re supposed to be fair for both sides, but it’s been shown that they almost always rule in favor of the company that has pre-selected them.

If anyone is in this situation, they will likely have a much better chance by convincing a judge to allow a different 3rd party to arbitrate the case.

Following up on this. I sent an email out to the team and got a response already.

To summarize, they would rather the solution work through updates for security fixes, but they were willing to compromise if automatic updates were disabled with the option for users to manually update somehow:

Yeah, one of the main points of this project is to help them reform Sec 1201 of the DMCA.

As far as for how to do it, I’m not sure if you would have to come up with something that would work even through an official Samsung update. From what I can tell, it would be enough to have it work with Home Assistant instead while blocking future updates. It’s definitely worth a question to the bounty team to get clarification on that point though.

There is a class action “mass arbitration” against Google for this: https://www.classaction.org/nest-thermostat-support-arbitration

Additionally, the Fulu Foundation has a bounty reward out for anyone who is able to get these working with something like Home Assistant.

The pot is currently at $12,856.00 https://bounties.fulu.org/bounties/nest-learning-thermostat-gen-1-2

In the U.S., since doing so would circumvent measures put in place on these devices, publishing how to do this would go against sec. 1201 of the DMCA. This has a risk of a maximum sentence of 3-5 years in a Federal Prison. You can still privately show the Fulu Foundation how it is done, and they will be able to use this information to help their case in their attempt to reform this law.

If you live in the U.S., you can also help by letting your representatives know about this. Here’s an ActionNetwork page that Fulu set up so that you can easily do so: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/right-to-repair-reform-section-1201-of-the-dmca

Yeah, concerning the DRM part, the main goal of this bounty system is to help change legislation so that people are allowed to legally modify the things that they own.

Specifically reforming section 1201 of the DMCA. Right now, if you break the digital locks on the fridge to remove the ads and then publicize that information, you can get 3-5 years in federal prison. (With this bounty system you keep the information private between you and Futo).

So when they hear lobbyists say things like, “We believe this legislation is in search of problems that do not exist…” Louis can respond with “Well actually, millions of people use these products and if this person releases a solution to it, he goes to prison”

Louis talks about that in more detail here: https://odysee.com/@rossmanngroup:a/after-17-years-of-repair,-i’m-doing:d

• These fridges didn’t have ads when people first bought them.
• If you’re renting, usually the landlord picks the appliances.

Close, but not always. It will give out the answer based on the data it’s been trained on. There is also a bit of randomization with a “seed”.

So, in general it will give out the most average answer, but that seed can occasionally direct it down the path of a less common answer.