Slashdot Mirror
Piracy Notices Can Mess With Your Thermostat, ISP Warns (torrentfreak.com)
U.S. Internet provider Armstrong has warned persistent pirates on its network of limiting their access to the thermostats if they didn't play by its rules. From a report: Our attention was caught by a recent letter the company sent to one of its users. The ISP points out that it received multiple copyright infringement notices, urging the customer to stop, or else. [...] While reduced Internet speeds are bad enough, there's another scary prospect. The reduced service level may also prevent subscribers from controlling their thermostat remotely. Not ideal during the winter. "Please be advised that this may affect other services which you may have connected to your internet service, such as the ability to control your thermostat remotely or video monitoring services." Accused pirates who want their full service restored, and regain control over their thermostats, have to answer some copyright questions and read an educational piece about copyright infringement.
See subject
Walmart was recently forced to stop their deferral program for first time shoplifters, because the judge said it was extortion. if the reasoning in that case stands, this kind of program may be found to be illegal for the same reasons.
Your internet provider is a conduit on which multiple services rely. It cannot and should not, by law, be used to control or limit access, or police content either of it's own accord or upon request of external parties.
Of course, personally, I am strongly against connecting any devices (other than computers) in my home to the outside facing network, but that's beside the point.
Is this really news? All the ISP is doing is pointing out things that will stop working properly if the customer's internet is shut off. This isn't a case of "behave or we lock you out of your thermostat", it's a case of "behave or we may shut off your internet. Here's what that could affect..."
Pirates are the ones who coppy illegally. Crackers, now hackers are people who blackmail you.
Nice try to try to link copyright infridgement with blackmail. Doubleplusgood. We where always at war with pirates.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
...it would be a real shame if something were to *happen* to it.
I won't be able to control the temperature of my home while I am not there?!? What the fuck am I supposed to do when I'm away from home?
Work at work? Talk to people in line? Fart in the elevator? This is anarchy people!
The letter states that the end users service level would be lowered to the lowest level that Zoom Internet offers which is Zoom Express (4 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up). I can't imagine for the life of me why a thermostat would need more than that.
If you are violating the ISP terms of services, then services may be termed.
Is having your Thermostat blocked that big of a deal? So you get home and your home is 50 degrees and you have to turn it up. and be cold for about an hour?
I mean what would happen if your ISP had an outage? Does your IoT fail when there is no connection?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
They are only pointing out what other ancillary services might be interrupted if the ISP shuts off the Internet. The ISP is hoping scare tactics will result in compliance. I donâ(TM)t think the ISP intends to log into the device and change its password or anything like that. They are merely saying âoethink of everything else you use the Internet for, donâ(TM)t lose all that functionality because you are piratingâ.
Sounds a little like a potentially dumber sequel to a dumb movie with a very contrived set of circumstances starring Sandra Bullock.
Armstrong? More like Strongarm.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Another reason to get a VPN.
Thereâ(TM)s fearmongering and then thereâ(TM)s this. Not only did people survive for thousands of years WITHOUT centralized heating, but people managed to survive decades without thermostats connected to the internet.
This whole IoT thing has gotten out of hand. Now your fucking electric toothbrush has a Bluetooth chip in it, and your sex toys will report back on your usage habits. Seriously, whatâ(TM)s next? Your kitchen sink will have a WiFi connection and will rat you out for using too much water in drought seasons? Or maybe your shower will automatically stop after a certain volume of water has been used.
First. World. Problems.
You can't complain
Sure, a single point of failure is outside of your control may fail but four single points of failure stacked atop each other (power/network hardware/ISP/server) is a recipe for disaster.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
When little johnny pirates at his grandma's house and then she gets her house frozen over during a cold winter.
Yet another great reason to not to connect things to the internet without a great reason.
people still pirate without using a VPN?
Dumb pipes or bust. Most people don't need/want the dumb pipe it seems, but at least make it available. They could literally charge more for doing less, but they don't want to, I guess.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Whether you pirate or not, this is another good reason to use an anonymous VPN service.
... is contract law.
I don't have a problem with the ISP, but I have a problem with the ToS.
Copyright owners should be going directly after the perpetrators.
Why don't we have a ToS with the electric company that NO powered devices will work if we violate copyright?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
/* get off my lawn mode */ ...and this is probably real good reason why you shouldn't put vital crap like home HVAC into the IoT bucket. Getting up to change the thermostat once in awhile isn't going to kill you, and while an automated home HVAC control setup might save you a few pennies each month, there are models out there which don't require an Internet connection or smartphone app that perform much the same energy-saving measures. /* end */
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
This isn't messing with your thermostat, it's interfering with remote access back to it when you're gone. Something I'm pretty sure 99% of us can't do now anyway and for the 1% who do, lack a substantial need.
The good news is that consumers appear to be getting the message that "smart" devices are dangerous; from what I've read, sales are way down. Security vulnerabilities are the most obvious issue, but there's also stuff like this (the vendor fucking with you for unrelated reasons) and the question of long-term support.
Heating and cooling can be matters of life and death. I wouldn't entrust them to the Internet. (Monitoring them, sure, but not controlling them.)
I would say a mechanical thermostat like a Honeywell Econostat is good enough. Yes, it may break due to the bimetallic spring and movement, but they are vary reliable. As an added bonus, without physical access, they can't be accessed from remote.
It may be nice to have a programmable thermostat to raise/lower temperature, but it definitely isn't a necessity.
What gets me is that there are thermostats out there that would malfunction or not work if they didn't have a constant internet connection. These devices are not Playstations or Xbox consoles where high-value DRM is a must.
Oh yes, your thermostat will get phreaked up, but don't worry, Netflix will keep streaming well!
Alright, you filthy pirates... Freeze!
Lose = not win
and meter testing like other utilities
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What online IoTish thermostat doesn't have a well-defined offline mode in the first place? Is NEST like that? I don't have one but was thinking about it.
There should be no such thing as an online device that doesn't behave properly when the Internet service goes down. Obviously it can't do everything it can do when the service is up but it should at least be programmable to do something reasonable if not desirable.
Either ISPs are a common carrier, or they aren't. If they're a common carrier, they're agnostic to the traffic they carry. In exchange, they're indemnified from liability for that traffic.
If ISPs argue they can throttle or assign certain traffic to fast lanes (anti-net neutrality), then they're arguing they're not common carriers. If they're not common carriers, then they're liable for the traffic they carry. They will have to track down pirates on their network and enforce copyright lest the copyright holders sue them instead of the actual pirates. They will have to monitor traffic for people plotting crimes, lest they be held liable for aiding and abetting. And if a member of a drug cartel conducts illegal banking transactions, the ISP will be on the hook for money laundering. Someone looks up ways to get away with murder, the ISP will be found complicit. If you can monitor your traffic to detect piracy, what's your excuse for not monitoring it to detect these other things?
That's the Pandora's box the ISPs will open if they decide they don't want to be agnostic to the traffic they carry. But like most people, they're tempted by only the positives of a course of action and blindly ignore the negatives.
It may be nice to have a programmable thermostat to raise/lower temperature, but it definitely isn't a necessity.
I'd really like to kill the heat when I go to bed and have it kick back on about an hour before my alarm goes off. If I owned the thermostat in my apartment, that would be worth the upgrade. That does not require IoT access. Being able to control the temperature in my apartment from work seems like a useless feature.
What gets me is that there are thermostats out there that would malfunction or not work if they didn't have a constant internet connection.
What good's a thermostat that can't help with a DDoS attack?
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
I never heard of someone getting their phone service cut because they were doing something illegal with it.
WTF is an ISP doing trying to play law enforcer? The authorities should get a warrant, tap the traffic, then make an arrest. Or not, if it turns out the evidence wasn't correct.
Then the ISP should update their watchdog software to not give such false positives.
What gets me is that there are thermostats out there that would malfunction or not work if they didn't have a constant internet connection.
Really? Can you name one or are you just assuming that's the case? I don't see why the failure of the remote-access function would keep you from manually adjusting the thermostat. Are there really models out there that have no manual interface?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Sounds a little like a debt collector threatening to call your employer, spouses, friends/etc if you don't cough up the cash. Hopefully if they are ever stupid enough to press the issue with someone and it goes to court the victim can pull out this letter and take them to the cleaners.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
We will let your pipes freeze.
We will let your house be burgled.
We will let your house burn down.
And there is nothing you can do about it Ha Ha Ha bloody Ha Ha!
Oh except answer some questions and watch a movie about the evils of piracy which was probably stolen by the anti-piracy people.
Having an internet connection is a right, even if you constantly use it to break the law. You get warned multiple times, maybe sued, maybe lose in court for doing multiple illegal activities on your internet connection. This is your position, which is fine.
But I want an gun, protected by the 2nd amendment already (law in Constitution), and HAVEN'T broken a law, people like you think I shouldn't be able to.
OR
I want to put on a ad for a politician I like within 30 days of an election (Campaign finance reform), again 1st amendment in the Constitution, I shouldn't be able to.
Let me just sit here an not give a crap about your point of view. Cool story though. Good luck with your breaking the law.
What an absolute pile of bollocks this "article" is.
This site has turned into the Daily Fucking Mail.. "And today readers, this is what you'll be morally outraged about...".
Where the fuck do these "editors" learn their trade, from click-bait sites ?
If they'd actually bothered reading the fucking summary properly, the truth is there in plain, simple English that even a goldfish can comprehend.
They're not threatening to "mess with your thermostat", they're saying "you carry on breaking our TOS and we'll cut your bandwidth", hey fuckwit editors, take a look at other ISPs TOS and you'll find similar, if not stronger text threatening to cut your connection completely.
But hey, that doesn't get clicks, so lets add some fluffy kitten pictures and make up a complete horseshit title to get the clicks in.
I'm done here, I thought this site would get better after the buyout, but nope it's somehow managed to go so far down hill they've emerged on the other site of the world.
See ya.
Jamming radio frequencies is illegal. How is effectively 'jamming' someones internet-connected devices in this way, devices which have no relation whatsoever to the alleged 'illegal activities' the ISP is complaining about, really any different? At the least it sounds like extortion. Considering that all these IoT devices like thermostats must 'phone home' to the manufacturers servers to function, I'd think the manufacturer would have a problem with it legally, too.
In a broader sense, this is the question I think needs to be asked: Is it illegal for anyone to interfere with the transmission or reception of data on the Internet?
they need to get a court order and not some auto take down.
Imagine you're away on vacation for a few months and don't want to waste money heating/cooling your home while you're away. You probably want to set the thermostat to the proper temperature a day or two before you get home. What's wrong with that? It seems a whole lot safer than trusting a neighbor you may barely know.
Or maybe on your vacation you hear that there's going to be a crazy cold spell back home and you need to remotely turn the heat on so the pipes don't burst.
Perhaps you just like to save energy while you're at work so you program your thermostat to not run during the day. If you come home early for whatever reason, wouldn't you want to reset the thermostat to know about your new arrival time?
None of those scenarios are very far-fetched. Why are you against them?
dom
a Programmable and s "Smart" thermostat.
I'd be more concerned about medical equipment in the home that depends on constant internet access to keep someone alive or safe losing connectivity.
Of course, they do. That's what SSL is for.
Yes, more regulations in NNs case. Because the words do not mean âoemore evilâ. We have poor regulations that we have no chance of changing. ie: Copyright, & ISP monopolies.
So yes, let us have regulations that help the consumer and fight the poor ones!
they need to get a court order and not some auto take down.
Is that what the law says?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
We were just 4000 miles away from home and realized we forget to turn down the thermostat in our house at the beginning of an 8 day vacation. It was nice to be able to put it in vacation mode from the balcony of our hotel room via the phone app. The metrics that are provided on which stage of the heat pump is in use, and when it cuts over to the furnace have also been useful to help fine tune the system.
How on earth have we gotten this far. Ohhh the humanity.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This summer I set our thermostat to 86 while we were away for 3 weeks. When we got home it took the AC about 2 hours to get the house back down to sleeping temps, not exactly a hardship that requiresan always on internet connection to solve. Now if you worked highly variable hours and were single and wanted to avoid that 2 hours of uncomfortable temps while maximizing energy savings I can see it being worthwhile, but that's probably a niche application.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My dad used to have a remote monitor for his pacemaker that sent data over the internet to his doctor. Without the remote monitoring, he'd have to make regular trips to the doctor for monitoring (and having an elderly man driving on snowy roads is a risk of its own)
The internet is becoming a utility, and it should be regulated as such - the power company can't turn off your power just because they think you're using electricity to grow marijuana. They can, however, tip off the police about the suspected grow house, but they can't turn off your power.
away on vacation for a few months
You misspelled "unemployment."
This is why we need legislation that treats internet access like the US used to treat the mail. Where mail service used to connect each citizen to the rest of the world and the fidelity of the service was vigorously protected, today we have the internet that does essentially the same thing for the modern world. As such internet access and protection of email should be enshrined into law as a basic right with the same protections of privacy as was the original US mail service.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
Imagine you're away on vacation for a few months and don't want to waste money heating/cooling your home while you're away. You probably want to set the thermostat to the proper temperature a day or two before you get home.
No, I generally don't. As with the vast, vast majority of homes, my home is reasonably well insulated, so it's never horrible inside. Setting the thermostat where I want it when I arrive gets the house close enough to be comfy by the time I'm done unloading the car.
Or maybe on your vacation you hear that there's going to be a crazy cold spell back home and you need to remotely turn the heat on so the pipes don't burst.
If that's something that can actually happen (your pipes bursting because your heater isn't on), it already has. Hopefully you had it repaired properly the first time so there won't be a second. And if you didn't, you can set your thermostat between "probable low temps" and "dangerously low temps"; that way, the heat kicks in if it gets too cold, but not otherwise. Isn't that neat? Modern technology at work...
Perhaps you just like to save energy while you're at work so you program your thermostat to not run during the day. If you come home early for whatever reason, wouldn't you want to reset the thermostat to know about your new arrival time?
No, I don't generally care. See the answer to the first quote. There is also another issue here. If it's so friggin' hot that this is actually a problem, setting your AC to a reasonable but higher than normal temp and leaving it there will use less energy than letting it get hot then trying to cool it down later. So if you like to save energy while at work, you won't do what you described.
None of those scenarios are very far-fetched. Why are you against them?
I'm not against them, I just don't see the point. Back in the day, we had these concepts called "planning ahead" and "dealing with it". They work.
I've heard millennials called "precious little snowflakes" more than once, and always considered it to be unfair and dismissive. You may have just changed my mind.
No matter how many examples like this you will present to the "who cares about privacy ?" or "who cares about net neutrality ?" or "Who cares about due process and the rule of law ?" or "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" etc, crowd, they will still find something to not care about.
Maybe even a Zeroeth World problem.
99.9% of the people of this planet would LOVE to have "I am unable to remotely access my " as their most significant problem.
If your thermostat is internet connected, you're an ASSHOLE.
Seriously, people who buy into this kind of shit are everything that's wrong with the world.
Nope, the law permits auto-take down.
Doesn't mean the law itself isn't flawed. Nor does it mean others should suffer over it. Bad Laws can, and should, be amended or repealed.
Your desire to keep bad law by declaring it as a "suck it up" thing, only outs you as a person who wrongly believes that Authority is perfect, and shouldn't be challenged. A word of advice: Everything can be improved, or "made better". It's a question of whether or not you care enough to do so.
Why the hell would you want your thermostat hooked to the internet? Or your fridge? WTF is wrong with some people???
Why does anyone need to change the temperature anyway?
I change mine 2 times a year, Once coming into summer to set the upper temp and again in autumn to set the lower temp for winter!. pick a comfortable temp and forget about it,
Just turn it on and off at the at the wall at the appropriate time of day depending on weather conditions and forget about it.
Not hard and certainly does not require any outside connection :-)
I think most people who buy a "WiFi" thermostat think they're getting something they can control from within the house. Feel a little chilly but don't want to go downstairs and turn up the thermostat? Boom! Use your phone. What they don't know is every single implementation out there requires the thermostat be exposed to the Internet and controllable by the manufacturer. In fact, utilities in California have already proposed to regulators that they be given the right to hijack customers' IoT thermostats to manage electrical load. If someone would release an actual WiFi thermostat that was just exposed to the local LAN for use by a slick little app, they'd make a killing.
Ask and you shall receive
radio thermostat ct50
It does have an IoT optional interface but you can just block it's ip on your firewall. It is still fully functional without phoning home.
You can use curl get and put requests to get the current temp current set temp the fan status and HVAC mode and change those via the local lan. I was logging data to MySQL for a while and wrote a little php web app that ran locally to change status.
Under the provisions of the DMCA portions of the Copyright Act, in order to remain immune from liability for acts of copyright infringement committed by its subscribers, an Internet Service Provider must have “adopted and reasonably implemented, and informed subscribers and account holders of the service providerspolicy that provides for the termination in appropriate circumstances of subscribers and account holderswho are repeat infringers.”
--- And music companies and such can sue in the ISPs if they don't.
Should ISPs be common carriers? I would argue probably yes. But under the law, they cannot do so. They have to play piracy police or get sued by RIAA, MPAA, etc.
If your buying into automation of the heat in general I am surprised you don't see the value. It allows you, if you have portable internet, to be more dynamic with that mentality you are already familiar with. For instance, when leaving work you can turn on the heat so its warmed up when you get home. Or if youre going out to dinner, you can turn it on when you leave the restaurant.
I can see the appeal if you have any requirements a plain old 7 day programmable is too basic to satisfy. I believe google home also detects when you enter the house and profiles you over time to automatically adjust the schedule.
For me, I have electric heat (instant heat when on). So i simply turn it on when i enter the room and off when i leave. But i can see the appeal of an internet connected thermostat once you hit the limitations of a fixed schedule, or if there are multiple schedules needed for each family member. Its the next generation of scheduling thermostat and its easy to picture the uses. Rather than say, an internet connected fridge, which seems totally useless to me. (cue defenders of internet connected fridges...)
-
Probably. Any interaction with a device wants to be logged - the only thing better than profiling data is even more profiling data if youâ(TM)re in the data business (which all businesses are now).
The interesting things happen when we realize what is connecting to what. If I was pirating Iâ(TM)d expect them to disable internet reachability. Why does a thermostat need an outbound connection if Iâ(TM)m adjusting it from inside the house? I suspect things like this will draw attention to a lot of misbehaving iot devices that are deliberately exfiltrating data from private networks, or that have been straight-up hacked.
That is not what ssl is for.
It's only $30. I suggest gifting the upgrade to your landlord and enjoy it for yourself as the current tenant.
https://www.lowes.com/pd/Honey...
You can connect most smart thermostats to OpenHAB and then control them through your own OpenHAB cloud instance in whatever PaaS provider you want to use to host it (or even not use the cloud component, OpenHAB works just fine with only local hub running). There are a few other projects out there if you want just local hub operation but AFAIK none of them have a self-controlled cloud component for non-local control.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
It may be nice to have a programmable thermostat to raise/lower temperature, but it definitely isn't a necessity.
I'd really like to kill the heat when I go to bed and have it kick back on about an hour before my alarm goes off. If I owned the thermostat in my apartment, that would be worth the upgrade. That does not require IoT access. Being able to control the temperature in my apartment from work seems like a useless feature.
What gets me is that there are thermostats out there that would malfunction or not work if they didn't have a constant internet connection.
What good's a thermostat that can't help with a DDoS attack?
Every major thermostat manufactuerer (Honeywell, et al), offer off-line 7 day programable thermostats. The one I have is set to warm the house up for 7am. (19C to 22C)., The thermostat learns how long it takes on the average, and starts turning on the furnace beginning around 1.5 hours early to up to2 hours before 7am each day. We have -23C outside and with the wind-chill, its like -35C. (The setback is working just fine and in short time. Recovery is slow, needing more than 2 hours to reach 22C. We also have it set to 21C until 5pm and down to 19C at 11:15pm. Saturday and Sundays we follow a different program because we have a different schedule.
And the A/C program is similar, but with higher temp settings.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
That’s how ridiculous the whole "intellectual property" crime scheme is.
Sure, they can "sell" me a mere copy of the result [money] of your (slaves') hard work. But all I will ever "pay" with, is also a mere copy of the result [money] of my (slaves'?) hard work. If one is not acceptable, then by the same rules, neither is the other.
Frankly, I worked in the media (specifically music) industry. (Bertelsmann, Sony, EMI) And you can quickly tell where this whole thing originates from: Pretty much everyone in the business snorts massive amounts of cocaine. And for those who don’t know it: That makes you feel massively overconfident... like you can do anything and know how to do anything... but at the same time insanely paranoid. Without the ability, to actually achieve more, mind you. Add to that the constant need for big money, and you got the perfect recipe for coming up with nonsense like "intellectual property".
They could easily use the same service business model as every other such business out there. One $money for one $work. Simple. Fair deal. And the resulting data/information/art would be free, like it always is anyway. (I don't see them build TPM chips into everyone's brain, let alone break the speed of light, to catch people sharing it outside of their light cone and never telling them.)
Fact is: They simply want to keep not working, yet rake in the cocaine money.
Aka steal our hard-earned money, and terrorize us with a racketeering scheme, like the Mafia, if we don't play along their cocaine delusions.
First you adjust the thermostat control it phones home back to mommy to find out if that's ok then if mommy approves you can change your temperature.
They are also admitting that they have considered that internet may be an essential service to some users and cutting it off may be life threatening. If the worst happens and somebody actually dies because of the actions of this ISP (actions based on a mere allegation and with no hint of due process) this publised admission may be enough to prove criminal negligence.
They are better off throwing the copyright notice in the bin and not bothering their actual paying customers with this shit.
I feel like this is a good example of why most people have never heard of Armstrong as an ISP.