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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.
...it would be a real shame if something were to *happen* to it.
Armstrong? More like Strongarm.
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Alright, you filthy pirates... Freeze!
Lose = not win
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.