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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.
See subject
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.
...it would be a real shame if something were to *happen* to it.
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.
Armstrong? More like Strongarm.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Another reason to get a VPN.
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.
Yet another great reason to not to connect things to the internet without a great reason.
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...
... 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.
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.
Alright, you filthy pirates... Freeze!
Lose = not win
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.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
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.
Being a threat, and due process (or lack thereof) have nothing to do with it. 'If you get caught shoplifting you will be prosecuted' is a threat, and is not extortion. 'Pay me $400 or I tell the cops you stole' could be extortion.
Extortion requires you to gain something through coersion. In the first statement, the person making the statement is not gaining anything, and there is no coersion. In the second statement, there is both potential gain and coersion.
In the ISP case, there is neither gain nor coersion.
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
Not the person you're replying to, but Google still works at finding citations. One of many:
Headline: Walmart halts program that told shoplifters: Pay up or face police ... Shoplifting suspects at stores that use Corrective Education are shown a video describing the program and are given 72 hours to decide whether they will pay or not, according to the Journal. The program costs either $400 up front or $500 later. If they decline, the retailer may pursue "other legal rights to seek restitution and resolve this crime," the video reportedly says. ... The move comes after a California court ruled in August that Corrective Education's program violates the state's extortion laws.
Seems like extortion to me. Telling people "pay us $400 or we'll turn you over to police" can be a strong threat, especially if the person is on legal probation, already has an outstanding warrant, or has other legal issues.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
it sounds like this particular ISP doesn't so much "shut off" as deliver less than the customer originally paid for
No, it sounds like the ISP is delivering exactly what they said they would when both parties agreed to a contract that - among other things - says you can't use their systems and properties and related services to rip off intellectual property. It's not exactly mysterious.
Which would be fine, except there's a rather significant track record of those complaints being not in fact true. There's also no penalty for that, outside of the few cases where the person decided to go ahead and sue and could because they could prove damages in court.
The DCMA is bad, bad law for many reasons, if you've not noticed.