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Don't Pirate Or We'll Mess With Your Connected Thermostats, Warns East Coast ISP (engadget.com)
Internet service provider Armstrong Zoom has roughly a million subscribers in the Northeastern part of the U.S. and is keen to punish those it believes are using file-sharing services. According to Engadget, "the ISP's response to allegedly naughty customers is bandwidth throttling, which is when an ISP intentionally slows down your internet service based on what you're doing online. Armstrong Zoom's warning letter openly threatens its suspected file-sharing customers about its ability to use or control their webcams and connected thermostats." From the report: The East Coast company stated: "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." All U.S. states served by Armstrong Zoom will be experiencing temperatures around or under freezing over the weekend and into the near future. Bandwidth throttling for customers in those areas who have connected thermostats could mean the difference between sickness and health, or even life and death. Seems like an extreme punishment for any allegedly downloaded Game of Thrones cam rips.
or i will take an axe to your series of pipes
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Bandwidth throttling for customers in those areas who have connected thermostats could mean the difference between sickness and health, or even life and death.
If you are needing to adjust your thermostat using the network, that means you aren't at home to do it manually. You are not where the thermostat controls the temperature. I.e., if you freeze to death because you didn't walk across the room to turn the thermostat up, it ain't the ISPs fault.
Yeah, maybe death of your pet fish if you aren't home to turn it up and the tank gets too cold, but "difference between ... life and death" is not something you usually hear with reference to fish.
Or are people facing death from the cold really so lazy that they'd rather freeze than walk across the room?
I've said it before, and i will say it again: 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.
Hooray! I remember reading the exact same story on /. a few days ago.
Let me google it, "connected thermostat site:slashdot.org". Here we go:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
Maybe editor should do the same and Google it before posting dupes ;-)
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Don't pirate or we'll post more dupes on Slashdot!
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
They aren't messing with anything other than saying if you pirate we'll nuke your internet so you won't be able to use all the internet things you like to use. All of this is likely covered in the TOS.
In practice temperatures change slowly enough that even getting a single packet every half hour would probably be adequate for keeping a temperature entirely livable.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You wouldn't have to worry about your ability to turn it up remotely if you didn't turn it down to start with before you left home.
It's a pretty well know fact that it takes [i]more[/i] energy to change the temperature in a home than to maintain a set temperature. If you're only in the house every other season that's one thing, but it's these people who insist on micromanaging their heating and cooling on an hourly basis who are missing the point.
And as for those people who are worried about pipes freezing -- they shouldn't be turning their furnace completely off to start with. Leave the thermostat at 50 degrees at least. Leave the cabinets open to allow the pipes better circulation with the warm air in the house (it's not like you're home anyway to be bothered by those doors), get pipe warmers and just hook them up and leave them plugged in. Heck. I bet you could set up a smarthome system that would turn them on and off for you using local temperature sensors (no internet needed). But instead, you buy a three hundred dollar thermostat and pay for internet service for an empty house for months you're not there, and you call this "saving money".
I've helped four members of our management setup nest thermostats and security cameras. Three of them have around 750 kbps DSL (supposed to be up to 1.5 Mbps, but Frontier around here sucks), and the cameras worked just fine. Even the spec page:
https://nest.com/support/article/Are-there-any-issues-with-streaming-Nest-Cam-over-a-mobile-Wi-Fi-hotspot
Says "It requires 200kb/s (0.2Mbps) of bandwidth on average, but can reach up to as much as 500kb/s" The thermostat should be a tiny fraction of that.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
and don't have anything online that can be seen by any other network.
Keep your home and its needed networks away from the open internet.
Use the ISP internet with a VPN.
Find other ways to secure the CCTV so CCTV keeps working.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Pretty bad. If grandma forwards a stupid email to more than 10 people she could be cut off. If you ask them to install an Ethernet card, they can't guarantee they won't lose all your data on your computer. They may change your provided email address without notice. They poison DNS lookup failures. Tiny 200GB data cap on their lowest tier. Hijacking HTTP requests when near your bandwidth limit.
ISPs want to be a monopoly with the protections of a common carrier public utility, but also want to be able to control content. You can't have it both ways.
If they want to control and police your content, then they should be the ones liable when they let illegal content through.
Just don't trust ANY programmable thermostat, never mind the Internet-connected ones which are vulnerable to hacking and stuff like this.
Up here in Ottawa, Canada - which is damned cold at the moment, -25C but cools things as fast as if it was -40C with the wind chill - any heating system outage could do serious damage to your home.
You're not worried just about frozen pipes. I've personally seen the water in the bowl of a toilet freeze, split the bowl, and cause the tank to fall over. The fill valve in the toilet then helpfully tried to keep the tank full... tens of thousands of dollars in damage, and, to add insult to injury, a huge water bill.
It could be an asshole ISP, North Korean hackers, or it could be a pair of weak AA batteries while you're away on vacation, but the more complicated something is, the more prone it is to failure. Even a top-quality Honeywell Commercial can't turn on the heat if it's got dead batteries.
When you install a programmable thermostat, keep the old one!
Most central heating systems have thermostat terminals labeled R and W (or W1). When R is connected to W, the furnace will go through its startup rituals and produce heat. As soon as you disconnect them, the furnace will start its shutdown rituals.
Startup/shutdown may take a few seconds before the furnace appears to do anything. Any relatively modern (since 1990 or so) gas or oil furnace will do things like start the drafting fan (blows air up the chimney) and heat the igniters before it turns on the fuel, and once it has the fuel burning, it will wait until the heat exchanger is warm before it turns on the blower that moves the warm air into your home. Likewise, shutdown may take a few seconds, usually with the main blower running until the heat exchanger has given up all its heat.
Mount the old mechanical thermostat someplace where it will ensure the house never gets below about 15C. Connect its R and W (W1) terminals in parallel with the R and W terminals on your new thermostat, so that they work as an OR gate (two switches in parallel).
That way, even if the programmable - or those silly/dangerous Nest things - fails, the old-school mechanical thermostat will click the heat on.
Keep the old thermostat set to a lower temperature than the house should ever normally reach and it won't interfere with the energy-savings provided by the programmable thermostat.
When you're connecting the old thermostat as a failsafe, don't assume that the colors on the wiring mean anything - not all R terminals are connected to the red wire, and not all W terminals are connected to the white wire!
The G and the Y terminals control other functions in your furnace, no need to touch them.
R - transformer common, 24V AC
W - call for heat (W1, W2, etc. are for multistage furnaces - use W1)
Y - call for air conditioning - leave it alone
G - call for fan (the fan will start automatically when the furnace is heating or cooling, connecting R-G will cause the fan to run continuously for air flow)
Other terminals can be Googled.
Do the wiring carefully, using proper thermostat/doorbell wire. Put a sticker on your furnace to remind you of where you mounted the backup thermostat. If you're in the least bit unsure of what I'm describing, call a licensed HVAC contractor.
A final warning is that while this COULD be done with baseboards and other line-operated electric heat, it would require suitable thermostats and a licensed electrician to do it - burning your house down to save a flood is counterproductive.
This is a great way to recycle an old mercury-filled thermostat; you've changed it from hazardous waste into a safety device.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.