Cloud connected doorbells must die as well as dragnet surveillance.
Cannot even imagine what is going on these days, inside & out.
During Snowden revelations I'd already been apprenticing for years; nothing Edward documented surprised me. I'd literally walk around our 500,000sqft elevated floors knodding my head [none of this exists, officially].
----
Nothing is as it seems.
----
During DEF CON ~XX~ (approximately same timeframe as story above) it was publicly revealed that intelligence communities had redefined the word "intercept," to mean when a human operator catelogs a certain piece of data/traffic (i.e. not algorithms sorting). #1984 #newspeak #elevenyearsago
----
I no longer carry a cell phone. Don't use email. PO Box in profile
I run grey man where I can. Stuff that's private stays private. Paper and physical security is still good.
I'm not quite there yet, but after Netanyahu made that comment like "if you have a phone you're carrying a little piece of Israel with you" right after the pager attack stuff.. I keep the phone in the back of my backpack away from my meat bits.
Could a solution be forcing Amazon (and Google and Flock and...) to open their backend software either for self-hosting or for running on somebody else's "cloud"? So subscribing to such a device isn't that different from getting web hosting from Dreamhost or Hetzner?
Maybe there's a host or IP field in the settings that users can easily change?
N.B. Flock isn't really targeting the consumer market.
I'd disagree and restate that cloud services willing to make these kinds of deals must die, painfully, in a fire after being stung by a million killer bees, after receiving a million paper cuts and having lemon juice poured all over them.
It is possible for a company to charge a monthly fee to provide a service and only that service without attempting to leverage their users and their data for any other form of income. Companies used to do it all of the time. It just takes a C-suite/board/founder to have the moral fortitude to not sell out their users.
Just for context, could you provide some examples of such people?
I made it half a century without a doorbell in my phone. I don't need it now.
I dont understand why anyone chooses Ring when the costs of Unifi are so much better.
The ring app also sucks imo and all their hardware is quite slow.
The self-hosted and home-automation and home-assistant subreddits are _full_ of discussion threads on this. The good news is that you have a TON of options to pick from. The bad news is that they're all deficient in one way or another so you really do have to spend a bit of time to figure out who executes best on the things you care most about.
If you don't mind the lock-in, Unifi is nice. Reolink (and the other DaHua re-brands) usually leave a lot to be desired in terms of software / quality but they are cheap and they reliably spit out a regular video stream that can be used with just about any software. Just don't let them onto the WAN!
Alternatives really need to be for the masses that have little Knowles in server hosting.
This is one reason I invest in Linux Smartphone company's that are work towards a clean solution for the masses. Daily drivers that are satisfactory for us build the stepping stones to walk to the alternative.
Hubitat is a different player in this space: https://hubitat.com/
Unfortunately a portion of the information getting circulated is the complete opposite.
I'm not a asshole so I cancelled my subscription.
If other people are cool with doing things without any reasons and based on pure trust, that's on them. But that's not gonna be me
Consider the Nancy Guthrie case. The owner wasn't around to give consent, and the camera didn't even have an active subscription, yet law enforcement was still able to recover video from Google's systems.
The only way it could be as you say is if the video was only stored locally without any remote access, or if the video was encrypted with keys only you control. Google clearly is not doing this. I really, really doubt Amazon is.
All tech puts it's best foot forward, some of it's really nifty, but a camera on every street corner is always going to pose more risks than it's worth IMO...
It's work to go back to the old ways but I think this is one we step we should really all take.
[0] https://reolink.com/ca/product/reolink-video-doorbell-wifi/
Ring (owned by Amazon, who runs a private airgapped AWS region for the CIA onsite at Langley) also works with law enforcement agencies.
minimaxir•1h ago
ramuel•1h ago
rwc•56m ago
https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/super-bowl-revealed-a...
SrslyJosh•24m ago