These cameras are a big part of why I recently moved. They're a canary for something deeper.
The area I was in was like the Korean DMZ with regard to flock cameras. I had one at the only entrance to my neighborhood. A trip to the grocery store would put me in their database 12 times at last count.
I still have to worry about the standardized fleet of cameras at Home Depot and a few other retailers, but it's not nearly as bad out here. Location is a big part of the dystopia. It is not evenly distributed. Fighting back at the municipal and HOA level can make a massive difference. Some areas seem hopeless though. You're better off finding something that already mostly works and trying hard to keep it that way.
The general fear level of the local population seems to be the biggest factor in all of this. I went from a place where people would do the quadruple check car lock routine when walking into the grocery store, to a place where many leave their unlocked vehicles idling in the parking lot. I don't even think about locking my doors at home now. It almost feels silly to do it around here. It's amazing the difference that ~65 miles can make.
>The general fear level of the local population seems to be the biggest factor in all of this. I went from a place where people would do the quadruple check car lock routine when walking into the grocery store, to a place where many leave their unlocked vehicles idling in the parking lot. I don't even think about locking my doors at home now. It almost feels silly to do it around here. It's amazing the difference that ~65 miles can make.
It's not even that. The real shitholes full o' crime have scant cameras because you don't need them for "real" investigations of "real" crime. You only need a traffic cameras to establish what you need for a murder investigation or whatever, pair the images with cell time stamps and presto.
Cameras are for making it cheap to enforce the long tail of petty deviance that doesn't actually matter. Karen calls up bitching that some guy did something, normally that would be discarded because it's not worth it. But with a camera system they can query it and maybe fine the guy from their desks. They're not using the system to go after someone for stealing from parked cars except perhaps to walk back in time and add charges to someone they already got (same reason they ask for serial numbers of electronics and the like when doing theft investigations they won't follow up on).
These are mappable in OpenStreetMap with the tags surveillance:type=camera + camera:mount=doorbell
Data query around the Netherlands shows about a hundred are mapped so far as specifically doorbell cameras: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/2dQw (the tag does not yet seem established in the USA). There are also many thousands of cameras mapped that are either not doorbell-mounted, or simply not tagged to such detail. This is a convenient map to see all of them: https://sunders.intri.cat/
Seems like a fairly impractical thing to map unless you're getting volunteers to walk up to and inspect people's front doors. I know there is an app for a sort of gamified version of this where people take tasks to verify street signs or even how many stories a building has, I used that app for a while, but doorbell mapping seems a lot leas casual.
If I can see them, they can see me. No need to walk onto anyone's property, the whole point (for me at least) is to map things that surveil public spaces
It's more casual than surveying e.g. addresses that may be hard to see if the building is recessed, but you'd still want to capture it because someone will want to route there sooner or later. Not so for cameras that only capture own property
StreetComplete has a "things" overlay that makes it very quick to add these at the position of a front door
Maybe less common in America, but in Europe it's not uncommon to have multiple people going around town delivering various things to your mailbox: a postman for letters, some poor student delivering grocery store brochures once a week, somebody delivering the local newspaper at the break of dawn, somebody else delivering the local church newspaper once a month, etc. And all of them are going door to door. If just one of them is an openstreetmap fan you quickly have all doorbell cameras in their delivery district mapped
To expand on this - Evri, DPD, and my Postie all come regularly to the door and are the same person nearly every time for me - and have been for years. Amazon, UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc. are irregular and often different people.
Then the leaflet drop guys are maybe three different people.
Then there is food delivery, which is rare (because we rarely order) bit still another group of people.
You don't need to walk up:
1. You can do wardriving and identify them by MAC address.
2. You can use object recognition on google street view photos or your own photos while you're wardriving.
Wouldn't identifying them via MAC address be very inaccurate, as you can't pinpoint them to a specific house very easily?
Would cameras like these emit any sort of IR light or anything that might be detected from a distance?
Object recognition would depend on them being very obvious from the outside - which Rings do appear to be (I've never seen one in person) but I imagine there will be less-obvious options soon enough, if there isn't already.
Walk up to door with stack of papers with a stock photo of a puppy on it that says lost puppy. Check if there's a camera. If the owner comes outside, ask them if they have seen this puppy.
And then at door 125,000 you finally reach the home of the puppy that’s in the stock photo you printed. And they say “Why yes, we have seen this puppy. How did you know??”
And then remember you live in America and you get shot for walking on someone's property.
Joking, a little, but seriously: the culture in the US has rotted to such an insane degree. Not only are we not friends with our neighbors, I'm actually scared to talk to them!
I participate in Nextdoor.com because of a community group I work with.
The fear in people’s hearts is insane. One memorable one was a Little boy who decided to sell candy bars. I knew the kid from my son’s school. Some psycho followed him for a few hours, tracked down to his home and called the sales tax authorities and the city clerk as he didn’t have a peddler permit. She documented her “investigation”, complete with photos.
>Some psycho followed him for a few hours, tracked down to his home and called the sales tax authorities and the city clerk as he didn’t have a peddler permit. She documented her “investigation”, complete with photos.
When you see a meme about "white women/karen" this is the personality type they're talking about.
> Why was this person upset with kids selling candies?
Because they didn't "follow the rules" or whatever. You see this personality type all up and down HN but usually not so extreme as to call the city about a lemonade stand or whatever.
The city clerk is also the same type of evil. They should have told that person there weren't resources available to enforce or some other lie.
They dont have any better to do. When I was living in south bay (nice suburb area) during short contract role the " nextdoor nanny state stay at home drunk soccer moms " would record out the front window, call the police in anyone POC, keep notes of what time you car leave and join
its like HOA mental illness. Different people had chased my amazon driver with a phone accusing them of being illegal, calling police for while I was cooking indian food... Ide rather have the crime in the city in contrast to this nonsense
I genuinely believe if I had dog at the time they would had poisoned it for barking once
That's fun. If you have an account you can use https://wigle.net/mapsearch to search for bluetooth devices with that prefix from other people's wardrives. There are definitely some results coming up. A wildcard search for bluetooth devices named "Ring %" also seems to work
A lot of doorbell cameras use infrared for night vision and motion detection. You could probably just drive down a street at night with a camera tuned to show infrared and they would all be bright beacons.
In most of EU doorbell cameras that point to public places are not covered by GDPR's household exception so if you use them you would be classified as data controller which come with it's own set of duties, responsibilities & limits. Is that not the case in Netherlands?
It is not legal to film the public street. But there is no enforcement, and the police is all too happy with each new camera that is out there. People think more camera's means higher safety. Privacy aware tech-savvy people see more camera's and get less warm vibes.
However, even ALPR doesn't show any devices for me:
I'm glad citizens in the EU are more on top of this. I really wish we as USA citizens had access to the same database of GPS coordinates for each Blink, Ring, and Amazon Key device that police do. Does anyone know how/if something like that could be FOIA'd? This seems it would be particularly fruitful if FBI/DHS has a comprehensive dataset for the entire nation.
Though I do worry that they may not "have" the dataset, but rather just have "access" to it via a queryable Amazon/Palantir database/API.
Unifi G4 Doorbell Pro [0] is a great self-hosted option. I've been very happy with mine over the last year, but I was already bought into the unifi ecosystem with a UDM Pro SE and U6 mesh APs.
Alternatively, the Reolink Doorbell cameras for anyone who doesn't want to be on the Unifi/Ubiquiti platform. Also I believe all these cameras provide a generic RTSP feed which can be consumed by any computer running Frigate[0], an open-source NVR/AI platform.
If it matters to you, Reolink is a Chinese owned company. Not passing judgement one way or another, but if avoiding Unifi over the remote incident matters, I could see this factoring in as well.
Separate vlans for iot devices with strict firewall rules is generally enough to mitigate the threat of most iot devices phoning home i think. We’re already in the territory of hobbyists who should be able to manage that with these suggestions like ubiquity and frigate.
I have a Unifi Protect system and am generally pretty happy with it. The biggest problem I have is similar in spirit to the Ring problem: remote access is required to get push alerts from the mobile app.
I have the same UI protect system w 7 cameras. After that incident, I made it local only. I like Unifi gear, but I became super paranoid after that incident.
After some digging around, I found homebridge [0] (with the homebridge-unifi-protect plugin by hjdhjd [1]) which fixed that for me by tying the UI Protect system into Apple's HomeKit ecosystem (which also leverages the homekit secure video that keeps alerts/motion/snapshots on iCloud). Now all our devices are able to have it popup alerts for motions, packages, etc.
It's not perfect, but this way I'm able to get alerts without tying in to Unifi's SSO system. I also still like to open the UI Protect app when I'm not on the local network to sometimes archive videos, view cameras, mess with one of the new UI PTZ cameras, so I have backup access options, including Tailscale. Tailscale doesn't give me the alerts I want, but lets me access the app as if I were still at home. I also have it tied in with HomeAssistant and recently began playing around with go2rtc.
I'm a super-newb when it comes to all this but 2022 is when I began getting fed up with all these privacy nightmares and began to teach myself selfhosting, docker, etc so I can mitigate all this. Unfortunately, I'm the only one who knows how to tinker and keep all this updated. However, I do have documentation for my wife how to access everything and start fresh to make it easier on her by using UI's SSO way so it "just works" as they say in the Macintosh World, when I'm no longer around.
I haven't seen any in depth performance comparisons, but I had also started to dig into this and I was leaning towards using Scrypted instead of the HomeBridge plugin. Just wanted to name-drop them for others also interested in all this
One more vote here for Scrypted. I have a bunch of cameras from various vendors, some with open FW, some with their original FW, all cut off from the internet. They used to be connected to Frigate but due to performance issues I offloaded the work to Scrypted on a RPi and an AppleTV and the setup works great. Bonus, it’s easier to set up and use compared to Frigate, especially for the less technical people in the family.
So, rather than Big Brother being government-imposed monitoring paid for by all taxpayers, the concerned citizenry is flipping the bill for the devices, network connectivity and electricity. Fascinating.
always, flock just charges local governments and then charges the police too to get access. They get us coming and going, and yet most crimes and murders go unsolved still. If a cop can track his Ex through hundreds of cams, why aren't the solve rates better? (Its not about crime)
Here in the Netherlands, the government gave them away for free
They're also illegal because you're not allowed to film public spaces without a good reason (it's up to the judge and case law to decide, e.g. if there has been arson in the area recently then it's reasonable to monitor your car that's parked at the kerb, for example). Nobody has yet gotten in trouble to my knowledge
So like it just came with the houses as they were built? If that's the case I wonder what kind of deal Ring make with the builders of new neighborhoods.
Yes, they were new build. They used it as part of the marketing too, calling them “smart homes”. There’s various other ring bits like motion detector and window/door sensors, alarm, etc. and some non-Amazon stuff like smart water meter, garage door opener.
They had some kind of deal with Amazon surely because it came with some amount of time free.
Agreed. Ring has a proven track record of giving up whatever video law enforcement wants, regardless of your choice or privacy laws.
If it was free, I could almost understand. Nothing is free, and if it cost the customer nothing, then the customer is the product. However, people paid for Ring gear and as a thanks have their privacy violated with no notice, no info and no choice.
By this point, we should assume that all companies with sensitive data that could theoretically help solve crime will be accessed by the government as a rule.
That's just being a realistic technology user in 2025.
The only real solution is strong privacy laws around gov usage and strong courts willing to enforce it. Expecting consumer choice or regulations to prevent that data from ever existing is mostly a fools errand IMO, there's just too much of it and it's everywhere.
Based on what? There's no constitutional right to privacy, while courts have consistently expanded the scope of government powers and immunities and consistently hollowed out the Bill of Rights. It's gonna require a new legal paradigm.
How is that working out for you? It can't stop your data being sold or grant you any kind of privacy when you appear in public (eg being filmed continuously when you leave your home).
This was always the end game for Ring. I think people were saying this since before the Amazon acquisition. The acquisition itself always struck me as Amazon attempting to reduce "shrinkage" - brick and mortar stores have their "loss prevention" team and Amazon has Ring.
The bottom line with technology is that you either host and control it yourself or you're at the whims of the vendor's business strategy.
Consider not sending your doorbell footage to accompany that has no respect for user privacy, and is now actively partnering with a police surveillance company.
Blue Iris is a fairly amazing camera hosting solution. I am continually impressed with the quality of the code and feature set. (disclaimer: $80/yr but we actually pay a bit less).
And it's cheap! If you want JUST cameras it's pennies a day, I'm running a 2010 gaming PC with a dozen services (which would cost >200 bucks from the usual suspects) and it's still only 20 bucks a month.
Is Ring camera encryption actually independently audited and known to be implemented correctly and provide all the desirable security properties?
Because when I reverse engineered my Tuya-based camera-equipped pet feeder, I've discovered that there was an encryption on the video stream, but they only encrypted I-frames and left P-frames unencrypted. Amazon is not Tuya, but IoT is IoT.
My point is, there are myriad of ways IoT vendor can boast "encryption" and "security" on the marketing materials, while the actual implementation could be flawed beyond redemption.
Thanks for the heads up, just went in and disabled it on my 2 cameras. Next step will be to throw these privacy invading pieces of junk in the trash. Just need to find a comparable product.
Are there any wireless (running power to these locations is not an option) doorbell cams that record to local storage instead of the cloud? I refuse to pay a subscription for these things.
Ideally they would record to my server instead of onboard SD card so that the footage can't just walk away if someone grabs the camera.
Reolink has some good options in this area. Both wired and wireless security and doorbell cameras with microSD storage by default, but FTP and SFTP can also be used. I've been happy with my (wired) doorbell camera with just a microSD card.
I agree it's the same as "opt-out" but I like the phrase "opt-in by default" because it implies there's an affirmative "I want to participate in this" option somewhere, and that it is set to "yes" by default.
IMO it properly reflects that what looks like an active affirmative choice by the user is actually not.
When a man murdered a woman in front of my house last year, our Ring camera's photos of his car led to his arrest within 24 hours, so not entirely useless?
I think a good thought experiment to consider, in terms of defining what your own views are, is to consider that if every single person had a mandatory 24/7 uplinked camera on them with redundancies, then the number of unsolved crimes would rapidly approach zero. It would be essentially impossible to get away with crime, so the only crimes that would happen would be those of passion, ignorance, or the political elite who would certainly excuse themselves from such social obligations, as usual.
But I definitely would not want to live in that world. And I think that's true for most people. It's kind of interesting too because there's some really nasty arguments one can make about this like, 'What, you'd rather see children kidnapped and even killed than consenting to surveillance that won't even be looked at unless you're under suspicion?'
But it's quite disingenuous, because with any freedom there is always a cost, and that cost is often extreme. 40,000+ people die per year because of our freedom to drive, yet few would ever use that as an argument to prohibit driving.
Another problem is that “crime” is a very flexible term and when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. Also the legal system specially in the US likes to equate convictions with solved cases which is not always the same.
I think it's the opposite. I think people would prefer the peace of mind of living in a high trust society. People like predictability and being able to trust people. I also think people would enjoy that laws that people pass are actually applied and we can efficiently apply the will of the people to the country.
>with any freedom there is always a cost
Laws ultimately would be what restrict your freedom, not the enforcement of them. I don't think freedom should rely on poor enforcement of laws.
One of the biggest 'culture shocks' I had when first moving to Asia, that eventually I'd see in numerous places, is visiting a food court during business hours. There's people shoulder to shoulder, so everybody goes to claim a table before getting their food. They do this by leaving various things, including their purses, on tables while they went to go queue up to get some food. There wasn't a camera anywhere. That is a high trust society, and it's amazing. What you're describing here is the opposite of a high trust society - when you have a camera on every person for fear they might do something bad, it's a 0, if not negative, trust society.
Your perceptions of other peoples' views are also off. Even with the current scope of government surveillance, 66% of Americans say that the potential risks outweigh the potential benefits. [1] And laws would not be what limit freedoms. Government and authority is not some abstract holistic entity. It's made up of people, like you and I. Would you feel comfortable with me being able to surveil every moment of your life? The difference between me and the person who would end up doing so is not this great gulf you might imagine.
For instance Snowden revealed that NSA officers would regularly collect and trade sexually explicit media obtained from surveillance. [2] They'd also use their position to spy on their love interests to the point it gained it's own little sardonic moniker 'LOVEINT'. The people that would be looking through those cameras are just people. And the government leadership overseeing these groups would include those prone to go off to an island to screw minors, or more upstanding fellows like Eric Swalwell, cheating on his wife with a Chinese spy while serving on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that oversees the entire US intelligence apparatus, and would oversee this sort of surveillance.
>What you're describing here is the opposite of a high trust society
In such a society, people don't steal because thieves have been removed from society. You can trust others because they have proven through their life that they are trustworthy. By trust I was talking between the people in society and not about the government trusting that people would not break laws. Humans are not perfect, so it's a bad assumption to assume that citizens will not break laws.
>66% of Americans say that the potential risks outweigh the potential benefits
The article you linked was about the current benefits. This is different than what I am talking about where laws are able to be effectively be enforced.
>Would you feel comfortable with me being able to surveil every moment of your life?
What do I get in return from you? Nothing? Then I have no reason to do so.
>NSA officers would regularly collect and trade sexually explicit media obtained from surveillance.
This should be made an instantly firable offense, like it is in the tech industry for accessing personal data of users. There should be alerting when such data is accessed to ensure that systems are not being abused.
The article was specifically and explicitly speaking of potential benefits, not present. The problem with systems made up of people is that you can't just have turtles all the way down. Let's say that retaining sexually explicit media of surveilled individuals is indeed grounds for instant dismissal. Who enforces this? Okay, the person above the people doing surveillance, who's somehow going through the entirety of said surveillance. And what happens when he is the one saving such media? Is it then overviewed by another person above him? And so on.
You can't really have endless redundancies and, at scale, this becomes even more true where the vast amount of data and processing becomes ever less viable to filter. And when you had 24/7 footage of everybody at every moment, that takes scale and ups it to an inconceivably vast level. More generally I think removing thieves from society, with extreme prejudice, is a far more pleasant path forward for everybody than treating everybody like a potential thief.
I’m ok with that as long as I, the camera owner, am choosing to hand over the footage. At best I can see some sort of watermarking to ensure that it’s legitimate.
There are legitimate reasons to want a camera either at your front door or surveilling your property. These can range from an increased sense of security to having documentation to support insurance claims, or even for watching wildlife. We installed our Ring camera after an ongoing string of nighttime car break-ins hit us and we had no direct proof of what happened for insurance. It was meant to be both a deterrent to that type of event and also for documentation if it happened again. There's also a pack of coyotes that lives in the woods near our house and occasionally eats our chickens. While that usage was more out of curiosity (if you have chickens, you're going to lose one from time to time), we were able to develop a sense of when that threat was higher.
I live on a bucolic cul-de-sac in a house that I've lived in since the mid 1970s. Most of the neighbors are the same. I never in my life expected a random person to drive down the street, drag a lady out of his trunk, chase her around the cul-de-sac, and stab her to death in front of my house. I never expected to find the body in the woods 40' from my side door. This is when I also learned that nobody comes to clean up after a crime like that and that if I didn't want pools of blood in front of my house and a 50' streak of it crossing the circle or the splatters all over the mailboxes that I was going to have to go out there and clean it up myself. I was in PTSD therapy for a while after that. I'm glad the Ring camera caught some of the activity.
After an event like that, it's easy to lose a sense of security in your home. How are you supposed to sleep the night after that happens, when the perpetrator remains at large? You can't lock your doors hard enough or do anything at all to feel secure. That lack of sense of security does not go away in a day or a week or a month. It goes away when you can find "normal" again. It helped us to find normal by installing other cameras around the house.
I don't want Ring or Arlo or anybody to be automatically sharing my camera footage with anybody. Even with the murder event, it was my choice to go through the footage and share it with the authorities. I don't support authoritarian "law enforcement" activities, I don't want anybody tapping into my camera feed to find lost pets or for any other reason. They shouldn't be allowed to do it. Like many other services we all use, we're more of the product than the customer, as our data is harvested and used for other purposes.
Personal security is different than targeted advertising. Most people won't know they need or want a camera until after they have experienced something that makes them feel less secure in their home. I just hope they have the wits to read the Terms and understand what they're opting into before automatically accepting all of the opt-in-by-default data sharing.
Even in the most dystopian sci-fi future where a hostile and totalitarian government watches everything everybody does, they would still use the information to investigate boring everyday crimes.
The (non rethoric) question is, are people willing to pay the increasing price of non-crime related surveillance as we see diminished security margins.
When a man murdered a woman in front of my house last year, our Ring camera's photos of his car led to his arrest within 24 hours, so not entirely useless?
Your doorbell photo of a car was really the only evidence to convict someone of murder?
I'm glad I live somewhere that needs more proof that.
No, it enabled them to find him quickly. There was other evidence, but with no previously know connection to the victim and the perpetrator having no prior criminal record, I was told it was unlikely they would have found him otherwise.
Just knowing when stuff happens outside your house when you're not home. Like, someone in the household came back from work, a package arrived, or a cool animal showed up. Or you're home and appreciate a little more notice before a visitor rings the doorbell.
Personally not a compelling enough reason to buy the camera in the first place, but those non crime notifications end up being the most common once it's up.
However, it's a very abbreviated way of stating, "soon you will not even be given this choice, because we make entirely too much money selling your data/info and we kinda bribe law enforcement by granting them any and all video, with a simple request"
This f shameless pretention of doing something noble - barely helpful above normal practices btw. - while manipulating clueless users into turning on mass-surveillance is revolting and disgusting. And ordinary employees figured this out, phrased, created content, implemmented, pubished, and are maintaining this dirty practice. Many times with (very misplaced) pride. Shame on all of them actively participating in this coward scheme!
What is an equivalently capable alternative that puts the user more in control?
The reason Ring is popular isn't just marketing or network effect, it's that it works. Before Ring and clones, security camera / DVR combos were really hard to make effective, I tried. Maybe you'd have a totally reliable system with good video, but it'd fail to notify you when you need it to, or notify way too often. Battery power was infeasible because cameras couldn't sleep. Phone notifications were DIY. A long compounding list of things could go wrong and make you miss an important event or fail to record it entirely. I'm hoping those have caught up by now, but haven't found any.
Someone tried to enter by the window next to my front porch door, it prompted me to install a video doorbell because the dude that frightened my wife only received a ticket because there was no proof he tried (and fail) to force open a window and did not enter the house. If I had a recording he would have spent the night at the station and it would have been a criminal offense instead of a civil one.
Even if it only provides deterrence, and a slight chance of after the fact punishment, I don't feel idiotic for buying a "doorstep Webcam", the door is visible from the street so there is no expectation of privacy and I really don't care that someone else could access those recordings.
If I had indoors cameras they would be in a private network. But for a front porch camera the easiest to install IOT junk is perfectly serviceable.
This. Local youths started playing ding-dong-ditch last summer. It was harmless when it was 8-9pm on a Friday or Saturday. They escalated to banging on windows, then to doing it at 1am, and finally to damaging our garage door to the point it won't open.
My wife is extremely upset about all of this, and I'm not going to be bullied out of the opinion that 24/7 cameras are actually a good thing.
No, I was pissed that the only punishment, for a know offender, was a small fine.
The police knew the guy (young adults with bright orange hoodie are quite uncommon here) and they told me that he already did this a few time before moving in my neighborhood and that they never had enough evidences to do something else than fine him.
Also I think the police are bored in my city because there were 4 patrols cars in the street when I got back home.
I have a Ring. I got the email notifying me and was about to go disable it, but it doesn’t share anything. It says it will notify you that your camera detected the dog and then YOU choose to share the video or not. So I left it enabled, as it becomes a later choice. Effectively I’m not opted into sharing was my take.
But you’re opted into the automatic detection, regardless. Ring is still processing your video still to see if there’s a match to any Search Party unless you turn the feature off.
At what point will the police request a warrant to run their own Search Party without consent?
See, I have no problem with searches that involve warrants and probably cause. They could already violate the shit out of your privacy with a warrant. That's kind of the point of a warrant.
The best time to not buy into all this non-free surveilence-as-a-service crap was a decade ago.
The second best time is today.
Unfortunately the public love this stuff, and are quite happy to have CCTV pointing at your house. Privacy never existed 300 years ago, it doesn't today. Accept your feudal masters and make peace with it, because they won years ago.
Is this seriously your conclusion? Might be a good time to get rid of the fucking spy camera owned by a multitrillion dollar corporation partnering with the state surveillance apparatus, is my opinion.
Have people never read/watched a sci-fi book/film before?
I think encouraging people to enable E2EE is more realistic than asking everyone to throw out the Ring cams they’ve potentially spent hundreds on, yeah.
From the linked document (in German for some reason, so I skimmed it as best I could), it sounds like the device will generate a password and you need to enter it on your phone. So symmetric encryption, not trusting the server to distribute keys that would be susceptible to MITM, and also not leaving users the options to choose bad passwords
Sounds good from a security point of view, although it also says they disable functions like having more than one person able to view the camera (having a partner be able to answer the door seems pretty fundamental; they probably just can't be arsed to make such functionality work with safety turned on...)
Of course, just like with Signal or anything else that gets regular updates, they can push an update to your device specifically that sends the decryption key out. You'll always have to trust them to not do something like that, but that's a whole different level from subpoenaing data they have on a hard drive
I can see benefits to a closed circuit camera. I've never felt the need personally.
If it's not running free software and treated in a secure fashion (camera can't talk to anything other than the server, enforced at the network level, etc) then it's not a risk per-se.
However people would rather pay up front and pay subscriptions to get outside companies to run it than run their own their own equipment. In the 90s when I was excited about tech I didn't even consider that aspect.
Just keep your cameras on separate vlan and access through eg. wireguard. Any company can have the best intentions but gov can just come to them, tell them to implement whatever is needed - even if that means lying to their users - and have access to everything. Probably even with plausible deniability for all parties involved, but not sure anyone even still cares about that.
Home Assistant is very flexible. It's kind of like a common meeting ground where all the things come together in one spot, and they can thereafter be programmatically automated.
Cameras? NVRs? A sea of IoT light bulbs, switches, and sensors that all variously speak Zigbee or Matter or Thread or Wifi or Z-Wave or Bluetooth or some clown connection or whatever? Almost all of it works fine with HA. It's very flexible.
If anything, it may be too flexible. It can be rough getting started with it.
(I use it in "Home Assistant OS" form in a VM on a light-weight x86 box that only cost me $50, wherein: Performance is quite lovely, and updates haven't hosed anything up [yet] that required me to go poking at it to keep it going. It's also right at home on bare-metal x86, or an ARM SBC like a Raspberry Pi, or in containers, or [...]. Did I mention that it's flexible?)
Not clear to me what the "External organizations with access" actually means or who decided which organizations to add to the list, but it's curious to me that the campus patrol for a college 250 miles away (SUNY Old Westbury) has access to camera data from Ithaca.
(Ex Flock Employee) It's as simple as that agency saying "Hey, can we have access to your camera data?" and the originating agency saying "Sure".
Flock (deliberately, IMHO) has no verification on whether said agencies are allowed by law or regulation or whatever to have that access, it's just a free-for-all.
This is one of those stories that reads like a Black Mirror episode but is just... real life now. What’s especially concerning is the normalization of this kind of surveillance creep...
One of the many reasons to host your own stuff. It costs about 0.75CAD per day to run my server and PoE switch. For my 20 bucks a month I get cameras, a media server, password manager, push notifications, file sharing, and a dozen other services, all without handing my data over to business or governments.
Is it as secure as a cloud service? Depends on what you consider secure. I closely monitor access logs and use strong passwords, Amazon has billions to spend on encryption, apps, and datacenters but they also have thousands of employees that can access your data at any time for any reason.
I would love it if some commercial host-it-yourself product were released but that goes against the pay to play model that has been chosen for all modern tech.
I fear ISPs have made a commercial host-it-yourself product near impossible. Imagine selling a product, getting no ongoing revenue, and then being on the hook - forever - to support average people trying to connect to something inside their home network from their phone. Nightmare material.
If anyone is having trouble understanding the support load, start by traveling to your local assisted living home and explaining to everyone static vs. dynamic IP address assignment.
You can do it fairly easily by bouncing off a server you control... aaaand we're right back where we started.
I think something like Tailscale's technology could resolve this and many other self hosting access cases. Already, I don't open any ports - just use Tailscale to connect to my PC at home. If this was integrated into the "camera app", it could be seamless - only authentication required. Since the traffic goes directly point to point, the cost of hosting this service isn't too large either.
Tailscale solves the access/NAT issue and keeps your services off of your WAN, but it relies on a 3rd party to let you use your own equipment. I understand why it is useful and a necessary service but I'll never touch it.
There’s a bunch of ways to achieve a similar goal. Especially if the scenario is you and your family to home or a server.
I use it with a few friends and we do stuff like host backups for each other. It makes it easy to securely allow that one server to be available to my hosts.
What worries me is how the HN groupthink mentions it at every possibility.
If people on HN aren't capable/willing to run their own kit there's no hope.
In the slashdot days you'd never get such worship of tailscale and cloudflare. Even in the early days of HN you'd have people suggesting a bit of rsync rather than using dropbox.
I understand why it's not feasible. I admin a server at home and one for a small business, and most people do not really understand "why doesn't it just work like a normal app." For the foreseeable future self hosting is an ideological choice rather than one of practicality :/
> In 2023, the FTC ordered the company to pay $5.8 million over claims that employees and contractors had unrestricted access to customers’ videos for years.
And this is why my setup will be using Reolink cameras integrated locally via HomeAssistant and Frigate. Detection runs locally on cameras and/or in Frigate, HA manages events and UI, and the only way to access any of it remotely is via VPN, no "cloud" anything.
If the authorities come knocking with a warrant, or frankly, even a nicely-worded sensible request, sure, have at it. But ain't nobody accessing the footage unnoticed and without my approval.
I bought Reolink PoE cameras because they support standard RTSP and I could put them on their own VLAN where they can't get to the Internet. I can still use the Reolink app to view them when I'm on the LAN, or through Wireguard when I'm not. I use ffmpeg to save streams to a big disk. Works great.
I do the same and it works well. But do you see the Reolink app hammering domains of the form p#p#.reolink.com? I have to kill the app between uses it it drains my phone's battery because of this.
I've never looked at what the Android app is doing on the network, but maybe I should. I usually just keep it open for a few minutes when I'm waiting for a delivery or I hear someone ring the doorbell, so I'm not too worried about it piping lots of video to Reolink HQ. I haven't noticed much of a battery drain having used it earlier in the day.
Yeah, this is my idea as well. Good to know that the Reolink app still works locally and via Wireguard, that means I'll have less UI to set up in HomeAssistant.
My reolink runs off power over Ethernet. Here in the uk, there have been reports of Amazon drivers using wifi deauth-ing devices to kill the ring cameras when they are near your property. My parents recently experienced this.
Absolutely, I will be running PoE wherever possible, definitely for the doorbell. Not just because of Amazon drivers, I've read reports of burglars using WiFi jammers to make sure wireless cameras are useless during a break-in.
Well this is disturbing. I guess my weekend project is running ethernet to my front door.
My problem is that the area around my front door where the doorbell is installed is solid timber, so it's not just a simple ethernet drop. I'm honestly not even sure how the builders ran the existing wire to that location. Maybe my only option is to add a second backup camera in a location where an ethernet install is easier.
Cops will also go after your networking prior to busting down your door. Same applies regardless of a correct and valid warrant so do with that as you will.
I'm sure the cops who trashed Afroman's place would have loved that ability.
I realize that if the authorities target me specifically, there's not much I can do. Even though I am not in the States and do not expect my local police to be quite as... forceful.
However, I do not intend to make it easy to just grab my footage along with any other that can be found, without at least asking.
Yeah, this is more of a "If police screw up, they'll still make it a 'you' problem". IIRC the example I was thinking of was federal agents attempting to threaten an anti-ICE activist.
I've had better experience with Armcrest cameras but same setup. Moved from using Arlo to a completely local setup and do not regret it one bit.
Worst part was just running ethernet to the spots where the cameras needed to go (only crawlspace access) but nice not having to charge batteries and even nicer knowing i'm not sending video to netgear anymore.
If I had of had a webcam on my front door a few weeks ago I would have been able to identify the thieves that broke into my car and stole a bunch of stuff whilst I was asleep.
Since then I have "cammed" up, but I use my own hard wired network and connected to a Pi5 with a Hailo8 chip running frigate.
No third party apps, just the fun of more stuff on the network. I do run a Cloudflare tunnel on the PI so that I can connect to Frigate from anywhere when I get alerts.
But basically, it's me and only me accessing the content of those cameras. However I do plan to configure Frigate to upload the alerts and detections into S3 with a three month lifecycle.
Oops I initially posted this comment at the top level before I saw this thread:
I assume some of the concern around this is that folks don't want to live in a panopticon. If that's your objection, I can't really help with that. On the other hand, if your objection is that you don't want a backdoor built into your video doorbell (even one that you must opt into), I'm happy to report that there are good non-Ring options.
I switched to a Reolink video doorbell, and it has decent support for local-only operation. It has the ability to save footage to a local micro SD card, and if you're worried about someone stealing the entire doorbell and losing your footage, it also supports RTSP (a common IP camera protocol). You can even have it upload footage to a FTP server on a schedule. It also supports PoE if you're lucky enough to have ethernet at your doorbell, or don't mind doing the drop yourself.
Set up does require an app, but you don't need to use the app after that. Push notifs also require egress, but, iiuc, this is mostly because of how push notifications work. Push does NOT require a paid subscription.
I personally just use the app, but it's nice knowing that if Reolink tried to pull a fast one, I could just block egress on my VLAN and use it locally.
If you'd rather just go completely app-less, I imagine a dumb doorbell paired with an IP camera and a local ZoneMinder [1] install would provide most of the benefits of something like Ring. Of course, the tradeoff is you now have a second job being sys admin of your homelab. Pick your poison, I guess.
This won't matter when all of your neighbors have a Ring doorbell, you will still be recorded every time you leave your house. You are just making yourself more noticeable and disagreeable to the surveillance apparatus.
I have 2 Reolink PoE cameras, and they just hopped on the network with DHCP and I used a web browser to configure them. No app needed. I did install the app later, once the cameras were safely on their own VLAN, and I could connect to them by internal host name or IP address.
I wonder how many existing Ring owners would have bought the camera had they known they would eventually give third parties access to the camera footage.
That's the beauty of capitalism, its very foundation allows you to act immorally or amorally, and pretend that it's ok because of "the market", "invisible hands", "revealed preferences", etc. If it's immoral but done in pursuit of maximizing shareholder value, it's magically allowed.
Slight tangent: on top of that, I just read an article yesterday (which of course I can't find again right now) about how false automatic alarms from such cameras will incur a fee from the owners when the Police comes to check it out. It was from somewhere in Texas.
That's pretty common with any alarm system not just Ring. I know you get the first false alarm with a response for free. After that, fines/tickets are issued. It might have been 2 free can't remember as it's been a long time since the alarm was installed and info was provided. This was in Dallas specifically before I go painting with too broad of a brush. Even further back, I had an alarm system installed, but never paid for monitoring. They also warned about fines after too many false reports, and that was a tiny town waaaay outside of Dallas.
When you take this info and combine it with the ability of Wifi7 routers to "see" where people are in their house, you realize that the recent demo of Anduril's helmet that gives an information display that the soldier/cop wearing it can use to "see who is in the house" or "see around corners" etc. is not sci-fi but instead, something they can do today.
> When you take this info and combine it with the ability of Wifi7 routers to "see" where people are in their house,
WiFi routers can’t tell you where people are in the house. The routers don’t even know their own location within the house.
All of those papers you see on the topic have extensive additional information being put into their models. The routers don’t magically know the layout of your house.
At most, a WiFi device could infer movement in a house if the RSSI of devices is fluctuating where it is normally stable.
Isn't that already enough for a heads up display? Direction relative to where I am point and shoot? I don't think the layout of the house matters that much since the person using the 'wifi' router strapped to their back/head can already see what's in front of them?
Floor plan isn’t enough for a location model. These have to be learned in from accurately tagged data combined with measurements taken at the precise time of the tagged location data. A lot of tagged data.
You’re not going from a floor plan to a precise location model. Just think about how different the WiFi environment would be if someone put their router next to their steel computer case versus someone setting it on a nice MDF cabinet with no wires nearby. Completely different RF environment and pathing.
Most robot vacuums (at least the ones that use LiDAR, which seems to be the majority) can only capture a very rudimentary plan of your house, that being a 2D image taken at an elevation of ~10cm or so. It will also be obstructed by any large objects, and there's no easy way of telling them apart from walls.
Your government probably knows your floor plan (though, I don't think they tend to be publicly accessible). Either way though, neither of these methods are anywhere near enough to do what was shown off in those Wi-Fi tracking demos. Here's hoping the tech doesn't get a lot better or has a series of unexpected breakthroughs.
Not just social media postings but past real estate listings can probably provide floor plans.
And if you don't have those, a lot of buildings have common patterns. Its very much in the realm of possibility to train a model using exterior and interior information so that you could have AI generate a floor plan using only exterior data.
Combine that with a small drone that could fly around a building and take different wifi signal readings to triangulate access point positions.
Once you have all that don't you have everything you need to detect movement in the building based on signal disruptions?
Yes, seems like a bit of work but it absolutely seems like the type of effort some governments would put effort into.
> Not just social media postings but past real estate listings can probably provide floor plans.
I regret even engaging with the floor plan debate.
It doesn’t matter if they have a floor plan. That’s not enough information to characterize the RF environment of a house and how it responds to people moving through it.
A floor plan won’t tell you the position of all the WiFi devices, obstructions, and how the environment responds to moving those around. It won’t even tell you where the router is with any precision or if it’s next to a big chunk of metal like a computer case that’s blocking half the house and causing reflections.
>Combine that with a small drone that could fly around a building and take different wifi signal readings to triangulate access point positions.
That seems like all you'd need anyway, skip the rest of this. Small autonomous drones with simultaneous location and mapping capability will absolutely revolutionize warfare (and firefighting, but I digress) whenever they stop being sci-fi.
The police has access to the planimetry of your home. Secondly, if they get close enough they can measure the distance between the agent and the router, and then deduce all the relative distances from the router to the people inside.
The floor plan of every home is not on file, especially older homes.
Police aren’t accessing your floor plan and then accessing your router and combining these into a perfect model that maps people’s locations. Where in this supposed plan are the police deducing the location of your WiFi router in the house and constructing a model of all materials and objects in the house that impact the model?
This just isn’t how those research papers work. It’s not something the police are going to combine with a file from the planning office and magically have a map of you in your house like in a movie.
They could easily find it for most people. It is generally public record, in my county it's available online, unless the individual built the home themselves (mine isn't on file because I opted out of building codes and planning, but commercial home builders can't do that here).
But let's be real, police constantly barge in to the wrong address, looking for people that have been gone for years, accomplishing not much more than shooting a beloved dog on a hair-brained last second witch hunt. It's not that they can't do it, it's that they have the attention span and executive planning facilities of a burnt out coke addict 3 hours post their latest scratch off ticket winnings.
A floor plan is not equivalent to a complete RF characterization of an environment. Ignore the floor plan comments because they don’t enable WiFi positioning.
Think through it: Does your floor plan contain info about the precise location of your WiFi devices and any obstructions between them? Even that isn’t enough to get a WiFi location model, but it’s not in there regardless.
Tech companies are doing stuff and giving police free for all access and use. Which is worse, because as stated, police are worthless. You think they consider the consequences or the rights of the people they use those tools on? Come on now.
This can be provided as a service, if it isn't already. Im sure something similar already exists.
Yeah, your local friendly police officer isn't gonna do that.
They're gonna pay Anduril, Palantir, and a whole host of other business or consulting firms a ton of your money to do that.
The criticism that "it's technically too challenging for the police department therefore its sci-fi" is extremely silly given that the current article literally is about private companies that are building surveillance networks that they will then sell to the police.
It's a lot cheaper to just bust the door down, toss in a bunch of flash bangs and light up anyone who doesn't have their hands raised. Maybe they'll just send an armed robot in first if there's a specific threat involved.
Yep. I used to be a building/remodeling contractor. If I accidentally showed up to the wrong address and demolished the wrong deck, I'd be responsible for making the property owner whole again.
If a cop serves a warrant and the wrong address and ends ups murdering a child, that cop will receive sympathy and paid time off.
Yeah, people have (attempted to) sue PDs and cities for even woefully negligent wrong address raids (different street to warrant and documentation), and the courts have happily told them "sucks to be you, they have no requirement to pay for any damage".
Back in the good old days police had some dedication to their work and some professional integrity. They would at least go through the effort of planting the drugs afterwards...
As was the administrations of Clinton and Obama. The real issue is they (whomever is currently in power) can do these things, and there's nothing we can do to stop it from happening.
No, it’s not. Whataboutism is collaborating. Don’t be that guy.
The difference with this administration is that they aren’t even pretending to follow the nominal controls or rules to wield that force.
There was a legal concept around the drone/missile/commando/aerial strikes to assassinate targeted individuals in the Middle East. The morality of that action was dubious at best, but what’s happening in the Caribbean doesn’t even meet that very low moral, ethical, or legal bar.
This administration, with their craven collaborators on the Supreme Court, is solely focused on asserting virtually unlimited executive power to a fairly obvious end.
At one point I volunteered to join an anti-jihadist Syrian militia (YPG) that was backed by the US government. When I returned to the US, they flagged my passport (and interrogated me everytime I crossed a border for about a decade).... thinking I was a jihadist.
So yeah consider that the government is so dumb that one half of the government thinks the secular anti-jihadist militias supported by the other half of government are actually jihadists.
They don't care about that. They care about the fact that you now have irregular warfare experience. Their morals are wholly situational, so they assume the same is true of everyone else.
It's not a terrible assumption; if you study extremist circles for long enough you come across examples of people who completely flip sides because they were only ever in it for the extralegal opportunities. Of course, you can find similar chameleons in politics.
"Just trust us" ... said the people who constantly instigate conflicts and wars and orchestrate and perpetrate false-flag operations to then claim they had to attack and murder people.
What the public does not understand though is that THEIR complicity and facilitation is not only integral, it is even necessary in a "democracy" where a psychological "consent" must be manufactured, not dissimilar to basic grooming tactics. And no, it's no coincidence that all the western leadership and institutions are effectively all various types of groomers, i.e., psychological manipulators and abusers.
The police have a very safe job, generally. They've done studies and construction workers have a much higher rate of injury and death than the police in the US. People have this idea that being a police officer is really unsafe and that they're throwing themselves in the line of danger just by doing their jobs, but most people are law-abiding and civil. There are people who are not, but that's not a good reason for the police to pretend like nobody is.
I think those narratives aren’t really correct either. At a 50,000 foot level, yes those numbers work out. But occupational numbers look at all sworn officers and don’t necessarily tell the story about the line police on the street. That said, the harrowing tales weaved by the unions in their negotiations or in TV don’t tell it either.
Highway patrol officers have a similar risk profile to construction workers. Mostly car accidents. Patrolmen in cities or towns get hurt in town or in altercations all of the time.
Court officers do not. Detectives largely do not. Police are more likely to get shot at, but way more likely to get hurt in a bunch of acute and long term ways. The nature of the stress that many police experience measurably shortens their lives.
The biggest issues with police with regard to officer and public safety are poor governance and macho culture. I live in New York so I’ll
use them as an example. NY State Police are highway patrol focused - they wear grey and black uniforms and Stetson hats. NYPD Highway patrol units wear black leather jackets and cavalry breeches. It looks cool and has a certain elan — but officers would be safer in more functional dayglo attire.
In terms of governance, like many areas of American governance, checks and balances are weak. Example: Cozy relationships between various departments, prosecutors, and perhaps elected judges mean that many NY police avoid prosecution or and sanction for DWI.
which can even come from situations where you want to help people but you can't so it also badly affects teachers, nurses and other people who come across people's dysfunction and suffering. It's worse to be made to feel that you violated your own values than it is to, say, get shot.
Great points. I have several people close to me who are firemen. They see shit you’re not really intended to see, and often don’t have a way to work through it. My mom was a nurse, mostly in CCU and ICU. She was an incredible advocate for her patients and profession, but she witnessed a lot of death and her way of intellectually processing that made her seem harsh about certain things, but it’s really perspective — most of us see death as a concept not reality.
It’s part of the reason why an observant person can usually spot a cop or firefighter in plain clothes. They put on a facade as a coping mechanism that leaks into life.
Most problems at their root are a result of people not treating people like people. Many “advocates” for police are really just attracted to the perception of power, and see failures of accountability as a sign of strength. It’s the opposite.
> They've done studies and construction workers have a much higher rate of injury and death than the police in the US.
Sure, but both construction worker and police officer are significantly more dangerous jobs than most of us here have sitting behind a desk.
Obviously it’s not a job where people are dying routinely, but suggesting death or serious injury are the only two risks of interacting with the public and responding to threatening or unstable situations is ignoring the reality. It’s a tough job. Much tougher than my time spent sitting at a desk.
I'm not convinced that being a cop is such a tough job. Most of it is sitting in your car waiting for speeders, or to warn traffic about road construction, or driving around looking for something unusual happening.
US courts have determined they don't even have a duty to risk their own lives to save civilians. Kinda the entire purpose of their job's existence, removed.
There's a lot of aggrandizement by and for cops; it's completely parallel to the worship of the military.
> I'm not convinced that being a cop is such a tough job. Most of it is sitting in your car waiting for speeders, or to warn traffic about road construction, or driving around looking for something unusual happening.
The tough parts of a job aren’t defined by the routine work. It’s the risks and edge cases. That’s like saying most of a construction worker’s job is measuring things and reading plans so it can’t be that tough.
It’s pretty obvious that a lot of commenters here have never known an actual police officer. They’re just choosing between two extreme archetypes that aren’t accurate: Either the heroic person risking their life on the daily to protect to the public, or the bumbling donut-eating cop who has been relegated to traffic duty only. Neither are true and comparing it that way is a false dichotomy.
The irony of us sitting at desks in our warm and comfortable offices while calling the job of someone who gets called to deal with troubling public situations “not tough” is ironic. I wouldn’t want to do that job and I bet you wouldn’t either.
just to make this explicit, protecting civilians has never been the purpose of modern police forces. they were developed to put down rebellions/catch slaves/protect rich people's property
There are plenty of instances where you would be correct, such as the origin of police forces in the American South (which were initially slave patrols), but that doesn't mean you are correct in all instances.
I'm not sure what joy you derive from spreading misinformation, but you should probably reconsider it.
You didn't refute anything in the comment, other than saying one part of it was correct. This comment would be more useful if you actually made an argument.
A cursory internet search would back up my statement. Feel free to do that if you're interested. I note that you aren't asking the parent poster for any citations for their claim, which I would say is quite extraordinary.
And to be clear, my "argument" is that the parent poster is objectively incorrect, which is accurate. I decided not to posit on why the parent poster made an objectively incorrect statement, though I am curious.
This is your statement: "just to make this explicit, protecting civilians has never been the purpose of modern police forces. they were developed to put down rebellions/catch slaves/protect rich people's property"
That statement is incorrect, no matter what your definition of "modern police force" is. That's it. It's not complicated, despite your attempts to deflect from the invalidity of that statement.
Funny to accuse someone of "spreading misinformation" while agreeing there are instances where they are correct, then asserting there are some instances where they are incorrect while giving no concrete examples yourself.
So saying something that is correct but not for all cases (which ones would those be) is now "spreading misinformation"?
I'm not sure what joy you derive from dismissing statements you already acknowledge have an element of veracity with some blanket label of "misinformation", but you should probably reconsider it.
> Funny to accuse someone of "spreading misinformation" while agreeing there are instances where they are correct, then asserting there are some instances where they are incorrect while giving no concrete examples yourself.
It's not funny, it's accurate.
Spending seconds looking into the history of policing worldwide, or in the US, would back up my claim.
Had the parent poster bothered to post evidence backing up their comment, I probably would have made the effort to post citations refuting it.
> So saying something that is correct but not for all cases (which ones would those be) is now "spreading misinformation"?
When you say that something is correct in all cases, yes.
> I'm not sure what joy you derive from dismissing statements you already acknowledge have an element of veracity with some blanket label of "misinformation", but you should probably reconsider it.
Nice try, but there is no "element of veracity" to an absolute statement that is objectively false.
No I completely agree that the police need things like health care and mental health and training on dealing with crises and all of this stuff we expect. But the idea that they need better weapons to do their job or that everyone they encounter should be treated like Afghani insurgents using the cameras they've installed in their own homes is beyond dystopian. Getting shot or stabbed, in my understanding is way less likely than just getting yelled at and traumatized by someone. And so I think the things that actually would add value would be things that either help you avoid those situations in the first place or things that help you process and lay down the trauma after the fact.
This I can agree with. I have experience with the local PD in handling "no good answer" domestic violence situations with a neighbor's mentally ill kid; they clearly had training to guide them. I'm grateful for that, although they still couldn't resolve much (the mental health system is still dysfunctional in the US).
Partly it's dysfunctional but the options for treating severe mental illness (schizophrenia spectrum, bipolar, major depression) aren't that great.
When you seem some guy screaming on the street corner a monthly depot injection of an antipsychotic drug would probably calm them down but overall the drugs are unpleasant [1] and have serious side effects, particularly sedation, weight gain, and high blood sugar [2] A "functional" system would probably be one that can get people like that a diagnosis and get them treatment against their will.
Kanye West is a good example. He has a bipolar diagnosis but now thinks he is fashionably autistic so he quit taking his meds and now he is shooting music videos of black people in blackface giving the Hitler salute after a whiney autotuned complaint that they won't let him see his kids after he posted something on Twitter [3]. For him responsibility is not "don't cosplay as a Nazi" but "face up to your condition and take your meds" and he won't want to cosplay as a Nazi and they might let him see his kids.
I've known quite a few people who are schizophrenia spectrum without a diagnosis: one of them lived at our house for a year and a half until she threatened my wife with a knife and she took her own life a year later, another one called us up five times in one day last week with a scrambled story about how she got bit by a dog, I sat down and listened to her for about 20 minutes in which she got lucid just a few times and I was able to piece together the place where it happened, that she's talked to the security guard and the EMT but not the police, that she did see a doctor and get a Tetanus shot though she wasn't sure if it was a Rottweiler or a Pit-bull.
The good news is that new drugs are here and more are under development:
[2] last year my condition got worse and my doc put me on the minimum dose of seroquel before going to sleep which is 1/10 the dose they'd give to someone who is really psychotic. It was effective at getting me quality sleep and avoiding "paranoia against objects" in the morning but I gained 15 lbs and my A1C was borderline in my last bloodwork and my doc thinks I should get off it. Even the smallest dose is so sedating I can't believe anyone could take it during the day, my guess is that if I cut the pills in half the sleep promoting effect will still be strong enough.
Its great for the narrative though, if you don't think they're special human beings risking their lives every day to save you how else can you convince the general population they should venerate them?
if you don't think they're special human beings risking their lives every day to save you how else can you convince the general population they should venerate them?
Along those lines, I think it's weird that in some cities, a cop who dies choking on a chicken bone on his day off in his own kitchen gets the same benefits and massive traffic-clogging live-streamed publicly-funded funeral with politicians and media spectacle as a cop who gets killed by a bad guy while on duty.
If they cared about police safety, they wouldn't do warrant checks at every interaction. If they cared about community policing, they wouldn't do warrant checks at every interaction. Because warrant checks make every situation potentially one where they are interacting with someone who has a life sentence over their head and might do something crazy.
Removing that one step just for community policing would completely change police interactions. Community policing is not the place to inject warrant enforcement, it too completely changes the dynamics.
I got hit by a car in a hit and run, and despite there being dozens of cameras, and me getting the footage of the car hitting me and driving off (not clear shot on license plate), the police immediately called it a cold case and refused to even try to get footage from any other cameras nearby - so I'll hold my breath that they use this for anything to prevent crime.
A country like the US has around 0.47 deaths in the line of duty per million per year whereas a country like Germany where people can't buy gun just like that is at 0.37 and a country like the UK where normal cops do not have guns is at 0.05
Which is easier, Wifi 7 in all homes or gun restrictions ?
I question where it's a good idea to give police / solider a big reflective helmet that can cause headaches, eye strain, and nausea (the previous system from Microsoft before Anduril took over). There were constant complaints by the users that it wasn't useful. I see Anduril using less lenses but the reflective ness of this helmet makes it a huge threat to the user of the product.
I hate that all our favorite sci-fi books were used as manuals for what to build next, instead of trying to avoid creating those futures in our real lives.
Sci-fi writers understood both what technology could create in the future (and what would be desirable), and also understood how people abuse power and the tools available to them to stay in power (or gain more).
In other words: they predicted the future, more than they inspired it. IMO, that also makes their writing that much more interesting.
Surprisingly, I never considered that, and agree that it makes the writing more interesting, I'm gonna keep this in mind for future stories. Thanks a lot for sharing that :)
Relatedly, somewhat, I've been reading a lot of 19th century French literature (because I'm French and because my sister is a literature teacher who's been "assigning" me stuff to read).
It has been somewhat shocking to see how relevant the writing is seen through a 21st century lenses. Whether it's how media works, how cliques of people function, etc.
It truly feels timeless in a way that I've found very surprising. It also very much supports notions that people don't change even if means and methods do.
Read more Solarpunk? From a writers standpoint though, I suspect its easier to weave a dramatic plot through a dystopic background than a more optimistic one
"It's about a family with a robot helper, that doesn't go beserk, and eventually recreates their late grandmother's casserole recipe using AI. It's a guaranteed bestseller!"
Yes, it's easier to captivate attention by evoking primal instincts - avoid predator, find food, reproduce, etc. These stories stick around in your head, the memetic survivors. They are easier to feed off.
But "Happy" doesn't mean a perfect utopia. The entire "classic" Star Trek is set in a utopian future, yet with plenty of space for intrigue. Usually a commentary on a contemporary problem, with a "happy ending" that's supposed to show us the road to a better solution, rather than a bland "forever after".
Even "First Contact" (a zombie/survival horror) is spun around the theme of "this is the history/future that we're saving".
A lot of aspirational tech was consumed by builders. I dare you to find a nerd who has watched Star Trek and hasn't once thought "wouldn't it be cool if I could interact with the computer with my voice", or "using touchscreens for everything looks so futuristic"?
And yet here we are complaining that our phones are over-listening to us and our cars no longer have knobs.
No doubt. The question is, is that the explicit goal, and if so, why? And if not, don't they consider the effects of their actions, if they aren't, why?
You actually don’t. Technologists have more leverage than most workers. There’s no shortage of jobs that don’t require building surveillance states or engagement addiction engines.
At this point, the path from what these teams of people are building to dystopian outcomes is well-mapped. Whether it’s an explicit goal is irrelevant because if you can reasonably foresee the harm and proceed anyway, you’re making a conscious choice to enable it.
Didn't someone a while ago make those QR codes which played with the facial recognition algorithms. I wonder where they are today... Sound like fashion could play a role here.
I am not sure how that would be helpful, regardless of how you mean that. Nothing in the past has ever even gotten remotely close to what even exists today, let alone what will exist in all of our lifetimes, no matter how old you are.
Humans are basically the same, even if the technology is different.
"History doesn't repeat itself but rhymes a lot" (or words to that effect). What is happening now in the US (and many other places) strongly echoes the events leading up to WW2.
I commented on a similar post earlier, but my entire neighborhood, hundreds of houses, came with them preinstalled. Can’t even leave my house without being surveilled.
Some people have the setting on where it starts announcing stuff any time it sees a person, which it does all the way to the sidewalk. So you go on a walk and get yelled at through a super shitty speaker several times.
And it’s about as dystopian as you can imagine with people posting recordings constantly on the neighborhood Facebook group and arguing.
I swapped to HomeKit secure video because of no additional subscription, included in the iCloud one I’m paying anyway. Allegedly end to end encrypted too.
I had one neighbor with the announcement thing but they eventually turned it off. No illusions that it’s not still recording. But how horribly hostile to have that on, right? No accounting for taste, I guess.
I’ll continue staying off nextdoor and the rest and keeping my camera feeds to myself…
The police chumminess is super dystopian. I definitely went with E2E encrypted cameras because I also think it's so crazy people just hand all that data over without realizing how powerful it is and how much personal privacy they are throwing out the window.
Apple at least claims to not have keys for their E2EE, such as when you turn on Advanced Protection (or whatever it’s called) it has this whole spiel about how screwed you are if you lose your recovery ability
Some people have the setting on where it starts announcing stuff any time it sees a person, which it does all the way to the sidewalk. So you go on a walk and get yelled at through a super shitty speaker several times.
George Orwell really never could have imagined that people would flock to purchase or otherwise use the methods of their own surveillance. (smart phones, social media, smart cameras, modern cars, etc) I think it paints government surveillance policies in something of a different light. There is definitely a constituency which believes that the evil central government is pushing for surveillance in a purely unilateral way.
I'm not really pro-government, but modern surveillance capitalism really pushes against this view. Put to their own devices, the public will generally (and apparently) flock towards mass surveillance all on their own, and I think one possible implication is that the government surveillance policies are more popular then some folks in HN circles would suspect.
And don't forget the AI companies. People are happy to send their highly personal information (and company secrets) to them so that a chatbot can use it. Didn't OpenAI just announce a porn feature?
OpenAI is receiving far more data with a far greater privacy impact than social networks. And all this is happening at a time when the US is transitioning from a somewhat functioning democracy to an autocratic and fascist system.
>government surveillance policies are more popular then some folks in HN circles would suspect.
2 things.
1. Few people understand most surveillance legislation, including journalists.
2. Most governments use thought terminating cliches involving child safety to force compliance on the middle set of people who dont like surveillance and understand a minimum amount of what the legislation does.
These points leave anti surveillance campaigners fighting an uphill battle. Most people, when they have these laws clearly articulated and arent in danger of being called a pedo for opposing them, oppose them.
I think this is correct, but buying something like a Ring camera is 100% voluntary. And buying a smartphone _used_ to be 100% voluntary, and people couldn't get enough of them. People aren't ignorant about privacy, they don't even care about it. Try telling your friends you turn bluetooth off on your phone and don't have a data plan for it. They'll think you're very, very weird. They do not care about privacy whatsoever.
I already have problem with negligent people using products like Ring that is to surveil anyone around without control, with uncontrollable and unreliable level of standard handling collected data (no high hopes here). But when I find it very very hard and limited purchasing products that cannot spy on me - special mention here for smart phones and cars - that makes me mad to the next level. Even for the elevated level privacy concious folks the car and the smart phone bringing hostility for your private life is getting harder and harder to avoid. Not having the suitable time to do the tedious investigations and costly trials into the reliability of products with low surveillance risks, not to mention the constant need of keeping yourself up do date to everything involved in this regard! We need to live our life, cannot spend it on constant workarounds, hacks, and very reasonable paranoia. When logging into essential services are MANDATING the use of smart phones (i.e. MFA, but own apps sometimes, requiring specific vendors!!), not to mention the need of getting from A to B the way required (goods, children, time limits, navigation), but cannot procure a solution that will not expose you to adverse agents or even criminals (those getting in and out of systems nowadays like they live there) that makes me really really mad! This society is shit. I cannot do it, but feel the highly increasing need for becoming the real life Captain Fantastic [1].
I feel this entirely. The constant surveillance is almost unavoidable if one ever wants to participate in society. How can I always avoid using a cell phone when my source of income requires that I be accessible most of time. People will respond to get another job or buy this obscure product instead, but as you said, I can’t live my life if I’m constantly researching EVERYTHING that affects my life, and having to wade through so much bs to do so.
Having tried to do this already to no avail, does anyone know if as an owner of one of these Ring devices if it's possible to take it offline and handle everything locally?
I'm usually against these types of "smart" devices, but only bought it because my house got burgled as a student (whilst I was asleep!), so I got pretty shaken up and got the cheapest thing I could find. Currently, I do have it connected to a local HA instance, but I'm pretty sure that relies on Ring's online services to access it, unless I'm mistaken.
Ring has better than typical device security. If you’re not looking to reverse engineer a brand new exploit, there are other devices that do the same thing but are designed to be local first.
Google for rtsp doorbell and you’ll find many discussion threads
Unfortunately MAC addresses are hard to mask. With a DIY camera you could customize the MAC address, but it would still be visible. To truly hide it I suppose you'd need to use a wired interface. Ubiquiti used to make 700MHz WiFi adapters but I don't think those are a thing any longer
Why not just get rid of it? Your anxiety is triggered from the past, not the present. We have lived without these devices in perfect safety and security for a long time. Simplify and be free!
All this hand-wringing about surveillance powers is not keeping up with how quickly our ability to surveil people is expanding. The fourth amendment seems kind of like a wet fart in a timeline where private companies can surveil the public and then simply choose to share their data with law enforcement.
I had to buy a surveillance camera recently, but I made sure mine doesn’t connect to the internet in any way.
How does your total solution work? Today, there's a lot of convenience with Nest. Is there an equivalent experience that doesn't involve exposing your data to megacorps?
Not having to expose data to mega corps is one part of the solution, but more so there should be a solution where government can’t so trivially circumvent 4th amendment by purchasing the data from corps they’re not allowed to collect w/o a warrant.
I mean the feed has to be written to a storage and this storage I immediately backup off-site in the case someone is clever enough to immediately go for such (e.g. burglary).
I think one of the traps we fall into is imagining that an attacker is somehow intelligent (someone who can immediately attack video storage) but simultaneously uncreative (doesn’t think of some way to make the surveillance footage irrelevant).
I’ve decided that I’m not a high-profile target for covert operatives, but I am a target of opportunity for people who have access to my data once that data is outside of my control. The decisions I make based on that are decisions like, “No surveillance feed goes into cloud services operated by companies I don’t trust,” but “I don’t need to encrypt my NAS”.
I'm surprised they weren't already, if one discards the ethical and moral issues (like one would expect from an Amazon product), they do have a lot of opportunities for working with each others data.
This is just the systemization, scaling of what existed previously. It's a rather predictable pattern at this point in America. Introduction through innocuous means, expansion through a combination of convenience and fear, then systematic expansion once the slaves have become accustomed to the new state of things. It's a rather common ratcheting normalization staircase.
Even public information clearly describes how it is the "CIAs" one trick pony, whether it's orchestrating a "color revolution" for "democracy", instigating conflicts and war to feign innocent self-defense, implementing social engineering and Constitutional subversion, or implementing mass surveillance specifically. It's the same wife-beater and child rapist type pattern of grooming abuse that then feigns innocence and deflects blame to anything and anyone else.
Most people are really not all that different than any run of the mill battered wife (even if only in the making), psychologically. I get it a lot when I point out what a trap and an illegitimate, enemy entity that the EU is (not to pick on the EU, because it also applies to the US and many other places, but it's far more pronounced with the "EU-cultists")... You get the constant predictable defenses of the love-bombing "abusive boyfriend"/wife beater in the making responses. "you don't understand", "the EU really loves me", "you never want anything good for me", "he showers me with all kinds of benefits and slick marketing", "we are going to be happy forever".
It's sad, and as someone that has watched that cycle unfold even in my own family, it's really kind of demoralizing and somewhat depressing to know exactly where it's heading and being unable to counter the forces that have roots a long long time ago, forces of nature. So, the US and the EU will have to suffer that which is predictable and was preventable, no matter how much they wanted to see the world through rose colored glasses.
Maybe for humanity's sake, China can free the world of the scourge of this cycle and the psychopathic, narcissistic, maniacal group of people that causes it all... if they don't just kill all life on the planet because if they can't be in control then no one can be in control.
However, AI-powered technology used by law enforcement has been proven to exacerbate racial biases.
This is a little misleading. Flock is primarily an ALPR that can identify make/model/color/identifying-feature of vehicles. It's not facial recognition. It doesn't itself have a racial component. The modal "proactive" Flock intervention (as opposed to investigative searches after crimes) is to flag a moving vehicle as stolen.
But in practice, the outcomes of deploying Flock are racialized, because the hot lists states keep of stolen vehicles aren't accurate enough for real-time enforcement, so recovered vehicles stay on the lists and false-positive. You're disproportionately likely to have a vehicle on a hot list if you live in a low-income neighborhood.
Even then: it's not clear how any of this is apposite to a Ring/Flock partnership. You can't use a Ring camera to do realtime ALPR flagging of cars. Presumably, this supports Flock's "single pane of glass" product; they just want police going to Flock for all their video needs. Police already canvass Ring and Nest cameras during investigations.
What's your point? Obviously we wouldn't allow something like this to be deployed in our community. But what does that have to do with Flock providing an interface to police departments for collecting Ring camera footage?
I don't think that's a good thing --- I think PDs should continue to manually canvass for footage and specifically ask residents for footage when they need it, I think that's actually the right public policy and we don't need to innovate past it. But good or bad, it has nothing to do with Flock's "AI".
Also the thing not being mentioned anywhere in this thread that is in other reporting is that the Flock partnership is an interface for police to ask the Ring owner to share their footage with police. A thing that police can already do under the current system. It seems to just be a "single pane of glass" for both systems.
Right; it bugs me that TechCrunch is doing this "AI is racist" thing here. Like: I think a lot of naive AI is in fact racist. But AI has nothing --- that I can tell --- to do with this story. Do they know what they're talking about or not? I have an issue with this "jazz hands" stuff.
I feel the same way about this Flock stuff as I did about all the NSA stuff back in the Snowden days: like, directionally, I get it, I'm on the same page, but I know just enough to know when Glenn Greenwald is just making shit up, and I can't let that slide.
My solution to that is to just not keep anything valuable in the car and leave it unlocked. After getting my car window smashed in twice for the thieves to not find anything other than trash I decided this was a better system and haven't had a problem since. For all I know people have rummaged around my car but I don't have to deal with damages anymore.
My ideal anti-theft device would be a mode where the car is unlocked but the alarm goes off if you try to open the door.
Security cameras could already be hacked and have their feed altered by using Toka services. Toka was founded by Ehud Barak (also of Carbyne fame, with Epstein) and a16z:
This is the logical conclusion to the state of irrational fear that Americans perpetually live in, that causes them to feel they need 24/7 surveillance of their homes, no matter the consequences.
Yup! I've had my car stolen and broken into in the past. So I have a rational fear the same thing could happen to my house, so I have a ring system. Out of respect for my neighbors, I'll go the E2EE pathway and make sure my camera isn't tilted towards the road, but I'm not going without cameras again.
Unfortunately the advent of the IP camera, or the Citizen app, and decreases in crime, have no correlation. It just makes one feel better, which is fine in the same way that smoking in public is fine.
Anybody can merely force someone else to do something. I can, you can. That's small fry stuff.
The real ticket is getting people to do the things you want with no force. Convincing them to act against their own interests. Now, thats much harder, and that's the type of thing the big dogs are looking at.
Do you mean about the folks with Ring cameras needing to feel control over their environment, and feeling like giving access to the Police/Flock/ICE will help gain that sort of control?
I think most people with video door bells just like being able to answer the door when they aren't at home and to see who is there without getting up from the couch
This program would literally not be possible if that was the case, as it's completely opt-in. Citizen, Flock, Ring, they're all symptoms of the same disease.
But let's say you're right: that means that laziness is enough to bring on the surveillance state.
Getting the notifications is opt-in by default, choosing to hand over your video footage is not:
For Ring users, the process is the same. Your privacy and control over your videos and information are non-negotiable, and your participation is completely optional. Public safety agencies can't see who received a notification or who chose not to respond. You can even turn off Community Request notifications altogether if you prefer. By combining community safety with strong privacy protections, Community Requests respects individual choice while helping neighborhoods thrive.
Unfortunately this is contagious. During the last election cycle in Sweden the Moderate party (third-largest in parliament, and part of the government) literally ran ads like "More cameras on our streets for safety"
We need a competent counter-narrative but no one (few) figures in the federal government are offering one. The media also loves to report on crime. Etc.
I hope people will join their local community groups.
In 1984 I can't remember if they prostrated themselves so fully, purchasing the screens that would spy on them, and did it all come about because they were sucking on the tit of "free" shipping that costs $139/year?
Stop paying companies to put spyware in your house. Don't connect your smart TV to the network, don't buy cloud cameras, and above all don't run a phone with an OS that they phone company gives you.
It's not that long ago that people used to talk about East Germany as a dystopian hellhole of state surveillance, and yet the US is now far more surveilled than the DDR ever was. It's amazing to me how easily this country was propagandized and its inhabitants persuaded to establish an authoritarian state of their own.
Orwell didn't foresee that people would voluntarily pay for their own surveillance, out of fandom for a company that charges $15/month for "free" shipping. That they also actually do give away for free if you can wait a few extra days rather than treating every purchase as an impulse buy.
Reality has become more stupid than even visionaries could have predicted.
He never mentioned if the screens in every house had a monthly fee or if you could pay more to skip adds. We could still be right on track to war with East Asia.
People need devices that will protect them from this mass surveillance. Plausible deniability needs to be restored.
Some sort of jamming tech or scrambling tech. There’s no reason to lock everyone into a surveillance state when we should be fighting it. Fighting through legislation isn’t tenable anymore.
On that page though it looks like most all the features are not available with E2EE, event timeline, person detection, search you name it. So imagine few if any use it, since alternative options that can locally do all that and still have E2EE.
Big tech have always been dogs willing to play fetch for any master. The free market didn't offer big tech these quantity of rewards for brutalizing people 'guilty' of administrative infractions, our 'democratically' elected government did.
Elected in part by the useful idiots on HN and many other places. They were so ignorant of how government actually works they were happy to give it this power. They foresaw the jackboot being used to stomp petty criminals and fellow middle class types who don't "pay their fair share". But they had never cracked open a history book because if they had they would know that sort of stuff is never a top priority.
50,000 years may come to pass, and nothing will be funnier than HN defending Apple's App Store monopoly one year and then realizing what a catastrophic disaster it was 6 months later.
Are we sure that formalized populist regulation is the boogeyman? Like, really absolutely super duper double-checked certain?
I am both amazed and not surprised by the amount of people that will work at a company that is directly opposed to their own points of view. I am willing to bet many of the employees of Google, Meta, and Amazon are morally opposed to the very things they are supporting.
Nah. They aren't. If they were, they would leave. I went to school for aerospace but didn't work in the industry for the longest time because all the jobs available were military.
These people don't care, they might put on a fake persona that pretends to care, but you outright don't care if you work at these places. You get a job somewhere else when you care.
What you hear from them isn't caring, it's just a way for them to pretend they are someone they aren't. The person they pretend to be would not be working there.
We used to know this inherently and we spent half a century passing really well thought out and actionable laws designed to thwart the darker side of capitalism while still allowing it's benefits to accrue to the masses.
Since then we've forgotten how to enforce anti monopoly and media ownership rules. Similarly we've somehow completely turned campaign financing into an open competition for bribes.
So, in this situation when a large company cooperates with intrusive policing, you think the problem is that the company is too large and that enforcement of laws should have taken place? To prevent this collaboration with law enforcement?
It's a much bigger problem when a company with >50% market share connects all the cameras to law enforcement than if a company with 0.5% market share does that, but the first one can't happen if there are no companies with a double digit market share.
And when there are more companies it's easier to tell people to buy a different one because that one is doing something shady. When Amazon does it, you recommend that unsophisticated people do what, use a Chinese camera which is presumably shunting the feeds to that government?
I recommend that people don't install networked cameras unless they build a dedicated air-gapped network for them. If you want to know who is at your door ... look out a window.
Unpopular take, I know, because it demands that people actually understand the technology they're using and where their data flows, and almost nobody has the skill, time, attention, money, and mindspace for that... but that's the only way to be a responsible networked camera user.
It's the government that wants unchecked power, no matter what. This is why people support the 2A, and why it was the 2nd most important thing to those who founded the country.
And weirdly, the staunch defenders of 2A, because how else do you fight tyranny are all, good with the tyrant and the tyrant party shitting all over the Constitution.
> It's the government that wants unchecked power, no matter what.
"The Government" is not a entity with "wants" or "needs", it's a collection of people with their own motivations. Motivations that usually end up being about power or money, or a combination, because the people who end up in the government are capitalists.
> why it was the 2nd most important thing to those
I mean, not really? The 2nd amendment includes stuff that they didn't even think of originally when creating the constitution, so just because it was the second amendment that went through, doesn't mean it was "the 2nd most important thing", the most important things are the original articles in the constitution, so the amendments must start ranking at 8th place or something like that, 2nd amendment ends up being the 9th most important thing if we were to rank things like you did, but honestly.
>"The Government" is not a entity with "wants" or "needs", it's a collection of people with their own motivations. Motivations that usually end up being about power or money, or a combination, because the people who end up in the government are capitalists.
The main issue is that its power only grows. No one sane would propose to reduce his influence and/or make his job harder and everyone has ideas on how to make his job easier. It's not about capitalism, communism or anything else. The only thing that plays a role is how many somewhat independent influence blocks you have and whether you have a system to stop the power creep and 'we only have to vote it in once' problem.
And it's not even strictly about 'easier' from the perspective of the worker. I imagine if you deal with police work and such spying probably seems a lot more reasonable since you're very exposed to the bad part of society, which does skew your view of the world, no matter how rational you think you are.
The same 2nd amendment from 1791 when the most firepower a government could have were cannons shooting round cannonballs?
Surely in 2025 a ragtag group of people with some revolvers, pistols, hunting rifles, and a small minority owning assault rifles, with limited ammo will be able to fight against the most well-funded armed force with tanks, IFVs, assault helicopters, aircrafts, missiles, rockets, and military infantry armed to the gills wearing NVGs.
People who think 2A will do anything in case your government actually turns violent on you are just trying to maintain the illusion of control.
If you look at the groups brutalized by the government, including blacks, Hispanics, leftists, and peasents in central America, they all have something in common. They have far lower gun ownership rates than the less victimized groups like whites and the right.
Now, maybe the guns didn't do anything either way, but the data correlates pretty strongly with the people with guns being brutalized less than the people without them. It certainly isn't leading to the conclusion you seem to be aiming at. Even the people in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising bought a few extra hours before getting gassed because of their (smuggled) guns.
>>This is why people support the [1A], and why it was the [] most important thing to those who founded the country.
>Yet the government has continuously taken more and more power for decades on end, and the [1st] amendment hasn’t stopped it.
I’m not even unsympathetic to the guns rights people. I just can’t square the. “We need guns to fight tyranny” with the constant screaming of “we’re falling into communism/fascisim/etc.” screeching s been doing since they learned those worlds.
Your 2A line sounds like a big joke. What are the armed citizens supposed to do? Shoot ICE? That would end well, I'm sure. The guns are fucking useless when most gun owners support the authoritarian government currently taking roots.
Ah, yes, because those <checks notes> communists and <checks notes again> feudal lords, theocratic regimes, monarchs and all manner of other non-capitalist societies have such a stellar track record of treating people well.
This isn't a capitalist or any other "ist" problem. It is a problem with society and social norms.
The cameras are there because people want them to be. The cameras get used because it is not politically toxic to do so. The use continues because the people objecting to the current abuse don't object on a principal level, they love the jackboot. They'd just rather see it used to levy ruinous fines upon middle class scofflaws (got I hate that word and the people who use it unironically) than whisk brown people off the street. Sure, different people would screech if the powers that be pivoted in that direction but at no point does the screeching add up to change because only the people who hate a specific abuse screech at any one time.
yes, some people genuinely do, and some people don’t.
some people have absolutely no understanding of what surveillance tech is doing and where it is going.
in terms of the “ist” problem you refer to, at the end of the day, the real answer is to deny anyone that amount of power. whether it’s corporations, religions, governments, or billionaires. none of these should have enough power to sway the world to terrifying places. none of them, including govs, billionaires, or corporations.
somehow we need to achieve separation of money and state with as much vigor as we used to separate church and state.
we should be incentivizing the power from all of those groups to be dispersed as much as possible.
>somehow we need to achieve separation of money and state with as much vigor as we used to separate church and state.
This used to be called "equality under the law" and laws that could not be written equally or enforced equally were not written or overturned by the courts.
> This used to be called "equality under the law" and laws that could not be written equally or enforced equally were not written or overturned by the courts.
The US in particular had discrimination encoded in law for a long time. It took Rosa Parks in 1955 to end "white only" areas in public transport, and it took until 1965 until racial discrimination by law was finally outlawed.
"Equality under the law" always depends on who is considered to be part of the group that enjoys said equality. Even today, many countries still have laws on the books that discriminate between ethnicity and/or country of origin and/or citizenship. Just look at us in Europe - you usually have to be a citizen of an EU country to hold public office for example, residency is not enough. Or you got border patrol clearly profiling whom to control at a border checkpoint - whites get left alone and unbothered, non-whites get the full experience of what border control is allowed to do. That's not just discrimination, it's showing citizens that happen to have non-white skin that despite them being equal citizens by law, in practice there is no equality.
Don't forget women. They couldn't open bank accounts until when? In any case, I should have known better than to leave open the door to race baiting.
Focusing on race or any other distinction among the peasants is categorically missing the point. This isn't about peasants vs peasants. It's about peasants and small groups of peasants vs big moneyed interests. Some small time tire shop gets fined into oblivion for letting chemicals go down their drain meanwhile Jiffy Lube does that all day and doesn't get picked on because their lawyers can craft a story about why it's fine. In the old days everyone or nobody could dump it down the drain. Some homeowner can't put up an ADU because "hurr durr wetlands" but some megacorp can buy his land and put up a solar farm in the same damn wetlands because they can put fancy stuff on fancy letterhead and put it in front of the regulators. 100yr ago either everyone could build there or nobody could.
We've given our regulatory agencies massive, massive, discretionary power and insanely broad mandates. And what winds up happening is that they pick on the small and the weak because those targets are plentiful and easy. We created dragnet surveillance to "stop terrorists" (it was a crappy argument even then) and it gets used to round up brown people or chase down and bankrupt a random business because 1/20 of their trucks had a plate that was illegible to toll readers for years on end. We told the EPA to make the water clean and they go harass farmers for digging trenches. Don't get me started on the FDA and opium. NYPD couldn't get away with stop and frisk (well, they could and did for far too long but that's not the point) but law enforcement across the country can now stop damn near anyone for any BS pretext because a technological obfuscation layer gives them pretext (much like the fake bomb detectors we were selling to the Iraqis back in the day) and the scale and division of responsibility makes it hold up in court.
If one person or a small group can't do a thing then a big group shouldn't either. And if a big group can do a thing then the small group.
If it's ok for ICE to just stop brown people then it's ok for NYPD to do stop and frisk. And if that's not ok then adjust the law.
> If one person or a small group can't do a thing then a big group shouldn't either. And if a big group can do a thing then the small group. If it's ok for ICE to just stop brown people then it's ok for NYPD to do stop and frisk. And if that's not ok then adjust the law.
For what it's worth I fully agree with you!
The thing is, this just isn't achievable with modern politics. The big guns will always lobby for them to be exempted in some way, and even if only by funding the enforcement agencies only so limited that they have no way of enforcing the law againt the big fish.
And on top of that you got Conservatives (or whatever tries to sell themselves under that label these days) and Wilhoit's (misattributed) law [1]:
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
Keep voting for politicians that spend our money on weapons and violence, this is the stuff we'll keep getting. This applies to both major political parties in the US.
Wild how if a government does this directly most folks agree its dystopian and flip out, but let companies do it and, even if it ends up in the governments hands, people install it themselves...
Some serious boycotts need to be happening, and soon. I do not care if this was an R or a D administration, this has been out of control and just getting worse.
This is us against the oligarchs, not us against each other. And something makes me worried that there is an impending recession/depression and that these surveillance devices will be use to quell any dissent. (I say this because of the insane rise in the price of gold)
I, for one, am canceling my Amazon Prime account and avoiding amazon as much as I can in this dystopia where it is the only place you can buy many goods anymore.
The corollary is that, when in power, many "libertarians" are only concerned with their own rights and nobody else's, failing to understand that any rights they give up for others may soon be lost for them too.
It's just the brown people who are put in detention centers, isn't it?
Do you believe burglars have more rights in your home and to your things than you do? Then why do you apply that logic to others that then must suffer your abusive imposition of abuse? How about you just abuse yourself if you want to abuse.
Why does in your mind a "brown person" that is a foreign national who broke the law in and of America by entering and/or remaining in the USA, have more rights to have a job, make money, and even receive public assistance in America than a non-"brown person" that is a legitimate citizen of the USA?
What is worse, is that you don't even understand that your support of this kind of lawlessness is only for the purpose of allowing the rich to plunder the working and lower middle class, the real victims that through your words and actions hate with a passion.
Sure, burglars also benefit from burglarizing, but that does not make it any better than foreign nationals benefitting while the rich also use them like some crime boss in control of a burglary ring. How do you think, e.g., the home builders who make ~30% gross profit on homes that are poorly built due to "immigrant labor" report triple digit billion dollar returns?
You people baffle me that you cannot connect two dots as you at the same time lament that wages are too low, as you support floods of wage decreasing supply flooding "immigration".
No one is targeting "brown people" they just happen to be the majority of brown people the ruling class loves importing to profit from at the expense of the indigenous people, just like when the British and Hispanics did it through slavery. You are no different than the slavery rationalizers of the 17th-19th century. Today the ruling class just figured out how to manipulate you into supporting importation of brown people to undermine the indigenous people, and you don't have the intellect or integrity to understand you are being manipulated.
Like HN hasn't been railing against Ring and Flock since their inception. The only difference today is that there's a dangerously stupid arm of the government that now has access to it.
It's the exact same problem HN has been talking about for years except now a group of wannabe commandos who stake out in the parking lots of Mexican restaurants now have a tool where they can just type in their stereotypes and have the AI find them.
I wouldn't say that. I put what's good for our community first — above my own individual rights. That is not Libertarian and I have not wavered from that.
So so late. But just so vile, so reprehensible to see such a corrupt fallen disagreeable state of the world march over us.
I am stricken with fear over the control and manipulation by the Chinese state. A dominance over people without respect or regard, a self certainty and pomp that denies life & possibility.
But what the West is letting happen here, the limitless post-state open-for-anyone surveillance Flock & others are offering has seemingly even less bounds, less respect, less purpose, less direction. These people, this enterprise is clearly the worst possible thing we could do, the most awful accrual & misuse of the world against its people's. To spy on everyone & to without regard sell that days to everyone is a crime against all.
Flock is truly the #HostisHumaniGeneris. Woe & (all too expectable) disappointment to see Amazon giving up all their data to fascist pro ICE losers who, were we a descent society, we would run out of the world.
I and many other US citizens were brutally imprisoned by CBP/DHS under Biden and no one gave a shit, and at the time it wasn't the cool hot topic for lawyers so ACLU and none of the civil rights lawyers I contacted were interested. I even pointed it out here on HN, I was accused of having it coming, it wasn't until Trump came into power that anyone other than my own family actually believed the story about DHS imprisoning me, dragging me around the state in a prisoner van, and insanely getting a retroactive warrant all over a completely fabricated PC of an unnamed dog alerting an unnamed officer (that as far as I know, didn't even exist).
Hopefully this will be a lesson to maybe start giving a shit about these things when they're being tested rather than when the heat gets cranked up against brown people.
DHS should've been abolished a long time ago. Biden was a wasted opportunity - all he did was preside over the already bad status quo instead of changing it for the better. I'm sorry this happened to you.
“All the people who are being deported right now…” That’s actually a lie, and it’s clear you know that because you already added that you don’t even care if it’s true.
People like you, who have never had an issue with any policy that might advantage them personally, have always existed. Of course you’re not suddenly the only one today!
I have deniability with the phone. I can also just leave it at home if I want or turn it off entirely. That access should also be illegal without a warrant; however, this is far worse than cellular "metadata" tracking.
I don't understand why you assume that the government is following all the laws when it comes to cell phones and cloud data but won't when it comes to ring data?
What laws do you suppose they have to follow, exactly?
Cops need a warrant to track your phone, check which tower it connected to or tail your car for extended period of time.
Cops do not need a warrant to use Flock system. They have an app where they can simply put your license plate and they will get a path showing every move of your car as tracked by the flock cameras, and there are a looot of them (e.g. near San Jose: https://deflock.me/map#map=16/37.335318/-121.881316). And thats without the integration of ring.
This essentially allows them to GPS tag anyone, with no warrant, while "following the laws". So no, it's not all the same.
They definitely need to follow the law when they get it from the Telco, but Cops can use their CSS/IMSI catcher all they want, theres almost no way to tell. But they can not then go to court and say "Yeah—we listened to their phone call and searched the car."
With this its no problem. No Hailstorm to buy for the entire force and there isn't any federal oversight on this sort of thing as near as I can tell. If you think police don't do crimes I've got a bridge to sell you.
They can do it right up until the battery truly discharges. You can’t turn off WiFi/BT for real either. Icons will go dark and your WiFi and devices won’t work, but underneath the radios are still plenty active and powered on.
I believe they changed the algorithm a lot in the last 12+ months; I think bots and automation are becoming more and more of an issue - like everywhere else
These cameras are a big part of why I recently moved. They're a canary for something deeper.
The area I was in was like the Korean DMZ with regard to flock cameras. I had one at the only entrance to my neighborhood. A trip to the grocery store would put me in their database 12 times at last count.
I still have to worry about the standardized fleet of cameras at Home Depot and a few other retailers, but it's not nearly as bad out here. Location is a big part of the dystopia. It is not evenly distributed. Fighting back at the municipal and HOA level can make a massive difference. Some areas seem hopeless though. You're better off finding something that already mostly works and trying hard to keep it that way.
The general fear level of the local population seems to be the biggest factor in all of this. I went from a place where people would do the quadruple check car lock routine when walking into the grocery store, to a place where many leave their unlocked vehicles idling in the parking lot. I don't even think about locking my doors at home now. It almost feels silly to do it around here. It's amazing the difference that ~65 miles can make.
>The general fear level of the local population seems to be the biggest factor in all of this. I went from a place where people would do the quadruple check car lock routine when walking into the grocery store, to a place where many leave their unlocked vehicles idling in the parking lot. I don't even think about locking my doors at home now. It almost feels silly to do it around here. It's amazing the difference that ~65 miles can make.
It's not even that. The real shitholes full o' crime have scant cameras because you don't need them for "real" investigations of "real" crime. You only need a traffic cameras to establish what you need for a murder investigation or whatever, pair the images with cell time stamps and presto.
Cameras are for making it cheap to enforce the long tail of petty deviance that doesn't actually matter. Karen calls up bitching that some guy did something, normally that would be discarded because it's not worth it. But with a camera system they can query it and maybe fine the guy from their desks. They're not using the system to go after someone for stealing from parked cars except perhaps to walk back in time and add charges to someone they already got (same reason they ask for serial numbers of electronics and the like when doing theft investigations they won't follow up on).
Even a short distance can feel like crossing from panopticon to peace and quiet
These are mappable in OpenStreetMap with the tags surveillance:type=camera + camera:mount=doorbell
Data query around the Netherlands shows about a hundred are mapped so far as specifically doorbell cameras: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/2dQw (the tag does not yet seem established in the USA). There are also many thousands of cameras mapped that are either not doorbell-mounted, or simply not tagged to such detail. This is a convenient map to see all of them: https://sunders.intri.cat/
And (several times previously on HN), Flock and other ALPR cameras are mappable too.
https://deflock.me/identify
Seems like a fairly impractical thing to map unless you're getting volunteers to walk up to and inspect people's front doors. I know there is an app for a sort of gamified version of this where people take tasks to verify street signs or even how many stories a building has, I used that app for a while, but doorbell mapping seems a lot leas casual.
If I can see them, they can see me. No need to walk onto anyone's property, the whole point (for me at least) is to map things that surveil public spaces
It's more casual than surveying e.g. addresses that may be hard to see if the building is recessed, but you'd still want to capture it because someone will want to route there sooner or later. Not so for cameras that only capture own property
StreetComplete has a "things" overlay that makes it very quick to add these at the position of a front door
Maybe less common in America, but in Europe it's not uncommon to have multiple people going around town delivering various things to your mailbox: a postman for letters, some poor student delivering grocery store brochures once a week, somebody delivering the local newspaper at the break of dawn, somebody else delivering the local church newspaper once a month, etc. And all of them are going door to door. If just one of them is an openstreetmap fan you quickly have all doorbell cameras in their delivery district mapped
To expand on this - Evri, DPD, and my Postie all come regularly to the door and are the same person nearly every time for me - and have been for years. Amazon, UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc. are irregular and often different people.
Then the leaflet drop guys are maybe three different people.
Then there is food delivery, which is rare (because we rarely order) bit still another group of people.
Oh and then there are the Jehovah's witnesses.
You don't need to walk up: 1. You can do wardriving and identify them by MAC address. 2. You can use object recognition on google street view photos or your own photos while you're wardriving.
Wouldn't identifying them via MAC address be very inaccurate, as you can't pinpoint them to a specific house very easily?
Would cameras like these emit any sort of IR light or anything that might be detected from a distance?
Object recognition would depend on them being very obvious from the outside - which Rings do appear to be (I've never seen one in person) but I imagine there will be less-obvious options soon enough, if there isn't already.
Walk up to door with stack of papers with a stock photo of a puppy on it that says lost puppy. Check if there's a camera. If the owner comes outside, ask them if they have seen this puppy.
And then at door 125,000 you finally reach the home of the puppy that’s in the stock photo you printed. And they say “Why yes, we have seen this puppy. How did you know??”
So use one that you know to now be dead.
We live in the age of generative AI.. can't you just use one of those instead?
See https://thisxdoesnotexist.com/ for some ideas!
Well this is taking a dark turn
And then remember you live in America and you get shot for walking on someone's property.
Joking, a little, but seriously: the culture in the US has rotted to such an insane degree. Not only are we not friends with our neighbors, I'm actually scared to talk to them!
I participate in Nextdoor.com because of a community group I work with.
The fear in people’s hearts is insane. One memorable one was a Little boy who decided to sell candy bars. I knew the kid from my son’s school. Some psycho followed him for a few hours, tracked down to his home and called the sales tax authorities and the city clerk as he didn’t have a peddler permit. She documented her “investigation”, complete with photos.
>Some psycho followed him for a few hours, tracked down to his home and called the sales tax authorities and the city clerk as he didn’t have a peddler permit. She documented her “investigation”, complete with photos.
When you see a meme about "white women/karen" this is the personality type they're talking about.
Can you share more? Why was this person upset with kids selling candies?
> Why was this person upset with kids selling candies?
Because they didn't "follow the rules" or whatever. You see this personality type all up and down HN but usually not so extreme as to call the city about a lemonade stand or whatever.
The city clerk is also the same type of evil. They should have told that person there weren't resources available to enforce or some other lie.
They dont have any better to do. When I was living in south bay (nice suburb area) during short contract role the " nextdoor nanny state stay at home drunk soccer moms " would record out the front window, call the police in anyone POC, keep notes of what time you car leave and join
its like HOA mental illness. Different people had chased my amazon driver with a phone accusing them of being illegal, calling police for while I was cooking indian food... Ide rather have the crime in the city in contrast to this nonsense
I genuinely believe if I had dog at the time they would had poisoned it for barking once
apparently Ring LLC has their own OUI [0]. I wonder if you could wardrive around and identify cameras by their MAC address
[0] https://maclookup.app/vendors/ring-llc
That's fun. If you have an account you can use https://wigle.net/mapsearch to search for bluetooth devices with that prefix from other people's wardrives. There are definitely some results coming up. A wildcard search for bluetooth devices named "Ring %" also seems to work
Yes
A lot of doorbell cameras use infrared for night vision and motion detection. You could probably just drive down a street at night with a camera tuned to show infrared and they would all be bright beacons.
In most of EU doorbell cameras that point to public places are not covered by GDPR's household exception so if you use them you would be classified as data controller which come with it's own set of duties, responsibilities & limits. Is that not the case in Netherlands?
It is not legal to film the public street. But there is no enforcement, and the police is all too happy with each new camera that is out there. People think more camera's means higher safety. Privacy aware tech-savvy people see more camera's and get less warm vibes.
That doesn't seem to work for me. Can you correct my query/URL?
https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=surveillance%3Aty...
The search directly on osm.org is optimzied for address things.
For a "complete" search in the OpenStreetMap-data I suggest [Overpass Turbo](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_turbo).
In this specific case I'd take a little detour over taginfo (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Taginfo), e.g. search for `surveillance` (https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/search?q=surveillance) there. A little bit of clicking (Type > Values > ALPR) leads to https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/surveillance%3Atype=A... If you click on 'Overpass turbo' on the top right, you get to a pre-filled search on Overpass turbo. Scroll the map to the region you want to search (start small), and click 'Run' on the top left.
Voila.
Fantastic! Thank you :)
However, even ALPR doesn't show any devices for me:
I'm glad citizens in the EU are more on top of this. I really wish we as USA citizens had access to the same database of GPS coordinates for each Blink, Ring, and Amazon Key device that police do. Does anyone know how/if something like that could be FOIA'd? This seems it would be particularly fruitful if FBI/DHS has a comprehensive dataset for the entire nation.
Though I do worry that they may not "have" the dataset, but rather just have "access" to it via a queryable Amazon/Palantir database/API.
Unifi G4 Doorbell Pro [0] is a great self-hosted option. I've been very happy with mine over the last year, but I was already bought into the unifi ecosystem with a UDM Pro SE and U6 mesh APs.
0: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/cameras-doorbells/collec...
Alternatively, the Reolink Doorbell cameras for anyone who doesn't want to be on the Unifi/Ubiquiti platform. Also I believe all these cameras provide a generic RTSP feed which can be consumed by any computer running Frigate[0], an open-source NVR/AI platform.
0: https://frigate.video
(Reolink, Unifi/Ubiquiti, and Frigate are all good solutions for anyone who is not interested in supporting the proliferation of a police-state)
If it matters to you, Reolink is a Chinese owned company. Not passing judgement one way or another, but if avoiding Unifi over the remote incident matters, I could see this factoring in as well.
> If it matters to you, Reolink is a Chinese owned company.
It does matter to me. Because I am an American, my greatest risks (actual and theoretical) are from American entities.
Conversely, China has little actual power to negatively impact my life. I am most comfortable (and arguably safer) with Chinese gear.
Separate vlans for iot devices with strict firewall rules is generally enough to mitigate the threat of most iot devices phoning home i think. We’re already in the territory of hobbyists who should be able to manage that with these suggestions like ubiquity and frigate.
I have a Unifi Protect system and am generally pretty happy with it. The biggest problem I have is similar in spirit to the Ring problem: remote access is required to get push alerts from the mobile app.
Unifi had an issue at the end of 2023 where users could access consoles they didn't own through remote access: https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/15/ubiquiti_camera_priva...
If I (or more specifically my spouse) could work the mobile app without SSO I'd be thoroughly satisfied. As it stands I have some regrets.
I have the same UI protect system w 7 cameras. After that incident, I made it local only. I like Unifi gear, but I became super paranoid after that incident.
After some digging around, I found homebridge [0] (with the homebridge-unifi-protect plugin by hjdhjd [1]) which fixed that for me by tying the UI Protect system into Apple's HomeKit ecosystem (which also leverages the homekit secure video that keeps alerts/motion/snapshots on iCloud). Now all our devices are able to have it popup alerts for motions, packages, etc.
It's not perfect, but this way I'm able to get alerts without tying in to Unifi's SSO system. I also still like to open the UI Protect app when I'm not on the local network to sometimes archive videos, view cameras, mess with one of the new UI PTZ cameras, so I have backup access options, including Tailscale. Tailscale doesn't give me the alerts I want, but lets me access the app as if I were still at home. I also have it tied in with HomeAssistant and recently began playing around with go2rtc.
I'm a super-newb when it comes to all this but 2022 is when I began getting fed up with all these privacy nightmares and began to teach myself selfhosting, docker, etc so I can mitigate all this. Unfortunately, I'm the only one who knows how to tinker and keep all this updated. However, I do have documentation for my wife how to access everything and start fresh to make it easier on her by using UI's SSO way so it "just works" as they say in the Macintosh World, when I'm no longer around.
[0] https://homebridge.io/ [1] https://github.com/hjdhjd/homebridge-unifi-protect#readme
Sooo you've basically built a modern home surveillance system that doesn't phone home to a dozen third parties
I haven't seen any in depth performance comparisons, but I had also started to dig into this and I was leaning towards using Scrypted instead of the HomeBridge plugin. Just wanted to name-drop them for others also interested in all this
That's a really interesting setup, thanks for the links! I'm pretty deep into Home Assistant but that plugin looks amazing.
I had the same setup for a while, but eventually moved to scrypted instead which had better startup time for streams in Home.app.
I second this. I have Unifi + Scrypted and it has worked great. Remote access turned off on UniFi.
One more vote here for Scrypted. I have a bunch of cameras from various vendors, some with open FW, some with their original FW, all cut off from the internet. They used to be connected to Frigate but due to performance issues I offloaded the work to Scrypted on a RPi and an AppleTV and the setup works great. Bonus, it’s easier to set up and use compared to Frigate, especially for the less technical people in the family.
Unfortunate that there's no stock except for the PoE variant.
I wonder if it's because the G6 is (afaict) launching in Q4? I guess we'll just have to hold tight for now.
I just installed mine (last weekend) and use a Unifi stack at home.
100% recommended alternative.
So, rather than Big Brother being government-imposed monitoring paid for by all taxpayers, the concerned citizenry is flipping the bill for the devices, network connectivity and electricity. Fascinating.
Yep, it's like we speedran 1984 but made it a startup
always, flock just charges local governments and then charges the police too to get access. They get us coming and going, and yet most crimes and murders go unsolved still. If a cop can track his Ex through hundreds of cams, why aren't the solve rates better? (Its not about crime)
Tax payers and citizenry are largely the same. It's not really flipping the bill.
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They are a bot:
user: chronci739
created: 8 days ago
This is why I never bought anything Amazon owned, other than Kindles; and I have dropped the latter, too.
I was always suspicious of Ring and never understood the people using it.
My entire neighborhood came with ring doorbells pre installed and eero routers.
I swapped out to the Logitech doorbell which I like better anyway
Here in the Netherlands, the government gave them away for free
They're also illegal because you're not allowed to film public spaces without a good reason (it's up to the judge and case law to decide, e.g. if there has been arson in the area recently then it's reasonable to monitor your car that's parked at the kerb, for example). Nobody has yet gotten in trouble to my knowledge
Gotta love hypocrisy
So like it just came with the houses as they were built? If that's the case I wonder what kind of deal Ring make with the builders of new neighborhoods.
Yes, they were new build. They used it as part of the marketing too, calling them “smart homes”. There’s various other ring bits like motion detector and window/door sensors, alarm, etc. and some non-Amazon stuff like smart water meter, garage door opener.
They had some kind of deal with Amazon surely because it came with some amount of time free.
> This is why I never bought anything Amazon owned
I buy their mice. They've been good mice and I'm increasingly unhappy with Logitech.
Occasionally I buy some cables. I think that's it.
Agreed. Ring has a proven track record of giving up whatever video law enforcement wants, regardless of your choice or privacy laws.
If it was free, I could almost understand. Nothing is free, and if it cost the customer nothing, then the customer is the product. However, people paid for Ring gear and as a thanks have their privacy violated with no notice, no info and no choice.
Forget law enforcement, for years they allowed all their employees to access literally any camera whenever they want.
There were women being stalked by ring employees. It was that bad. Teslas had (has?) a similar problem.
By this point, we should assume that all companies with sensitive data that could theoretically help solve crime will be accessed by the government as a rule.
That's just being a realistic technology user in 2025.
The only real solution is strong privacy laws around gov usage and strong courts willing to enforce it. Expecting consumer choice or regulations to prevent that data from ever existing is mostly a fools errand IMO, there's just too much of it and it's everywhere.
> The only real solution is strong privacy laws around gov usage and strong courts willing to enforce it.
I don't think this is a solution, personally.
Care to elaborate? You can't just say "I disagree" without explaining why you disagree.
Based on what? There's no constitutional right to privacy, while courts have consistently expanded the scope of government powers and immunities and consistently hollowed out the Bill of Rights. It's gonna require a new legal paradigm.
> There's no constitutional right to privacy,
Being secure in my person, house, papers, and effects is my privacy in action.
How is that working out for you? It can't stop your data being sold or grant you any kind of privacy when you appear in public (eg being filmed continuously when you leave your home).
any solution that has “law” in it is 100% not a solution
They did say "and strong courts willing to enforce it." What good is a law without enforcement, after all?
At this point, it's not if the data gets accessed, it's when and how quietly it happens
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With the stroke of a key, 100 million customer-installed cameras become part of the surveillance state.
This was always the end game for Ring. I think people were saying this since before the Amazon acquisition. The acquisition itself always struck me as Amazon attempting to reduce "shrinkage" - brick and mortar stores have their "loss prevention" team and Amazon has Ring.
The bottom line with technology is that you either host and control it yourself or you're at the whims of the vendor's business strategy.
Unfortunately you can’t opt out. The surveillance network blankets virtually everyone - friends, family, all of society.
This is also the end game for LLMs
Might be a good time to enable E2EE on your Ring cams if you haven’t already:
https://ring.com/support/articles/7e3lk/using-video-end-to-e...
Consider not sending your doorbell footage to accompany that has no respect for user privacy, and is now actively partnering with a police surveillance company.
> now actively partnering with a police surveillance company
You can make this point stronger: Amazon is a police surveillance company (with Ring), just not primarily.
Yeah there are plenty of self-hosted solutions that work just as well.
Blue Iris is a fairly amazing camera hosting solution. I am continually impressed with the quality of the code and feature set. (disclaimer: $80/yr but we actually pay a bit less).
And it's cheap! If you want JUST cameras it's pennies a day, I'm running a 2010 gaming PC with a dozen services (which would cost >200 bucks from the usual suspects) and it's still only 20 bucks a month.
Is Ring camera encryption actually independently audited and known to be implemented correctly and provide all the desirable security properties?
Because when I reverse engineered my Tuya-based camera-equipped pet feeder, I've discovered that there was an encryption on the video stream, but they only encrypted I-frames and left P-frames unencrypted. Amazon is not Tuya, but IoT is IoT.
My point is, there are myriad of ways IoT vendor can boast "encryption" and "security" on the marketing materials, while the actual implementation could be flawed beyond redemption.
Bad news: Ring just enabled opt-in-by-default "search parties" for people to leverage your outdoor cameras to find their "lost animals".
https://ring.com/search-party
The feature in the app is also worded cleverly:
“Search party lets you use your outdoor Ring cameras to help neighbors in your area”
Note: doesn’t mention pets yet. Then:
“Starting with lost pets, Search party will…”
What comes after lost pets? Very open ended
> What comes after lost pets? Very open ended
endangered animal conservation groups looking for rare birds
“Do it for the lost puppies!” is darkly comedic as a way to ease people into the idea.
Thanks for the heads up, just went in and disabled it on my 2 cameras. Next step will be to throw these privacy invading pieces of junk in the trash. Just need to find a comparable product.
Are there any wireless (running power to these locations is not an option) doorbell cams that record to local storage instead of the cloud? I refuse to pay a subscription for these things.
Ideally they would record to my server instead of onboard SD card so that the footage can't just walk away if someone grabs the camera.
Reolink has some good options in this area. Both wired and wireless security and doorbell cameras with microSD storage by default, but FTP and SFTP can also be used. I've been happy with my (wired) doorbell camera with just a microSD card.
I love how evil the concept of "opt-in-by-default" is. It's so rapey and sinister.
“Opt-in-by-default” is a lot of words to say “opt-out”.
I agree it's the same as "opt-out" but I like the phrase "opt-in by default" because it implies there's an affirmative "I want to participate in this" option somewhere, and that it is set to "yes" by default.
IMO it properly reflects that what looks like an active affirmative choice by the user is actually not.
You opted-in by buying the product in the first place.
People are buying these things out of fear anyways. I thought they'd be happy big brother is watching.
When a man murdered a woman in front of my house last year, our Ring camera's photos of his car led to his arrest within 24 hours, so not entirely useless?
I heard there could be zero crime soon, once they start “pre-registration” and open up the death camps for everyone Grok says is a baddy. So useful!
I think a good thought experiment to consider, in terms of defining what your own views are, is to consider that if every single person had a mandatory 24/7 uplinked camera on them with redundancies, then the number of unsolved crimes would rapidly approach zero. It would be essentially impossible to get away with crime, so the only crimes that would happen would be those of passion, ignorance, or the political elite who would certainly excuse themselves from such social obligations, as usual.
But I definitely would not want to live in that world. And I think that's true for most people. It's kind of interesting too because there's some really nasty arguments one can make about this like, 'What, you'd rather see children kidnapped and even killed than consenting to surveillance that won't even be looked at unless you're under suspicion?'
But it's quite disingenuous, because with any freedom there is always a cost, and that cost is often extreme. 40,000+ people die per year because of our freedom to drive, yet few would ever use that as an argument to prohibit driving.
> 40,000+ people die per year because of our freedom to drive, yet few would ever use that as an argument to prohibit driving.
that is a fantastic argument to force reduced driving and shows up in virtually all discussions about car safety and public transit.
The trouble is, there would also be no unsolved thought crimes
Another problem is that “crime” is a very flexible term and when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. Also the legal system specially in the US likes to equate convictions with solved cases which is not always the same.
>And I think that's true for most people.
I think it's the opposite. I think people would prefer the peace of mind of living in a high trust society. People like predictability and being able to trust people. I also think people would enjoy that laws that people pass are actually applied and we can efficiently apply the will of the people to the country.
>with any freedom there is always a cost
Laws ultimately would be what restrict your freedom, not the enforcement of them. I don't think freedom should rely on poor enforcement of laws.
One of the biggest 'culture shocks' I had when first moving to Asia, that eventually I'd see in numerous places, is visiting a food court during business hours. There's people shoulder to shoulder, so everybody goes to claim a table before getting their food. They do this by leaving various things, including their purses, on tables while they went to go queue up to get some food. There wasn't a camera anywhere. That is a high trust society, and it's amazing. What you're describing here is the opposite of a high trust society - when you have a camera on every person for fear they might do something bad, it's a 0, if not negative, trust society.
Your perceptions of other peoples' views are also off. Even with the current scope of government surveillance, 66% of Americans say that the potential risks outweigh the potential benefits. [1] And laws would not be what limit freedoms. Government and authority is not some abstract holistic entity. It's made up of people, like you and I. Would you feel comfortable with me being able to surveil every moment of your life? The difference between me and the person who would end up doing so is not this great gulf you might imagine.
For instance Snowden revealed that NSA officers would regularly collect and trade sexually explicit media obtained from surveillance. [2] They'd also use their position to spy on their love interests to the point it gained it's own little sardonic moniker 'LOVEINT'. The people that would be looking through those cameras are just people. And the government leadership overseeing these groups would include those prone to go off to an island to screw minors, or more upstanding fellows like Eric Swalwell, cheating on his wife with a Chinese spy while serving on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that oversees the entire US intelligence apparatus, and would oversee this sort of surveillance.
We're all just people, warts and all.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/11/15/key-takea...
[2] - https://time.com/3010649/nsa-sexually-explicit-photographs-s...
>What you're describing here is the opposite of a high trust society
In such a society, people don't steal because thieves have been removed from society. You can trust others because they have proven through their life that they are trustworthy. By trust I was talking between the people in society and not about the government trusting that people would not break laws. Humans are not perfect, so it's a bad assumption to assume that citizens will not break laws.
>66% of Americans say that the potential risks outweigh the potential benefits
The article you linked was about the current benefits. This is different than what I am talking about where laws are able to be effectively be enforced.
>Would you feel comfortable with me being able to surveil every moment of your life?
What do I get in return from you? Nothing? Then I have no reason to do so.
>NSA officers would regularly collect and trade sexually explicit media obtained from surveillance.
This should be made an instantly firable offense, like it is in the tech industry for accessing personal data of users. There should be alerting when such data is accessed to ensure that systems are not being abused.
The article was specifically and explicitly speaking of potential benefits, not present. The problem with systems made up of people is that you can't just have turtles all the way down. Let's say that retaining sexually explicit media of surveilled individuals is indeed grounds for instant dismissal. Who enforces this? Okay, the person above the people doing surveillance, who's somehow going through the entirety of said surveillance. And what happens when he is the one saving such media? Is it then overviewed by another person above him? And so on.
You can't really have endless redundancies and, at scale, this becomes even more true where the vast amount of data and processing becomes ever less viable to filter. And when you had 24/7 footage of everybody at every moment, that takes scale and ups it to an inconceivably vast level. More generally I think removing thieves from society, with extreme prejudice, is a far more pleasant path forward for everybody than treating everybody like a potential thief.
I’m ok with that as long as I, the camera owner, am choosing to hand over the footage. At best I can see some sort of watermarking to ensure that it’s legitimate.
There are legitimate reasons to want a camera either at your front door or surveilling your property. These can range from an increased sense of security to having documentation to support insurance claims, or even for watching wildlife. We installed our Ring camera after an ongoing string of nighttime car break-ins hit us and we had no direct proof of what happened for insurance. It was meant to be both a deterrent to that type of event and also for documentation if it happened again. There's also a pack of coyotes that lives in the woods near our house and occasionally eats our chickens. While that usage was more out of curiosity (if you have chickens, you're going to lose one from time to time), we were able to develop a sense of when that threat was higher.
I live on a bucolic cul-de-sac in a house that I've lived in since the mid 1970s. Most of the neighbors are the same. I never in my life expected a random person to drive down the street, drag a lady out of his trunk, chase her around the cul-de-sac, and stab her to death in front of my house. I never expected to find the body in the woods 40' from my side door. This is when I also learned that nobody comes to clean up after a crime like that and that if I didn't want pools of blood in front of my house and a 50' streak of it crossing the circle or the splatters all over the mailboxes that I was going to have to go out there and clean it up myself. I was in PTSD therapy for a while after that. I'm glad the Ring camera caught some of the activity.
After an event like that, it's easy to lose a sense of security in your home. How are you supposed to sleep the night after that happens, when the perpetrator remains at large? You can't lock your doors hard enough or do anything at all to feel secure. That lack of sense of security does not go away in a day or a week or a month. It goes away when you can find "normal" again. It helped us to find normal by installing other cameras around the house.
I don't want Ring or Arlo or anybody to be automatically sharing my camera footage with anybody. Even with the murder event, it was my choice to go through the footage and share it with the authorities. I don't support authoritarian "law enforcement" activities, I don't want anybody tapping into my camera feed to find lost pets or for any other reason. They shouldn't be allowed to do it. Like many other services we all use, we're more of the product than the customer, as our data is harvested and used for other purposes.
Personal security is different than targeted advertising. Most people won't know they need or want a camera until after they have experienced something that makes them feel less secure in their home. I just hope they have the wits to read the Terms and understand what they're opting into before automatically accepting all of the opt-in-by-default data sharing.
It's all trade offs.
Even in the most dystopian sci-fi future where a hostile and totalitarian government watches everything everybody does, they would still use the information to investigate boring everyday crimes.
The (non rethoric) question is, are people willing to pay the increasing price of non-crime related surveillance as we see diminished security margins.
When a man murdered a woman in front of my house last year, our Ring camera's photos of his car led to his arrest within 24 hours, so not entirely useless?
Your doorbell photo of a car was really the only evidence to convict someone of murder?
I'm glad I live somewhere that needs more proof that.
No, it enabled them to find him quickly. There was other evidence, but with no previously know connection to the victim and the perpetrator having no prior criminal record, I was told it was unlikely they would have found him otherwise.
Why do you think it's fear?
The owners I know consider it a convenience device.
Convenience for? Security? Isn’t increased security measures based on fear?
Just knowing when stuff happens outside your house when you're not home. Like, someone in the household came back from work, a package arrived, or a cool animal showed up. Or you're home and appreciate a little more notice before a visitor rings the doorbell.
Personally not a compelling enough reason to buy the camera in the first place, but those non crime notifications end up being the most common once it's up.
Or having a quick chat with the delivery guy/neighbour while remote.
Who said anything about security?
They are toys
However, it's a very abbreviated way of stating, "soon you will not even be given this choice, because we make entirely too much money selling your data/info and we kinda bribe law enforcement by granting them any and all video, with a simple request"
Oh, Jesus!!
This f shameless pretention of doing something noble - barely helpful above normal practices btw. - while manipulating clueless users into turning on mass-surveillance is revolting and disgusting. And ordinary employees figured this out, phrased, created content, implemmented, pubished, and are maintaining this dirty practice. Many times with (very misplaced) pride. Shame on all of them actively participating in this coward scheme!
Shame on the idiots who place a webcam on their front doorstep too.
plenty of good use cases for it, and the popularity of the devices speak for themselves.
just don't get ones owned by evil megacorps who have openly said they'll sell access to ICE
What is an equivalently capable alternative that puts the user more in control?
The reason Ring is popular isn't just marketing or network effect, it's that it works. Before Ring and clones, security camera / DVR combos were really hard to make effective, I tried. Maybe you'd have a totally reliable system with good video, but it'd fail to notify you when you need it to, or notify way too often. Battery power was infeasible because cameras couldn't sleep. Phone notifications were DIY. A long compounding list of things could go wrong and make you miss an important event or fail to record it entirely. I'm hoping those have caught up by now, but haven't found any.
Reolink also seems to work pretty well with local storage, notifications and no subscription or cloud uploads.
Unifi is as good or better and doesn't require a subscription
Someone tried to enter by the window next to my front porch door, it prompted me to install a video doorbell because the dude that frightened my wife only received a ticket because there was no proof he tried (and fail) to force open a window and did not enter the house. If I had a recording he would have spent the night at the station and it would have been a criminal offense instead of a civil one.
Even if it only provides deterrence, and a slight chance of after the fact punishment, I don't feel idiotic for buying a "doorstep Webcam", the door is visible from the street so there is no expectation of privacy and I really don't care that someone else could access those recordings.
If I had indoors cameras they would be in a private network. But for a front porch camera the easiest to install IOT junk is perfectly serviceable.
This. Local youths started playing ding-dong-ditch last summer. It was harmless when it was 8-9pm on a Friday or Saturday. They escalated to banging on windows, then to doing it at 1am, and finally to damaging our garage door to the point it won't open.
My wife is extremely upset about all of this, and I'm not going to be bullied out of the opinion that 24/7 cameras are actually a good thing.
is the doorbell camera industry held up by wife guys?
were you frightened also?
No, I was pissed that the only punishment, for a know offender, was a small fine.
The police knew the guy (young adults with bright orange hoodie are quite uncommon here) and they told me that he already did this a few time before moving in my neighborhood and that they never had enough evidences to do something else than fine him.
Also I think the police are bored in my city because there were 4 patrols cars in the street when I got back home.
I have a Ring. I got the email notifying me and was about to go disable it, but it doesn’t share anything. It says it will notify you that your camera detected the dog and then YOU choose to share the video or not. So I left it enabled, as it becomes a later choice. Effectively I’m not opted into sharing was my take.
But you’re opted into the automatic detection, regardless. Ring is still processing your video still to see if there’s a match to any Search Party unless you turn the feature off.
At what point will the police request a warrant to run their own Search Party without consent?
See, I have no problem with searches that involve warrants and probably cause. They could already violate the shit out of your privacy with a warrant. That's kind of the point of a warrant.
Yep but Ring doesn't require warrants to hand over your video if police say "it's an emergency". https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/amazon-ring-stop...
If you don't require warrants as long as the requester uses magic words, then you just don’t require warrants, period.
The best time to not buy into all this non-free surveilence-as-a-service crap was a decade ago.
The second best time is today.
Unfortunately the public love this stuff, and are quite happy to have CCTV pointing at your house. Privacy never existed 300 years ago, it doesn't today. Accept your feudal masters and make peace with it, because they won years ago.
Is this seriously your conclusion? Might be a good time to get rid of the fucking spy camera owned by a multitrillion dollar corporation partnering with the state surveillance apparatus, is my opinion.
Have people never read/watched a sci-fi book/film before?
I think encouraging people to enable E2EE is more realistic than asking everyone to throw out the Ring cams they’ve potentially spent hundreds on, yeah.
But... what makes you think that Amazon et al can't MITM the connection?
From the linked document (in German for some reason, so I skimmed it as best I could), it sounds like the device will generate a password and you need to enter it on your phone. So symmetric encryption, not trusting the server to distribute keys that would be susceptible to MITM, and also not leaving users the options to choose bad passwords
Sounds good from a security point of view, although it also says they disable functions like having more than one person able to view the camera (having a partner be able to answer the door seems pretty fundamental; they probably just can't be arsed to make such functionality work with safety turned on...)
Of course, just like with Signal or anything else that gets regular updates, they can push an update to your device specifically that sends the decryption key out. You'll always have to trust them to not do something like that, but that's a whole different level from subpoenaing data they have on a hard drive
Why people would purchase a telescreen to place on their homes in the first place is also incomprehensible to me.
I can see benefits to a closed circuit camera. I've never felt the need personally.
If it's not running free software and treated in a secure fashion (camera can't talk to anything other than the server, enforced at the network level, etc) then it's not a risk per-se.
However people would rather pay up front and pay subscriptions to get outside companies to run it than run their own their own equipment. In the 90s when I was excited about tech I didn't even consider that aspect.
Just keep your cameras on separate vlan and access through eg. wireguard. Any company can have the best intentions but gov can just come to them, tell them to implement whatever is needed - even if that means lying to their users - and have access to everything. Probably even with plausible deniability for all parties involved, but not sure anyone even still cares about that.
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I have a friend who's been extolling this open source alternative: https://www.home-assistant.io/
Home Assistant is very flexible. It's kind of like a common meeting ground where all the things come together in one spot, and they can thereafter be programmatically automated.
Cameras? NVRs? A sea of IoT light bulbs, switches, and sensors that all variously speak Zigbee or Matter or Thread or Wifi or Z-Wave or Bluetooth or some clown connection or whatever? Almost all of it works fine with HA. It's very flexible.
If anything, it may be too flexible. It can be rough getting started with it.
(I use it in "Home Assistant OS" form in a VM on a light-weight x86 box that only cost me $50, wherein: Performance is quite lovely, and updates haven't hosed anything up [yet] that required me to go poking at it to keep it going. It's also right at home on bare-metal x86, or an ARM SBC like a Raspberry Pi, or in containers, or [...]. Did I mention that it's flexible?)
Home assistant just connects to the devices; you still need the devices to make it useful.
Flock is controversial in my area https://transparency.flocksafety.com/ithaca-city-ny-pd
Not clear to me what the "External organizations with access" actually means or who decided which organizations to add to the list, but it's curious to me that the campus patrol for a college 250 miles away (SUNY Old Westbury) has access to camera data from Ithaca.
(Ex Flock Employee) It's as simple as that agency saying "Hey, can we have access to your camera data?" and the originating agency saying "Sure".
Flock (deliberately, IMHO) has no verification on whether said agencies are allowed by law or regulation or whatever to have that access, it's just a free-for-all.
And actively ignoring state law in others, then violating cease-and-desist orders when told to remove the cameras.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45382434 (discussion from 2025-09-26)
Louis Rossmann has been going of a lot about Flock lately, and not only in Austin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQxQpzNSNZU&pp=0gcJCfwJAYcqI...
This is one of those stories that reads like a Black Mirror episode but is just... real life now. What’s especially concerning is the normalization of this kind of surveillance creep...
One of the many reasons to host your own stuff. It costs about 0.75CAD per day to run my server and PoE switch. For my 20 bucks a month I get cameras, a media server, password manager, push notifications, file sharing, and a dozen other services, all without handing my data over to business or governments.
Is it as secure as a cloud service? Depends on what you consider secure. I closely monitor access logs and use strong passwords, Amazon has billions to spend on encryption, apps, and datacenters but they also have thousands of employees that can access your data at any time for any reason.
I would love it if some commercial host-it-yourself product were released but that goes against the pay to play model that has been chosen for all modern tech.
> For my 20 bucks a month I get cameras, a media server, password manager
Ok, I’m stumped, what service is this?
I fear ISPs have made a commercial host-it-yourself product near impossible. Imagine selling a product, getting no ongoing revenue, and then being on the hook - forever - to support average people trying to connect to something inside their home network from their phone. Nightmare material.
If anyone is having trouble understanding the support load, start by traveling to your local assisted living home and explaining to everyone static vs. dynamic IP address assignment.
You can do it fairly easily by bouncing off a server you control... aaaand we're right back where we started.
I think something like Tailscale's technology could resolve this and many other self hosting access cases. Already, I don't open any ports - just use Tailscale to connect to my PC at home. If this was integrated into the "camera app", it could be seamless - only authentication required. Since the traffic goes directly point to point, the cost of hosting this service isn't too large either.
Tailscale solves the access/NAT issue and keeps your services off of your WAN, but it relies on a 3rd party to let you use your own equipment. I understand why it is useful and a necessary service but I'll never touch it.
There’s a bunch of ways to achieve a similar goal. Especially if the scenario is you and your family to home or a server.
I use it with a few friends and we do stuff like host backups for each other. It makes it easy to securely allow that one server to be available to my hosts.
What worries me is how the HN groupthink mentions it at every possibility.
If people on HN aren't capable/willing to run their own kit there's no hope.
In the slashdot days you'd never get such worship of tailscale and cloudflare. Even in the early days of HN you'd have people suggesting a bit of rsync rather than using dropbox.
It feels like the modern tech zeitgest is either dripping in far-right memes, or it's "tech enthusiasts" from https://thecatholicdev.substack.com/p/tech-enthusiasts-vs-te...
It was probably ever so -- slashdot 20 year ago was full of Atlas Shrugged, Firefly, etc, I was just too young and naieve to understand it
I understand why it's not feasible. I admin a server at home and one for a small business, and most people do not really understand "why doesn't it just work like a normal app." For the foreseeable future self hosting is an ideological choice rather than one of practicality :/
Tailscale
>they also have thousands of employees that can access your data at any time for any reason.
They have 0 employees who can do that.
> In 2023, the FTC ordered the company to pay $5.8 million over claims that employees and contractors had unrestricted access to customers’ videos for years.
It’s right in the article
> One of the many reasons to host your own stuff.
This doesn't solve the primary problem of your neighbours turning your country into a surveillance state.
I'm willing to bet $$$ anyone will be able to call themselves a 'local security agency' before proper controls are implemented.
Likely a form followed by a "Do you promise you didn't lie" checkbox at the bottom is all that will separate a user from access.
And this is why my setup will be using Reolink cameras integrated locally via HomeAssistant and Frigate. Detection runs locally on cameras and/or in Frigate, HA manages events and UI, and the only way to access any of it remotely is via VPN, no "cloud" anything.
If the authorities come knocking with a warrant, or frankly, even a nicely-worded sensible request, sure, have at it. But ain't nobody accessing the footage unnoticed and without my approval.
I bought Reolink PoE cameras because they support standard RTSP and I could put them on their own VLAN where they can't get to the Internet. I can still use the Reolink app to view them when I'm on the LAN, or through Wireguard when I'm not. I use ffmpeg to save streams to a big disk. Works great.
I do the same and it works well. But do you see the Reolink app hammering domains of the form p#p#.reolink.com? I have to kill the app between uses it it drains my phone's battery because of this.
I've never looked at what the Android app is doing on the network, but maybe I should. I usually just keep it open for a few minutes when I'm waiting for a delivery or I hear someone ring the doorbell, so I'm not too worried about it piping lots of video to Reolink HQ. I haven't noticed much of a battery drain having used it earlier in the day.
Yeah, this is my idea as well. Good to know that the Reolink app still works locally and via Wireguard, that means I'll have less UI to set up in HomeAssistant.
My reolink runs off power over Ethernet. Here in the uk, there have been reports of Amazon drivers using wifi deauth-ing devices to kill the ring cameras when they are near your property. My parents recently experienced this.
Absolutely, I will be running PoE wherever possible, definitely for the doorbell. Not just because of Amazon drivers, I've read reports of burglars using WiFi jammers to make sure wireless cameras are useless during a break-in.
Well this is disturbing. I guess my weekend project is running ethernet to my front door.
My problem is that the area around my front door where the doorbell is installed is solid timber, so it's not just a simple ethernet drop. I'm honestly not even sure how the builders ran the existing wire to that location. Maybe my only option is to add a second backup camera in a location where an ethernet install is easier.
Cops will also go after your networking prior to busting down your door. Same applies regardless of a correct and valid warrant so do with that as you will.
I'm sure the cops who trashed Afroman's place would have loved that ability.
I realize that if the authorities target me specifically, there's not much I can do. Even though I am not in the States and do not expect my local police to be quite as... forceful.
However, I do not intend to make it easy to just grab my footage along with any other that can be found, without at least asking.
Yeah, this is more of a "If police screw up, they'll still make it a 'you' problem". IIRC the example I was thinking of was federal agents attempting to threaten an anti-ICE activist.
I'm not disputing this but I'm not sure if I understand what it is they're doing or why but am curious.
I've had better experience with Armcrest cameras but same setup. Moved from using Arlo to a completely local setup and do not regret it one bit.
Worst part was just running ethernet to the spots where the cameras needed to go (only crawlspace access) but nice not having to charge batteries and even nicer knowing i'm not sending video to netgear anymore.
Same here, only I used Hikvision PoE cameras.
If I had of had a webcam on my front door a few weeks ago I would have been able to identify the thieves that broke into my car and stole a bunch of stuff whilst I was asleep.
Since then I have "cammed" up, but I use my own hard wired network and connected to a Pi5 with a Hailo8 chip running frigate.
No third party apps, just the fun of more stuff on the network. I do run a Cloudflare tunnel on the PI so that I can connect to Frigate from anywhere when I get alerts.
But basically, it's me and only me accessing the content of those cameras. However I do plan to configure Frigate to upload the alerts and detections into S3 with a three month lifecycle.
Oops I initially posted this comment at the top level before I saw this thread:
I assume some of the concern around this is that folks don't want to live in a panopticon. If that's your objection, I can't really help with that. On the other hand, if your objection is that you don't want a backdoor built into your video doorbell (even one that you must opt into), I'm happy to report that there are good non-Ring options.
I switched to a Reolink video doorbell, and it has decent support for local-only operation. It has the ability to save footage to a local micro SD card, and if you're worried about someone stealing the entire doorbell and losing your footage, it also supports RTSP (a common IP camera protocol). You can even have it upload footage to a FTP server on a schedule. It also supports PoE if you're lucky enough to have ethernet at your doorbell, or don't mind doing the drop yourself.
Set up does require an app, but you don't need to use the app after that. Push notifs also require egress, but, iiuc, this is mostly because of how push notifications work. Push does NOT require a paid subscription.
I personally just use the app, but it's nice knowing that if Reolink tried to pull a fast one, I could just block egress on my VLAN and use it locally.
If you'd rather just go completely app-less, I imagine a dumb doorbell paired with an IP camera and a local ZoneMinder [1] install would provide most of the benefits of something like Ring. Of course, the tradeoff is you now have a second job being sys admin of your homelab. Pick your poison, I guess.
[1] https://zoneminder.com/
This won't matter when all of your neighbors have a Ring doorbell, you will still be recorded every time you leave your house. You are just making yourself more noticeable and disagreeable to the surveillance apparatus.
Don't Reolink cameras require the Reolink mobile app for setup?
I have 2 Reolink PoE cameras, and they just hopped on the network with DHCP and I used a web browser to configure them. No app needed. I did install the app later, once the cameras were safely on their own VLAN, and I could connect to them by internal host name or IP address.
Initially I believe so, but they can then be isolated via VLAN / firewall rules and cut off from internet access.
dude thinks reolink is more secure -- awful lot of 9.9 CVSS vulns for them
What are the nature of those vulnerabilities though? How many require physical access or network access to exploit?
If someone is in my house tapped into the network, cameras are the least of my problems.
Who cares? If you're doing local-only cameras they're not internet accessible. Who's going to try to hack those vulns? The mailman?
I wonder how many existing Ring owners would have bought the camera had they known they would eventually give third parties access to the camera footage.
Flock is funded and supported by YC.
Not sure how YC sees this.
why do you think YC have any more morals than Ring? or Palantir?
If it brings in ARR it makes an exit more likely and that makes them happy.
They're "investors, not bosses" - https://www.ycombinator.com/principles/
They're investors, not bosses
Being an investor is not an excuse. It makes you amoral, too.
"I didn't build the bomb, I just funded the company that built it."
That's the beauty of capitalism, its very foundation allows you to act immorally or amorally, and pretend that it's ok because of "the market", "invisible hands", "revealed preferences", etc. If it's immoral but done in pursuit of maximizing shareholder value, it's magically allowed.
> done in pursuit of maximizing shareholder value, it's magically allowed.
Not even allowed, sometimes legally required ("fiduciary duty").
This is YC.
In case you haven't noticed, the surveillance state is 100% YC adjacent.
Slight tangent: on top of that, I just read an article yesterday (which of course I can't find again right now) about how false automatic alarms from such cameras will incur a fee from the owners when the Police comes to check it out. It was from somewhere in Texas.
That's pretty common with any alarm system not just Ring. I know you get the first false alarm with a response for free. After that, fines/tickets are issued. It might have been 2 free can't remember as it's been a long time since the alarm was installed and info was provided. This was in Dallas specifically before I go painting with too broad of a brush. Even further back, I had an alarm system installed, but never paid for monitoring. They also warned about fines after too many false reports, and that was a tiny town waaaay outside of Dallas.
When you take this info and combine it with the ability of Wifi7 routers to "see" where people are in their house, you realize that the recent demo of Anduril's helmet that gives an information display that the soldier/cop wearing it can use to "see who is in the house" or "see around corners" etc. is not sci-fi but instead, something they can do today.
> When you take this info and combine it with the ability of Wifi7 routers to "see" where people are in their house,
WiFi routers can’t tell you where people are in the house. The routers don’t even know their own location within the house.
All of those papers you see on the topic have extensive additional information being put into their models. The routers don’t magically know the layout of your house.
At most, a WiFi device could infer movement in a house if the RSSI of devices is fluctuating where it is normally stable.
Couldn't someone standing outside figure out where interior routers are by triangulation, simply by walking around the house?
Kinda: ESPARGOS: ESP32-based WiFi sensing array
https://espargos.net/
Isn't that already enough for a heads up display? Direction relative to where I am point and shoot? I don't think the layout of the house matters that much since the person using the 'wifi' router strapped to their back/head can already see what's in front of them?
So combine it with a plan made from a social media posting.
Floor plan isn’t enough for a location model. These have to be learned in from accurately tagged data combined with measurements taken at the precise time of the tagged location data. A lot of tagged data.
You’re not going from a floor plan to a precise location model. Just think about how different the WiFi environment would be if someone put their router next to their steel computer case versus someone setting it on a nice MDF cabinet with no wires nearby. Completely different RF environment and pathing.
Or a robotic vacuum. Or one of the other thousand houses with the same layout in the neighborhood
Or a Roomba... One of the first things they want to do is make a plan of the house.
But also, don't builders have to submit plans of homes to the local government when building them for approval?
Most robot vacuums (at least the ones that use LiDAR, which seems to be the majority) can only capture a very rudimentary plan of your house, that being a 2D image taken at an elevation of ~10cm or so. It will also be obstructed by any large objects, and there's no easy way of telling them apart from walls.
Your government probably knows your floor plan (though, I don't think they tend to be publicly accessible). Either way though, neither of these methods are anywhere near enough to do what was shown off in those Wi-Fi tracking demos. Here's hoping the tech doesn't get a lot better or has a series of unexpected breakthroughs.
Not just social media postings but past real estate listings can probably provide floor plans.
And if you don't have those, a lot of buildings have common patterns. Its very much in the realm of possibility to train a model using exterior and interior information so that you could have AI generate a floor plan using only exterior data.
Combine that with a small drone that could fly around a building and take different wifi signal readings to triangulate access point positions.
Once you have all that don't you have everything you need to detect movement in the building based on signal disruptions?
Yes, seems like a bit of work but it absolutely seems like the type of effort some governments would put effort into.
> Not just social media postings but past real estate listings can probably provide floor plans.
I regret even engaging with the floor plan debate.
It doesn’t matter if they have a floor plan. That’s not enough information to characterize the RF environment of a house and how it responds to people moving through it.
A floor plan won’t tell you the position of all the WiFi devices, obstructions, and how the environment responds to moving those around. It won’t even tell you where the router is with any precision or if it’s next to a big chunk of metal like a computer case that’s blocking half the house and causing reflections.
It’s a red herring.
>Combine that with a small drone that could fly around a building and take different wifi signal readings to triangulate access point positions.
That seems like all you'd need anyway, skip the rest of this. Small autonomous drones with simultaneous location and mapping capability will absolutely revolutionize warfare (and firefighting, but I digress) whenever they stop being sci-fi.
The police has access to the planimetry of your home. Secondly, if they get close enough they can measure the distance between the agent and the router, and then deduce all the relative distances from the router to the people inside.
This is sci-fi fantasy mixed with paranoia.
The floor plan of every home is not on file, especially older homes.
Police aren’t accessing your floor plan and then accessing your router and combining these into a perfect model that maps people’s locations. Where in this supposed plan are the police deducing the location of your WiFi router in the house and constructing a model of all materials and objects in the house that impact the model?
This just isn’t how those research papers work. It’s not something the police are going to combine with a file from the planning office and magically have a map of you in your house like in a movie.
They could easily find it for most people. It is generally public record, in my county it's available online, unless the individual built the home themselves (mine isn't on file because I opted out of building codes and planning, but commercial home builders can't do that here).
But let's be real, police constantly barge in to the wrong address, looking for people that have been gone for years, accomplishing not much more than shooting a beloved dog on a hair-brained last second witch hunt. It's not that they can't do it, it's that they have the attention span and executive planning facilities of a burnt out coke addict 3 hours post their latest scratch off ticket winnings.
A floor plan is not equivalent to a complete RF characterization of an environment. Ignore the floor plan comments because they don’t enable WiFi positioning.
Think through it: Does your floor plan contain info about the precise location of your WiFi devices and any obstructions between them? Even that isn’t enough to get a WiFi location model, but it’s not in there regardless.
(fyi, hare-brained... like a hare)
Depends on how far you go back with the language. https://grammarphobia.com/blog/2013/10/harebrained-hairbrain...
Police aren't doing anything, they're worthless.
Tech companies are doing stuff and giving police free for all access and use. Which is worse, because as stated, police are worthless. You think they consider the consequences or the rights of the people they use those tools on? Come on now.
This can be provided as a service, if it isn't already. Im sure something similar already exists.
Yeah, your local friendly police officer isn't gonna do that.
They're gonna pay Anduril, Palantir, and a whole host of other business or consulting firms a ton of your money to do that.
The criticism that "it's technically too challenging for the police department therefore its sci-fi" is extremely silly given that the current article literally is about private companies that are building surveillance networks that they will then sell to the police.
Which makes the entire situation a lot worse.
It's a lot cheaper to just bust the door down, toss in a bunch of flash bangs and light up anyone who doesn't have their hands raised. Maybe they'll just send an armed robot in first if there's a specific threat involved.
Yet. Given the availability of the data online and that most new startups are defense or security oriented, it’s only a matter of time.
Everything about our world today was the stuff of dystopian paranoia 20 years ago.
Police won't even check the address before they raid a place, so I don't think so.
Yep. I used to be a building/remodeling contractor. If I accidentally showed up to the wrong address and demolished the wrong deck, I'd be responsible for making the property owner whole again.
If a cop serves a warrant and the wrong address and ends ups murdering a child, that cop will receive sympathy and paid time off.
Yeah, people have (attempted to) sue PDs and cities for even woefully negligent wrong address raids (different street to warrant and documentation), and the courts have happily told them "sucks to be you, they have no requirement to pay for any damage".
In reality - I think this will be far worse than that. Why send in an expensive soldiers or a cop when you could just filter in a drone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=901lYbPmqu4
"Just trust us, the people on that boat were definitely smuggling drugs."
Back in the good old days police had some dedication to their work and some professional integrity. They would at least go through the effort of planting the drugs afterwards...
"The guys we blew up with a drone were definitely jihadists."
Not any better, nor different, than a missile from a piloted plane, or a guided missile.
Yes, the current administration is morally capable of destroying random ships to claim victories over "bad guys". But they always had that ability.
As was the administrations of Clinton and Obama. The real issue is they (whomever is currently in power) can do these things, and there's nothing we can do to stop it from happening.
No, it’s not. Whataboutism is collaborating. Don’t be that guy.
The difference with this administration is that they aren’t even pretending to follow the nominal controls or rules to wield that force.
There was a legal concept around the drone/missile/commando/aerial strikes to assassinate targeted individuals in the Middle East. The morality of that action was dubious at best, but what’s happening in the Caribbean doesn’t even meet that very low moral, ethical, or legal bar.
This administration, with their craven collaborators on the Supreme Court, is solely focused on asserting virtually unlimited executive power to a fairly obvious end.
some of them were definitely jihadists.
but the other half of the wedding party they hit were not...
Next time a jihadist invites you to their wedding... politely decline.
At one point I volunteered to join an anti-jihadist Syrian militia (YPG) that was backed by the US government. When I returned to the US, they flagged my passport (and interrogated me everytime I crossed a border for about a decade).... thinking I was a jihadist.
So yeah consider that the government is so dumb that one half of the government thinks the secular anti-jihadist militias supported by the other half of government are actually jihadists.
They don't care about that. They care about the fact that you now have irregular warfare experience. Their morals are wholly situational, so they assume the same is true of everyone else.
It's not a terrible assumption; if you study extremist circles for long enough you come across examples of people who completely flip sides because they were only ever in it for the extralegal opportunities. Of course, you can find similar chameleons in politics.
"Just trust us" ... said the people who constantly instigate conflicts and wars and orchestrate and perpetrate false-flag operations to then claim they had to attack and murder people.
What the public does not understand though is that THEIR complicity and facilitation is not only integral, it is even necessary in a "democracy" where a psychological "consent" must be manufactured, not dissimilar to basic grooming tactics. And no, it's no coincidence that all the western leadership and institutions are effectively all various types of groomers, i.e., psychological manipulators and abusers.
Yikes. Talk about imperial boomerang.
Cellular radios also have this capability. There's work done to track individuals in this way (matching your walking pattern/gait).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44416761
Signal processing is probably a general problem. This month we had news about transcribing speech from sound waves jiggling a regular computer mouse.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/07/mouse_microphone_secu...
Today? No, 30 years ago.
https://www.militaryaerospace.com/communications/article/167...
Pros: potentially greater safety for police and EMS when dealing with touchy people, obvious benefits for fire rescue (assuming it works in a fire).
Cons: use your imagination.
The police have a very safe job, generally. They've done studies and construction workers have a much higher rate of injury and death than the police in the US. People have this idea that being a police officer is really unsafe and that they're throwing themselves in the line of danger just by doing their jobs, but most people are law-abiding and civil. There are people who are not, but that's not a good reason for the police to pretend like nobody is.
I think those narratives aren’t really correct either. At a 50,000 foot level, yes those numbers work out. But occupational numbers look at all sworn officers and don’t necessarily tell the story about the line police on the street. That said, the harrowing tales weaved by the unions in their negotiations or in TV don’t tell it either.
Highway patrol officers have a similar risk profile to construction workers. Mostly car accidents. Patrolmen in cities or towns get hurt in town or in altercations all of the time.
Court officers do not. Detectives largely do not. Police are more likely to get shot at, but way more likely to get hurt in a bunch of acute and long term ways. The nature of the stress that many police experience measurably shortens their lives.
The biggest issues with police with regard to officer and public safety are poor governance and macho culture. I live in New York so I’ll use them as an example. NY State Police are highway patrol focused - they wear grey and black uniforms and Stetson hats. NYPD Highway patrol units wear black leather jackets and cavalry breeches. It looks cool and has a certain elan — but officers would be safer in more functional dayglo attire.
In terms of governance, like many areas of American governance, checks and balances are weak. Example: Cozy relationships between various departments, prosecutors, and perhaps elected judges mean that many NY police avoid prosecution or and sanction for DWI.
See https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6400077/
My understanding is that the most predictive thing that harms you after traumatic events is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_injury
which can even come from situations where you want to help people but you can't so it also badly affects teachers, nurses and other people who come across people's dysfunction and suffering. It's worse to be made to feel that you violated your own values than it is to, say, get shot.
Great points. I have several people close to me who are firemen. They see shit you’re not really intended to see, and often don’t have a way to work through it. My mom was a nurse, mostly in CCU and ICU. She was an incredible advocate for her patients and profession, but she witnessed a lot of death and her way of intellectually processing that made her seem harsh about certain things, but it’s really perspective — most of us see death as a concept not reality.
It’s part of the reason why an observant person can usually spot a cop or firefighter in plain clothes. They put on a facade as a coping mechanism that leaks into life.
Most problems at their root are a result of people not treating people like people. Many “advocates” for police are really just attracted to the perception of power, and see failures of accountability as a sign of strength. It’s the opposite.
> They've done studies and construction workers have a much higher rate of injury and death than the police in the US.
Sure, but both construction worker and police officer are significantly more dangerous jobs than most of us here have sitting behind a desk.
Obviously it’s not a job where people are dying routinely, but suggesting death or serious injury are the only two risks of interacting with the public and responding to threatening or unstable situations is ignoring the reality. It’s a tough job. Much tougher than my time spent sitting at a desk.
And nurses have even a more dangerous job.
I'm not convinced that being a cop is such a tough job. Most of it is sitting in your car waiting for speeders, or to warn traffic about road construction, or driving around looking for something unusual happening.
US courts have determined they don't even have a duty to risk their own lives to save civilians. Kinda the entire purpose of their job's existence, removed.
There's a lot of aggrandizement by and for cops; it's completely parallel to the worship of the military.
> I'm not convinced that being a cop is such a tough job. Most of it is sitting in your car waiting for speeders, or to warn traffic about road construction, or driving around looking for something unusual happening.
The tough parts of a job aren’t defined by the routine work. It’s the risks and edge cases. That’s like saying most of a construction worker’s job is measuring things and reading plans so it can’t be that tough.
It’s pretty obvious that a lot of commenters here have never known an actual police officer. They’re just choosing between two extreme archetypes that aren’t accurate: Either the heroic person risking their life on the daily to protect to the public, or the bumbling donut-eating cop who has been relegated to traffic duty only. Neither are true and comparing it that way is a false dichotomy.
The irony of us sitting at desks in our warm and comfortable offices while calling the job of someone who gets called to deal with troubling public situations “not tough” is ironic. I wouldn’t want to do that job and I bet you wouldn’t either.
just to make this explicit, protecting civilians has never been the purpose of modern police forces. they were developed to put down rebellions/catch slaves/protect rich people's property
Just to make this explicit, you are incorrect.
There are plenty of instances where you would be correct, such as the origin of police forces in the American South (which were initially slave patrols), but that doesn't mean you are correct in all instances.
I'm not sure what joy you derive from spreading misinformation, but you should probably reconsider it.
You didn't refute anything in the comment, other than saying one part of it was correct. This comment would be more useful if you actually made an argument.
A cursory internet search would back up my statement. Feel free to do that if you're interested. I note that you aren't asking the parent poster for any citations for their claim, which I would say is quite extraordinary.
And to be clear, my "argument" is that the parent poster is objectively incorrect, which is accurate. I decided not to posit on why the parent poster made an objectively incorrect statement, though I am curious.
> I decided not to posit on why the parent poster made an objectively incorrect statement
you accused me of intentionally spreading misinformation for my own joy. bad faith argument is bad faith.
Well, why exactly are you doing it?
begone troll
This is about the response I expected. God forbid you consider whether your feelings and preconceived notions align with reality.
FYI, my response to your initial post wasn't for you.
God forbids I engage in bad faith arguments with trolls who put words in my mouth
Exactly what words did I put in your mouth?
This is your statement: "just to make this explicit, protecting civilians has never been the purpose of modern police forces. they were developed to put down rebellions/catch slaves/protect rich people's property"
That statement is incorrect, no matter what your definition of "modern police force" is. That's it. It's not complicated, despite your attempts to deflect from the invalidity of that statement.
Funny to accuse someone of "spreading misinformation" while agreeing there are instances where they are correct, then asserting there are some instances where they are incorrect while giving no concrete examples yourself.
So saying something that is correct but not for all cases (which ones would those be) is now "spreading misinformation"?
I'm not sure what joy you derive from dismissing statements you already acknowledge have an element of veracity with some blanket label of "misinformation", but you should probably reconsider it.
> Funny to accuse someone of "spreading misinformation" while agreeing there are instances where they are correct, then asserting there are some instances where they are incorrect while giving no concrete examples yourself.
It's not funny, it's accurate.
Spending seconds looking into the history of policing worldwide, or in the US, would back up my claim.
Had the parent poster bothered to post evidence backing up their comment, I probably would have made the effort to post citations refuting it.
> So saying something that is correct but not for all cases (which ones would those be) is now "spreading misinformation"?
When you say that something is correct in all cases, yes.
> I'm not sure what joy you derive from dismissing statements you already acknowledge have an element of veracity with some blanket label of "misinformation", but you should probably reconsider it.
Nice try, but there is no "element of veracity" to an absolute statement that is objectively false.
> US courts have determined they don't even have a duty to risk their own lives to save civilians.
Not only "not risk their lives", US courts have ruled they have no duty to act to prevent any crime in progress.
No I completely agree that the police need things like health care and mental health and training on dealing with crises and all of this stuff we expect. But the idea that they need better weapons to do their job or that everyone they encounter should be treated like Afghani insurgents using the cameras they've installed in their own homes is beyond dystopian. Getting shot or stabbed, in my understanding is way less likely than just getting yelled at and traumatized by someone. And so I think the things that actually would add value would be things that either help you avoid those situations in the first place or things that help you process and lay down the trauma after the fact.
This I can agree with. I have experience with the local PD in handling "no good answer" domestic violence situations with a neighbor's mentally ill kid; they clearly had training to guide them. I'm grateful for that, although they still couldn't resolve much (the mental health system is still dysfunctional in the US).
Partly it's dysfunctional but the options for treating severe mental illness (schizophrenia spectrum, bipolar, major depression) aren't that great.
When you seem some guy screaming on the street corner a monthly depot injection of an antipsychotic drug would probably calm them down but overall the drugs are unpleasant [1] and have serious side effects, particularly sedation, weight gain, and high blood sugar [2] A "functional" system would probably be one that can get people like that a diagnosis and get them treatment against their will.
Kanye West is a good example. He has a bipolar diagnosis but now thinks he is fashionably autistic so he quit taking his meds and now he is shooting music videos of black people in blackface giving the Hitler salute after a whiney autotuned complaint that they won't let him see his kids after he posted something on Twitter [3]. For him responsibility is not "don't cosplay as a Nazi" but "face up to your condition and take your meds" and he won't want to cosplay as a Nazi and they might let him see his kids.
I've known quite a few people who are schizophrenia spectrum without a diagnosis: one of them lived at our house for a year and a half until she threatened my wife with a knife and she took her own life a year later, another one called us up five times in one day last week with a scrambled story about how she got bit by a dog, I sat down and listened to her for about 20 minutes in which she got lucid just a few times and I was able to piece together the place where it happened, that she's talked to the security guard and the EMT but not the police, that she did see a doctor and get a Tetanus shot though she wasn't sure if it was a Rottweiler or a Pit-bull.
The good news is that new drugs are here and more are under development:
https://www.cobenfy.com/
[1] no diversion risk!
[2] last year my condition got worse and my doc put me on the minimum dose of seroquel before going to sleep which is 1/10 the dose they'd give to someone who is really psychotic. It was effective at getting me quality sleep and avoiding "paranoia against objects" in the morning but I gained 15 lbs and my A1C was borderline in my last bloodwork and my doc thinks I should get off it. Even the smallest dose is so sedating I can't believe anyone could take it during the day, my guess is that if I cut the pills in half the sleep promoting effect will still be strong enough.
[3] oddly not "X"
Its great for the narrative though, if you don't think they're special human beings risking their lives every day to save you how else can you convince the general population they should venerate them?
if you don't think they're special human beings risking their lives every day to save you how else can you convince the general population they should venerate them?
Along those lines, I think it's weird that in some cities, a cop who dies choking on a chicken bone on his day off in his own kitchen gets the same benefits and massive traffic-clogging live-streamed publicly-funded funeral with politicians and media spectacle as a cop who gets killed by a bad guy while on duty.
If they cared about police safety, they wouldn't do warrant checks at every interaction. If they cared about community policing, they wouldn't do warrant checks at every interaction. Because warrant checks make every situation potentially one where they are interacting with someone who has a life sentence over their head and might do something crazy.
Removing that one step just for community policing would completely change police interactions. Community policing is not the place to inject warrant enforcement, it too completely changes the dynamics.
I got hit by a car in a hit and run, and despite there being dozens of cameras, and me getting the footage of the car hitting me and driving off (not clear shot on license plate), the police immediately called it a cold case and refused to even try to get footage from any other cameras nearby - so I'll hold my breath that they use this for anything to prevent crime.
A country like the US has around 0.47 deaths in the line of duty per million per year whereas a country like Germany where people can't buy gun just like that is at 0.37 and a country like the UK where normal cops do not have guns is at 0.05
Which is easier, Wifi 7 in all homes or gun restrictions ?
False dichotomy.
I question where it's a good idea to give police / solider a big reflective helmet that can cause headaches, eye strain, and nausea (the previous system from Microsoft before Anduril took over). There were constant complaints by the users that it wasn't useful. I see Anduril using less lenses but the reflective ness of this helmet makes it a huge threat to the user of the product.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Visual_Augmentation... https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/11/anduril-to-take-over-microso...
I hate that all our favorite sci-fi books were used as manuals for what to build next, instead of trying to avoid creating those futures in our real lives.
Personally, I think it's the other way around.
Sci-fi writers understood both what technology could create in the future (and what would be desirable), and also understood how people abuse power and the tools available to them to stay in power (or gain more).
In other words: they predicted the future, more than they inspired it. IMO, that also makes their writing that much more interesting.
Surprisingly, I never considered that, and agree that it makes the writing more interesting, I'm gonna keep this in mind for future stories. Thanks a lot for sharing that :)
Relatedly, somewhat, I've been reading a lot of 19th century French literature (because I'm French and because my sister is a literature teacher who's been "assigning" me stuff to read).
It has been somewhat shocking to see how relevant the writing is seen through a 21st century lenses. Whether it's how media works, how cliques of people function, etc.
It truly feels timeless in a way that I've found very surprising. It also very much supports notions that people don't change even if means and methods do.
Read more Solarpunk? From a writers standpoint though, I suspect its easier to weave a dramatic plot through a dystopic background than a more optimistic one
"It's about a family with a robot helper, that doesn't go beserk, and eventually recreates their late grandmother's casserole recipe using AI. It's a guaranteed bestseller!"
You're joking, but you're not far off from Murderbot by Martha Wells, which has done phenomenally well.
Swapping grandma's casserole recipe for fighting mega-corps might be the big difference.
all happy futures are the same, all terrible ones are terrible in their own, unique way
Hard disagree.
Yes, it's easier to captivate attention by evoking primal instincts - avoid predator, find food, reproduce, etc. These stories stick around in your head, the memetic survivors. They are easier to feed off.
But "Happy" doesn't mean a perfect utopia. The entire "classic" Star Trek is set in a utopian future, yet with plenty of space for intrigue. Usually a commentary on a contemporary problem, with a "happy ending" that's supposed to show us the road to a better solution, rather than a bland "forever after".
Even "First Contact" (a zombie/survival horror) is spun around the theme of "this is the history/future that we're saving".
Bonus: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq4QY0LGOiI>
A lot of aspirational tech was consumed by builders. I dare you to find a nerd who has watched Star Trek and hasn't once thought "wouldn't it be cool if I could interact with the computer with my voice", or "using touchscreens for everything looks so futuristic"?
And yet here we are complaining that our phones are over-listening to us and our cars no longer have knobs.
Many people (including in this website) are hard at work creating the torment nexus.
No doubt. The question is, is that the explicit goal, and if so, why? And if not, don't they consider the effects of their actions, if they aren't, why?
The torment nexus is very interesting from a research standpoint and very profitable for investors. There's many military and industrial applications.
the torment nexus can't torment you specifically, you're overreacting.
i am totally a real person and use the nexus every day to improve my productivity -- it is a simple and intuitive tool.
Gotta bring home that stable paycheck (not justifying it)
You actually don’t. Technologists have more leverage than most workers. There’s no shortage of jobs that don’t require building surveillance states or engagement addiction engines.
> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
Rich or poor, smart or dumb. We all are slaves to the mighty dollar.
At this point, the path from what these teams of people are building to dystopian outcomes is well-mapped. Whether it’s an explicit goal is irrelevant because if you can reasonably foresee the harm and proceed anyway, you’re making a conscious choice to enable it.
When one is fascinated with building a gear, they might not see the machine they are creating.
AI/Surveillance are only gears in the machine.
Whats important to understand about the indeterminacy of peoples minds is that if we could read each others thoughts, we would be vulnerable.
Now with the written word and how seemingly determinant people are in large numbers we are again super vulnerable.
A flashbang or tear gas will also do the trick, they don't need fancy wifi tricks.
Didn't someone a while ago make those QR codes which played with the facial recognition algorithms. I wonder where they are today... Sound like fashion could play a role here.
Look the outcomes from past history to understand how future will become.
Sadly it is only going to get much worse before it gets better.
I am not sure how that would be helpful, regardless of how you mean that. Nothing in the past has ever even gotten remotely close to what even exists today, let alone what will exist in all of our lifetimes, no matter how old you are.
Humans are basically the same, even if the technology is different.
"History doesn't repeat itself but rhymes a lot" (or words to that effect). What is happening now in the US (and many other places) strongly echoes the events leading up to WW2.
I am quite sure there are a few lessons from the past that can be used to guess where current administration is going.
Then is up for the citzens to let it happen or react.
I commented on a similar post earlier, but my entire neighborhood, hundreds of houses, came with them preinstalled. Can’t even leave my house without being surveilled.
Some people have the setting on where it starts announcing stuff any time it sees a person, which it does all the way to the sidewalk. So you go on a walk and get yelled at through a super shitty speaker several times.
And it’s about as dystopian as you can imagine with people posting recordings constantly on the neighborhood Facebook group and arguing.
I swapped to HomeKit secure video because of no additional subscription, included in the iCloud one I’m paying anyway. Allegedly end to end encrypted too.
I had one neighbor with the announcement thing but they eventually turned it off. No illusions that it’s not still recording. But how horribly hostile to have that on, right? No accounting for taste, I guess. I’ll continue staying off nextdoor and the rest and keeping my camera feeds to myself…
> came with them preinstalled
That's concerning. Now we have to worry about spyware coming pre installed on houses. I wonder how much the developers got paid to install those?
I doubt the developer was paid, although I bet they get the hardware for free.
The data shows people like video doorbell. If the developer has to install a dumb one, then they would benefit by installing video doorbells.
> So you go on a walk and get yelled at through a super shitty speaker several times.
I would love to see legislation banning this kind of automated harassment.
Never done it, but on late night walks home I've imagined banging on the doors of the houses with these just to inform them I got the message.
The police chumminess is super dystopian. I definitely went with E2E encrypted cameras because I also think it's so crazy people just hand all that data over without realizing how powerful it is and how much personal privacy they are throwing out the window.
E2E encryption but what are the ends? If one is your camera and the other is a cloud service then you aren't really protecting anything.
Apple at least claims to not have keys for their E2EE, such as when you turn on Advanced Protection (or whatever it’s called) it has this whole spiel about how screwed you are if you lose your recovery ability
You could additionally use encryption at rest where the key is only ever on the client.
Some people have the setting on where it starts announcing stuff any time it sees a person, which it does all the way to the sidewalk. So you go on a walk and get yelled at through a super shitty speaker several times.
What sort of stuff does it say?
Honestly, these cameras don’t solve anything or provide any real utility and essentially represent a waste of money and resources.
There are quite a few videos online where it has helped prove self defense and fraudulent statements by cops.
Who knows how long that utility lasts with cheap video editing on the horizon.
George Orwell really never could have imagined that people would flock to purchase or otherwise use the methods of their own surveillance. (smart phones, social media, smart cameras, modern cars, etc) I think it paints government surveillance policies in something of a different light. There is definitely a constituency which believes that the evil central government is pushing for surveillance in a purely unilateral way.
I'm not really pro-government, but modern surveillance capitalism really pushes against this view. Put to their own devices, the public will generally (and apparently) flock towards mass surveillance all on their own, and I think one possible implication is that the government surveillance policies are more popular then some folks in HN circles would suspect.
And don't forget the AI companies. People are happy to send their highly personal information (and company secrets) to them so that a chatbot can use it. Didn't OpenAI just announce a porn feature?
OpenAI is receiving far more data with a far greater privacy impact than social networks. And all this is happening at a time when the US is transitioning from a somewhat functioning democracy to an autocratic and fascist system.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/chatgpt-pa...
> government surveillance policies are more popular then some folks in HN circles would suspect.
"Ignorance is bliss"
That was a major, if not the core theme of 1984, and how the system could create and manage such a state.
>government surveillance policies are more popular then some folks in HN circles would suspect.
2 things.
1. Few people understand most surveillance legislation, including journalists.
2. Most governments use thought terminating cliches involving child safety to force compliance on the middle set of people who dont like surveillance and understand a minimum amount of what the legislation does.
These points leave anti surveillance campaigners fighting an uphill battle. Most people, when they have these laws clearly articulated and arent in danger of being called a pedo for opposing them, oppose them.
I think this is correct, but buying something like a Ring camera is 100% voluntary. And buying a smartphone _used_ to be 100% voluntary, and people couldn't get enough of them. People aren't ignorant about privacy, they don't even care about it. Try telling your friends you turn bluetooth off on your phone and don't have a data plan for it. They'll think you're very, very weird. They do not care about privacy whatsoever.
I already have problem with negligent people using products like Ring that is to surveil anyone around without control, with uncontrollable and unreliable level of standard handling collected data (no high hopes here). But when I find it very very hard and limited purchasing products that cannot spy on me - special mention here for smart phones and cars - that makes me mad to the next level. Even for the elevated level privacy concious folks the car and the smart phone bringing hostility for your private life is getting harder and harder to avoid. Not having the suitable time to do the tedious investigations and costly trials into the reliability of products with low surveillance risks, not to mention the constant need of keeping yourself up do date to everything involved in this regard! We need to live our life, cannot spend it on constant workarounds, hacks, and very reasonable paranoia. When logging into essential services are MANDATING the use of smart phones (i.e. MFA, but own apps sometimes, requiring specific vendors!!), not to mention the need of getting from A to B the way required (goods, children, time limits, navigation), but cannot procure a solution that will not expose you to adverse agents or even criminals (those getting in and out of systems nowadays like they live there) that makes me really really mad! This society is shit. I cannot do it, but feel the highly increasing need for becoming the real life Captain Fantastic [1].
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3553976/
I feel this entirely. The constant surveillance is almost unavoidable if one ever wants to participate in society. How can I always avoid using a cell phone when my source of income requires that I be accessible most of time. People will respond to get another job or buy this obscure product instead, but as you said, I can’t live my life if I’m constantly researching EVERYTHING that affects my life, and having to wade through so much bs to do so.
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Having tried to do this already to no avail, does anyone know if as an owner of one of these Ring devices if it's possible to take it offline and handle everything locally?
I'm usually against these types of "smart" devices, but only bought it because my house got burgled as a student (whilst I was asleep!), so I got pretty shaken up and got the cheapest thing I could find. Currently, I do have it connected to a local HA instance, but I'm pretty sure that relies on Ring's online services to access it, unless I'm mistaken.
Ring has better than typical device security. If you’re not looking to reverse engineer a brand new exploit, there are other devices that do the same thing but are designed to be local first.
Google for rtsp doorbell and you’ll find many discussion threads
Unfortunately MAC addresses are hard to mask. With a DIY camera you could customize the MAC address, but it would still be visible. To truly hide it I suppose you'd need to use a wired interface. Ubiquiti used to make 700MHz WiFi adapters but I don't think those are a thing any longer
Why not just get rid of it? Your anxiety is triggered from the past, not the present. We have lived without these devices in perfect safety and security for a long time. Simplify and be free!
https://archive.is/7fMPK
All this hand-wringing about surveillance powers is not keeping up with how quickly our ability to surveil people is expanding. The fourth amendment seems kind of like a wet fart in a timeline where private companies can surveil the public and then simply choose to share their data with law enforcement.
I had to buy a surveillance camera recently, but I made sure mine doesn’t connect to the internet in any way.
How does your total solution work? Today, there's a lot of convenience with Nest. Is there an equivalent experience that doesn't involve exposing your data to megacorps?
HomeKit secure video is cloud stored, but end to end encrypted
Not having to expose data to mega corps is one part of the solution, but more so there should be a solution where government can’t so trivially circumvent 4th amendment by purchasing the data from corps they’re not allowed to collect w/o a warrant.
I don’t know what the “equivalent experience” is, since I never really cared to learn what Nest does or why people want it.
PoE cameras, frigate, home assistant.
I mean the feed has to be written to a storage and this storage I immediately backup off-site in the case someone is clever enough to immediately go for such (e.g. burglary).
I think one of the traps we fall into is imagining that an attacker is somehow intelligent (someone who can immediately attack video storage) but simultaneously uncreative (doesn’t think of some way to make the surveillance footage irrelevant).
I’ve decided that I’m not a high-profile target for covert operatives, but I am a target of opportunity for people who have access to my data once that data is outside of my control. The decisions I make based on that are decisions like, “No surveillance feed goes into cloud services operated by companies I don’t trust,” but “I don’t need to encrypt my NAS”.
Of course they are.
I'm surprised they weren't already, if one discards the ethical and moral issues (like one would expect from an Amazon product), they do have a lot of opportunities for working with each others data.
This is just the systemization, scaling of what existed previously. It's a rather predictable pattern at this point in America. Introduction through innocuous means, expansion through a combination of convenience and fear, then systematic expansion once the slaves have become accustomed to the new state of things. It's a rather common ratcheting normalization staircase.
Even public information clearly describes how it is the "CIAs" one trick pony, whether it's orchestrating a "color revolution" for "democracy", instigating conflicts and war to feign innocent self-defense, implementing social engineering and Constitutional subversion, or implementing mass surveillance specifically. It's the same wife-beater and child rapist type pattern of grooming abuse that then feigns innocence and deflects blame to anything and anyone else.
Most people are really not all that different than any run of the mill battered wife (even if only in the making), psychologically. I get it a lot when I point out what a trap and an illegitimate, enemy entity that the EU is (not to pick on the EU, because it also applies to the US and many other places, but it's far more pronounced with the "EU-cultists")... You get the constant predictable defenses of the love-bombing "abusive boyfriend"/wife beater in the making responses. "you don't understand", "the EU really loves me", "you never want anything good for me", "he showers me with all kinds of benefits and slick marketing", "we are going to be happy forever".
It's sad, and as someone that has watched that cycle unfold even in my own family, it's really kind of demoralizing and somewhat depressing to know exactly where it's heading and being unable to counter the forces that have roots a long long time ago, forces of nature. So, the US and the EU will have to suffer that which is predictable and was preventable, no matter how much they wanted to see the world through rose colored glasses.
Maybe for humanity's sake, China can free the world of the scourge of this cycle and the psychopathic, narcissistic, maniacal group of people that causes it all... if they don't just kill all life on the planet because if they can't be in control then no one can be in control.
However, AI-powered technology used by law enforcement has been proven to exacerbate racial biases.
This is a little misleading. Flock is primarily an ALPR that can identify make/model/color/identifying-feature of vehicles. It's not facial recognition. It doesn't itself have a racial component. The modal "proactive" Flock intervention (as opposed to investigative searches after crimes) is to flag a moving vehicle as stolen.
But in practice, the outcomes of deploying Flock are racialized, because the hot lists states keep of stolen vehicles aren't accurate enough for real-time enforcement, so recovered vehicles stay on the lists and false-positive. You're disproportionately likely to have a vehicle on a hot list if you live in a low-income neighborhood.
Even then: it's not clear how any of this is apposite to a Ring/Flock partnership. You can't use a Ring camera to do realtime ALPR flagging of cars. Presumably, this supports Flock's "single pane of glass" product; they just want police going to Flock for all their video needs. Police already canvass Ring and Nest cameras during investigations.
They're a lot more than "license plate readers", they're complete AI surveillance systems: https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Flock_License_Plate_Readers
They're license plate readers, make/model/identifying-feature databases, and search engines. I didn't say they were just "license plate readers".
have you seen this?
https://www.flocksafety.com/products/flock-dfr
much much more dystopian...
What's your point? Obviously we wouldn't allow something like this to be deployed in our community. But what does that have to do with Flock providing an interface to police departments for collecting Ring camera footage?
I don't think that's a good thing --- I think PDs should continue to manually canvass for footage and specifically ask residents for footage when they need it, I think that's actually the right public policy and we don't need to innovate past it. But good or bad, it has nothing to do with Flock's "AI".
Also the thing not being mentioned anywhere in this thread that is in other reporting is that the Flock partnership is an interface for police to ask the Ring owner to share their footage with police. A thing that police can already do under the current system. It seems to just be a "single pane of glass" for both systems.
Right; it bugs me that TechCrunch is doing this "AI is racist" thing here. Like: I think a lot of naive AI is in fact racist. But AI has nothing --- that I can tell --- to do with this story. Do they know what they're talking about or not? I have an issue with this "jazz hands" stuff.
I feel the same way about this Flock stuff as I did about all the NSA stuff back in the Snowden days: like, directionally, I get it, I'm on the same page, but I know just enough to know when Glenn Greenwald is just making shit up, and I can't let that slide.
This combined with all the price increases makes me hate the fact I bought a ring doorbell.
I _hate_ walking down the block and hearing their dumb "Hi! You are being recorded!" jingle. Ffs if you're going to record me at least do it quiely
Me too, but these people probably aren't having their cars pilfered in the middle of the night.
My solution to that is to just not keep anything valuable in the car and leave it unlocked. After getting my car window smashed in twice for the thieves to not find anything other than trash I decided this was a better system and haven't had a problem since. For all I know people have rummaged around my car but I don't have to deal with damages anymore.
My ideal anti-theft device would be a mode where the car is unlocked but the alarm goes off if you try to open the door.
Security cameras could already be hacked and have their feed altered by using Toka services. Toka was founded by Ehud Barak (also of Carbyne fame, with Epstein) and a16z:
https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/06/a16z-backed-toka-wants-to-...
I think Amazon hired the bizarro team to run Ring. Because they just keep giving reasons NOT to get a Ring device.
This is the logical conclusion to the state of irrational fear that Americans perpetually live in, that causes them to feel they need 24/7 surveillance of their homes, no matter the consequences.
Yup! I've had my car stolen and broken into in the past. So I have a rational fear the same thing could happen to my house, so I have a ring system. Out of respect for my neighbors, I'll go the E2EE pathway and make sure my camera isn't tilted towards the road, but I'm not going without cameras again.
Unfortunately the advent of the IP camera, or the Citizen app, and decreases in crime, have no correlation. It just makes one feel better, which is fine in the same way that smoking in public is fine.
The camera will not prevent it.
"Land of the free".
I struggle to reconcile.
A line from George Carlin comes to mind...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-54c0IdxZWc
It’s about control, not fear.
Nobody is consenting to it out of fear.
You control people by instilling fear.
Anybody can merely force someone else to do something. I can, you can. That's small fry stuff.
The real ticket is getting people to do the things you want with no force. Convincing them to act against their own interests. Now, thats much harder, and that's the type of thing the big dogs are looking at.
I disagree. Fear is the tool authoritarians use to control people. First they make you fear the other, then they make you fear their force.
When your fear the other the consent is internal.
Do you mean about the folks with Ring cameras needing to feel control over their environment, and feeling like giving access to the Police/Flock/ICE will help gain that sort of control?
I think most people with video door bells just like being able to answer the door when they aren't at home and to see who is there without getting up from the couch
This program would literally not be possible if that was the case, as it's completely opt-in. Citizen, Flock, Ring, they're all symptoms of the same disease.
But let's say you're right: that means that laziness is enough to bring on the surveillance state.
It's "opt in by default" - aka opt-out.
Getting the notifications is opt-in by default, choosing to hand over your video footage is not:
Video door bells are a massive safety feature for people living by themselves.
Unfortunately this is contagious. During the last election cycle in Sweden the Moderate party (third-largest in parliament, and part of the government) literally ran ads like "More cameras on our streets for safety"
Edit: added country
We need a competent counter-narrative but no one (few) figures in the federal government are offering one. The media also loves to report on crime. Etc.
I hope people will join their local community groups.
My first thought : Orwell's 1984 Telescreen is happening.
In 1984 I can't remember if they prostrated themselves so fully, purchasing the screens that would spy on them, and did it all come about because they were sucking on the tit of "free" shipping that costs $139/year?
Stop paying companies to put spyware in your house. Don't connect your smart TV to the network, don't buy cloud cameras, and above all don't run a phone with an OS that they phone company gives you.
Great job giving the government a live dossier of all the political volunteers canvassing out there. This makes me feel so much safer!
I’m surprised to not see more noise about Rings new “search party” features, for… Finding dogs?
It's not that long ago that people used to talk about East Germany as a dystopian hellhole of state surveillance, and yet the US is now far more surveilled than the DDR ever was. It's amazing to me how easily this country was propagandized and its inhabitants persuaded to establish an authoritarian state of their own.
As VC backed startups run out of ideas that meet their return requirements, they pivot to government.
The whole flock thing is brilliant as the FBI is the sales force through their grant programs.
Zoneminder is a good alternative
Get a Chinese knockoff that transmits everything to Chinese servers. Good luck to the US government getting your data out of there. :)
they'd get it before it gets to china
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45614713
Orwell didn't foresee that people would voluntarily pay for their own surveillance, out of fandom for a company that charges $15/month for "free" shipping. That they also actually do give away for free if you can wait a few extra days rather than treating every purchase as an impulse buy.
Reality has become more stupid than even visionaries could have predicted.
He never mentioned if the screens in every house had a monthly fee or if you could pay more to skip adds. We could still be right on track to war with East Asia.
People need devices that will protect them from this mass surveillance. Plausible deniability needs to be restored.
Some sort of jamming tech or scrambling tech. There’s no reason to lock everyone into a surveillance state when we should be fighting it. Fighting through legislation isn’t tenable anymore.
They do have an end to end encryption option.
Wonder if that helps any.
https://ring.com/support/articles/7e3lk/using-video-end-to-e...
Without solid third party verification that promise isn’t worth the HTML it’s written in.
On that page though it looks like most all the features are not available with E2EE, event timeline, person detection, search you name it. So imagine few if any use it, since alternative options that can locally do all that and still have E2EE.
It depends if Amazon has any way to access to the encryption key that supposedly protects the content.
The security of pretty much everything Amazon boils down to KMS.
KMS access is based on IAM policies.
If law enforcement wants access to your KMS keys, they'll compel IAM, not KMS, to give them access. If you ask KMS about it, they'll play dumb.
It was only a matter of time.
Doesn't matter, cops will raid a home on no more info than intuition.
To control the public, just play on the fear or safety part, and they will just follow mindlessly.
how cheap is rolling your own with a little mini PC running an Ultralytics model?
Official post: https://blog.ring.com/about-ring/ring-expands-community-requ...
Big tech is nothing different from the German industrialists one hundred years ago
Big tech have always been dogs willing to play fetch for any master. The free market didn't offer big tech these quantity of rewards for brutalizing people 'guilty' of administrative infractions, our 'democratically' elected government did.
>elected government
Elected in part by the useful idiots on HN and many other places. They were so ignorant of how government actually works they were happy to give it this power. They foresaw the jackboot being used to stomp petty criminals and fellow middle class types who don't "pay their fair share". But they had never cracked open a history book because if they had they would know that sort of stuff is never a top priority.
50,000 years may come to pass, and nothing will be funnier than HN defending Apple's App Store monopoly one year and then realizing what a catastrophic disaster it was 6 months later.
Are we sure that formalized populist regulation is the boogeyman? Like, really absolutely super duper double-checked certain?
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Maybe people are just responding to things like labelling them all as "useful idiots" and "Nazis" and "fascists"
Fine, let's call them patriots who are fed up with democracy, limits on governmental power, and the rule of law.
"You called me a nasty name so I'm gonna blow up our 250 year old democracy"
There's another word we can call them: juvenile.
No a bunch of extremely intelligent and diligent people have been working on that for ages, they just rely on juvenile people voting them into power.
what about snowflake, that's a good one too!
We are all useful idiots, comrade.
I am both amazed and not surprised by the amount of people that will work at a company that is directly opposed to their own points of view. I am willing to bet many of the employees of Google, Meta, and Amazon are morally opposed to the very things they are supporting.
Nah. They aren't. If they were, they would leave. I went to school for aerospace but didn't work in the industry for the longest time because all the jobs available were military.
These people don't care, they might put on a fake persona that pretends to care, but you outright don't care if you work at these places. You get a job somewhere else when you care.
What you hear from them isn't caring, it's just a way for them to pretend they are someone they aren't. The person they pretend to be would not be working there.
Germany was a mess after WWI, there wasn't much industry at all to speak of in the 1920s.
If you follow the money, it might even be less different.
If history has thought us anything, it has to be that capitalists have absolutely no spine and only think about profits, no matter what.
We used to know this inherently and we spent half a century passing really well thought out and actionable laws designed to thwart the darker side of capitalism while still allowing it's benefits to accrue to the masses.
Since then we've forgotten how to enforce anti monopoly and media ownership rules. Similarly we've somehow completely turned campaign financing into an open competition for bribes.
So, in this situation when a large company cooperates with intrusive policing, you think the problem is that the company is too large and that enforcement of laws should have taken place? To prevent this collaboration with law enforcement?
It's a much bigger problem when a company with >50% market share connects all the cameras to law enforcement than if a company with 0.5% market share does that, but the first one can't happen if there are no companies with a double digit market share.
And when there are more companies it's easier to tell people to buy a different one because that one is doing something shady. When Amazon does it, you recommend that unsophisticated people do what, use a Chinese camera which is presumably shunting the feeds to that government?
I recommend that people don't install networked cameras unless they build a dedicated air-gapped network for them. If you want to know who is at your door ... look out a window.
Unpopular take, I know, because it demands that people actually understand the technology they're using and where their data flows, and almost nobody has the skill, time, attention, money, and mindspace for that... but that's the only way to be a responsible networked camera user.
It's the government that wants unchecked power, no matter what. This is why people support the 2A, and why it was the 2nd most important thing to those who founded the country.
Most of the sanctuary areas that have historically resisted ICE are brutally against any originalist interpretation of the 2A.
And weirdly, the staunch defenders of 2A, because how else do you fight tyranny are all, good with the tyrant and the tyrant party shitting all over the Constitution.
You’ll have to fight fascism with mass protests not guns.
And art
> It's the government that wants unchecked power, no matter what.
"The Government" is not a entity with "wants" or "needs", it's a collection of people with their own motivations. Motivations that usually end up being about power or money, or a combination, because the people who end up in the government are capitalists.
> why it was the 2nd most important thing to those
I mean, not really? The 2nd amendment includes stuff that they didn't even think of originally when creating the constitution, so just because it was the second amendment that went through, doesn't mean it was "the 2nd most important thing", the most important things are the original articles in the constitution, so the amendments must start ranking at 8th place or something like that, 2nd amendment ends up being the 9th most important thing if we were to rank things like you did, but honestly.
>"The Government" is not a entity with "wants" or "needs", it's a collection of people with their own motivations. Motivations that usually end up being about power or money, or a combination, because the people who end up in the government are capitalists.
The main issue is that its power only grows. No one sane would propose to reduce his influence and/or make his job harder and everyone has ideas on how to make his job easier. It's not about capitalism, communism or anything else. The only thing that plays a role is how many somewhat independent influence blocks you have and whether you have a system to stop the power creep and 'we only have to vote it in once' problem.
And it's not even strictly about 'easier' from the perspective of the worker. I imagine if you deal with police work and such spying probably seems a lot more reasonable since you're very exposed to the bad part of society, which does skew your view of the world, no matter how rational you think you are.
The same 2nd amendment from 1791 when the most firepower a government could have were cannons shooting round cannonballs?
Surely in 2025 a ragtag group of people with some revolvers, pistols, hunting rifles, and a small minority owning assault rifles, with limited ammo will be able to fight against the most well-funded armed force with tanks, IFVs, assault helicopters, aircrafts, missiles, rockets, and military infantry armed to the gills wearing NVGs.
People who think 2A will do anything in case your government actually turns violent on you are just trying to maintain the illusion of control.
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If you look at the groups brutalized by the government, including blacks, Hispanics, leftists, and peasents in central America, they all have something in common. They have far lower gun ownership rates than the less victimized groups like whites and the right.
Now, maybe the guns didn't do anything either way, but the data correlates pretty strongly with the people with guns being brutalized less than the people without them. It certainly isn't leading to the conclusion you seem to be aiming at. Even the people in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising bought a few extra hours before getting gassed because of their (smuggled) guns.
>>This is why people support the [1A], and why it was the [] most important thing to those who founded the country.
>Yet the government has continuously taken more and more power for decades on end, and the [1st] amendment hasn’t stopped it.
Ergo 1A advocates are larpers.
i know someone who is a single issue voter for guns.
he owes $33k after having a kid with crappy insurance. I asked him how guns would help and started on a rant about slippery slopes bla bla bla
I’m not even unsympathetic to the guns rights people. I just can’t square the. “We need guns to fight tyranny” with the constant screaming of “we’re falling into communism/fascisim/etc.” screeching s been doing since they learned those worlds.
Your 2A line sounds like a big joke. What are the armed citizens supposed to do? Shoot ICE? That would end well, I'm sure. The guns are fucking useless when most gun owners support the authoritarian government currently taking roots.
democracy in the US exists entirely because the common man was willing, and able, to do that
ICE are fat and woefully underqualified.
I thought that was the Texas national guard lol. Kinda surprised they didn’t take this “it’s fake” defense.
Ofc they do not. It is only about making money. As is free market. Actually they will always trade morals for profits if possible.
Ah, yes, because those <checks notes> communists and <checks notes again> feudal lords, theocratic regimes, monarchs and all manner of other non-capitalist societies have such a stellar track record of treating people well.
This isn't a capitalist or any other "ist" problem. It is a problem with society and social norms.
The cameras are there because people want them to be. The cameras get used because it is not politically toxic to do so. The use continues because the people objecting to the current abuse don't object on a principal level, they love the jackboot. They'd just rather see it used to levy ruinous fines upon middle class scofflaws (got I hate that word and the people who use it unironically) than whisk brown people off the street. Sure, different people would screech if the powers that be pivoted in that direction but at no point does the screeching add up to change because only the people who hate a specific abuse screech at any one time.
> they love the jackboot
yes, some people genuinely do, and some people don’t.
some people have absolutely no understanding of what surveillance tech is doing and where it is going.
in terms of the “ist” problem you refer to, at the end of the day, the real answer is to deny anyone that amount of power. whether it’s corporations, religions, governments, or billionaires. none of these should have enough power to sway the world to terrifying places. none of them, including govs, billionaires, or corporations.
somehow we need to achieve separation of money and state with as much vigor as we used to separate church and state.
we should be incentivizing the power from all of those groups to be dispersed as much as possible.
>somehow we need to achieve separation of money and state with as much vigor as we used to separate church and state.
This used to be called "equality under the law" and laws that could not be written equally or enforced equally were not written or overturned by the courts.
> This used to be called "equality under the law" and laws that could not be written equally or enforced equally were not written or overturned by the courts.
The US in particular had discrimination encoded in law for a long time. It took Rosa Parks in 1955 to end "white only" areas in public transport, and it took until 1965 until racial discrimination by law was finally outlawed.
"Equality under the law" always depends on who is considered to be part of the group that enjoys said equality. Even today, many countries still have laws on the books that discriminate between ethnicity and/or country of origin and/or citizenship. Just look at us in Europe - you usually have to be a citizen of an EU country to hold public office for example, residency is not enough. Or you got border patrol clearly profiling whom to control at a border checkpoint - whites get left alone and unbothered, non-whites get the full experience of what border control is allowed to do. That's not just discrimination, it's showing citizens that happen to have non-white skin that despite them being equal citizens by law, in practice there is no equality.
Don't forget women. They couldn't open bank accounts until when? In any case, I should have known better than to leave open the door to race baiting.
Focusing on race or any other distinction among the peasants is categorically missing the point. This isn't about peasants vs peasants. It's about peasants and small groups of peasants vs big moneyed interests. Some small time tire shop gets fined into oblivion for letting chemicals go down their drain meanwhile Jiffy Lube does that all day and doesn't get picked on because their lawyers can craft a story about why it's fine. In the old days everyone or nobody could dump it down the drain. Some homeowner can't put up an ADU because "hurr durr wetlands" but some megacorp can buy his land and put up a solar farm in the same damn wetlands because they can put fancy stuff on fancy letterhead and put it in front of the regulators. 100yr ago either everyone could build there or nobody could.
We've given our regulatory agencies massive, massive, discretionary power and insanely broad mandates. And what winds up happening is that they pick on the small and the weak because those targets are plentiful and easy. We created dragnet surveillance to "stop terrorists" (it was a crappy argument even then) and it gets used to round up brown people or chase down and bankrupt a random business because 1/20 of their trucks had a plate that was illegible to toll readers for years on end. We told the EPA to make the water clean and they go harass farmers for digging trenches. Don't get me started on the FDA and opium. NYPD couldn't get away with stop and frisk (well, they could and did for far too long but that's not the point) but law enforcement across the country can now stop damn near anyone for any BS pretext because a technological obfuscation layer gives them pretext (much like the fake bomb detectors we were selling to the Iraqis back in the day) and the scale and division of responsibility makes it hold up in court.
If one person or a small group can't do a thing then a big group shouldn't either. And if a big group can do a thing then the small group.
If it's ok for ICE to just stop brown people then it's ok for NYPD to do stop and frisk. And if that's not ok then adjust the law.
> If one person or a small group can't do a thing then a big group shouldn't either. And if a big group can do a thing then the small group. If it's ok for ICE to just stop brown people then it's ok for NYPD to do stop and frisk. And if that's not ok then adjust the law.
For what it's worth I fully agree with you!
The thing is, this just isn't achievable with modern politics. The big guns will always lobby for them to be exempted in some way, and even if only by funding the enforcement agencies only so limited that they have no way of enforcing the law againt the big fish.
And on top of that you got Conservatives (or whatever tries to sell themselves under that label these days) and Wilhoit's (misattributed) law [1]:
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_M._Wilhoit
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History also teaches us about communism but so many people refuse to accept that part of history and romance it.
So why wouldn’t any accept capitalism and ignore its flaws?
Nobody was talking about communism.
We should all learn from stalinists like you. Murdering 145 million people is quite the feat.
If anything, I'm a anti-ist, belonging to no-one.
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Silence, clanker.
Hey don't be so ageist, IBM is still around!
(Context, IBM helped the Nazis with recordkeeping.)
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_World_War_II
historical Big Tech was more than willing to help out the Axis powers.
IBM did a ton of business with the Nazis.
Keep voting for politicians that spend our money on weapons and violence, this is the stuff we'll keep getting. This applies to both major political parties in the US.
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u /hopelite is a 4 month old account with ~40 karma who mostly posts about european immigration
low-effort agit-prop bot
Wild how if a government does this directly most folks agree its dystopian and flip out, but let companies do it and, even if it ends up in the governments hands, people install it themselves...
Unpopular Opinion: good? I mean I like wish all the people who steal packages and break into cars in my neighborhood would get arrested.
Some serious boycotts need to be happening, and soon. I do not care if this was an R or a D administration, this has been out of control and just getting worse.
This is us against the oligarchs, not us against each other. And something makes me worried that there is an impending recession/depression and that these surveillance devices will be use to quell any dissent. (I say this because of the insane rise in the price of gold)
I, for one, am canceling my Amazon Prime account and avoiding amazon as much as I can in this dystopia where it is the only place you can buy many goods anymore.
Everybody is a libertarian when their political opposition has power.
The corollary is that, when in power, many "libertarians" are only concerned with their own rights and nobody else's, failing to understand that any rights they give up for others may soon be lost for them too.
It's just the brown people who are put in detention centers, isn't it?
Do you believe burglars have more rights in your home and to your things than you do? Then why do you apply that logic to others that then must suffer your abusive imposition of abuse? How about you just abuse yourself if you want to abuse.
Why does in your mind a "brown person" that is a foreign national who broke the law in and of America by entering and/or remaining in the USA, have more rights to have a job, make money, and even receive public assistance in America than a non-"brown person" that is a legitimate citizen of the USA?
What is worse, is that you don't even understand that your support of this kind of lawlessness is only for the purpose of allowing the rich to plunder the working and lower middle class, the real victims that through your words and actions hate with a passion.
Sure, burglars also benefit from burglarizing, but that does not make it any better than foreign nationals benefitting while the rich also use them like some crime boss in control of a burglary ring. How do you think, e.g., the home builders who make ~30% gross profit on homes that are poorly built due to "immigrant labor" report triple digit billion dollar returns?
You people baffle me that you cannot connect two dots as you at the same time lament that wages are too low, as you support floods of wage decreasing supply flooding "immigration".
No one is targeting "brown people" they just happen to be the majority of brown people the ruling class loves importing to profit from at the expense of the indigenous people, just like when the British and Hispanics did it through slavery. You are no different than the slavery rationalizers of the 17th-19th century. Today the ruling class just figured out how to manipulate you into supporting importation of brown people to undermine the indigenous people, and you don't have the intellect or integrity to understand you are being manipulated.
> Do you believe burglars have more rights in your home and to your things than you do?
Do you believe that you aren't presenting a ridiculous false dichotomy?
Like HN hasn't been railing against Ring and Flock since their inception. The only difference today is that there's a dangerously stupid arm of the government that now has access to it.
It's the exact same problem HN has been talking about for years except now a group of wannabe commandos who stake out in the parking lots of Mexican restaurants now have a tool where they can just type in their stereotypes and have the AI find them.
I wouldn't say that. I put what's good for our community first — above my own individual rights. That is not Libertarian and I have not wavered from that.
So so late. But just so vile, so reprehensible to see such a corrupt fallen disagreeable state of the world march over us.
I am stricken with fear over the control and manipulation by the Chinese state. A dominance over people without respect or regard, a self certainty and pomp that denies life & possibility.
But what the West is letting happen here, the limitless post-state open-for-anyone surveillance Flock & others are offering has seemingly even less bounds, less respect, less purpose, less direction. These people, this enterprise is clearly the worst possible thing we could do, the most awful accrual & misuse of the world against its people's. To spy on everyone & to without regard sell that days to everyone is a crime against all.
Flock is truly the #HostisHumaniGeneris. Woe & (all too expectable) disappointment to see Amazon giving up all their data to fascist pro ICE losers who, were we a descent society, we would run out of the world.
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Immigrants with no criminal record now largest group in ICE detention: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/26/immigrants-c...
ICE Agents Rappel from Helicopter in Overnight Chicago Raid, Dragging Kids from Beds to U-Hauls: https://people.com/ice-agents-overnight-chicago-raid-1182308...
Feds detain WGN-TV staffer, slam into resident’s car in Lincoln Square: https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2025/10/10/feds-arr...
We Found That More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days: https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-...
Videos of violent ICE interactions flood social media: https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/ice-agents-violent-...
I and many other US citizens were brutally imprisoned by CBP/DHS under Biden and no one gave a shit, and at the time it wasn't the cool hot topic for lawyers so ACLU and none of the civil rights lawyers I contacted were interested. I even pointed it out here on HN, I was accused of having it coming, it wasn't until Trump came into power that anyone other than my own family actually believed the story about DHS imprisoning me, dragging me around the state in a prisoner van, and insanely getting a retroactive warrant all over a completely fabricated PC of an unnamed dog alerting an unnamed officer (that as far as I know, didn't even exist).
Hopefully this will be a lesson to maybe start giving a shit about these things when they're being tested rather than when the heat gets cranked up against brown people.
DHS should've been abolished a long time ago. Biden was a wasted opportunity - all he did was preside over the already bad status quo instead of changing it for the better. I'm sorry this happened to you.
“All the people who are being deported right now…” That’s actually a lie, and it’s clear you know that because you already added that you don’t even care if it’s true.
People like you, who have never had an issue with any policy that might advantage them personally, have always existed. Of course you’re not suddenly the only one today!
To all the people talking about government surveillance do you not realize the government already can track you by your cell phone?
I have deniability with the phone. I can also just leave it at home if I want or turn it off entirely. That access should also be illegal without a warrant; however, this is far worse than cellular "metadata" tracking.
I don't understand why you assume that the government is following all the laws when it comes to cell phones and cloud data but won't when it comes to ring data?
What laws do you suppose they have to follow, exactly?
Cops need a warrant to track your phone, check which tower it connected to or tail your car for extended period of time.
Cops do not need a warrant to use Flock system. They have an app where they can simply put your license plate and they will get a path showing every move of your car as tracked by the flock cameras, and there are a looot of them (e.g. near San Jose: https://deflock.me/map#map=16/37.335318/-121.881316). And thats without the integration of ring.
This essentially allows them to GPS tag anyone, with no warrant, while "following the laws". So no, it's not all the same.
Well, they don't.
They definitely need to follow the law when they get it from the Telco, but Cops can use their CSS/IMSI catcher all they want, theres almost no way to tell. But they can not then go to court and say "Yeah—we listened to their phone call and searched the car."
With this its no problem. No Hailstorm to buy for the entire force and there isn't any federal oversight on this sort of thing as near as I can tell. If you think police don't do crimes I've got a bridge to sell you.
> or turn it off entirely
That part you can't do. Unless the battery is removed, phone can be turned back on remotely.
I can’t seem to figure out how this works with a Linux-based phone. Do you have any details?
Pull SIM card?
citation needed
https://www.idownloadblog.com/2021/12/16/ios-15-2-power-rese...
They can do it right up until the battery truly discharges. You can’t turn off WiFi/BT for real either. Icons will go dark and your WiFi and devices won’t work, but underneath the radios are still plenty active and powered on.
What "they" don't want you to know:
- You can disable this feature
- Disabling radios from Control Center behaves differently than from Settings
The Faraday cage wallet it is then.
Mine is often in airplane mode which makes tracking a little difficult.
this article with 1 comment is top of the front page for me, how come?
I believe they changed the algorithm a lot in the last 12+ months; I think bots and automation are becoming more and more of an issue - like everywhere else