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TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML

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Re: TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML

#171

Post by lupire »

amalcon wrote: post #115
notatoad wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this seems like a pretty silly criticism - you have a feature that is both gated behind a per-site permission prompt and that has an option to globally turn it off, and you're still grumpy that it exists? if you don't like it turn it off. arguing that things shouldn't exist just because you choose not to use them is pretty selfish.

I mean... it does exist now, and I don't advocate taking it out since people have probably come to rely on it for some reason. Defaults matter, though, and I suspect[0] that a minority want this default. [0]- With only anecdotes supporting my suspicion; I haven't done a rigorous study.

It seems silly to ask for a release to be crippled just because a page does something obnoxious inside its own space. The solution to that is a URL allowlist or blocklist.

Re: TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML

#172

Post by coupdejarnac »

merelysounds wrote: post #45
Waterluvian wrote: post #27

A lot of totally valid opinions out there about this, but I personally _love_ how the browser is becoming a very well-featured sandbox for shipping applications. For personal fun and learning, I'm making a complete 2D video game in ideally less than 1MB. It has 60fps graphics, full spatial audio, and gamepad support, all because the browser has a lot of these APIs that didn't exist when I was starting out my career.…

> I personally _love_ how the browser is becoming a very well-featured sandbox for shipping applications. Same. My latest project is a waveform generator for wavetable synthesizers [1]; there are visualizations, as well as handling audio (not real time but still). I was surprised that I could build that as a web app and achieve good UX and performance. [1]: https://merely.xyz/waves

I love the Fourier transform animation.

Re: TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML

#173

Post by Silhouette »

ridgered4 wrote: post #89
Silhouette wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I habitually cover the camera on my phone when I'm not using it. It's just common sense for any connected device running complicated software without hardware switches to turn the sensors off reliably. The latter would be better of course but there wasn't a practical option for it last time I was looking for a new phone.

Last time I looked only the pinephone had hardware switches, and they were under the case making it kind of clunky to turn them on and off.

It's definitely a niche market at the moment. It really shouldn't be given the implications of connected devices, sensors like cameras and microphones, and where those devices get taken by many of their owners. I believe we would have a much safer and more resilient society today if the norm had become for connected devices to follow the principle of least privilege and for there to be complete transparency about how any kinds of sensors and any kind of remote communication operated. But apparently the market has spoken (even though in most cases it was only given one "choice" of what to say).

Re: TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML

#174

Post by meltedcapacitor »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #157
osrec wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for saying this, as I know a lot of people on HN have very negative feelings towards this trend. Personally, I feel the browser is a great way to stop reinventing the wheel, and the APIs abstract away a lot of the heavy lifting. They pretty much get you 80% of the way there, and the last 20% is where you can really add the stamp of "uniqueness" to your implementation. The fact that the browser is also heavily…

The browser is inefficient. Use a modern website on a ten year old laptop and it is close to unusable because of modern web dev practices. That laptop is still perfectly usable for a lot of things. The modern web drives obsolescence second only to gaming, but while gaming is user driven and entertainment focused (i.e. not essential), the web is megacorp driven and also includes necessary modern infrastructure. That i…

"modern web practices" may be more to blame than the browser. It's possible to make lean fast things running on browsers (within reason), but the culture is nobody gets fired for bloat. It's ubiquitous, same for mobile apps, server side, etc.

Re: TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML

#175

Post by loudmax »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #157
osrec wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for saying this, as I know a lot of people on HN have very negative feelings towards this trend. Personally, I feel the browser is a great way to stop reinventing the wheel, and the APIs abstract away a lot of the heavy lifting. They pretty much get you 80% of the way there, and the last 20% is where you can really add the stamp of "uniqueness" to your implementation. The fact that the browser is also heavily…

The browser is inefficient. Use a modern website on a ten year old laptop and it is close to unusable because of modern web dev practices. That laptop is still perfectly usable for a lot of things. The modern web drives obsolescence second only to gaming, but while gaming is user driven and entertainment focused (i.e. not essential), the web is megacorp driven and also includes necessary modern infrastructure. That i…

There's no desktop standard. Desktop operating systems are either proprietary or niche. Any application you write needs to be ported again to each operating system separately.

The web is the closest thing there is to a ubiquitous operating system. And with the development around WASM, performance and efficiency is getting closer and closer to native. That's along with built-in security and sandboxing.

This is all around a good thing.

Re: TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML

#176

Post by zikduruqe »

Starmina wrote: post #109
_tom_ wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are apps for turning old phones into dashcams and security cams, too. Why waste an old phone?

Not the same but for a more pro approach and allowing to stream to a RTSP Server I use LARIX Broadcaster, which is both available on android and iOS and it's just superb to turn an old phone into a camera, ofc you'd need an other software to actually detect movement and such from the RTSP feed. Scrypted can do that (for example)

A friend of mine swears by https://zoneminder.com

Re: TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML

#177

Post by water8 »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #155
madelyn wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ship an entire physical PC to the user pre-loaded with the application? A phone (hi iOS), a video game console, a smart appliance, etc. are examples of this. Building cross platform, native applications is expensive (comparatively) to building web applications. I made an FM synthesizer in the browser using WASM and the webaudio api just for personal use. I wouldn't have made it if I had to write it as a native app,…

> A phone (hi iOS), a video game console, a smart appliance, etc. are examples of this. Related to this: iirc, games for the Xbox One (and presumable the latest generation 'Series' consoles) always run in a VM, with their own kernel and graphics drivers.

Could be for backwards/intergenerational compatibility because and hardware is no longer standardized for a console generation

Re: TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML

#178

Post by JohnFen »

acdha wrote: post #159
JohnFen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not arguing that the trend is a bad one, but it does come with downsides that are significant for some. For instance, I certainly don't want every random website I might visit to have access to these abilities. It just strikes me as an unnecessary security risk.

What exactly is the security risk? The browser intermediates all access and you already trust the browser to handle many other sensitive operations on your behalf. There's no way for a site to activate this without your approval or covertly without a full zero-day (probably two since most OSes also have recording indicators now). Contrast this with where we were in the bad old days: sites used things like plugins or…

The security risk is that advanced functionality is available to all websites. Even if the browser itself is actually a perfect sandbox (and I don't think that's a claim anyone would make), it's still a security problem because a lot of mischief can be done within those parameters, such as tracking, fingerprinting, and other forms of spying.

> Contrast this with where we were in the bad old days

In the "bad old days", you could decide not to install plugins, choose which ones to install, etc. You could customize the attack surface you're willing to present. That ability is seriously constrained now.

Understand that my complaint is about web browsers allowing websites to do these things. In effect, it's allowing any random website to have the power of a natively installed application. This is a bad thing in my view because with native applications, I could decide which ones were and were not acceptable to me. That's extremely difficult now that the browser gives that power to every website.

Re: TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML

#179

Post by amelius »

ryandrake wrote: post #99
osrec wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for saying this, as I know a lot of people on HN have very negative feelings towards this trend. Personally, I feel the browser is a great way to stop reinventing the wheel, and the APIs abstract away a lot of the heavy lifting. They pretty much get you 80% of the way there, and the last 20% is where you can really add the stamp of "uniqueness" to your implementation. The fact that the browser is also heavily…

It just feels like every time software developers can't (or won't) build things cross-platform, users end up with bigger and bloatier solutions and poorer experiences. First, it was cross-platform UI toolkits and OS abstractions like Qt (require users to use a big, "lowest common denominator compromise" library ) Then, it was web apps (require users to provide a browser) Then, it was Electron and friends (ship the wh…

The problem with HTML is that it is not a layered technology. It's all or nothing.

And sadly it will get more complicated over time.

I just figured that at some point we should start over with a very simple sandbox that allows to run all the webgl renderers, javascript interpreters, css parsers, and whatnot, inside it. This simple sandbox would also be more secure, because of its simplicity.

Re: TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML

#180

Post by jcynix »

choeger wrote: post #134
ryandrake wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just feels like every time software developers can't (or won't) build things cross-platform, users end up with bigger and bloatier solutions and poorer experiences. First, it was cross-platform UI toolkits and OS abstractions like Qt (require users to use a big, "lowest common denominator compromise" library ) Then, it was web apps (require users to provide a browser) Then, it was Electron and friends (ship the wh…

You're absolutely correct. IMO, the reason is, to a large degree, ineptness of software engineers. It simply doesn't pay to hire or train high-quality SEs, if you're not google or Amazon (and even they probably only hire and pay the best to prevent competition). Instead, the industry as a whole hands out more "productive" tools, i.e., the abstraction layers you mentioned, in order to build ever more trivial applicati…

> You're absolutely correct. IMO, the reason is, to a large degree, ineptness of software engineers.

Hmm, software engineers? IMO the culprits are "greedy" managers who didn't like (and still don't like) common libraries, file systems etc. Motto: "It must be my standard, or else ..." Where's the common (license free and secure, encryptable) standardised file system, to exchange data between all platforms, including digital cameras and other gadgets? Where's the graphics API? Java tried to answer some of these questions, but failed miserably IMHO.

My experience: as soon as I learned to use some API or framework, at least two new APIs or frameworks showed up posing as the best thing since sliced bread. Sorry for the sarcasm, but I lost my optimism regarding software development some years ago.

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