211–220 of 261 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You joke but wireguard and, very easily, tailscale, solves most crap you normally need to fix. Close everything with ufw and put tailscale, and then you trivially have access from any device / desktop.
"and you trivially have access from any device / desktop" My definition of "trivial" seems to be different.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I'm not leaving a baby at home while I go on vacation. I would never be on another network, even. Why need the cloud?
Maybe you want it to be easy to grant a babysitter access to the cameras temporarily and not bother getting them VPN'en into your CCTV network. Maybe you want to check up on the babysitter (as creepy as that sounds, there might be good reasons). Or you're traveling but your partner is home, and you want to be able to see your sleeping child from half a world away. I do think we've gone to far in the direction of clou…
I hope you do tell them in advance. Secret surveillance is indeed in the creep territory.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because it’s easy and convenient for new parents. The typical parent has never heard of Synology or Ubiquiti, doesn’t have a NAS, and gets whatever tech their ISP gave/rents them.
There is no technical requirement for an easy-to-use baby monitor to be cloud-connected. If there is no easy-to-use baby monitor which is not cloud-connected, that is a market problem, not a technical problem.
A common use case for baby monitors is being able to wander short distances away and still listen in: Work in yard, talk to a neighbor, go out to the detached garage.
Having a baby monitor which is not tethered to the WiFi coverage is a selling point. Many cheap monitors are WiFi connected or use their own WiFi network and the range is limited.
A lot of people in this thread are also completely missing the selling points of Nanit which include breathing tracking and sleep tracking features. It’s a product that could technically be implemented locally with enough extra processing power and cloud servers for coordinating out of home access and bouncing notifications, but obviously the number of people who would pay extra for that (instead of trying to roll their own solution HN style) is not large.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe you want it to be easy to grant a babysitter access to the cameras temporarily and not bother getting them VPN'en into your CCTV network. Maybe you want to check up on the babysitter (as creepy as that sounds, there might be good reasons). Or you're traveling but your partner is home, and you want to be able to see your sleeping child from half a world away. I do think we've gone to far in the direction of clou…
"and you trivially have access from any device / desktop" I hope you do tell them in advance. Secret surveillance is indeed in the creep territory.
In HN style, I'm going to diverge from the content and rant about the company: Nanit needs this storage because they run cloud based baby cameras. Every Nanit user is uploading video and audio of their home/baby live to Nanit without any E2EE. It's a hot mic sending anything you say near it to the cloud. Their hardware essentially requires a subscription to use, even though it costs $200/camera. You must spend an add…
I actually don’t really get the point of a cloud service for this. Aren’t babies usually left in situations where there’s at least one trusted adult locally available?
Many cheap baby monitors are WiFi connected. You have to haul the video unit around and keep it live to hear when it cuts out, then move back toward where WiFi coverage was good.
This won’t seem like a big deal to someone who lives in an apartment or who has a house with 7 Ubiquiti APs covering everywhere inside and out, but it is a big deal to a parent who has a single WiFi router and wants to be able to do something like pull weeds in the yard, have a conversation with the neighbor, or go to a detached garage and work on a project without having to worry about their exact WiFi coverage at every moment to check on the baby.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course you don't _need_ it, but it's a useful convenience. Due to the layout of our house it was quite hard to hear my toddler if he was crying in the middle of the night - we often wouldn't wake up to it. So the monitor was very helpful.
Why on earth do you need an app and a camera? The same basic VTech audio monitors that are basically the same for many decades now work great, don't cost a fortune and there's no question of "where is this data going?" It's all just a big cash grab for people who need chincy tech toys for a non-problem that's better solved with way more simple kit.
The comment you’re replying to literally started by saying you don’t need it.
In HN style, I'm going to diverge from the content and rant about the company: Nanit needs this storage because they run cloud based baby cameras. Every Nanit user is uploading video and audio of their home/baby live to Nanit without any E2EE. It's a hot mic sending anything you say near it to the cloud. Their hardware essentially requires a subscription to use, even though it costs $200/camera. You must spend an add…
> Self-hosted video isn't that hard but no one makes a baby-monitor centric solution. It's not that easy. The only usecase that is actually really fucking easy is when both the camera and the device trying to access it is in the same network - broadcasts for discovery, that's it. Although I've seen people turn on "client isolation" in their wifi back when I did computer repairs, so it's not a given that this works! B…
Exactly. There are a lot of comments in this thread from people who are either non-parents or who haven’t lived in a situation where they didn’t have perfect WiFi coverage of their entire living area.
Being able to visit the neighbors or go out in the yard without worrying about missing baby monitor events is a huge advantage that many parents will pay for.
I think this entire comment section is a prime example of HN not understanding non-technical audiences.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I'm not leaving a baby at home while I go on vacation. I would never be on another network, even. Why need the cloud?
Because it’s easy and convenient for new parents. The typical parent has never heard of Synology or Ubiquiti, doesn’t have a NAS, and gets whatever tech their ISP gave/rents them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In other words, E2EE requires two or more clients, and only on these clients the information is in clear. In the case of this product, there is only one client (and a server). E2EE bills then down to having the traffic encrypted like you have with a https website.
No, this doesn't get at the point of end-to-end encryption. Better to look at it in terms of the parties involved -- E2EE implies that there are two or more parties , and that only some of those parties should have unencrypted access. In the case in point, the parent (camera owner) is one party and Nanit is another party. (Prior to the work in the linked post, AWS S3 was another party). The goal of E2EE is to deny pl…
> It’s all end-to-end encrypted
> The video is privately analyzed by your home hub using on-device intelligence to determine if people, pets, or cars are present.
You can use a cloud provider's infrastructure without giving it access to your material. My devices generate the content, my devices do the processing and analysis, I consume the content. The cloud just coordinates the data in flight, and stores it at rest, all encrypted. It's possible but most companies don't bother because they have to put effort and their "payoff" is that they can't monetize your data anymore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do all your comments seem LLM generated? You do clearly have something to contribute, but it’s probably better to just write what you’re talking about than going through a LLM.
They do not have anything to contribute. It's all made up. > Having worked extensively with battery systems, I think the grid storage potential of second-life EV batteries is more complex than it appears > Having worked extensively with computer vision models for our interview analysis system, > Having dealt with similar high-stakes outages in travel tech, the root cause here seems to be their dependency > Having gon…
This is also the reason I toned it down a bit, although I've never received a formal reprimand from dang he's often dropped by my threads containing such callouts when the original poster of the LLM comment disagreed with my assessment.