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Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

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Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#461

Post by boardwaalk »

gilfoy wrote: post #379

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 yo…

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…

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#462

Post by charcircuit »

somenameforme wrote: post #438
charcircuit wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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…

>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.

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#464

Post by ssl-3 »

browningstreet wrote: post #443

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?)

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#465

Post by ta1243 »

andrepd wrote: post #172
bryancoxwell wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#466

Post by ta1243 »

nik282000 wrote: post #412
Liftyee wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#467

Post by squigz »

spyder wrote: post #168
mikkupikku wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#469

Post by bob1029 »

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.

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#470

Post by e40 »

nik282000 wrote: post #389

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 s…

> For my 20 bucks a month I get cameras, a media server, password manager

Ok, I’m stumped, what service is this?

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