> A spokesperson from Ring sent a statement saying, "Like any wifi-enabled device, WiFi signal interference may affect Ring device performance. If customers are experiencing issues with connectivity, we encourage them to reach out to Ring Customer Support."
If you're a connoisseur of corp-speak, this is the 100% pure undiluted stuff. You must need a degree in Communications and 10 years experience to talk like that.
"A spokesperson, when asked to talk about an issue, found the most irrelevant issue that technically is related, and gave a useless answer for dealing with the unrelated issue instead of actually talking about the problem at hand"
It would require the PR person to commit career suicide - Ring's usage of words like "security" and " protect" in their descriptions of the camera systems, coupled with the fact that neither Ring nor Nest has a hardwired network option (or, better yet, PoE), there is hardly a surprise there.
As an individual customer buying a product: I don't care about the career of a corporate mouthpiece: I want the corporation that sold me something and claimed to be looking out for me to not be a piece of trash.
>>I want the corporation that sold me something and claimed to be looking out for me to not be a piece of trash.
That's the problem though - they already sold you something. They have your money. That's where the interest and care usually ends for most companies, because any potential future money to be extracted from you is just that - potential. If their issues prevented you from giving you money in the first place, then that's a completely different question, but that's kinda hard to prove.
I don't see what prevents a determined user from removing the built-in antenna, and run a coaxial cable with suitable characteristic impedance from the WiFi doorbell's u.FL connector to a cheap WiFi dongle somewhere inside (perhaps add an attenuator if the lowest transmit powers are too high).
I simply constructively suggest to bypass jamming concerns for the 2.4GHz link, by having the devices communicate more privately over coaxial cable.
From the perspective of the radios in the doorbell or a wifi dongle it doesn't matter if you are transceiving via antenna over the ether or transceiving over coax, as long as you use a suitable characteristic impedance.
For a person who doesn't understand cars perhaps changing a tire feels like "Frankensteining" too...
I suggest you reconsider the downvote but predict the suggestion to be in vain.
The quote of your parent was:
> neither Ring nor Nest has a hardwired network option (or, better yet, PoE)
so it's not entirely honest when you say:
> The poster pointed said Ring didn't have an ethernet/PoE option.
(eliding that this person made a more general statement: not having a hardwired connection)
So I think my point stands that it does have a hardwired connector (transmission line to u.FL) and that it isn't broken out.
Those who wish their security camera to function in a mission critical setting (like working when it's supposed to work, even in the face of wireless jamming) I make a practical suggestion (as opposed to lamenting the idiocy of the average uninformed consumer when selecting a WiFi doorbell, like I read in other comments on this HN submission).
All it requires is to disassemble the doorbell a little, to remove the WiFi antenna, to drill a small hole in the plastic casing, and to attach a coaxial cable.
Do you remember old ethernet? it ran over coax too.
If most posters on this HN submission lament the idiocy of the consumer when selecting a WiFi security doorbell, those consumers can only conclude to buy another model, with the older one ending up in a landfill or at least unused. It is more ecological to fix the design, and thankfully WiFi antenna is a separate PCB so theres a u.FL connector for a coax to connect to, internally. This way these doorbells can continue to be used.
In trying to understand why a person would consider running a WiFi network over a coaxial cable a Frankenstein-like idea, I can only conclude it stems from a form of xenophobia: it is easy to believe that everything is the way it is because its the best way to handle things. In fact as a transmission line coaxial cables are superior to "ethernet" cables, its just that the latter are much cheaper to manufacture. This resulted in the (economical) dominance of "ethernet" cables. It is then only one misconception away to erroneously believe non-coaxial cables were chosen for their superior performance, when in fact its just a cost trade-off. So I conclude you are not too familiar with physics or electronics, else you would not call this Frankensteining.
Don't know if you didn't reply to whom you intended, or whatever, but I assure you, my response was quite "accurate".
> All it requires is to disassemble the doorbell a little, to remove the WiFi antenna, to drill a small hole in the plastic casing, and to attach a coaxial cable.
I can disassemble things with plastic latches. I can solder wires to boards. I can add ICs to pads and add tiny rework wires and CA them all down pretty. This doesn't mean they're "included".
I didn't know you couldn't downvote the person one replies to. Thank you for pointing this out, so I retract the suggestion for you to remove the downvote.
That is correct, my suggestion requires one to buy a coaxial cable of suitable characteristic impedance at the required frequency, and some u.FL connector(s), they are obviously not included in the doorbell.
Drilling a hole in a plastic casing, and installing a connector on bare coaxial wire is pretty simple, one just looks up the steps and performs them. I consider it much easier than PCB board rework (which isn't necessary in my suggestion: just disconnect the u.FL-connected PCB antenna, and attach the coaxial cable).
I finally see what you mean: my comment was indeed supposed to reply to the parent T3OU-736 commenter. I switched devices, and your comment made the relevant quote more prominent as opposed to some part in the middle of a sentence...
Yes, I understand how to plug something in to a u.FL connector. That was my point: I can kinda tack anything onto anything else dead-bug style, but it isn't "included".
The point of a Ring doorbell is to get something that just works-- not to string lots of high frequency coax, dedicate a wifi radio on the other side, figure out appropriate attenuation (probably want about 65dB total between coax and pad from 20dBm to -45dBm), and troubleshoot inevitable resulting fuckery.
If you'd come at things from another angle--- replying to the post above, and say-- well, you actually could just patch right into the wifi radio and run coax!-- your comment might have been favorably received.
One wouldn't need special high frequency coax. Bog standard RG-58/U for example has about 1dB loss per meter (or yard). The loss in the cable means less attenuation will be needed.
Quite possibly most WiFi radios can reach low transmit and high receive levels, as some devices are placed in proximity and some at large distance.
A top brand 20 dB attenuator can be had for less than $4...
As I said, you'd have to find out the characteristic impedance at the u.FL connector first, and then select the appropriate coax (obviously at the frequency of interest).
BTW does the PoE doorbell you linked actually have an ethernet network, or does it just use it for power?
I fully concede my original comment should have replied your parent, but the following replies were responses to the contents of your comments (Frankenstein, etc.)
That's hardwired for power (from the doorbell transformer) not for networking, though at least it does store "up to an hour" of video offline locally. I have a cheap but totally unreliable Wyze doorbell, which also is wired in for power, but has no local storage (unlike the Wyze cams, which record to sdhc along with the cloud).
How fast is the McDonald's wifi or how slowly does one have to drive past to get a 1 hour video uploaded? Sure, it's MP4 compressed, but still 1 hour at 1Mbps is still a 3GB file.
I haven't been to MickD's in a really long time, but do they have free/open wifi with no captive portals? Seems like a big liability risk for a corp their size (or any fast food chain) to have it wide open.
I know some Arby's are semi open wifi. They do have a web client after connecting that I think authenticates you somehow. But I have no idea what it's actually doing.
"And if your Wi-Fi is spotty one day, you still won’t miss any important moments. The new Nest Doorbell will automatically record an hour’s worth of important events to its local memory."
To be fair, I feel like these things aren't real security devices. They're better rhan nothing, but highly vulnerable to any number of attacks, privacy issues, etc. These are convience devices sold to make people feel safer.
Absolutely; they are not. I didn't get one to use as a security device, in fact my requirement was probably not very typical, but; I can't hear my doorbell from my home office, and I wanted a "connected" doorbell which doesn't have to have a cloud connection so went for the AD410.
I have Home Assistant set up to flash my desk lamp and play a little tune on an ESP32 speaker under my desk when someone rings it; the video part is just an added bonus.
Besides ripping them off, a spray can might do "wonders" to the video quality. Yes, you might have a video clip of the spraying, but if a cloaked perpetrator does it …
True. A decent secure implementation, beside ditching wireless which is step 0, would imply more cameras facing each other and their surroundings, plus other areas in which the thieves don't expect to be watched and could either travel in their own cars or with the hood off.
Indeed. A doorbell camera is really not a security device, I don't have one for that purpose, nor should anyone else; I real security device needs to be out of reach and hard wired.
This is like saying "a security camera that's wired to a central recorder should still work for a few minutes even if someone cuts through the wire." It's indeed a feature that you could add to a device, but it's clear that it would increase the cost and _not_ clear that it would be worth that cost.
WiFi even in perfect conditions is much less reliable than a wired connection, so a security device that is dependent on wifi should have a buffer, even if a wired device would not.
I can take measures to secure wired connection (metal / armored conduit as an example) there are very very limit to no measures you can take to prevent signal jamming
The feature being an in-memory buffer that can store a few minutes of not-particularly-highres, mostly stationary video? I'm surprised Ring doesn't seem to have that already -- although the article does talk about missing hours, which implies the jammer was activated long before the actual heist.
He dismisses the fact that most cameras have flash storage inside and don’t need a network connection. Others can use Ethernet. He mentions wifi-enabled when it is wifi-required.
"Might we suggest upgrading to the Ring Camera Elite, sir? Our new extra shiny, twice the price ELITE doorbell is exquisitely suited to one with such exceptionally high requirements. I'll just add that to your basket, would you like me to complete the order for you with card ending 2008, sir?"
I went with the wired network route. I'm sure to most people it seems like the more secure route, but it's important to realize that for outside cameras, you now have ethernet connections accessible from outside. Jamming WiFi is a denies you the ability to record, but external ethernet gives them access to your network. I went with building an isolated network, but I think that's outside the relm of what most consumers can do. A WiFi camera, while not perfect, really does give you the best bang for the buck.
I'm sure we all know that most residential locks can be picked with relative ease, but criminals rarely go through the trouble. The one time a person did "break in" to my house, they just opened an unlocked door. Usually I keep that door locked, a large piece of plywood in front of it, and a table saw braced up against that. Just so happened I worked on a project that day and just forgot to lock the door. Lucky break for her, but trying enough doorknobs she was bound for find some. She had gotten into two other houses that night. She was also tripped out on meth and couldn't have operated a WiFi jammer if she wanted to.
So, yea, a WiFi camera isn't great, but it's still going to get 99% of criminals out there. Next we just need WiFi jammer alarms.
> So, yea, a WiFi camera isn't great, but it's still going to get 99% of criminals out there. Next we just need WiFi jammer alarms.
All we need is onboard storage to record a couple hours of video locally which can then be synced when the connection is back again. Right? That doesn't fix real-time information transmission, but video is most often important for finding suspects after the fact.
Sounds like you think law enforcement actually give a shit about/can do anything toward solving burglary crime.
Maybe it's better in other countries, but 5% solve rate sounds like they go and knock on the doors of the local known burglars to see if they still got the goods lying around.
I actually work in LE and video from domestic and commercial security cameras are always a major piece of information that we look for in every single investigation. So... Yes, LE gives a shit in many countries.
However, also in many countries, like my own, police is very under staffed and burglaries are often on the bottom of the priorities list. Armed robberies, murders, shootings, stabbings, explosions, fires, domestic abuse, rape, to name a few, are the ones that get the highest priority. And those things take a lot of work to find suspects, prove what they're suspected of, write it down and get them convicted.
A case, unfortunately, isn't finished when you catch a suspect. It's a crap load of work to get someone convicted and that gets massively underestimated by people who only read statistics and conclude that LE doesn't care... Most of us do, which is why we join the field.
Same, used to work for one of the largest depts in the us, the part 1 crimes that are violent really take up the mindshare in a violent city. Cameras only tell so much, the flyers go out with what is found. Lots of people don’t snitch either. We are relying a lot more on technology not just registries of voluntary ring locations but LPRs etc. I think the goal is to get around no snitching.
I had WiFi cameras until my friend showed me how his cameras were jammed when his neighbour had a broad daylight burglary. A van pulled up and a second later the video was completely jammed. Then five minutes later it comes back to normal, but neighbour doors were smashed in.
So I got a wired network now, on a separate LAN and have two cameras on each perimeter, so if someone tries to cut the cable (unfortunately I was unable to run the cables inside the wall, so they run in PVC pipes attached to the wall), I very least should have that recorded. Also all my cameras are 4k. The cameras also record to built in SD card. There are also two servers hidden each is pulling the videos from DVR to back up and then one copy is uploaded to external server.
Why not a physically separate network? If all you care about is catching outside problems like porch pirates, car thieves, and dogs owners who don't clean up after their pets just run cables from each camera to a switch that's connected to a single machine that isn't on your network or the internet.
Cameras inside the house get internet access, so intruders can't just walk off with your footage, but external camera feeds are fine to be stored locally.
That'd take very little skill to set up, prevents anyone from using those external connections to get at the rest of your network or abuse your internet connection,you don't have to worry about jammers, the police won't be accessing your feed whenever they feel like it, and Amazon won't be keeping detailed logs of everyone who comes to your door, how often you have company over, what your daily/weekly schedule is like, how often you get food delivered, what kinds of clothing you and your guests are wearing, how many children are in your home, how many pets, how often you go out on the weekends vs staying inside, how often you vacation and for how long, how many friends you have, how often you have non-amazon packages delivered, what kind of car you drive, etc
Pour gasoline over the cameras, then light it, and you can burn the whole house down destroying the footage and killing everyone inside!
You can't build a system that's immune to every possible type of attack, but fortunately you don't have to. Most people will never catch a single "bad guy" with their camera set up, and will never have anyone mess with the system at all. That doesn't mean it's not a good idea to take a few simple steps to better protect yourself, your family, your packages, your network and your privacy. If you see value in having your surroundings captured on camera you can gain a lot of benefits for a small amount of effort by throwing your ring cameras in the trash and setting up a dedicated network for their replacements.
I take the lazy VLAN route, then. Ideally, I can plan all this out during construction, and run conduit through all walls, have electrical outlets near each ideal switch location, and so on. But in most homes that are not previously owned by tech-geeks, re-wiring properly means busting down drywall. If you own the home, it's a major pain, and if you rent, it's impossible.
Typically the things on my home network that need to be isolated and/or revoked Internet access are not in physical proximity with one another, so using a separate switch for them means a lot more wiring. It is much simpler to just run devices to the nearest already existing switch and do the isolation in software. This also cuts down on the number of switches which means fewer points of failure.
Because we've already got the skills to secure a shared network I don't blame you. On the other hand though there's some benefit to redundancy too. if your switch dies it'd be nice to be able to take the cameras offline and swap in the working switch so your internet stays up while you wait for the new one to arrive.
For the crowd who can't isolate the cameras from the rest of their network and don't already have a bunch of networking equipment laying around though a dedicated network for the security cams is a easy solution that offers a lot of advantages over a ring cam.
Worth noting even the cheapest router chipsets normally support vlan tagging, so with a sub $100 router you can flash an opensource firmware on it like openwrt and then isolate network traffic on each port and filter it with iptables.
What use is getting access to the network these day anyway? Everything has moved to a model of not trusting the network or anything else on it. I guess they could cast something to your chrome cast?
Are you sure everything has? Smart appliances in particular are typically terrible with security, so having access to their network certainly gives you an edge.
Guys I mean it, i just bought a brand new fiber router (AVM fritz.box) and the first thing firefox would like me to do is to switch to the http version of said configuration page.
Chrome lets me add an exception for the box itself, but really how many end user do you know that will not click on "take me to the http version(unsafe)", when talking about their home router?
So given the fact that I am in your wifi, One could use dhcp (if active) for MITM attacks, grab the router password and install tracking daemons right on top.
Next step would be to forward the dns requests to one of mine so I can build a map of what sites you use and from there all I have to to is to make you accept an insecure ssl cert and done?
> I went with building an isolated network, but I think that's outside the relm of what most consumers can do.
An off-the-shelf consumer PVR that uses wired ethernet typically has its own integrated PoE switch on its own subnet. Maybe it will route to your LAN if you probe the private ranges, but it's also a fairly straightforward software issue to fix - nothing fundamental to the arrangement, and at no additional marginal cost.
I suggest a physically separate network for ip based security systems. The GPs concerns are also why most wired CCTV at the higher end is often not ethernet, but there are ways to secure ethernet even externally (camera housings that are basically safes, very high placement that would require a ladder to get to, etc)
The term you are looking for is "high-security", which covers the private industry side, DoD has others at play. Also dont forget the value of having custom welding done.
Thanks, my initial search found cameras for oil rigs, which minimized sparks :) I've used carriage bolts to reinforce steel enclosures, with single-use wire rope seals for tamper detection on covers, minimizing exposure of the clamping point.
Axis P1204 has a small camera sensor separated from the camera body by a 25' cable, which makes it easier to enclose and secure the camera body. Not seen that elsewhere, must be a proprietary protocol on that cable, e.g. RPi camera sensor cables can only be a few cm.
i just bought a reolink RLC-823A Smart 8MP PTZ PoE Camera with Spotlights
It is build like a tank and fully aluminium. If you mount it right you easily can hold a person from it. I bascially made a hole through the wall for the cables and mounted it directly to the outside wall.
For now im quite confident that nobody will be able to remove it without much fuzz
Wouldn't you, ya know, see a baddie disconnecting/destroying your camera and connecting their CP downloading device or whatever they're planning to do on your network?
I think you can encrypt ethernet comms too using 802.1x RADIUS. That's as secure as Wi-Fi and removes the need for an isolated network (which, when unencrypted isn't as secure as you think, e.g. MiTM). Ideally you connect via both but that's overkill for most use cases.
> I went with building an isolated network, but I think that's outside the relm of what most consumers can do.
A bit off topic, but can we please stop calling people "consumers"? It's such a weird and patronising term, not to mention completely unnecessary when "people" does a better job.
> can we please stop calling people "consumers"? It's such a weird and patronising term, not to mention completely unnecessary when "people" does a better job.
"Consumer" IS the technically more accurate term, as outside of the consumption of tech/services as designed for them, they do not venture beyond that realm & try to understand how the tech works.
Similar analogies include:
- Not caring about how a car works internally, & leaving its repair & maintenance to a mechanic.
- Not caring about how their dishes were made, & leaving that to cooks/chefs.
- Not caring about the minutiae of the law, & leaving that to the legal system & its lawyers & judges.
- Not caring about sewer maintenance, & leaving that for sewage workers.
- Not caring about recyclables processing, & leaving that for recycling plants.
- Not caring about Y, and leaving that for (workers/entities that work with Y).
All of us are consumers in some form or another: We require the services of others that require the services of others that require the services of others ad infinitum.
I'll go ahead and say I mostly agree. I don't like being called some kind of sink, evaporator, diminisher or resource-terminator. Though granted, in English, these connotations are not as prevalent as in my language.
In my language, employers are routinely called "work-givers", employees are "work-takers", even though we have a perfectly fine "employee" term. I hate how it introduces a power relationship into the terms themselves.
But I also know it's a lost fight. I once specifically used the neutral term for employee in a work contract I wrote - which was best practice just a few decades ago. It was immediately changed.
I think consumer/customer is the right term in this situation. Even though I could build an isolated network with ethernet cables and security camera's, we're usually left with the other people, myself included, that wouldn't always be able to do research and come up with the best solution. That's why I want to outsource that by purchasing something. Which is why we're left with this freemarket of vulnerable devices and practises. People setting up security camera's usually do a good job. Consumers do not.
Of course wireless networks are subject to jamming attacks. Of course, therefore, a security system that uses those wireless networks will be subject to the same attacks. Why is anyone surprised? Aside from the fact it took this long for an exploit to hit the news.
Criminals (and cops and reporters...) aren't the most tech-savvy, so it's useful to know when possible attacks are actually used. Like, it took over a year (and it going viral on TikTok) for thieves outside Milwaukee to catch on that late model Kia/Hyundais are as easy to steal as 90's Hondas.
That said, I'm not convinced the criminals in this case jammed anything; she said hours were missing and car thieves aren't sticking around that long, and balaclavas are still cheap. And the techie "of course you need to hardwire everything" is extraordinarily unhelpful.
Actually being useful would be spreading knowledge that deauth attacks can be prevented with 802.11w (even other posters here don't seem to know that!), and pointing out what supports that and how to enable it. Or promoting cameras with enough local storage to mitigate being disconnected for a half hour or so, which is also useful for power outages...
Thank both of you for proving my point that you all will irrationally argue "any even marginally imperfect security is completely and utterly pointless" in literally any context.
Worrying about criminals jamming wifi is the distraction, because criminals definitely carry around microwaves and portable kilowatt power sources, or implement novel DoS attacks, all just to temporarily disconnect cameras that if it's competent, cached all the video locally anyway.
Why not worry about criminals cutting mains power? That'd kill most wired cameras even harder than battery-powered wireless ones.
> The key takeaway of our analysis is that currently there exist diverse ways of abusing SAE to inflict DoS, and, excluding software bugs, some of them are rather due to misconceptions or conjectures done while implementing the standard.
The criminals we don’t hear about because they don’t get caught go to great lengths to achieve their goals. As one person said, they have two jobs - committing the crime, and not making a mistake that can get them caught. It only takes one small slip up in most cases documented.
I think it’s a great mental exercise akin to escape rooms or Tetris.
It is my experience that local law enforcement put very little effort into solving property crime. The effort rises dramatically if the victim is a cop (or is related to one), a politician gets involved or the media reports on the crime.
As one example, after my father died, people were using his credit cards and checkbook to steal money (until the Master Death File sent his details to banks). The police said that this crime was so common that they did not investigate (nor refer anything to the district attorney) when the theft is below $250k. A casual mention that dad was a volunteer cop, and had been for 9 years lit a fire under the police and they had investigated and arrested the perps within 2 weeks.
One of the perps worked at his doctor's office and had access to his records (including payment details). She had plead to a lesser charge and when her parole officer visited her office and checked the office computer records, it turns out that he wasn't the only victim of this sort of thing (emptying dead people's bank accounts). Additionally, she was using the doctor's office computer to issue narcotics prescriptions that she also sold.
Which shows how short-sighted not investigating "this" crime is. Anyone willing to go to those lengths is probably committing multiple crimes, maybe some worse.
Today in most areas (at least in the US) Normally that means just getting away without interacting with the cops at the moment sometimes not even that is required
the defund police movement, bail reform, and many other political movements have more or less decriminalized property crime
Unless you have a gun, are violent (sometimes not even then), or steal from a politically connected person chances are the police in the US will do nothing for normal everyday theft from a normal everyday person
Anyone who is tech savvy enough to be on Hacker News isn't going to be shocked.
However MOST people don't understand the technology. As the resident IT person in my family/friends, I've been asked about this sort of thing on a regular basis. Everytime I talk them through the convenience vs security. Without fail people are surprised by the idea of being easy to "jam" wifi.
Even some of the tech savvy don't realize how cheap it is to build a deauther. I can get ESP8266 units for less than $2 each and load up pre-made deauth firmware from Github in a matter of minutes.
Heck, I've seen some projects involving trying to diy short range digital comms accidentally turn into a jammer which will mess with anything in the 2.4Ghz band. All it takes is a VCO and the wrong (or right, depending on purpose) circuit attached to it.
> However MOST people don't understand the technology.
More than that, people are being intentionally mislead by Amazon who is well aware of the massive vulnerabilities their products have, but still advertise their devices as being secure and able to protect the customer. They even have police going door to door shilling for them.
It's perfectly reasonable for people to believe tech companies and Officer Friendly when they both say a ring camera is a smart purchase and they should buy one. They should feel betrayed when they find out they bought a device that's trivial to bypass and the best Amazon has to offer by way of a solution is that they waste their time calling customer support who can do nothing for them.
Not to fear though, as it is against FCC regulations to interfere with a radio signal. We all know criminals fear the FCC more than any other law enforcement agency.
Also, this whole interference issues is like a big DUH!!! There's a label on the devices (or at least the docs provided) with the FCC logo that states that the device much accept that interference or however the labels are worded. I don't have anything within arms reach with one of those labels.
Naw, they're too busy mediating Starlink and Dish bickering, or trying to convince people 5G isn't going to give you cancer and crash planes, or reversing net neutrality.
Everyone saying you should hardwire these cameras is right, of course. But what you are missing is that the majority of people (at least in the US) are renters (or otherwise have restrictions), which means you can’t wire cameras. Wireless cameras and doorbells are crucial for renters having any semblance of security.
> But what you are missing is that the majority of people (at least in the US) are renters (or otherwise have restrictions)
According to the St Louis Fed 65% of US households are home-owners[1]. Now if there is some other data about "or otherwise have restrictions" to show how it becomes a majority of US, I would be interested in seeing that.
Condos is a possibility. But if the HOA allows a WiFi camera on the outside of a house, then I can't see why they wouldn't allow a wired camera on the outside of a house.
There is a product called "ghost wire" - about 6 inches of paper thin Ethernet specifically formed for fitting into the gap between a window frame and the sliding glass. The Ethernet itself is shaped like the letter "U", so it conforms to the paper thin gap and the window still operates normal. These are designed to enable Ethernet to transparently (without building alteration) be added to properties that cannot/shouldn't be altered.
If you are relying on the cameras for deterrence though then even wiring them wouldn't help. The burglars or thieves would activate their jammer and then attack the house without realizing the jamming was ineffective.
I saw a wifi camera that replaces a lightbulb. It takes power from the light socket. I don't see why you couldn't make one that also used the power line as a network cable, too. Would require no installation and could be used at your next house.
Power line as network cable is a thing, it's called power line communication (PLC, [1]). It was used in some home automation hardware back in the day, probably still used in industrial setting. AFAIU the noise is too high to be useable in residential
Power line Comms is very much alive in residential settings... There are devices that can cram gigabit data rates onto home AC wiring. They're a great alternative to running new ethernet runs.
They are controversial with other radio users, because while the devices themselves don't emit much RF energy, your home wiring and wiring in the street will typically radiate most of the high frequency data into the air, disrupting FM radio and lots of other sub 500 Mhz radio users.
> I was trying to get a good signal upstairs, downstairs, and outside at the same time. I didn't want to run an Ethernet cable out a window or drill a hole in a wall or floor, so I was stuck with moving around a Wi-Fi access point. That was until I realized that I already had wire in the walls—coax cable! But wait, you can't use coax cable for Ethernet communication, can you? The answer turned out to be yes, you can!
No or at least the one I have does not. It's similar to this one on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09KMVD13T). I was just looking for a quick and simple solution to check for package delivery. (I'm disabled; so, just hopping up and checking the front porch isn't simple.) I have the camera's app on an old phone, sitting on my desk. It detects motion and I can control it to check the entire porch. Not as good as a wired system; but, it works.
hardware required for isolation of powerline communication is gonna be hard to stuff in that small of a space.
Powerline tends to be sorta unreliable and only runs at like 5-15% of the rated max speed, but if you had buffering at the camera to ensure all frames made it to the otherside, you could work around that.
> Wireless cameras and doorbells are crucial for renters having any semblance of security.
This seems hyperbolic to me. You don’t need internet connected cameras and doorbells for your home to have a semblance of security. That’s what locks are for, and maybe a big fence behind the house.
Most people won’t ever have their home broken in to - according to a quick Google there were ~192,000 burglaries reported in 2021 in England & Wales. Extrapolate that over a typical lifetime and you’ll see 15.3 million nationwide, which for a population of about 65 million people means 76% of people never have anyone break in.
Wireless cameras and doorbells are, on the whole, products which rather than giving peace of mind leave people constantly worried that someone is going to do something, after all, we can see the constant stream of suspicious looking people setting of the motion detection.
It should be based on households rather than population. There were 24,782,800 households in England and Wales on the last Census Day in 2021. Meaning by your other figures/logic, you have a 62% chance of being burgled at some point if you live in England or Wales. I.e, you're more likely to get burgled than not.
Good point, and does definitely push the numbers towards the risk being somewhat higher than I intuitively think of. I still won’t be fitting cameras all over my property though!
It is also making the assumption that adding cameras to your house makes you unburglable, which is far from true. Not that it doesn't reduce the likelihood.
All the camera allows you to do is point at some vaguely humanoid figures in your house to the police (who will likely not be able to do anything about it) and to your insurance (who likely would have paid out anyway)
What I'd like to know is if turning your house into a fortress makes you _more_ of a target to a specific subset of professional high-end thieves, as they know you have valuable stuff that you would like to protect.
> This seems hyperbolic to me. You don’t need internet connected cameras and doorbells for your home to have a semblance of security. That’s what locks are for, and maybe a big fence behind the house.
1. You’re correct, they don’t need to be Internet connected, they do need to be network connected. That’s how the video gets from the camera to the recording device.
2. Locks just keep an honest man honest, and are another thing you can’t change in a rental (at least in the US).
There are a lot of other precautions someone can take if they can modify the building, but pretty limited options for renters.
All that said, I take a very… American… view on this. I need /evidence/ after the fact, which is what the camera is for. I work from home and am pretty much always here, so the most likely scenario is I kill my home invader, and need that evidence for my defense. In the US, self-defense is an affirmative defense, meaning because I live in a heavily blue area, I’m guaranteed to be arrested and charged, and the camera provides evidence that the person entered uninvited.
My primary precaution against burglary and home invasion is having a tech salary that lets me afford living in an area where there are few burglaries and home invasions. The cameras are necessary for evidence after the fact, and to help with retrieving package deliveries promptly.
You certainly can wire cameras even if you are a renter, without doing any damage to the property. It is no different than running a wire to your computer from a router in another room. You just can't poke a bunch of holes in the wall. I'm not a renter, but I don't want my camera on a network or susceptible to jammers so I have a camera on my porch with a 50' wire running inside the small gap at the upper corner of my door, and up the stairs.
It undoubtedly varies based on local law and landlord, but where I’m from, as a renter you can typically put as many holes in the walls as you want as long as you properly patch them up when you move out. Same goes for painting and other modifications.
I’ve done similar things indoors, however there should be no gaps with properly hung and weatherstripped exterior doors, at least there aren’t in any of the places I’ve lived, purely for energy reasons.
This seems like a relatively easy problem to mitigate: just put some local storage in the camera (even 1TB microSD cards cost very little). When the Wi-Fi is out, simply record to local storage. When it's restored, upload the recorded footage.
Then the criminals start off with a jammer and follow up with a baseball bat to the camera (or they steal the camera too). It's always been a cat & mouse game between someone with valuables to protect, and people wanting to take them.
Is this comment sarcastic because I don’t see anything that stops them from baseball batting the camera to start…? Seems more effective than wifi jamming.
Well - most effective is to just steal from an area where police are known to do nothing about property theft. So, most of the US then…
Ideally a wired camera would record up until its destroyed, even warning the owner of motion. In that case even wearing mask still gives away height/build clothes, direction of approach, numbers etc.
If its jammed first then you dont have that potential information, and you are relying on a loss of connection to be recognized as an attack.
Running a jammer as you approach the home would prevent it from uploading video to the cloud of your vehicle (perhaps the license plate can be seen), and your appearance/gait/etc. as you walk up to the house. The baseball bat is just insurance against any locally stored footage.
I mean the best thing you can do as an immediate reaction is call the police. Otherwise, hope nothing personal is stolen and that you can use the footage to claim insurance.
This problem could be mitigated with onboard storage for the cameras. Obviously, it wouldn’t solve the alerting issue, but “wifi went down” is probably already an alert, and with onboard storage, at least the footage could be reviewed.
I'm not blocking the wi-fi just to play in the garden.
If I'm already security aware enough to do that, I'm probably cutting power, phones and will have some idea (IR cameras are easy to find) what needs taking care of in terms of internal security.
Concealed network storage and backup power is how I go to jail.
I guess the same apply to home alarm systems that typically use 433/838mhz. Experienced a bit with that at home, and sure, could break into my own house without tripping the alarm. But I assume the alarm system is able to detect that jamming is occurring, but the alarm company did not send anyone.
The door magnetic sensor is easily bypassed with a strong neodyne magnet, but you most likely need an accomplice as you most close the door while still holding the magnet over the sensor from the outside - might be possible to do it alone if you have two magnets. Found a YouTube video of that in action https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pPsSraQ3wlo
Next thing I want to try is to blind the motion sensors with strong IR light, but have not found time for that yet.
What I am really paying for is the stickers staying I have an alarm
My alarm system can be annoying with false positives from deliveries and people walking by from time to time, but in spite of the maintenance in feeding and poop scooping, the K9 alarm system does have some oxytocin perks.
Also might consider a portable electromagnet like used to erase VHS tapes. I’ve got one on the shelf still considering what to exploit with it. I was going to try the car sensors at certain traffic signals but an engineer friend in transportation reminded me interfering with normal equipment operation is a felony if caught…which is why he wouldn’t share his Opticom clone software with me.
Sounds like PoE is the way to go. Another option might be to get a webcam that doesn't operate on wifi at all (maybe some other unregulated band which is tougher to block and more importantly, tougher to recognize)
Aside from immunity to radio signal jamming, there's no worrying about batteries/charging or ugly wall warts. You can also power your PoE switch from a UPS to survive power outages.
It's also vendor agnostic and fairly future proof. What I mean is while you might have lock-in with cameras/NVR today, you aren't locked in forever; worst case is you may be forced to replace everything but the wiring, but that's by far the hardest part to do in a finished house. The Cat5/6/7 will be useful for the foreseeable future.
I agree, but I’m having a fun time getting PoE switches that network security will sign off on at work, they are quite pricey. Just a note from the other side, wall wart is 5$ poe is like 40$ a port
Using a regular switch and using a POE injector just before the run to the camera is an option. It's about $15 to get the injector. It's not as elegant as a POE switch though.
Multi-port PoE injectors are a nice option to add say 3-8 PoE ports to an existing switch.
More flexible in some ways, I’m using 1 port of my 8-way injector to add PoE to the WAN interface of my router. In conjunction with an active PoE “splitter” on the far end I can remotely power the GPON modem on the other side of the house and power everything from one UPS.
I also made sure to get a Mode A “gigabit” injector in order to power 2x PoE cameras in a location with a single Cat6 drop. On the far end there’s just a passive splitter, each camera only gets 2 pairs which run both 100Mbit Ethernet and PoE. Cheaper “non-gigabit” PoE Mode B injectors save a buck by omitting the isolation transformers and instead inject DC onto the spare pairs, so not compatible with pair scavenging.
MikroTik’s PoE switches also use Mode B. They’re gigabit so have to include the isolation transformers anyway, presumably this is due to their ability to operate in 24V passive PoE mode. I was going to get a MikroTik switch but my pair scavenging requirements drove me down the path of a separate multi-port injector, which worked out to be a lot cheaper too!
8 port injector with a decently powerful 56V power supply was approx $100 via AliExpress.
Only drawback is a bit more cabling and no ability to remote power cycle an individual port.
This is for work so the only things that qualify are more enterprise type hardware. I have a MicroTik for my home PoE and it works quite well and it's not pricey.
Put the Wi-Fi camera with the built in speaker as the doorbell, and then a redundant PoE camera on the wall in a place where it's easier to run a cable to.
The problem isn't the power, it's the ethernet. Most homes are already wired for a doorbell with a single wire pair to the doorbell switch and then to the bell. So you'd have to pull an ethernet cable to the door.
I just installed an Amcrest doorbell which took me like 10 minutes. I'm using it with Scrypted to connect it to HomeKit. I didn't install it for security reasons. My old doorbell switch was broken and I figured as long as I needed to replace it, it would be nice to see what the heck my dog is constantly barking about.
If I wanted something for security reasons, I'd indeed use a PoE camera, but it wouldn't be a doorbell cam. There's very few PoE doorbell cameras in any case and they are quite a bit more expensive. And pulling an ethernet cable to the doorbell switch location would be non-trivial.
>And pulling an ethernet cable to the doorbell switch location would be non-trivial.
The tedium/difficulty/expense of running cabling through walls and crawl spaces is something a lot of tech people seem to take for granted. Wireless is convenient(ish), particularly compared to the aforementioned, so most people are naturally going to gravitate towards it if that serves purpose.
Also, ethernet cabling available right at the front door is a security concern in itself. You need to be knowledgable of networking and have appropriate networking hardware to properly secure it against physical attacks.
It’s expensive, not weatherproof, and hard to order. Same for the one made by 2N. These both recycle old DSL technology I believe.
How difficult it is to install also depends on how your doorbell circuit is wired. Mine goes from a transformer in my basement to a switch on my door and from there to two chimes with a junction hidden somewhere. For these converters to work you need a straight run end to end.
That may be slightly better, but you still need to pull a connection to the chime. In my case, it wouldn’t be all that much easier to get there vs going straight to the door.
This should be the product people want. I'm betting that the price difference (percentage wise) is low when purchasing a camera. I can't help but think that finding out if the camera is recording to a card will lead to home invasions to get the physical media it writes to as well. Essentially, a cat and mouse game with more and more higher stakes for the thieves and their innocent targets.
One mitigation is to secure the physical camera, e.g. Axis P1204 can separate the camera lens by 25 feet from the camera with SD card, which can be located inside a locked enclosure/safe/room.
Good luck with the other radio band stuff. PoE is likely easier to find and more reliable. Most WiFi based security cameras already struggle to function decently on WiFi.
Most of the spectrum is cellular. The reason we have wifi at all is because 2.4Ghz is the frequency of water and rain heavily disrupts it. Microwave ovens also work on 2.4Ghz, because they are dumping energy into the water molecules and making them spin.
> Microwave ovens are not tuned to any specific resonance frequency for water molecules in the food, but rather produce a broad spectrum of frequencies, cooking food via dielectric heating of polar molecules, including water. Several absorption peaks for water lie within the microwave range, and while it is true that these peaks are caused by quantization of molecular energy levels corresponding to a single frequency, water absorbs radiation across the entire microwave spectrum.
Certainly in my area they seem to just wear dark plain hoodies and face masks and don't care much about cameras as at 4am no-one is likely monitoring any alerts that come up and once people see the footage in the morning there isn't anything distinctive to ID them.
I have seen some cases of just using spray paint or even some kind of oil or whatever else to mess up the lens (mainly for doorbells or otherwise where the camera is easy to reach and see) or if it's too far out of reach they just throw rocks or hit it with a long stick or similar until it's out of action.
I joined NextDoor partially from curiosity, partially for some deals on secondhand goods. Not a week goes by that several points aren't made with little clips from these sorts of cameras. A few have gotten jammed, although the owners didn't immediately know it -- they didn't understand why the cameras suddenly stopped working as someone came in range.
I'm not really sure what these things are for. Nobody seems to be able to identify anyone from these (low resolution, not a great frame rate or bit depth, the person is often masked), yet people post "Do you know who this is who was trying the handle on my car door at 3 a.m.?" I would think people would do better with concealed, street-adjacent pairs of cameras pointed antiparallel to capture license plates and just use this Ring business as a way to know when to check the cameras. As it stands, they seem to be "Yes, a porch pirate did in fact take your stuff" confirmations and little else.
All it took was a work truck across the road from my house caused my WiFi, Zigbee alarm system to start sending "Jam Detected" notifications to my phone. I assumed his CB Radio was the cause.
Yes, the legal max is 4 watts, but that is if you're 'running barefoot' as they say, or without amplification.
There are car RF amplifiers that can run into the hundreds of watts or more and they do cause significant interference across many frequencies. CB radio users using these amps can easily be heard on home stereo systems, and sometimes even toasters (as lore goes, from their common use in the 70s & 80s).
Honestly, cctv is a bit pointless anyway.
My bike was stolen and the police had cctv footage from a neighbour but it was no good because they had their faces covered. Unfortunately, the best way to protect a bike is a stronger shed, or a car is fit a steering wheel lock.
My wife and I dislike both our cars. They're older than average, they're externally unimpressive, and they're internally unimpressive. So long as we remember to take anything of value out of them, we don't give a fuck if they get stolen. The only hassle would be the insurance paperwork and finding a suitably average replacement vehicle.
They also don't mark us as the type of people that have anything worth the effort and risk of stealing.
I'm currently on holiday and so we're driving a much more modern car than either of ours, and what I refer to as "the distance from the road" is noticeably further than our two cars.
What I mean by "distance from the road" is the number of layers between driver action and machine reaction. Changing gears in a manual is a direct, instantaneous (pending a crunch and grind) process from driver action to machine reaction. Pressing the accelerator in an automatic has always had a noticeable lag, for me at least, being raised in a manual. In this much more modern car, there's not just the auto-lag, there also seems to be a choice the car itself makes in what it feels like it's an attempt to be maximally efficient on fuel, in restricting acceleration. It really feels there's more a layer of software in addition to the acceleration auto-lag.
The end result feels like an unpredictable rate of acceleration as I increasingly convince the car to "fucking move you piece of shit" whilst attempting to enter traffic at a decent clip. The car ends up massively over-revving in a low gear/band and then almost skipping the next two gears to settle into the normal 60 - 80 kmph zone.
This "distance from the road" is bothersome to me, but may be (much?) safer for the majority of drivers who aren't used to being so "near the road".
Vale the manual car!
(If you can't drive a manual, you lack the concentration and skill required to safely drive any car on a public road. It was an appropriate and effective barrier to entry whose absence is a threat to every road user)
Another boon of the manual car is that you are probably not likely to have a lead foot and find yourself speeding. In an automatic with a lead foot, the gears shift for you and suddenly you are going 50mph, but you cant tell because the car put you in the overdrive gear already and you are only revving 1800 rpm. Electric cars are probably even worse in this regard because theres no sense of connection to the powerplant that you can interpret from the cockpit.
In a manual on the other hand, if you start having a lead foot, the engine lets you know. Once you are familiar with a given manual car's gear ratios, you don't need the dashboard anymore. You know what 3000 rpm feels like because (in a good drivers car at least) you can feel the engine vibrating through the pedals, through the steering wheel, and through the gear shift, in additon to hearing the exhaust note. You also quickly figure out what speed a given rpm gets you in each gear. Maybe 4th gear at about 2000rpm is your 35mph cruising gear. To go over the speed limit in this case you would have to rev the engine up which would be noticeable, or shift into 5th.
That still doesnt make you immune to theft. I had an older crappy car and it was constantly targeted for things like a $5 charging cable I got from the gas station with frayed wiring. It didn't matter if I had nothing in it, people will still rip through the glove box on the off chance I do. I feel like an older car is a mark in that sense because of how easy it is to get inside. With mine, you can activate the unlock button with a shoelace because it protrudes slightly, but the tools most thieves use these days (the air bag jack and the long rod inserted into the gap the air bag jack for hitting the unlock button) will work on all cars, and these tools are sold at hardware stores. After that 10 seconds it takes to get the car unlocked, there's no more risk of being caught stealing because then you look like you could very well be the car owner rooting around.
In the U.S. it doesn't matter what it is, people want it for the scrap value at the very least. Its like a bed frame's worth of scrap but you can ride it off versus having to schlep it.
I'm sure it's not coincidental that I got an email today about wired Ring cameras.
Have we yet developed consumer grade counter-jamming tech? Seems like the tech to detect and recognize these attacks shouldn't be very expensive at all, and then it can text you (mobile network, of course) to call the police on the jammers (I imagine the police would get pretty peeved if you don't have a human in the loop.)
From there we can get some sort of adaptive, agile jammers for the criminals, and then FPGAs recording the jammers for processing and recognition at a central anti-jamming-as-a-service company.
Advanced missile warfare for my neighborhood, without the explosives!
I'm reminded of when key fob range extender attacks became common, security people were talking about faraday cages, removing batteries every night, encryption, more complex protocols, and all sorts of crazy stuff to try and protect against it.
Car manufactures added a motion sensor to the fobs to disable the signal after being motionless, and that's all that was really needed to kill the attack.
Look for a deauth detector. On Amazon you can find an ESP8266 preflashed with deauth detection firmware and it includes a hardware buzzer. The firmware is probably something like this: https://github.com/SpacehuhnTech/DeauthDetector
I can't imagine it's hard to make a jammer given that wifi is often naturally jammed. You could generate very strong signals in the correct frequency range with a modified microwave; you'd just need a way to modulate the signal to make noise, which you might be able to do physically, or by further modifying the microwave (one of those rare times you want a noisy power supply!)
My place has an old school intercom system that links to the outside with push to talk button. Wonder if I can use the wiring to upgrade it to something more modern. No Ring or anything from amazon or google.
Old thing says NuTone on it.
What about giant electromagnets built-into and hidden under the driveway? You could leave the doors unlocked with the keys in the ignition. It may start, but it won't go anywhere until the emagnet is switched-off. A little hard on the shocks and tires, but peace of mind is priceless.
Correct. But how could you have figured that out so effortlessly? In my GGP, I had encoded that secret bit of information in a hard encryption known as the English language. You must have somehow uncovered the key, which was reading comprehension. Well done.
> A little hard on the shocks and tires, but peace of mind is priceless.
"A Florida man was discovered deceased under his vehicle last week with bizarre injuries. Examination of video from a neighbour's security camera shows he was working under his vehicle at the time when suddenly the vehicle crushed him into the driveway. "
Does anyone know if this affects WPA2 only or WPA3 as well? Do these jammers operate in the DFS band (seems dangerous and highly illegal to do so) or simply on 2.4 Ghz because that's what most webcams use?
You can use Protected Management Frames (PMF) with both WPA2 and WPA3, they are mandatory for the latter. Not sure what you mean with DFS band - remember that on any 5 GHz radar channel where an AP is communicating, stations can assume the AP has done the necessary pre clearing. Deauthing is illegal in any scenario.
Brute jamming of course will affect any encryption you use.
The assumption is that because DFS is intended for military use operating a jammer (not deauthing) on it would be more severely illegal than doing so on purely civilian frequencies.
One thing to note: even if you hardwire the cameras, criminals can disable them using another way. I saw online a group of masked men simply cover the camera with their hand while they tried to rob a house.
I wonder what would be the most optimum security setup without being prison security level.
Like fenced home, clearly visual cameras around the place, night sensor lights, dog, security monitoring company?
Perhaps there could be a security monitoring company that used AI human recognition, then users would set their general times. Hence, anyone approaching at night would be pinged by the AI, and a human would verify whether its a security threat or not.
AI being used would be necessary to make 24/7 monitoring across tons of homes possible.
Where do you live? What does the neighborhood look like?
You don't want to look like fort knox. You do want to look just a bit more hardened than your neighbors.
If window bars and serious fences are the norm, do that. If nobody has window bars, don't do that.
AI human recognition misses a lot. AI also can't tell the difference between a girl scout selling cookies and a criminal scouting a place (or a bored uber driver waiting for a slow client).
> By utilizing both real-life modern Wi-Fi 6 certified and non-certified equipment and the OpenBSD’s hostapd, we expose a significant number of novel DoS assaults affecting virtually any AP. No less important, more than a dozen of vendor-depended and severe zero-day DoS assaults are manifested, showing that the implementation of the protocol by vendors is not yet mature enough. The fallout of the introduced attacks to the associated stations ranges from a temporary loss of Internet connectivity to outright disconnection. To our knowledge, this work provides the first wholemeal appraisal of SAE’s mechanism endurance against DoS, and it is therefore anticipated to serve as a basis for further research in this timely and intriguing area.
It might be possible to use copper mesh to shield an exterior camera, with a low-power wifi AP mounted on the opposite site of the same wall, shielded with copper mesh and connected to ethernet. Camera-AP wifi communication would go through the wall.
I want to be able to move cameras inside my business on a whim. The cameras are 99% for monitoring while we're open. They solve many, many mysteries that tend to take place in bars.
When I read "Ring camera didn't record crime" my mind does not leap to "Criminals must be using deauth / jamming devices." Ring's camera products are the worst WiFi clients I've ever encountered.
ADT guy tried to re-sell ADT monitoring service after I bought a house fully decked with now-unused ADT hardware.
Told him to replace the doorbell video camera with Ethernet wire-based (IEEE 802.3) ones is the only condition of getting back into their grace. They’re unable (or unwilling) to.
Hence begins my long road of repurposing the ADT panel and its hardware sensors with Home Assistant.
Ring doesn't protect you from anything, and not just because it's wireless. Ring is a device designed to enable a corporation to surveil the outside of their customers' homes so that said corporation can sell those customers more shit. (They have other devices that surveil the inside of said homes.)
And said corporation also shares Ring video with the police so the cops can monitor you 24/7 too.
So yeah, Ring is a security device. It's just not for your security.
Absolutely. This exists. My Eufy devices have on board looping storage. A well designed camera that has battery backup and local+cloud storage would work in any situation except where a thief jams the Wi-Fi then steals the cameras. But at that point you have an extremely determined and professional thief and no security measure is impervious.
When my house was constructed, I bought a book on how to defeat burglar alarms. It was very helpful in order to implement countermeasures to those attacks.
For example, one simple one was taking an axe to the phone terminal box mounted on an exterior wall. Goodbye alarms that used the phone system. I had a big fight with The Phone Company because I wanted the phone box inside. They finally made me sign a paper saying they were not responsible for it, because they didn't have access to it.
This sounds like a theoretical attack more than a real one. Mostly, houses are never broken into at all, and of the houses which are broken into, most burglars are going to avoid houses with an indication of an alarm, a dog, or someone at home.
The burglar who really wants to get into your house enough to carry an axe... I mean, really?
Have you made sure they can't disable the siren with a foam fire extinguisher? [1] :-)
In a home it may be 'theoretical' but in businesses with expensive and/or desirable items it is not at all. My dad owned such a business at one point and we armored and concealed the alarm lines. A fake demarc was installed and wired to trip the alarm when it was cut. And it was cut along with the power to the building. The power company lineman had no idea why the burglars avoided death as when they cut the line the bolt cutters grounded to the junction box and it started melting and welding things and would have temporarily blinded the industrious fellow doing the cutting.
They managed to only grab a small number of items before the police arrived much sooner than expected. Of course the portly constabulary were unable to chase them through the woods behind our building and they were apprehended weeks later because they were unable to maintain operational security and were talking to their friends too much.
With how much people post on the internet these days, you can case a place rather easily these days.
You're acting like some homes don't have tens to hundreds of thousands of crap in them, especially when you get into the higher income brackets, many of which would frequent a site such as HN.
Ah, maybe the reason my home has never been broken into is because I’m the one neighbor without the alarm! They figure I must not have anything worth protecting.
Right, but I guess they'd either have to climb a pole or figure out where it's buried to do that. In my neighborhood, they could just yank the fiber from the fiber pedestal conveniently located near the sidewalk every other house.
Traditionally the way this was solved for businesses was with a cellular or (before that) radio back up. My dad's photoshop/darkroom business in Miami in the 70s/80s had a radio connected alarm, but ultimately, a physical barrier (solid barred backdoor, a gate across the windows in front) was the best preventative. The pawn shop in the same strip mall wasn't so lucky: thieves used a sledge hammer to make a hole in the cinder block wall from behind while somehow avoiding setting off the shop's alarm.
I'm still trying to imagine a burglar carrying an axe to break into a house. I saw some crazy shit growing up in Miami and even I can't imagine that.
In the late 80s/90s it became popular to steal cars and drive them into buildings then follow up with a second car and load up as much as possible in 60 seconds then flee before the police arrived. Had to install concrete filled pipe to prevent that from occurring.
Axe offers the advantages of analog and one loud noise, but is noticeable. Cordless angle grinders and oscillating multitools are portable and can handle a variety of steel obstacles, from locks to conduit. But they are loud and take a few seconds to cut through obstacles.
At the end of the day even with cameras and security systems, burglars generally get away. Celebrities get robbed—there's no hope for you and your $30 wifi camera to prevent a burglary or stop one in the act. If you want security, insure your possessions and bury your great grandmothers precious heirloom jewelry out in the yard.
I just put a network of wired AI driven cameras around the house. It was a hassle to lay PEO all over the house, but well worth it.
Remebert to put them on a VLAN because they can still get rippred right of the wall they are mounted on and an attacker would have easy acces to all other systems.
And exactly why anyone thought a wifi video camera would be a good idea is beyond me. I write video security software and have told people as long as I can remember that any wireless security camera is a joke. Hell, electrical storms disrupt them.
Hopefully this will scare the market into centering more towards PoE video doorbells that support ONVIF. One can only wish... There are only just a few options now, and all are expensive.
If someone were to build a custom house, what steps might they embark on to ensure it both mitigated these problems but are as future proof as possible?
Run ethernet everywhere. In new homes, this usually means a "Structured Wiring" product like Legrand On-Q. This system is essentially the conventional commercial building design of ethernet and telephone jacks throughout on home runs to a patch panel, but instead of a rack you use an in-wall enclosure with modules that screw into it. Ideally the cable is run between these through "smurf tube" flexible conduit, which makes it reasonably easy to run more or different cables in the future. Run ethernet at least to positions where you might want surveillance cameras, during new construction you could do this cheaply enough that it might make sense to go overboard.
Be warned though that structured wiring tends to end up being appreciably more expensive than a 19" rack and commercial devices, because it's a very small market. e.g. in theory you can put your ethernet switch neatly in a structured wiring enclosure but in practice there are very few options for gigabit switches that fit the structured wiring module system and they tend to cost considerably more than a comparable switch. This means that you end up zip-tying a desktop switch into the enclosure along with its power brick, it becomes a hassle. You can put a wall-mount rack in a hall closet ventilated with AC Infinity products or something like that.
I don't think there's a lot more you can do to futureproof than to have cat 6 run everywhere and a PoE+ switch, and the good news is that none of this is really that expensive. A surprising number of tract homes and apartment complexes are being done with structured wiring systems these days, I just think they're sort of underdelivering on installed cable because of the high cost of structured wiring enclosures and the perceived need to run coaxial cable (equipped for satellite antenna!) and 2-pair telephone as well, with the high cost of structured wiring patch panels and distribution amplifiers for those. I really wish people would adopt more of an "ethernet to every wall" approach as you see in commercial construction. And 19" racks; the increasing use of vertical wall cabinet racks means that there's a pretty good selection now of network devices with power consumption and fanless or very quiet cooling similar to consumer devices.
run cat5e or cat6 everywhere. use a quality low-voltage contractor to run your drops.
adequately label the lines and patch panel.
save some money for a good network core (like managed switches, a wlan controller, etc) and a wall-mount rack. there are subreddits made for this if you want to see how it's done.
eBay sometimes has older Axis (enterprise) PoE cameras, but those no longer get firmware updates.
Axis P1204 has a camera sensor that can be separated from the camera by 25 feet, https://www.networkcamerastore.com/axis-p1204-0531-001-minia.... Would be nice to accomplish the same with a Linux SBC (RPi, ODROID, Rock64), where MIPI camera cables are usually limited to cm, not meters.
I am sure I can DIY it or hack something I just don't want to, I want cameras for monitoring for practical reasons not because I have an interest in playing with them.
The market is plagued with eth+poe cameras under $100. For live streaming you'd need to configure your network and probably some apps might offer cloud service. Maybe, even the same maker's app have cloud services. Check: Reolink, amcrest, zosi, dahua...
It's definitely a rabbit's hole digging into these stuff. Expect to dedicate long hours of research and setup, due to the multiple options there are, brands/models/cameras/technologies.
Making your own camera, as suggested by other person, at this point is pointless.
A hacker would isolate from the internet a cameras VLAN and run its own NVR software. At this point, the market has an abundance of good-enough options for cameras. The fight is in other areas, not the cameras as a device.
There are many different use cases and threat models, some of which do not permit random unmaintained Chinese-origin firmware to be present on local networks, VLAN network isolation claims not withstanding.
Open firmware for some camera SoCs (HiSilicon, Goke, Ingenic): https://openipc.org/
I'm with you in considering any software in the cameras as a threat, that's why you keep the cameras isolate from the internet. I've audited a few cheap chinese ones and they were indeed filled with vulnerabilities and unknown services running in high ports.
The idea that you can't effectively isolate them network wise is just a stretch.
> Switches were not designed as security devices. Their use as such simply evolved over time, and is ancillary to their main use as devices that improve network performance. If you use a switch for security reasons, you are relying on the correct configuration of the switch, including understanding not only the standards that the switch software is based upon, but also the correct implementation of those standards. The 802.1Q spec itself is 211 pages long, and is only one of a handful of standards that a compliant switch manufacturer must support. Any time that you need to segregate networks for serious security purposes, I recommend that you not use a switch.
You are not restricted to VLANs for isolation purposes. You can consider the entire PoE switch LAN as compromised. Then firewall the NVR, which would connect to that switch to pull the cameras streams. Any software in the cameras don't need to see WAN at all.
I bought one of those cheap ones, mostly because it was cheap. It has a telnet server enabled with 123456 hardcoded as root password. It's also sending FTP and email passwords to some chinese server in cleartext, and seems to desperately hit various DNS servers with requests for cryptic domain names when internet access is blocked.
To this day, I still won't connect it to my network, and don't really consider that class of cameras an option -- and from what I hear, mine is not a unique experience.
There are obviously alternatives on the market, but they're rarely cheap.
Given that cheating at chess would require an extremely small amount of bandwidth you'd end up monitoring or jamming an extremely large amount of spectrum. One could go so far as to use things like IR/UV LEDs and it would be extremely difficult to detect.
If you're a connoisseur of corp-speak, this is the 100% pure undiluted stuff. You must need a degree in Communications and 10 years experience to talk like that.