Anybody said “have a usb stick with Tails in your pocket all the time”?
just gonna pout this here
Interesting.. local boy battles Flock cameras using FOIA
I’ve been following the case somewhat. I hate that the DOJ prosecuted Rodriguez and Hill, and that part of the charges against them were simply for releasing source code. But I wonder if the prosecution would have occurred without the founders also making a ton of money off the mixing services that were spawned off.
The worst part about all of this, aside from the ridiculously long sentence, is that both of the founders plead guilty, giving up their right to appeal and challenge the charges. I understand completely from their perspectives about facing a much longer prison sentence if they went to trial and lost, but by pleading guilty to a brand new type of prosecution, they have helped it become the law of the land, at least until someone else is charged and does decide to fight it.
Absolutely. It sucks the plea deal is even a thing. It’s a perversion of the judicial process itself.
Just looked it up. “Unlicensed money transmitting.” So now we each need a license to pay anyone with money?
And they accuse us of having the mark of the beast…
Ring + Flock = little brother
That’s why I never wanted to have cloud connected cameras…
Maybe I’ll give UniFi Protect a go at some point, if it’s as local as it seems that it…
I ended up with a bunch of these Chinese eufy (anchor) cameras that were cheap and good enough quality.. supported rtsp (if you set it up specifically).. so what I did was I set static IPs on my network for them and then specifically blocked outbound internet access for all of them. About 6 months after I did that, Eufy cams had a massive breech where it was discovered anyone could stream any live video from any camera without any passwords at all.. which made it clear all video footage was going to China regardless of paying for storage or not.
Alternatively you could also just omit the gateway IP in DHCP or static IP settings for each camera, but this is not exactly 100% reliable since malicious internal software could work around this to discover your gateway and use it anyway, and I also needed to pass traffic across some internal subnets through the router. Setting a hard block at the firewall was the better choice. That said, malicious internal software could also set up multiple IPs or alternative IPs on the same network to work around such blocks.. so unless you are doing some pretty strict IP to mac address binding and layer 2 security on your network, it’s still pretty iffy. A proper vlan with locked down ip subnets and strict mac address mapping is really what you’d need if you suspected any potentially malicious devices on your network.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to set up a simple little offline linux CCTV network over ethernet or USB, but all the cameras I find on the market are so fishy. Everything these days wants a proprietary “app” or some nonsense instead of just complying with a well supported iso standard or such. Nothing I’ve bought shows up on /dev/video0. Why must they make it so hard to simply stream video file data from a camera to the filesystem where I’m going to use it? They insist upon obfuscating the process with an app, probably so they can hide spyware in it, or lock it behind a future paywall.
They want 1) a locked in user experience, 2) a user experience that works for the bell curve consumer, 3) a clear path to obsolescence, 4) possibly your data / video feed / obliteration of your privacy.
To these manufacturers, Linux is a means to an end only, not an operational philosophy.
We’ve all seen the academic papers about using Wi-Fi and other radio systems for presence detection, motion detection, and worse.. identity detection. Now it’s being rolled out probably without your consent whether you want it or not.
@tac0s sent me this.
Not to dox who I get my internet from, but:
(please note, I can only read the first few paragraphs because off the paywall)
This is not new, or not new for all users. Xfinity has been shoving this down my throat a ton for months.
In theory the capability is impossible to turn off or circumvent in whole by a customer, but thankfully this is probably not being used maliciously by xfinity or a parent company as that would be immoral and uncool.
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I am aware that this does not provide any form of protection for the above issue, but for those of you running ISP routers still out of necessity and not cost or lack of skill or interest, it may be worth implementing some form of additonal firewall. Yes, probably two NAT layers. Your own local DNS server would be nice too. Your own AP too. Basically throw that ISP router thing in the corner and use it as an adapter from lc/coax/rj11/etc to ethernet.
I need a nap and coffee. I only got a cup and a half today.
Also all hail our corporate overlords. I hope they enjoy watching me look into my fridge 14 times a night wating for espresso ice cream to appear.
Damn man. Time to dump their wifi gear and set yourself up with your own stuff. Dump their router too if you can.