Side note: if you have a smart home security system that you're actually happy with, I'd like to hear about it. I've been doing research, and it seems almost nobody is happy with the current offerings. It is either equipment problems, or long, expensive contracts.
I soon stopped, because I think they aren't worth it (which made me the world's worst salesperson. I remember near the end talking one old woman out of it.) The first important thing is that they won't prevent the nightmare encounter where a thief enters the house when you're there. Second, police are too swamped to have ever reacted in time to catch the thief. To my knowledge, it has never, ever happened.
There is a possible benefit that it may truncate the time in the house. To me this is not a big issue, I suspect most competent thieves are efficient with time.
Finally, there is an unobservable deterrence effect, but that is easily obtained by faking the appearance of a system without needing to enter a contract and pay monitoring fees. The most useless thing about security systems, the monitoring, is the only thing that costs serious money.
The final benefit is life-alert style stuff, but there are better solutions for that.
On the other hand, there is a massive placebo effect, a sense of safety that the monitoring provides. I suppose that is what people pay for.
For example, if I was shot during an armed burglary, it is more likely that someone would be coming to my aid because of my alarm system than without it.
I personally don't feel more safe because of my alarm system. But, I do feel more hopeful that if my (or my spouse's or children's) safety is endangered, that someone will be coming that can increase the likelihood that we will survive that danger.
I agree with you totally that a security system isn't going to deter or prevent anything. It's also not going to help get police to your house faster - that's basically impossible and active-monitoring tied into some BS ADP tactical ops center (who basically just call the cops for you) is basically worthless.
So my thought was to just have a really good recording system so that in the aftermath of whatever happens, you can give really good info to the police or your own PI to follow a lead. Basically the same thing that corner stores without security people do.
I think along these same lines, so I have a combination of some raspberri pi's running a customized version of RPi-Cam-Web-Interface [1], and a ring.com video doorbell.
https://github.com/tchellomello/python-ring-doorbell/issues/...
I have a Ring "Pro" so the battery level isn't an issue and it's able to do live-view for a few hours no problem (I tried it by leaving the windows 10 app up and running on live view for a while).
Still, if it really is running SIP the whole way, then it most likely can be accessed locally without touching their infrastructure (unless they are using something custom for the Ring-Servers -> Doorbell connection...)
I would LOVE to have a security system that automatically locks doors inside the house and fills the room with a thick fog. There are fog machines that work faster than the ones in the club. Hard to find a way out of the room in that case. And hard to find and assault anyone, or steal things, with a thick fog.
Humane - can't get sued for leaving lasting damage - and also
As a fallback, I'd remoty enable use of really unpleasant sound or pepper spray on the perp.
If I lived in a rural area, I would also want a drone to take off half a mile away and film people coming to my house. That way I'd know who's coming and have a record of it even if they thought they destroyed all the surveillance video.
Thoughts? I believe these kinds of things would be far better for security than what's currently on the market.
I would also add a laser that slowly scans the room, combined with the voice from the first Resident Evil movie.
Would you get sued for him tripping over your coffee table because of the fog or my lasers?
In a rural area, they would just shoot the drone (I still really like your idea). You could blanket the area with inexpensive trail cams.
I use security cameras strapped to the top of very high trees on my property, triggered by motion detection. Keep it simple. (Suburbs of a major city in Central Florida)
There are other considerations as well (via wikipedia [1]) : "There is also the possibility that such traps could endanger emergency service personnel such as firefighters who must forcefully enter such buildings during emergencies. As noted in the important US court case of Katko v. Briney, "the law has always placed a higher value upon human safety than upon mere rights of property"
That is why private islands have those signs - otherwise someone coming ashore could assume it is a regular public island.
Video cameras would be nice for checking in on the house when away, and for post-mortem purposes if there is a break-in. But I tend to worry about the security vulnerabilities and/or backdoors in the cameras sold for these purposes (particularly the cheap Chinese ones). It's not worth it if randos are spying on you in your own home.
This is precisely why I try to use Raspberry Pi's for stuff like this. Even then, I do put the devices on a separate guest wifi network that is firewalled off from the rest of my network. It doesn't keep them from being used for DDoS or as a jump point for attackers, but at least it (hopefully) keeps them out of my local network.
I didn't mention it in my other comment but about 6 months ago I did set up a "YI" brand dome camera[1] for my mother-in-law. It comes with a slick little iPhone/Android app for controlling it, and the setup process / onboarding the device onto her WiFi network was very smooth.
So anyway I was demoing their mobile app to her, and I was going to show her how you'd have to be on her WiFi network with the admin password to be able to access the video stream / device. So I disabled the WiFi on her phone to demo that. My jaw about hit the floor when the video stream was still working over her cellular modem (in other words the video was streaming over the Internet by default)! Note this was fresh out of the box, she didn't sign up for YI's cloud platform option or anything like that.
So yeah I would be very heavy on iptables rules if I were you.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Univivi-U48R-48-LEDs-WideAngle-Illumi...
Around here gun safes are mandatory. And local hunters and sports shooters work together with the police to keep guns out of the hands of people who cannot be trusted.
(To be clear, I agree everyone should keep their guns properly stored in gun safes at all times, and I also think guns for self defence are a bad solution in first world countries.)
Do you have any research to back that up?
and I also think guns for self defence are a bad solution in first world countries.
I don't have a gun for self defense but I don't think I should judge those who have either.
Unless there is more details the fact that few burglars were shot probably tells us that most homeowners with guns are peaceful and just use the guns as a deterrent.
As someone else already pointed out, # of criminals shot vs. successful burglaries is a ridiculous statistic. But it's coming from the Violence Policy Center so that's not surprising.
What's your proposed alternative? If burglars are already armed and violent (your own words) I should disarm myself and submit myself to their mercy? No thanks.
Anyway, when we got a house we also brought a diy alarm connected to the land line. It was liberating to know you weren't going to come home to any nasty surprises.
I looked into how they work and wasn't impressed. Easy to jam etc. So one day I may make my own wired one as a hobby project, just because I'm the kind of person who hangs out on HN and thinks that's cool :)
Anecdotally, I've seen Mountain View PD show up with 3 vehicles on a commercial false alarm in less than 3 minutes, and Sunnyvale PD show up in 1 minute to catch a shoplifter around Sprouts.
I think it depends a lot on where you live.
I just cut my losses and installed a good security camera system that covers the full exterior (using Hikvision cameras and a DVR). If that doesn't deter someone an alarm won't, and at the very least I can keep an eye on anything suspicious and have evidence after the fact.
With the base board you can run a couple of relays to trigger whatever you'd like. I use it to turn on the lights when the alarm is tripped which helps the camera system I have actually get a picture and not just a dark room. It is also nice when coming home in the dark, and for automating light schedules when out of town.
The IT-100 gives a simple serial interface to monitor/control the entire system from a computer. I used cereal on debian to follow/interact with the serial stream, and a bunch of perl/bash scripts to do things like log events to a mysql database, turn on/off the zoneminder DVR system, manipulate relays, send emails, and pretty much do whatever I wanted.
As far as B&E deterrent, I think having the monitoring company stickers is 90% of the benefit since most criminals are looking for a quick low-risk fix and will just hit your neighbour without a security system. That said, making it hard for them to hang around and really clean you out makes me feel a lot safer, since most valuable are hidden away somewhat.
I also like the cameras so I can check in while out of town. I have heard that video footage has to be REALLY cut and dried as far as identity for the police to use it, so low-res or low-light images are probably useless for prosecution.
You may find that the monitoring costs are paid for by a house-insurance discount that you get for having active fire alarm monitoring
Still, probably not as good as a vicious-sounding dog.
Yeah, I have a couple cameras and a temperature sensor. Especially on a longer trip, it's nice to be able to just look in now and then and see that everything seems to be OK. (Of course, it doesn't help if there's an extended power outage but that's rare where I live.)
But what was the interesting feature of this was that most sensors were based on infrasound, notionally they were meant to detect shattering glass, but somehow the sensitivity was tweaked in such way that they even detected opening of doors/windows (this was mentioned in manual as feature) and even could detect person moving around the room.
I have it because I had a triple play package, TV/phone/internet, and they offered me quadruple play, TV/phone/internet/security, on a two year package that was actually $40/month cheaper than my triple play and included Starz.
There have been a few minor things that I actually have found it useful for that have nothing to do with security, and could easily be accomplished by simpler means.
1. If there is a power outage while I am at work, I can find out when it started and how long it lasted from the security system logs, which log both power out and power back events. Before, I could figure out when power came back from my digital clocks that reset to 12:00 when power comes on. I could improve this if I added an electric analog clock, since in a power outage that would not reset but it would stop ticking. The amount of time the analog clock was behind would then tell the total time power was out, and the digital clock would tell how long ago power came on. That would not tell me if there was a single outage, or multiple outages. It would be fairly easy to build a gizmo specifically for that: analog electric clock hooked up through a relay in such a way that if it loses power, it does not come back on until you press a reset button. That clock would then record the time the first outage started. From that, the time power came back on for the last time (found via the digital clock), and the total outage duration (from the other analog electric clock), one could figure out if there had been a single outage or multiple outages.
2. I wanted to monitor my home temperature while away. I pointed the security camera at a thermometer, and then could use the remote camera app to look at it. (Later replaced with an ESP8266 and temperature sensor that takes a reading every minute and uploads to my website).
3. I had some work done on the house that required everyone present to use a respirator while work was in progress. I went and spent the day at my office, and used the camera to check if the workmen had left before I headed home.
Pingdom works well for this as well :)
> I wanted to monitor my home temperature while away. I pointed the security camera at a thermometer, and then could use the remote camera app to look at it. (Later replaced with en ESP8266 and temperature sensor that takes a reading every minute and uploads to my website).
Is there anything the ESP8266 can't do?? (I also have some of these - Wemos D1 minis) spread around my place for temperature monitoring and general geekery)
It just posts all of the events from the sensors to a VPS in the cloud (that I have already to run personal web sites). If its "set" with a post from my phone, it simply texts a list of people (wife, dad, good friend) that an "alarm" went off. Otherwise it just records the events for later curiosity.
I've also got one IP camera that I can jump on and look into the main room with.
It was nearly free except for the happy project time to build it and is all I've ever felt I needed.
It's not a full proper security system but could be made into one. I had it alert me when a certain room was entered or had a high temperature or humidity.
I say used (past tense) because some support is now discontinued but I think it is a worthwhile idea.
I haven't tried the sphere and not sure of the status.