Amazon Cloud Cam Indoor Security Camera | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Cloud Cam Indoor Security Camera

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42 pointsprostoalex27 comments

How on earth are they able to post photographs from a professional digital camera and pretend those are images from the device? I'd expect some sort of "simulated image" disclaimer somewhere... but these images are clearly shot with a professional camera.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71sMIACL1bL...

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71xBkN5g40L...

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/kindle/d...

You mean like this? https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71sMIACL1bL...

lol.

I'm also impressed by your knowledge of that random command. Is that listed in a product advertising API somewhere? Did you have a reason to remember it? Just curious.

Former intern, that CDN can do plenty of more powerful on the fly transformations for which Amazon product pages use.

The marketing world has moved beyond honesty.

Seriously, this world is just going into the crapper faster than we can say crapper.

There is not a goddamn chance I am putting a cloud-connected indoor or outdoor camera in/on my house.

I can't believe how popular this trend is becoming.

I have similar concerns, but I was just on vacation for 2 weeks and would have loved a way to check-in on my cat / cat-sitter to see how things are going.

Are there products that would permit me to do this while still avoiding privacy concerns?

Call (or maybe text) the cat-sitter with a phone? Sorry to be facetious but that seems like the best privacy preserving strategy here and also what I do (for our dog).

No need to apologize - I kind of do that already with texts, but my last vacation was in Japan, so the timezone thing gave little overlap and it would have been nice to have something a bit more asynchronous.

Synology NAS, and some IP cameras you found online somewhere (it is simpler to ask which cameras doesnt Synology support). You’ll have to figure out which external access method works for you (I just use Synology’s dynamic IP mapper). My DS410 is seven years old, so I don’t know if that’s the reason, but remote access can be slow. But it gets the job done.

As an added bonus, you get a really nice NAS.

Just unplug it when not out of town? Else there are lots of not-cloud solutions out there; though i'd assume the cloud to actually be safer.

How would the cloud be safer? If you have a personal setup you can control the level of security yourself, and a hacker would only gain access to your cameras, and not the cameras of everyone connected to the cloud. A lot less motivation to hack one person, than thousands.

If you are only storing images locally, an intruder could destroy or remove recordings.

Presumably a cloud storage company has more incentives to hire a security engineer, conduct security reviews and keep things updated.

I remote desktop into my home computers and can turn on the webcams and see what is happening when I am away. Obviously a limited solution in multiple respects, but for just checking in occasionally it works well-enough. There may even be an open source software somewhere that uses your webcam as a security camera and handles archiving, possibly even uploading daily files to a destination of your choosing so you can access while away.

There is an open source project that's pretty good: https://www.zoneminder.com/

I personally think Zoneminder is beyond "pretty good".

Honestly, for a casual home setup, it goes well beyond what anyone needs. You can configure it to the n-th degree. It supports pro-level PTZ security cams (some of those cameras are expensive af). It has options for triggering based on hardware interrupts (monitoring serial ports, ethernet packets, whatever you want). It can trigger external alarms itself (with addition hardware). It uses computer vision techniques.

In short - it is basically a professional video security package. There are companies out there that package it up (video security appliances) and sell it as such. Again - waaay overkill for most people's needs.

But it isn't very difficult to get set up and running, provided you have the right hardware. For instance, at home I run it using an old 900 MHz P3 with 512 MB and an old hard drive; it supports a couple of cameras easily - I could probably add one or two more streams and still be ok. Beyond that, though, you'd want to increase the CPU and RAM (something I plan to do is break out an old Core2Duo and repurpose it for this job).

I use cheap IP cameras for my cams, but ZM supports a wide variety of cameras (everything from video capture boards, to webcams, ethernet/wifi IP cams, etc). It can upload captured images and videos to servers of your choice, email them to you, there's a android phone app available...

Shinobi, which isn't as fully featured as ZM but is far more modern (and in active development), is also worth checking out: http://shinobi.video/

You can setup a beaglebone/rpi OpenVPN solution in 30 minutes. Then whenever you want to check the camera, connect to the VPN from your phone and launch an app like TinyCamMonitor. This is my setup.

Its because of how difficult is for the average person to setup port forwarding and to keep these device secure.

Using a cloud system means the device make and outbound connection through however many nats, doesn't matter. Also no way to directly connect to device without going through the cloud server acting as a high level proxy. The cloud servers are more likely to be kept up to date and monitored.

I have a Synology system for my cameras, uses https with an inbound port for the app to connect. Works well, but I do worry about it getting hacked.

If IPV6 where widely deployed maybe the ease setup could be made better.

Technically, this question is perhaps solved long back, but still. At a very high level, how is this implemented? I assume following is happening:

1) Camera is connected to our home WiFi and streams video to a server on Amazon cloud, tied to our account. Free plan has content saved for 24 hours. Spec says "Up to 1080p Full HD resolution" and "Up to 30 FPS resolution". What's the upload bandwidth requirements on this? 2) Alerts/Notifications are treated with urgency. 3) The app on our mobile device pulls the feed from cloud (and notifications gets pushed).

Is this right, in a hand wavy sense?

Curious to know the tech stack behind this.

So, let's see...

There's Alexa which can record what you say...and now this CloudCam (not to be confused with CloudJam or CanJam or CloudCan, etc.), which records both what you say and what you do...Perhaps, soon enough there will be the Amazon AnPro to complete the privacy invasion angle?

Oh, you haven't heard of Amazon AnPro? It's Amazon's wifi-enabled, kinetic/motion-powered Anal Probe device; based on some of the same advanced alien technology found at Roswell decades ago. It keeps constant watch over essential data points such as your body temperature, diet (or at least your diet's "output"), ph balance, blood pressure, cholesterol, overall bodily well-being, etc. Yes, you too can capture a complete "picture" of your body - both "inside" and out! The first 100 callers get a free tube of "integration fluid" to ease data connection of the device-to-human interface/web hooks.

;-)

c. Cloud Cam Recordings. Cloud Cam streams your Cloud Cam Recordings to the cloud when it detects motion. Amazon processes and retains your Cloud Cam Recordings in the cloud to provide and improve our products and services. You give us all permissions we need to use your Cloud Cam Recordings to do so. These permissions include, for example, the rights to copy your Cloud Cam Recordings, modify your Cloud Cam Recordings to generate clips, use information about your Cloud Cam Recordings to organize them on your behalf, and review your Cloud Cam Recordings to provide technical support. Learn more about Cloud Cam, including how to delete your video clips.

So, Amazon can see what I have in my house and listen to what I say. How people are comfortable with this level of corporate intelligence gathering is absolutely beyond me.

Hopefully this motivates Google to make a more competitive, low end offering of Nest.

Nest seems like such a stagnant cluster-F that I think they would be better off cleaning shop. Something seems to be very wrong there since the acquisition.

I see Nest dropping price of nest pretty quickly here, I don't think i'd buy another Nest cam with this as an option (and i already have a few)

To me the thing that sets Nest cameras apart from the rest is the software. I am curious to see how Amazon did it.

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