The US reportedly considering blacklisting Chinese surveillance firm Hikvision | Hacker News Reader

The US reportedly considering blacklisting Chinese surveillance firm Hikvision

cnbc.com

31 pointsbluedino16 comments

Hikvision makes _very cheap_ good quality network cameras ... that you have to deploy behind a firewall to avoid https://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2017/Sep/23

Like the US really cares about surveillance or dictators...if they care they could stop selling weapons to SA or stop US companies selling surveillance products & services. I mean the very US companies that helped build The Great Firewall. What US is really concerned about is that China has a big market share in this industry and will only get better. Maybe the next time SA will buy from China instead of US...it's really just about old good $$$

I have a mixed feeling about this new technology war. On one side I think China being a quite poor country has a good chance to improve life of millions of its people if it continues to innovate in AI and Robotics. On the other side, these technologies can be used easily to control all the people, restricting freedom of speech and debate, thus inevitably leading to economical deadlocks and wrong decisions, at least while real people do decide yet.

This I actually agree with. Tried one, and while the hardware is surprisingly decent, the software has holes like an Emmental.

If we're going after surveillance firms, how about the Israeli firm exploiting human rights activists or the Saudi firm making wife-surveillance apps? Or is it a radical concept that we should do this based on a system of rules rather than arbitrary executive decisions?

As long as you keep them on their own air gapped network, they should be okay. Arecont are just too expensive.

The Ubiquiti cameras are of a much higher build quality and don't have these issues albeit are a tad more expensive. I have Foscam, Hikvision, and Ubiquiti cameras. I've stopped buying anything but the Ubiquiti cameras due to the quality being that much better.

Thanks for pointing them out. They’re doing good things for prosumers and small companies who don’t need “enterprise” solutions yet.

We looked at them all and went with Hikvision. Ubiquitous does not at the moment make a comparable camera. I can get 4-10MPixel HKV cameras and the unifi G3 tops out at 1080p.

The Unifi G4 Pro tops out at 4K, but is not a cheap camera. Like the G3 Pro however, the build quality is extraordinary. I mounted it to my masonry garage on the outside and love run it via PoE to a Unifi 8 port PoE switch inside my garage (which in turn goes through conduit into my basement and into a 48 port switch :D

https://store.ui.com/products/unifi-protect-g4-pro-camera

I went with a full Ubiquiti UniFi setup and the UniFi Cameras. One of the reason was the reported backdoors and phoning home stuff the cheaper cameras were doing. If I were to get them I’d put them on VLANs with no access to the internet.

fucking buggy ass vulnerable cameras are constantly exploited for IoT botnets....good riddance.

Remember everyone - if you're looking to buy any cheap surveillance/camera gear and you're smart enough to block it from phoning home to the dirty communistic reds, you better buy it very soon and quickly as most cheaper surveillance equipment is basically re-branded Hikvision technology anyways!

The grey markets cameras are worse. Not only are they rebranded Hikvisions, they also don’t update the software at all. I bought a cheap camera from Monoprice that is really a Hikvision. And even shows up in their discovery tools. Except the firmware is 4 years old. I can’t get security updates and since it’s not Hikvision I can’t flash it with their patched firmwares.

I've had to unbrick gray-market hikvision cameras that were flashed with hikvision firmware for a friend. Best to keep them on their own subnet along with a small zfs cluster and drop all new outgoing packets.

By design our camera network is unroutable. If you want To watch a feed you get it from the NVR. I trust these cameras as much as I trust any cheap IoT device.

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