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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!

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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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