Hacker News Reader

Comment by epc | Hacker News Reader

I finished setting up a pile of Nest thermostats and cameras about a month before Google killed “works with Nest”. Am now planning to remove all of the Nest products. Haven't figured out what to replace the cameras with (I do not want to go through this again with another vendor). The Nest thermostats were great for the first couple of years we had them and we saw some measurable savings on heating and cooling. Killing off the automation options via IFTTT kills the utility of the thermostats for me (and Google Assistant is useless as a replacement if your primary Google accounts are G Suite accounts).

View on HN

I use Wyze cameras for baby monitors, home security, etc., and I’ve been pretty happy with them. They’re cheap enough that you can throw a camera at pretty much any idea. They are a cloud-based product so they come with all of the associated privacy concerns, but if you were using Nest then that’s maybe not a huge deal. Not affiliated with the company, just relatively pleased with the products.

The Wyze cams are very cheap and you might be able to use them locally as normal network cameras without any internet connection.

A year or two ago I looked into this and there was a 'jailbreak' to load different firmware onto it, but I think it stopped being functional due to updates. However, I have heard things about an official offline firmware being released by Wyze which you may want to look into.

Awesome, that'd be huge. Only issue with them are the SD cards being the canonical place to store footage... so if the criminal (or weather event) destroys the cameras.... not so useful.

Same. I use their cameras and now their motion detectors. They are cheap and work well. Their IR filters jam regularly though on the cameras, giving everything a blindingly purple shade unless you just have IR/night mode on at all times. Small price to pay for the cost of the camera I guess.

Ubiquity has some nice cameras. They operate on the LAN only. Not sure whether they have any alerting/movement detection or IFTT capabilities though.

The Ubiquity cameras are nice! They do offer remote access, which I used to monitor 3D printers and chickens from afar. I’m not sure if remote access comes with the cameras or requires their “cloud key” device, which we also have.

The remote access comes with it. The footage is stored locally and their remote access acts as a proxy.

Comes with. They’re actually fairly separated from the rest of Ubiquiti’s offerings. I have seven cameras currently and would like to add a few more.

There’s an ongoing migration of ubiquiti video hardware to “unifi protect” which requires their hardware NVR (cloud key gen2+) to run. Of course remote access is possible, but you can’t self host the new software (at least for now).

Use normal network enabled cameras and make them remote accessible via a Tor hidden service: https://github.com/n8fr8/talks/blob/master/onion_things/Inte...

Jesus, why would you waste Tor's limited bandwidth on personal cameras. Throw it behind a VPN and that's it. It's like trying to record your camera footage in blockchain bad.

Because any use of Tor's network is a good use. If you only use Tor for child porn and other communication that can get you behind bars in your jurisdiction, any Tor user is an automatic suspect. Using Tor's bandwidth for mundane things helps the whole network.

Out of curiousity, what benefits does Tor bring here? Wouldn't a domain + VPN (or simply HTTPS + password protection) + a restrictive firewall work as well?

I use a VPN when the router have a public ip (static or dynamic). Behind CGN there are not many alternatives to onion services.

Running a VPN on a cheap VPS is a much better alternative.

Ah, didn't realize you could use Tor as a poor man's TURN server. That makes sense.

... thinking about it, has anyone tried to actually use Tor to provide TURN/signalling functionality for WebRTC? Seems to me you could get true peer-to-peer WebRTC calls relatively easily this way.

Yi cameras are quite cheap but good quality (xiaomi is behind that company I think). There is a custom firmware you can load that will enable ftp and ssh so you can grab the recordings from your home server and push them wherever you want, bypassing the need to use their cloud.

Fire Phone notwithstanding, Amazon seems to offer good long-term support for their devices. I've been very pleased with my e-Ink Kindles, first-gen FireTV, and first-gen Alexa. I expect the Amazon Cloud Camera to have a similarly lengthy product lifetime.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com