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Comment by noodlesUK | Hacker News Reader

What I don’t get about all of these cctv solutions is why you’d want a system that uploads to the cloud at all. Surely it’s better to have all the footage on a local device, and then perhaps have a VPN-like tool remote access. Unifi protect works pretty well for me, and I’m sure other local solutions like ZoneMinder work super well too. I’ve got a fast internet connection, but I don’t trust it to be able to handle multiple streams of live video uploading constantly. Coupled with the privacy concerns, why would you choose ring over another vendor of more old-school CCTV?

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why you’d want a system that uploads to the cloud at all

I don't want to configure, monitor and manage a local DVR -- what do I do when I'm away from home and it fails? What do I do if the burglar finds that expensive looking DVR and steals it? How would I even know if it fails without some external (cloud?) service monitoring it?

These problems are solvable (I use Unifi cameras with a DVR with RAID disks and a hard to find network backup drive, and a monitoring process on my home router that will tell me if the DVR is offline but I'm still subject to failure when I'm away from home), but does the average consumer want to expend the effort to solve them?

> What I don’t get about all of these cctv solutions is why you’d want a system that uploads to the cloud at all. Surely it’s better to have all the footage on a local device, and then perhaps have a VPN-like tool remote access

If the threat model is burglary, no I don't want footage on a local device at all. Or more specifically, I don't want footage only on a local device and, ring or not, the first thing I'll want to do is ship it offsite.

If this is a business or it otherwise has people managing a security office, then local storage (ideally shipping to an offsite location later) should be adequate. Or if the system is well-protected enough that it would take longer to tamper (or destroy it) than law enforcement's response.

If the threat model is real burglary (not the hollywood kind where expert thieves steal everything in your house), storing footage on a NAS somewhere in a closet or in your basement is fine.

If your threat model is this fantasy burglary, the burglars are going to know to simply cut your Internet line before they rob the house to render the cloud-connected shit useless. Then they will just steal the cameras to ensure no local caches push data back up when the Internet is restored.

It’s not always better. One good case for cloud-linked would be when someone breaks in and steals the DVR. It also doesn’t need to constantly upload, because most have motion detection to only upload interesting events to the cloud.

Sure, but what thieves actually do is cut your cable/phone line, thus disabling most cloud surveillance systems.

Smart thief would just flood the WiFi network with deauth packets since everyone is using these things over WiFi. Disabled it before you even have to be in view.

Remind me:don’t you need to be connected to the WPA2 WiFi router to send deauth packets?

Actually no, you can send deauth without already knowing the key. It's a good way to force clients onto your rogue AP and then obtain the key via captive portal.

https://www.aircrack-ng.org/doku.php?id=deauthentication

No, that would sort of defeat the purpose. The deauth's are commonly used to try to capture the connection handshake so that one can then (offline) try to figure out the network's password. The management frames (such as deauth) are not encrypted, and one needs only the easily eavesdropped details of client and server MAC to spoof them: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/190133/why-does...

There are also signal jammers which I believe are _highly_ illegal.

So is breaking and entering. I doubt most determined thieves are going to be deterred by something being illegal. Your typical junkie isn't going to do that, so you're mostly looking at attackers going after higher end neighborhoods or middle tier business campuses.

Depends entirely on the frequency, jurisdiction and purpose.

Do they really? Because I’m pretty sure that’s a movie trope. Sneaking around the property looking for the cable and telephone lines seems like a great way to get caught by a camera.

Yeah. Alarm systems are all on cellular and trigger on loss of power.

I know someone it happened to.

> One good case for cloud-linked would be when someone breaks in and steals the DVR.

That's a pretty uncommon edge case considering that it's usually easier to disable the camera to begin with, e.g. with a paintball gun, than to track down and remove a DVR which could be in an unknown and arbitrarily well-secured location within the building -- or even outside of it. Just because the video storage isn't in the cloud doesn't mean it can't still be offsite.

Eh, disabling the camera is also risky. First carrying a paintball gun is a great way to get shot in many places in the US on its own, especially when committing another crime. Second, by the time you've disabled the camera it is very likely you're already on the film somewhere.

And it also depends on how serious of crime one is committing. When working for defense attorneys years ago, it was not uncommon to be on a case involving data recovery by the FBI because a person lit the building on fire because there was a camera in their somewhere.

> which could be in an unknown and arbitrarily well-secured location within the building -- or even outside of it. Just because the video storage isn't in the cloud doesn't mean it can't still be offsite.

Right. Ring is usually placed in homes. Where is the well-secured location in your average home?

> Right. Ring is usually placed in homes. Where is the well-secured location in your average home?

A DVR can be smaller than a Raspberry Pi. Remove any random electrical outlet in the house, put the DVR in the wall behind it and then replace the outlet. Or put it on the underside of your washing machine etc. Can't remove it if you have to disassemble the whole house to find it.

Or just put it inside a safe which is bolted down. There are safes with interior electrical outlets.

And encrypt them locally before upload.

5% of people know how to work on-prem and big players don't offer it as a solution. Your ring camera would be much more expensive if it included 1TB storage, processing, dedupes, backups, playback, etc.

You don’t need 1TB and neither does ring.

I have a Eufy camera setup that uses in-home storage. There’s about a year of data on a 64GB SD card that cost maybe $30.

You’re buying a camera. Amazon is getting a perpetual license to everything that happened in front of your home, forever. The cloud story is about analytics and data mining. You buy a camera, they get a feed.

Someone should invent pass-through hardware encrypt-video-on-a-fly box and send to AMZN encrypted garbage.

Same box would decrypt data on read for authorized user.

AMZN wants to monetize your feed?

Sell them subscription for access the feed with clear usage license. No sneaky, default, subtle crap "we will use your data and monetize it forever at our will without your concent"

This is basically the idea behind HomeKit Secure Video -> https://www.imore.com/homekit-secure-video-everything-you-ne... .

Remote access? Display solutions? Alerting? Availability? Backups? Ease of config? It's totally dependent on your use case.

Did you have to Port forward or set up a VPN for local viewing? Just that will stop 95% of users.

> Your ring camera would be much more expensive if it included 1TB storage, processing, dedupes, backups, playback, etc.

You don't need anywhere near 1TB of storage if you're only storing video when there's motion, and that smaller amount of storage has minimal cost. You also can't really dedup a series of unique videos anyway. And processing and playback cost nothing when done locally; pretty much all the rest of it is software.

All "cloud" really gets you is backups, which is more of a nice-to-have than a necessity for video which is going to get auto-deleted on a schedule regardless and can be manually backed up any time it becomes relevant to retain. You could also get automatic backups without "cloud" for any system that spans multiple sites, which is the case for most businesses and even an individual with any family member or friend who uses the same system.

It’s insanely easy and cheap to get a quality doorbell and alarm system that has monitoring (they call the police and/or fire) and lets me see a month (or more, I’ve only needed a month so far) of video from anywhere. Storing video on the camera is only good if someone doesn’t take the camera.

Do you have any recommendations?

I use a Ring doorbell and alarm, actually. My comment was explaining why someone would use a system like Ring. I use them over a self-hosted solution because of the professional monitoring. I don’t use their cameras in my house, though.

Sticker-eye camera maybe.

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