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Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

> Putting surveillance video on the cloud is... kinda dumb.

I tend to agree, but ...

If you're a small business or manufacturer, IT is a pain in the ass. The "cloud" is a benefit because you don't need to maintain any servers yourself and can just get on with your business.

The problem is that these companies don't face any consequence for claiming that they're secure and then not actually being ... you know ... secure.

If this stuff was simply encrypted at rest, that would have mitigated most of this breach.

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I don't think it would, because they leaked admin credentials (unless it was encrypted with a customer key and inaccessible to admin/support)

Anyway, I think we're at the point with software/digital systems where food manufacturing was in 1900: there's been a gold-rush due to new technology, and we're reaching peak negligence in the pursuit of profit, and I think we'll soon get to a threshold where regulators will finally step in and lock down the wild-west and impose some real standards. Between SolarWinds, Exchange, and now this, it's to a point where it's dragging down our whole society. Something has to give.

I just had an aha moment reading your post. Food safety, drug safety, airline safety, all these regulations were implemented because manufacturers were operating with standards so lax that people suffered actual harm.

Perhaps that's the real reason behind the anti-FDA lobbying we are seeing here. The FDA demonstrates that government-mandated safety standards work. We can't have those in the IT field because they would diminish profits!

The FDA also has massive associated costs and acts as a hurdle to innovation- which is partially by design (lobbyists like regulatory capture).

The Moderna and Biontech RNA vaccines got past the FDA in record time and are a massive innovation. What are you even talking about?

Also: Hepatitis C antivirals. One pill and you are cured, whereas in the past you'd be looking at a liver transplant. If that's not innovation it's impossible to say what that would be.

Sure, but many of Verkada's customers are large enterprises with large IT teams just making a bad decision.

Small businesses have either a box they bought at Costco or use something like Comcast's service which they just add on to their cable modem.

Those boxes from Costco come with WiFi built in and a mobile app paired to it. The small business owner invariably sets up port forwarding so they can watch from home and leaves the default password because it doesn’t force you to change it. Not much better there either.

My point was less that those were good solutions, but that a company I contend "shouldn't exist" likely has a different customer segment, like Tesla and Cloudflare.

Oh, the places I've boldly gone - using default passcodes

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