Hacker News Reader

Comment by kccqzy | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a relatively easy problem to mitigate: just put some local storage in the camera (even 1TB microSD cards cost very little). When the Wi-Fi is out, simply record to local storage. When it's restored, upload the recorded footage.

Indeed a quick search shows that newer Google Nest cameras support recording for an hour during Wi-Fi outage: https://store.google.com/magazine/compare_cameras?hl=en-US I'm surprised that Ring doesn't have something equivalent.

View on HN

Then the criminals start off with a jammer and follow up with a baseball bat to the camera (or they steal the camera too). It's always been a cat & mouse game between someone with valuables to protect, and people wanting to take them.

Is this comment sarcastic because I don’t see anything that stops them from baseball batting the camera to start…? Seems more effective than wifi jamming.

Well - most effective is to just steal from an area where police are known to do nothing about property theft. So, most of the US then…

Ideally a wired camera would record up until its destroyed, even warning the owner of motion. In that case even wearing mask still gives away height/build clothes, direction of approach, numbers etc. If its jammed first then you dont have that potential information, and you are relying on a loss of connection to be recognized as an attack.

Running a jammer as you approach the home would prevent it from uploading video to the cloud of your vehicle (perhaps the license plate can be seen), and your appearance/gait/etc. as you walk up to the house. The baseball bat is just insurance against any locally stored footage.

My $20 Wyze camera came with a microSD slot and a strong recommendation to buy a card for it.

That works for letting you see what happened after the fact, but not for alerting you to something happening right now.

If your camera is down for an extended period that would probably be enough of an alert?

If I was the attacker I'd start off by knocking the cameras out a few times to make you think they're unreliable.

That probably requires more forward planning and effort than most criminals will bother with.

I mean the best thing you can do as an immediate reaction is call the police. Otherwise, hope nothing personal is stolen and that you can use the footage to claim insurance.

I had the same thought

Reply on news.ycombinator.com