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Apart from leaks harming the privacy of customers, paying ransoms does social harm by providing an income and incentive to criminals.

I found leaked details of Royal Mail's negotiations with their attackers fascinating [0].

I'm not sure it's practical to outlaw the payment of ransoms, but it should at least be heavily taxed (say, 100%). Naively, I would expect this to cut by half the amount that can be extorted through ransomware attacks, making countries that implement such a tax less attractive targets.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/feb/15/under-no-ci...

It’s been tried. Laws against paying just make people not report to the police at all.

well, i guess laws against murder, makes murder no report them self...

The analogy is closer to being: the state will prosecute the murder victim's family for failing to properly protect them AND won't be able to locate or punish the true murderer. So in this situation, what's the family going to do? Mourn in private and not report the crime, maybe try for vigilante justice if they think they've identified the murderer.

And not let the community know there is a threat out there.

In this scenario. the community is a danger to the family.

Reporting the murder will see the community punish the family for not protecting the person better.

> laws against murder, makes murder no report them self

One of these is more universally repulsive than the other. Were it illegal, I'm not sure I could be bothered to blow a whistle on a company paying a cyberransom. That's obviously different for murder.

Then you toss the entire executive branch in prison when it inevitably leaks. The problem will solve itself soon enough. These criminal organizations should be treated as such.

Hah the LockBit negotiator displays that childish " I'm going to make something up and be convinced it's true" mentality that's much too common nowadays..

> LockBit refused to accept the explanation and accused the company’s negotiator of “bluffing”, speculating that the company’s directors probably held £100m of cryptocurrency personally that could “finish this nightmare”.

"I have the ability to punish you for my fantasy not being true" isn't childish, it's common among adults, and, indeed, is a defining feature among the adults who abuse children and anyone else less powerful than them. It is, in fact, one of the most powerful tools a dictator has: "You failed to capture that objective? You are incompetent, and possibly traitorous, so you will be executed, your family will be executed, and I will continue this war with competent generals who execute my plans because my plans are viable."

If an organization pays a ransom, I consider that organization to be effectively in league with the criminals, and avoid doing any business with them in the future.

This. It would have been (relatively) easy for Ring to encrypt the video data so that they themselves can't access it. Obviously I don't wish it upon the individuals that use these cameras but I would probably smirk if data gets leaked and Amazon gets sued into the ground.

E2E encryption is supported with Ring. You have to enable it yourself. Only discovered this a few weeks ago and immediately enabled it [1]

This doesn't protect your PII data though. This is not a good situation at all.

[1] https://support.ring.com/hc/en-us/articles/360054941511-Unde...

There are also some pretty extreme feature downgrades to enabling it. Main ones for me if I was a customer would be

Limited notifications,.loss of timeline feature, inaccessible on desktop and other non-mobile platform

Definitely some tradeoffs there. I recall going back and forth in my head "I'm paranoid, I don't need to enable this" to "what if there was a breach..".

and well.. here we are.

E2E encryption only protects the data while it is in transmission.

If there is a breach, all of your data is accessible because it is decrypted at the endpoint.

Thats not what E2E encryption means. Encryption during transmission is called transport layer encryption (eg via TLS). E2E (end to end) encryption is encryption where the data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Generally E2E systems only have the keys to decrypt the data on the user's (endpoint) device.

Thanks for your comment. I truly had no idea.

This was very informative and changes my views on a few things.

That said, I'm pretty sure Zoom used your definition of E2E in their marketing so the confusion is warranted.

Run your own camera system with Blue Iris.

That's a nice idea, but Blue Iris in particular, while being affordable and while not requiring a subscription, only runs on Windows. Keeping a Windows system running 24/7 is a whole chore in itself.

Got any suggestions for OSes that are easy to secure and easy to run 24/7?

MotionEyeOS isn’t as easy as a Windows installer and is probably only as secure as you make the rest of your network, but as a main Windows user and occasional *nix, the various guides weren’t too hard to follow and it’s been fairly reliable.

Frigate, optionally with Home Assistant. Exceptionally reliable for the two years I've used it.

I rolled my own system, initially with MotionEye, and then rolled over to Frigate. I appreciate the extra object detection feature in MotionEye, whereas MotionEye really only records on, well, motion. Even with two 720P streams, I'm able to do motion detection and object recognition on an ancient Core2Duo Mac Mini, no TPU.

No data leaves my LAN unless I want it to.

The most painful part of the whole process was the YAML files for Frigate.

They should be required by law to provide offline access to your stream, RTSP or something similar.

> I've said it before and I'll say it again

Don't tell us, tell your legislators. Ideally with some kind of narrative that ties to a financial incentive for the lawmaker and his or her constituents.

If the security industry got together and lobbied for this as both a jobs program (security companies offering services to tech companies) and as a means of protecting Americans/constituents, then it might get somewhere.

>Ideally with some kind of narrative that ties to a financial incentive for the lawmaker and his or her constituents.

Absofuckinglutely. Never talk to a politician without remembering that if they don't get a cut...

> never talk to a politician without remembering that if they don't get a cut

Most voters don't care about digital security. That means most politicians, reasonably, don't care either. Most voters do care about their economies. So linking what you're talking about to talking points the political can use is helpful. Not because they're going to get a cut.

Yes. Also, this time it's a consumer grade surveillance, but the same goes for security cams in prisons or nuclear facilities: hoarding information (sensitive or not) does not translate 1:1 to increasing security. This should be obvious, still we feel more, not less, safe with our house surveilled with technology.

I kinda agree with you but it’s a tough one because what you’re describing is fining the victims of a crime. We don’t fine homeowners who fit cheap locks and get burgled do we.

Pragmatically, it might be the right thing to do, but it feels wrong. Would you consider a due diligence to security threshold? That would certainly make it easier the well resourced to weasel out of fines, but when a small startup comes up against a well resourced nation state level hackers with a catalogue of 0days what are they supposed to do? Just go out of business?

We don't fine them, but homeowners usually don't have million of records of private data at home.

Wouldn't you want your bank get fined if they aren't secure enough and loose your money? Or your local government if they loose your tax records because they think they don't need to lock their door?

The hard part will be determining whether the company could have done something about it (like locking the doors or the windows). If they could, they for sure should get a fine if they didn't.

We absolutely do fine/convict homeowners if, in a burglary, their improperly secured gun is stolen. The fines aren't for being hacked, they're for not adequately securing user data; ownership of which is a conscious decision.

> We don’t fine homeowners who fit cheap locks and get burgled do we

This isn't an appropriate comparison. I'm not a lawyer but I would imagine this would fall under negligence. Businesses are liable for improperly securing dangerous materials in the physical world.

> We don’t fine homeowners who fit cheap locks and get burgled do we.

The type of locks you have affect the price of your home insurance, in the UK at least.

It would be like fining the victim of home burglary who stores data about their neighbors for profit. Mandatory business data leak should be exempt but everything else should be a liability. If they save cc info by default (opt-out) that should be a major liability.

In the next episodes:

- Why so expensive?

- Where did all businesses go?

- Let’s create a certified secure data enclave companies!

- Why so expensive still?

- We can’t charge a certified company because it would damage half the economy!

You can translate this to any kind of regulation.

Want cars not to explode when slightly rear-ended? Why are they so expensive now? Where did the car businesses go? Let's create car security companies! Why so expensive still? ...

I think your example just fortified his comment.

I can't make a car company. I can make a webcam on doors company.

And you might say it is about raw materials. But I can buy enough materials for one car and one webcam door. I can't put the car on the road (as much as it make sense) only because of the sheer amount of cost required to pass regulations.

So while regulation is something we want as costumers. I think we'd prefer to not have it become a obstacle in the software sector to the point it exist elsewhere.

That is why I think the GDPR is great since it applies to companies with 250+ employs.

>So while regulation is something we want as costumers. I think we'd prefer to not have it become a obstacle in the software sector to the point it exist elsewhere.

Alternatively looked in the metaphor, cars are dangerous things - for the passengers and civilians nearby. We as a society don't want any random vehicle to be on the road due to the risks involved. A webcam door doesn't have this type of risk associated, so it's fine to DIY and whatever. However there are still risks, like PII leaks, so these they need to be mitigated too.

> That is why I think the GDPR is great since it applies to companies with 250+ employs.

No it doesn't? It applies to any company that holds EU citizens' PII.

> No it doesn't

Well I guess I fell into this myth:

https://www.vistra.com/insights/if-i-have-fewer-250-members-...

Which do give some exemption to <250 people companies but not to an extent that I said.

i am only glad that you arent selling cars without safety tests.

i would also be glad that not anyone would make a air traffic control or a train signaling system.

while i like foss programs and have low barriers of entry in any field, there needs to be a minimal standard that everyone shoud adhere to where a system failure could affect someones life beyond minor inconvenience.

I am very much with you on this but I think the biggest hurdle in this theory is that introducing such regulation would create a de-facto hostile innovation environment in that jurisdiction. And no regulator will lightheartedly put themselves into the position of being the guy that “drove away all the innovators/startups/research/business”

> I am very much with you on this but I think the biggest hurdle in this theory is that introducing such regulation would create a de-facto hostile innovation environment in that jurisdiction.

Personally I think that is a price worth paying. Laws like the parent are suggesting are about having a standard that companies need to meet if they want to operate in a given space, and currently it is clear that companies will not meet these standards unless they are legally obliged to do so.

Some would say the most fertile ground for "business innovation" is a country with no labor protection laws.

I think innovation will happen regardless and I'm kinda tired of fear mongering around "throttling innovation" whenever people talk about making our world better for people.

> companies should suffer massive fines / damages / criminal charges when they leak the personal data of millions of customers

This is zealous. If consumers don't care, and nobody can show tangible damages, "massive fines" and "criminal charges" are closer to moral outrage than prudent lawmaking.

Noone cares about anything, unless they're the one affected by this.

I don't care if people around me don't have car insurance, but once one of them crashes into my car, i sure want them to have one, while the rest will continue not caring.

So yes, requiring companies to safeguard data, even if that means fines and criminal charges for responsible people is important.

What's your basis for assuming customers don't care?

I think there are those who don't care, and those who care but don't know better in the face of misleading marketing.