Generally they are in and out in a few minutes long before police or a security service can dispatch someone.
My system has a large battery backup for an old lantern or something, recording, 4G fallback, is wired, and I regularly spend time outside.
All of which is invalidated by people staking out a place and wearing a mask.
I saw a burglar with almost all of my neighbors things and appliances. Thought they were moving or upgrading and waved.
This brings up another point, which is that one of the best things you can do for your security is to be well known by your neighbors. If no one knows your appearance and habits then all kinds of crazy stuff can go down while you're away and your neighbors won't know anything's wrong.
My favorite part of the beginning of the pandemic was going to the bank in a hankerchief like an Old West bank robber. Just as effective today as back then...for hiding your identity just slightly better than Clark Kent taking off his glasses.
On a health-level, how is this remotely controversial? Bandanas--especially draped "bank robber" style--are simply a bad choice:
> Loosely folded face masks and bandana-style coverings provide minimal stopping-capability for the smallest aerosolized respiratory droplets.
-- https://pubs.aip.org/aip/pof/article/32/6/061708/1068115/Vis...
Dude, re-read the thread:
1. You specifically framed it as during "the beginning of the pandemic."
2. You brought up people wearing masks (implicitly for health concerns.)
3. You said those particular masks were amusingly ineffective (for disguising identity in the bank.)
4. I wryly noted those particular low-quality masks were indeed ineffective in multiple ways. (The health concerns that motivated them in #2.)
I can't make you enjoy my reply, but stop acting like this is some kind of shocking non-sequitur leap into forced realms of conversation. You more than set the stage yourself.
From that observation I infer masks are effective at eliminating virus transmission, which is quite extraordinary given the virus is so small.
And whether you can distinguish between those and rhinoviruses / adenoviruses / etc?
There was another poster on that thread who said they were able to smell colds. I wonder if this is just extremely common and / or if we can all be trained to do it like with wine?
> From that observation I infer masks are effective at eliminating virus transmission, which is quite extraordinary given the virus is so small.
This inference doesn't really make sense to me. I bet putting a cigarette in your mouth, or a chopped onion in front of your face, would achieve the same frustration of this ability.
On the other hand, if a place has visible cameras and ADT signs, do they have valuables worthy of protection and worth the risk?
The other glaring flaw with cameras is that they always face perpendicular to the street, so even if the getaway car has plates you'll never get a shot of them. Not that the car isn't stolen anyway...
With security ops like this, it is important to understand that they are not targeting joe schmoe. They are targeting specific orgs/people that have a lot to lose.
Using the "Lockpicking Lawyer" as an example: "Oh they can get into a security shed, who cares." It's not about meemaw's security shed, its about a cop's trunk with guns in it.
Approximately 6 years ago, I saw a face detection demo, which detected the face of a man behind a snow mask while running in the night with minimal lighting from a side-shot. I think seeing the eye and nose geometry was enough.
The only time the system saw the face was from another camera in the same system head-on. I don't remember whether it was masked or not.
If this is available for defense, it can be made available for civilian applications, too, but it won't be, because then you won't be able sold it to that price because of depreciation.
Increasingly, cameras are the way that security companies dispatch their guards. They are far more actionable than traditional intrusion alarms. Depending on the police department, alarm reports with video may be treated as crimes in progress while intrusion alarm activations alone are not.
Unfortunately the technical standards around video verification are not widely implemented and so in practice it usually requires getting your intrusion alarm, surveillance, and security response all from the same vendor. There are common standards but the consumer security industry today is heavily organized around walled gardens and there isn't much adoption of the industry standards outside of commercial.
In the commercial world these types of systems are often referred to as "pre-intrusion" since the monitoring center observes the cameras in realtime and, in theory, could dispatch guards to suspicious activity before any intrusion alarm would be triggered. In the consumer world, for cost and privacy reasons, the monitoring center usually only receives video after the activation of an intrusion alarm.
I was notified by the motion alarm in my driveway and then my front door and was able to hit the Siren button and scare them off.
Without that, I would have had 6 "armed" intruders inside my house with myself+partner+4 year old.
The camera system prevented the crime being far more serious than it would have been (both cars+valuables stolen and maybe a stabbing or 3).
I was also considering the safety glass option, given that we had a porch door with "all" glass (just a small wooden frame). I'm a distracted and clumsy at times so I was worried about running through the glass in the door. After talking to the window manufacturer, I learned that I didn't need the safety glass option since the extra sound insulation meant the construction was laminated, hence acted much like a laminated safety glass.
Haven't tried to break them yet, but after helping getting them mounted (about 50kg for a 1x1m window, heavy!) it seems to me it'll take some effort to get through them. Proper anti-burglary glass is likely much better, but wouldn't surprise me if a group of teens would struggle.
Anyway, wasn't my primary consideration but I sleep slightly better at night compared to the old windows which could easily have been shattered with a simple rock, including the porch door.
edit: Also sleeping much better due to the sound insulation. The triple-pane does most of the damping I imagine, but between them it was a vast difference. I had three ~10 yo boys running around screaming (or playing as they'd say) 10m from my wall, and once I closed the new window to my room I could barely hear them. Not at all like the old windows.
edit 2: We also got the option for IR blocking, it adds just the slightest blue tint but cuts 60% of the IR. Made a massive difference in keeping especially the living room cool during summer.
The windows have a U value that's significant lower than what the old would be due to the three-pane glass. The lack of cold flowing compared to the old windows was very noticeable as we got them mounted during the winter, so had an almost direct comparison. This winter we had a week below -25C and even then it was hardly any noticeable "cold shower".
The IR filter was incredibly noticeable when opening the porch door on a bright and sunny day when outside temps were roughly same as inside temps, holding one hand behind the main window and one in the door opening in direct sunlight. The difference in radiant heat from the sun on each hand was striking. It was also very noticeable on the living room floor during summer if the porch door was left open for a while, standing with one foot on a patch lit by the window and the other on a patch lit by direct sunlight. Though it wasn't unexpected given the blackbody radiation from the sun[1].
The additional sound proofing I'll agree on though. It wasn't that significant on paper, IIRC listed as 5-6 dB reduction, maybe less.
But we had waited and bought them during a 50% off campaign which included the extra options, so we went for it as it didn't add that much after the 50% reduction and my SO is really affected by noise.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight#Composition_and_power
Inspiring, thanks for sharing!
What people expect:
- triggering an alarm so the theives don't spend the night looking at every nook and cranny of the house
- having proof that it was burglars and not the drunk neighboor forcing his way to the wrong house (if so, you'd also want proof of that though)
- get the cops and insurance to be on board and have the incident processed swiftly. "solving" here basically means getting the insurance monney to buy the missing stuff.
Yep.
Dashcams don't prevent traffic accidents. But they _do_ make it much much easier for the not-at-fault party to make their insurance claim.
It'd be nice of home security cameras "stopped crime", but they are much more useful in documenting your insurance claim. Which is still worthwhile (assuming you have insurance to claim on).
What else do you need except that you got stolen n items when doing your insurance claim?
Edit: it's also very useful to me to keep video logs of my shop and other areas. I can easily go back to see what happened if something goes wrong (stuff falling, me forgetting stuff somewhere, figuring out why there were big car tire tracks across my yard, etc).
It is only recent history that cell phone cameras have become ubiquitous and it has caused a huge shift in the authorities ability to squash their abusive behaviors
In the same way that TV played a fundamental part of progress in the civil rights and Vietnam wars, one of the best tools the average person has to hold people accountable is to control the narrative via video
My only concern is that gen AI will mean that nobody will ever trust video evidence again. I hope we get some kind of signature based crypto verification on recordings to prove they aren’t fake. Like every device is keyed to authenticate the recordings it produces
Like, ok, every device is keyed to authenticate the recordings it produces, using a unique key signed by the manufacturer - as long as a few valid device keys ever leak from the device or the manufacturer, any fake video can get signed with a valid key from Camera#1234 from ShenzhenCameraCorp567, ltd.; you're not going to make every $1 camera module in cheap embedded devices tamper resistant.
For web CA's to work, all you need is that the single certificate for the site you're choosing to visit is good - but if you want to use a similar system to verify trustworthiness of viral images originating from strangers through social media, you need 100% of the camera certificates to be valid - if there are any leaked certificates, then manufacturers of fake images will use those; and on the other hand if you "revoke" everything from any compromised manufacturer, people won't just replace their cameras, they'll simply keep posting data with their valid-but-invalid certificates and you'll either have to automatically mistrust lots of genuine true content or be vulnerable to fake data, and most people will choose the latter.
I would like to opt out of this nightmarish safety hellscape. I never use the phrase Orwellian because it’s so often misused, but yikes is this some 1984 badthink.
I'd also like to opt-out of having cameras everywhere in public but the fact of the matter is they are here to stay. Additionally, most of the cameras which capture your image in public are not cameras which you installed and they're not cameras which you have the authority to remove. Adding your own cameras to the mix is functionally equivalent to exercising your freedom to speak; really, to document, in this context.
> David Brin is worried, but not just about privacy. He fears that society will overreact to these technologies by restricting the flow of information, frantically enforcing a reign of secrecy. Such measures, he warns, won't really preserve our privacy. Governments, the wealthy, criminals, and the techno-elite will still find ways to watch us. But we'll have fewer ways to watch them. We'll lose the key to a free society: accountability.
Note this was published in 1999, so one can argue about how far we went in either direction. I think we mostly ended up with a collective shrug.
"Before he was George Orwell, he was Eric Blair, police officer" -- https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/05/books/review/george-orwel...
Today's "nightmarish safety hellscape" is brought to you by (amongst others) Toby Roberts, a former technical surveillance officer at the UK's Eastern Region Special's Operations Unit, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation where he's the official "Maker In Residence". -- https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/09/rpi_maker_in_residenc...
https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/security/amazons-r...
(Although Amazon claim to be "sunsetting" that as of a couple of weeks ago: https://www.npr.org/2024/01/25/1226942087/ring-will-no-longe... )
My knowledge of the law here is virtually nonexistent. It seems likely that I could still be subpoenaed to turn over footage under some circumstances. But at least I'm in control of that footage and it's not automatically being given to some third party.
The privacy implications are astounding. But, as you say, this is all inevitable (I intentionally left out your "nearly" there), and it's a very good question about how that's going to change society and whether we (I) want to live in that.
Stopping short of that, there'd still be value in being able to cryptographically prove that your home surveillance video (or dash cam video) came from _your_ camera and is unaltered from the original recording.
I think going forward, the "circle of trust" for the next "capital insurrection type event" video evidence will be founded on multiple videos of the same scenes from multiple angles and from devices owned by un related individuals.
Although, the biggest category of cameras these days is cell phones, and all (most?) of them have some sort of hardware trust store with private keys that are extremely difficult to extract, so it wouldn't be to much of a stretch to consider having Android and iOS default camera app being able to digitally sign photos/video - all without "a centralized signing administration" and piggybacking on existing token security methods...
I know of at least 2 countries where police will be immediately dispatched to a robbery in progress if a person is caught on camera by the alarm system and the owner confirms it's a robbery (e.g. on a phone call). By law, police won't be dispatched unless a person is caught on video, due to false alarms.
I know this because that's what happened when my home was robbed and I was out of town. Fortunately, since the police response was quick the thief didn't have enough time to take anything (!), as he must have been in and out in 2 minutes at most.
It also helped that there was no jewelry or cash inside the house, of course.
Although unsolicited calls are not a problem here, fortunately.
2) You might be right about some places and are definitely wrong about quite a few others.
Having clear face images of "troubled youth" known to the cops has led to arrests in Australia, for one.
Also, non-Western countries generally don't have a great track record with things like gay rights, women's right, etc. So I'm mostly happy that we do things the Western way and not otherwise.
Give the car thieves 3 chances and the muggers zero.
assault gets less time than that, and i'd hope that getting attacked physically would rate worse than the loss of possessions on your chart
Who said or implied that?
Rape is s notoriously hard crime to prove and murders are either done in gang neighbourhoods where there sre few cameras and people don't talk to police.
I don't know of any actually actionable improvement ideas to improve solve rate.
Police juke stats and in a number of urban centers are effectively a legalized gang.
you must of have read over the "detectives"--pural--part of that sentence. I have had a burglary in one home, and then a few years later had a home invasion where the person was very obviously identified to the police. The responding officers were able to look him up, have a positive witness ID made, and then see that this was a "bad guy". No arrest made.
Not true at all. Police love footage that provides anything useful when they have time to work on a case and, importantly, the footage is actually useful.
A lot of DIY security camera installs provide useless footage: Cameras are mounted too high to catch faces, lighting is bad, license plates are blurry, and the list goes on. If you can actually catch faces, license plates, or anything else identifiable then it goes into the case.
> We've been told directly by detectives that they are too busy to look at emails with evidence.
That's a polite way of saying your case isn't a priority for them. Caseload is high and most departments have to filter and prioritize aggressively.
Unfortunately, anything involving e-mail evidence gets messy very quickly because e-mails require legwork from specialists to verify and admit with a proper chain of evidence. Forwarding an e-mail to a police officer or sending them a screenshot of something might be useful as a hint in an active case, but it's not going to meet the bar for admissable evidence unless they can get more resources on it.
i guess i could have worded that more clearly. the email wasn't the evidence. the email was just providing information for the detective on who to talk to with much more information that would not have a questionable chain as you're suggesting.
I was responding to the parent commenter's complaints that police wouldn't look at e-mails in some case (not related to video).
If you're in a city with 1,000+ home burglaries a year, nobody cares that you clear one and arrest some meth head. But, solve some gruesome or politically-tinged crime and you're holding a press conference and getting praise left and right.
We do the same thing as software engineers. Every large company has some lore about what types of work get you promoted, and many engineers prefer to work on that.
Often the police know who the criminals in town are. However they lack evidence to prove anything. Thus a camera feed showing an already known criminal is enough to get their attention as while they might not care about you directly they criminal who hit you may have also hit a high importance target but they cannot prove it in court - thus convicting them of hitting you helps them for cases they cannot prove.
Actually crime against persons (murder, assault, armed robbery) have higher priority than simple burglaries. Having your property taken away is infuriating but no one can argue that stoping a violent criminal is more important.
First, a lot of simple assault arrests are for objectionable but ultimately trivial stuff - people getting into drunken brawls, spitting on each other, and so on. A series of burglaries targeting a local small business can be far more devastating to the owner than that.
But your argument also doesn't hold because it's clear that there are property crimes that are investigated with zeal. For example, in the SF Bay Area, a person was recently charged with "hate crimes" for taking down some pro-Palestine signs. I'm not making some political point here, but we can agree that the investigation wasn't motivated by the severity of the crime, right?