Comment by eamonnsullivan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eamonnsullivan | Hacker News Reader

I did pretty much the same thing. The issue wasn't cats (I have two, but they'll gladly let anyone pet and feed them), it was that I can't hear the doorbell from my WFH office. I wanted to flash the light. I already use Home Assistant for loads of stuff.

I tried ESP32 and a 433MHz antenna thingy, so that I could continue to use my cheapo bell. That proved unreliable (a press got picked up, at best, about 90% of the time).

Then I went through two zigbee buttons. The issue is that Amazon and other delivery drivers appear to use a hammer to press doorbells. That's the only explanation I can think of for the state of the buttons after a few weeks.

I finally just caved and bought the cheapest (still expensive) Ring doorbell and disabled the camera. It's been solid, but I feel dirty and regret it each time I pay the annual bill. It's my last cloud-enabled device, but I can't afford to just keep throwing Zigbee buttons at the gorillas who deliver my packages.

I have an Amcrest doorbell and run amcrest2mqtt which sends messages that get picked up by Home Assistant. Keeps everything local and means I don't have to pay for a Ring subscription.

My only complaint is that when I blocked the doorbell from the internet, it just started rebooting every few minutes. If I cared, I'd tape over the camera, but I'm not too worried about someone spying on my front yard via my doorbell camera.

The threat model is that they capture your ingress and egress patterns.

If someone's targeting me specifically then I feel like it's easier to just watch my house in person. Plus there are all the neighbors with (I assume) their doorbell cameras that would also have my house in view. And this threat would have to, I don't know, run CV on the feed from my camera to see when I leave or when my car leaves, then figure out if everyone in the house left so they could break in?

For this to be worth doing with hacked cameras instead of in person, you need to be monitoring a lot of camera feeds. But to get any useful info out of it, you need to spend a lot of time putting together data about a single feed. And unless you've already evaluated the target, you don't know which feeds are from valuable houses.

I just don't buy this as a real threat for any but the most valuable targets.

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