Posts by morsey

Eufy security cams 'ignore cloud opt-out, store unique IDs' of anyone who walks by

Tuya WiFi security cameras

:) I bought myself one of the 'replaces the peephole on your front door' camera's that are all over Amazon at the moment.

I'm under no illusions on how much is handed off to someone else with it and I'm a strong believer in not renting my doorbell to someone else.

I've been picking it apart to see how bad it is (it's not getting fitted till I've looked under as many rocks as I can find and blocked the snakeholes).

I've gotta say, I thought it would be bad, but it's much worse. It's a big bloated generic build that's been optimised by configuration for the particular model.

Because of this there are a couple of heavy lifting binaries in it that seem to do all the main work, ankya_ipc being one of them. A couple of years ago these generic builds were easy to get a root shell to, but the builds now are doing basic good things (long passwords so John is unlikely to crack them in my lifetime) making it harder to simply open a telnet, give it a sdcard hosted file to update it's config and call the save function to set that as part of it's firmware image.

I'm at the point now that I can at least watch what it's output is throwing while it 'does stuff' and I've gotta say, before I was leery about it being fitted, now it's an absolute no, not until it's walled in and I've made it truly local only.

Here's the thing, these devices have face recognition on board, they are little linux'es so that's entirely feasible. They do a fair amount of the instantaneous heavy lifting onboard for this, but as the article says, it's all sent up to a centralised location. With that as well, a lot of it is centralised in one way. The way to view the feeds on this thing are to use the app, there are local feeds you can access and find, but it's very much not a trivial thing to work out.

Final point is this, mine has a mic and speaker so if someone is at the door I can enable the mic and speak to them. This is only accessible (so far that I've found so far) through the app, so the app sends the command to the device.

So the stream is an endpoint on the apps servers

the ability to enable mic audio into the stream is an endpoint on the apps servers

the ability to send audio to the speakers is an endpoint on the apps servers

...so anyone who can find my cameras endpoint on the public application can watch, listen and send audio through my camera.

Being one of the 1% sucks if you're a Rackspace user

Pffft serves them right. About 10 years ago I filled out a survey with them on the promise of a free t'shirt with the 'fanatical' slogan on it.

Still hasn't arrived... although I have moved twice since then. Still, no excuse!

Ballmer: Windows Mobile lost a 'whole generation'

We really do need a Balmer icon here....

..dancing, he MUST be dancing

User Data: Here, there, everywhere

backed up and replicated work = good, backed up and replicated roaming profiles = bad

Ok, so I get where this is going and its a happy fluffy place where Alice can have a picture of her kitties (they're her 'babies') with thpeshal mouse cursors and a icon theme from the 1990's that reminds me of Geocities, along with a million IExplore toolbars and enough spyware to push the moon into a unstable orbit along with her entire ABBA collection in her ITunes account that is stored in her My Documents and definitely not forgetting along with every badly taken photo of her 'babies' (did I mention they are cats) that has then been b&w or 'sepia'ed in a misplaced attempt at improving the aesthetics and I wonder..

....what the everloving hell do I care if that vanishes overnight in a disk crash? I mean seriously...

Now I'll be the first to admit that Alice does a sterling job, she keeps a good watch out on the holidays and the phone list, she does the petty cash, she also keeps a tight clutch on the p45's, the work she does needs backing up with some priority..

..but roaming profiles and folder redirection? waste of server drive and tape space.

just you know, my /humble/ opinion.

Games console 'killer' powers Avatar 3D power package

games on pc's? naah

I stopped playing games on pc's years ago, I prefer consoles because the game was written precisely for this hardware profile, no messing around with fast hard disks, specced ram or wickedy wick graphics cards, if its for this console, its optimised for this console.

if this moves over to online consoles however... THAT would be interesting..