Ring security is actually useless. We had one at our work and somebody ripped it off the door and stole it, then transferred the device to their account.
Yes Ring allows anybody to transfer the device to their account once they steal it. No confirmation email to original account owner.
Even worse, this clears all of the video from the original account holder SO YOU CAN’T SEE WHO STOLE IT!!!
The whole point of owning a security camera is gone. No footage.
Its just a fundamentally poor product. And given all the other poor privacy measures - I’ll never buy one again.
This is the dumbest flaw ever. You'd think that a product so good at making everyone feel watched & raising so many privacy concerns would at least be good enough to protect itself... well apparently not.
But if historic video from the device is no longer associated with the original account, does it get deleted or just owner change? who is to say it doesn't get given to the new account... You'd have to try it and see.
Looks like they will offer you a replacement, as long as you report to the police: "You will need the police report in order for Ring to provide you with a free replacement device."
I wanted to go this route, the alternative I found on short notice (saw something sketchy that made me just buy prebuilt cameras) is to get Wyzecams, they're working on the outside cameras, but I have them staring outside through the window.
This is so sad, I hope it winds up being magnified by media outlets. Otherwise it will never be fixed. Your footage shouldnt be reliant on you having your camera still. Tells you they match videos to cameras and can't filter them out between owners.
You don't have to use that, you can stick an SD card in it and record yourself. That's if you wish to use their cloud storage for long term storage. I have a few of those, I just stuck an SD card in them. If you setup notification, it will record around 12seconds and store that in the cloud for you. It has also been hacked so you can modify it to stream to your own cloud.
Not sure where you read that, but you can put an SD Card. The other reason I chose them is there seemed to be work on CFW for those cameras. They also sell other things which I intend to buy like smart light bulbs and sensors.
I run video surveillance at my home out of some combination of paranoia and curiosity. But I run everything myself - cameras are recorded by an in-house NVR, which is an inexpensive single-board computer with a 1TB hard disk, and 'alert' clips are uploaded to a VPS on the off chance of someone breaking in and stealing the NVR.
Although open source NVR packages are, in my experience, a massive disaster (either extremely outdated and frustrating to set up and use in the case of ZoneMinder, or extremely feature limited as in the case of the fifty Raspberry Pi-based solutions), commercial software packages like Blue Iris and Xeoma (which is even cross-platform) are inexpensive and have expansive feature sets. I use Blue Iris, which has the downside of requiring Windows, but the upside of generating MQTT messages or HTTP requests on alerts which makes for a lot of easy integration. Xeoma is cross-platform but relatively immature (although I've found the vendor to be extremely responsive to emails) and has a bizarro-land UI that's very tricky to learn to use.
On the other hand, consumers don't necessarily need to deal with any of this, because lots of vendors sell NVR appliances that are hardware and software in one product, and they're pretty cheap. Costco even regularly carries them from a couple of major manufacturers. I prefer to do things myself, but I've used appliance NVRs from Swann in a couple of cases and they work fine with extremely easy setup. More recently Ubiquiti has gotten into this space, and I haven't had the opportunity to try their system yet but their products tend to be pretty good quality and ease of use for the rock-bottom prices - and as I understand it their premises-based NVR also runs the UniFi manager, so it makes it really easy to build out a large-campus WiFi-based solution but might also be a neat trick for home use if you want to use the great-for-the-price Ubiquiti APs and/or USG.
At the end of the day, I'm not convinced that cloud-based surveillance solutions really offer much to consumers beyond being backed by vendors with very aggressive marketing. Most people know about Ring cameras but don't know that they can buy a completely non-cloud, on-prem solution-in-a-box at the big box store or even, well, from Amazon. And at the end of the day, the manufacturers of these on-premises systems don't get to loop you into a "social network of fear" and analyze your video, so their opportunities to monetize are a lot more limited, and so they charge higher up-front prices.
I think a lot of it is just awareness though - Amazon and their competition are pushing their cloud-based solutions very hard, while the on-prem surveillance vendors that have for the most part been around much longer just don't really advertise to the consumer market.
> More recently Ubiquiti has gotten into this space, and I haven't had the opportunity to try their system yet but their products tend to be pretty good quality and ease of use for the rock-bottom prices - and as I understand it their premises-based NVR also runs the UniFi manager, so it makes it really easy to build out a large-campus WiFi-based solution but might also be a neat trick for home use if you want to use the great-for-the-price Ubiquiti APs and/or USG
I recently set up UniFi Protect (their NVR software), a CloudKey 2+, a set of cameras, and a small UniFi SDN at a vacation home. I can confirm it's extremely simple to install and configure (at least for the audience reading comments on Hacker News; maybe not so much for laypeople). With the USG, you can fairly easily set up a site-to-site VPN to your other personal networks and, assuming you have the bandwidth, watch the video streams real-time from back home or elsewhere.
The downside of the UniFi Protect model is that once adopted/managed by Protect, the cameras are not readily available for streaming to other NVRs, at least as far as I can tell. So if you wanted to integrate the UniFi cameras into a different NVR (e.g., to centralize multiple sites' cameras), it could get challenging if you also have Protect involved.
The cameras/sensors I have on my water heater and sump pump are multitudes more valuable than any of my outward facing ones.
I'm much more likely to have a catastrophic equipment failure than a break in. Porch pirates my most likely theft problem and a camera likely won't help much with that.
Yes! I would tell anyone that e.g. Z-Wave smoke/CO and flood/temperature sensors with some kind of base station that will alert you is probably the best investment you can make in home protection. These kinds of accidental emergencies can easily turn into absolutely enormous financial losses if they aren't caught quickly, and tbh the chances of prompt alerting minimizing the damage are better than for smash-and-grab burglary where the police or you will very probably arrive too late.
>[Ubiquiti] products tend to be pretty good quality and ease of use for the rock-bottom prices
Unfortunately, contrary to their wifi gear, Ubiquiti's cameras are very expensive for what they are - I had some cheap Hikvision cameras that were already a few years old and the image quality was way higher than the G3 Bullet cameras (Hikvision had sharper optics, better dynamic range, better H.264 encode, higher bitrate options, better motion detection). Hopefully some of this will change with Ubiquiti's new G4 Bullet cameras when they're released.
The Protect system is also not particularly reliable (I've had occasions where a firmware update to the Protect server has taken out all access via the web UI, the web interface is very prone to totally breaking in a browser even when on the same network - streams stopping, or downloads of clips failing, no API and they use a proprietary and undocumented .ubv container format on disk, so you can't grab the media over SFTP)
That was my experience as well -- using a cloud key and ubiquiti camera yielded a less responsive video feed via a hardwired ethernet connection than a nest camera over wifi!
Ubiquiti needs to step up the quality of the hardware. I realize they're appliances but even powerful embedded processors are cheap. There's no excuse.
How good (or bad) is Blue Iris for false positives on motion detection (ie. alerts on trees blowing instead of meaningful motion)?
I saw another self install windows software a few months ago that does machine learning to find people and reduce false positives, but I can't find it now. Have you tried any that do this?
I'd say that Blue Iris is, uh, 'medium'. More recent versions include an object-tracking motion detection engine that's a lot better at rejecting scene changes (e.g. camera switching between day/night mode) by simply discarding the motion if the 'object' makes up a very large portion of the image area. I've set it to be very sensitive and I only occasionally get false positives - I could probably eliminate those if I tweaked it a little more.
I've seen at least one company that actually sells a BlueIris plugin that implements some kind of ML human detection as a way to filter alerts, but I haven't given it a try.
Xeoma has some "AI" features like this if you pay for the higher-tier license, but tbh I've found Xeoma's base motion detection engine to be so unreliable that I just wouldn't recommend it for this application - but to be fair it was also a while back that I was using it and they may have improved things since then.
I'm not sure if there's a good guide, maybe I ought to try to write one. I would say the simple things to keep in mind are just to buy cameras that are ONVIF compliant, since this more or less guarantees that you will be able to use them with any "open standard" NVR you want. tbh the ONVIF spec itself is frustrating and not that much help, it's just that ONVIF compliance guarantees you that there will be RTSP streams available and that an NVR will more-or-less be able to configure automatically.
When it comes to NVRs, there's a million options and I couldn't produce reviews on all of them... but Blue Iris is probably the most popular commercial NVR and ZoneMinder and Shinobi the most popular open-source. I would describe ZoneMinder as hopelessly obsolete and Shinobi as unstable and hard to get running on other than their supported platforms, but Blue Iris is Windows only so everything has its problems.
The only "big" NVR solution I've worked with is Milestone, and I'd say it's very good and actually not that expensive, but it is pretty heavy to deploy (e.g. needs MS SQL Server) and you have to buy through a VAR which is kind of a huge hassle to go through for a license that is only around $100 (for the lowest-end package).
Also, if you run cheap no-brand Chinese made IP cameras like I do... the cameras are often pretty damn good very a very low price, but sometimes it's a real adventure figuring out how to configure them (e.g. firmware not completely translated to English, often shared between many models so half of the settings don't apply to your device) and I recommend blocking them off from the internet because some have management/cloud recording features that you can't disable and it's a little sketchy having them connect out to some white-box overseas cloud management solution all the time.
It's a best practice to put IP cameras on their own VLAN anyway and it's not really that expensive to get home equipment that can support this, e.g. Ubiquiti's routers/switches and/or the TP-Link "Easy Smart" switches (which are 'semi-managed' and handle VLANs and QoS for well below the cost of a managed switch). But the machine I run Blue Iris on right now just happens to be a weird x86 single-board machine with 2 GbE interfaces, so I have the cameras on a physically segmented network just because it was easy.
Here's a review that covers a few of their cameras and both their older NVR software and newer Protect. I didn't write this, it's just a blog entry I came across while looking for a comparison of Unbt's video offerings.
You can read about Ubiquiti's self-hosted gear at their web site, ui.com. A good starting point is their NVR/SDN controller, which they call a "CloudKey Gen2+" [1]. A slightly unfortunate name because using the word "Cloud" in the name makes it sound as if it's hosted in a third-party cloud when it's actually an on-prem device that can (optionally) be configured to allow remote access via the Ubiquiti cloud service.
I happen to be in the market for a home security system and was originally looking at Ubiquiti but after reading this article, I'm considering Ring since their Neighbors Portal is used by my local law enforcement.
Those rings certainly paid for themselves in stopping the violent break in... oh. well the woman screaming for help was saved when... oh. Well how about... never mind.
Ring, and CCTV in general doesn't prevent or even deter crimes nor did it save anyone. The irony with how useless a Ring camera is, is illustrated in all those Amazon package thefts ring captures but didn't stop. The only useful thing is being able to prove to Amazon your package was stolen. A pointless system of waste for lazy people. Boon for the surveillance state.
My Nest Hello (Google's knockoff of the Ring) fits into my home security plan in a few ways.
1. It tells me who is at the door when I'm home and lets me see their face. If it's a good friend I can just tell them to let themselves in, if it's a marketer I can ignore it, etc. This is somewhat just convenience compared to a peephole.
2. It tells me who is at the door when I'm not home. I can let me friends know to come back, if it's a neighbor I can let them know I'll catch up with them later, etc.
3. It lets me keep an eye on packages when I'm traveling. I can ask whoever is house sitting to swing by if there's a buildup of them (which in turn hides that I'm away).
4. It lets me confirm that my pet sitter is indeed swinging by. Sure they could text me every time, but it's easy for people to forget that and it's a hassle for the sitter.
5. When things go wrong, it helps me identify the culprits and circulate those pictures. That may not do much in all circumstances, but at the very least it lets me pass on useful information to my neighbors.
The way I see it, they're a tool, part of a bigger picture that aids in security and safety. The issue it seems is that there isn't a proper follow up once the perpetrator gets identified and caught. There doesn't seem to be strict enough punishment for people who get caught to deter them. Or you have ridiculous laws where the thief can sue the owner of the house they broke into because they got hurt or "excessive force" was used to contain them until the police arrive.
Some premeditated crimes (e.g. first-degree murder, bribery) can be deterred by threat of punishment, but when people are making the snap-decision to commit a crime of opportunity, they aren't carefully weighing the risk vs reward.
A reasonable way to look at risk is the severity of the outcome multiplied by the probability it will occur. Your link seems to endorse that that kind of risk acts as a deterrent when sufficiently large.
If your point is that people (at least those who aren't scientists or statisticians) round small probabilities to zero, then I agree, and it's something that I think people need to be more aware of when considering deterrence or other behavior. However, I don't think you or the article made this point clearly. The article would be so much shorter and simpler if it was condensed down to that one observation.
It's quite reasonable to say that punishment only has an effect when it is clearly linked to an action, but that sounds like a completely different message than saying punishment doesn't work (implicitly assuming it almost never occurs).
Studies like this always seem to be confined to Western societies (and particularly the US). Other societies seem to be doing just fine with harsh punishments like the death penalty. There are other factors at play here, but having harsh punishments that are actually applied is one factor in the system. In other countries, serial rapists would be executed for instance. I'm not sure that's the case in the US.
Not that I'm recommending we go this route, but Singapore will literally beat you with a big stick, likely permanently handicapping you, for offenses as small as chewing gum. They have remarkably low crime.
It's about how correctly applied those punishments are. Just because it has the death penalty and high incarceration rates doesn't mean that they're being used correctly. For instance, does a serial rapist or serial child molester get the death penalty? In other countries he would. Why do people who were convicted with 100% certainty get put on death row for very long periods of time? People like public shooters and so on. It's a flawed application of the system in the US.
>The way I see it, they're a tool, part of a bigger picture that aids in security and safety.
There's a particular rock in the Atlantic off the coast of Europe and East or Ireland that's been carpet bombed with CCTV cameras. Ask anyone who lives there and they'll tell you that they're still waiting for the reduction of petty crime the cameras were supposed to bring. There always seems to be plenty of money to fund more cameras and more surveillance but never any money to fund the Good Old Fashioned Police Work(TM) needed to follow up on all the crime those cameras see.
You're not negating what I wrote, there definitely needs to be a follow up once the perpetrators are identified, not to mention other approaches like funding the police. I'm no fan of the Chinese government, but they do seem to have something going there. Not to mention countries like Singapore, the UAE, etc. where there are harsh punishments, and much better safety overall compared to the US.
Again, it's a tool in the tool box, necessary but perhaps not sufficient.
The Office for National Statistics shows a continual fall in the long term rate of theft for the UK since 1995. From around 11k incidents per year to around 4K. A steady decrease.
Not to mention you can just cut the internet to disable it. I don’t see this preventing any, err, career criminals. You’d be just as effective putting up a fake camera on your porch, and you’d probably be on better terms with the neighbors.
Ironically, Ring's fairly low-key appearance undermines the only value it might actually have - as a deterrent. I suspect you'd be better off with a chunky 7/11-style CCTV camera over your front door.
And if your goal is to actually prevent theft, you wouldn't even need to turn it on. It's the same issue as home security systems: they run all those goofy ads about a crook sitting in your bathtub because there's almost no real use-case. As a deterrent, an ADT sticker provides all the benefits of a security system for about $2. As a reaction, all it does is tell you that someone has stole your electronics and jewelry. It won't get recovered, the crook won't get ID'd if they wore a mask, probably won't get caught even if they didn't, you'll just be notified a bit sooner.
I'm not going to condemn people for getting these products, but only because I think they've been badly and systematically mislead. Products like Ring are sold on the back of an entire narrative of crime, deterrence, and punishment that has essentially no bearing on reality. Crimes against person and property are one of very few issues where I've seen people completely change their position just by seeing accurate data.
> I suspect you'd be better off with a chunky 7/11-style CCTV camera over your front door.
Get one of those outdoors camera covers, and fix somewhere people can easily see. Don't bother with an actual camera.
There is a simple test for when a camera is useful: if you saw something happening on the camera, will you do anything differently? A camera that watches some hidden corner near your front door that lets you decide not to go in there right now can be useful (but then, getting rid of the corner is much better).
It threatens their business if customers aren't comfortable having products delivered at home.
But obviously it's a new revenue stream with myriad additional business opportunities for Amazon to capitalize on the paranoia of its customers WRT having their packages stolen, to sell surveillance products to them (and access to law enforcement, ad/marketing interests, etc.).
The drivers are not always malicious either. Sometimes it's bad training and/or user experience on their equipment.
I had several packages delivered which were "signed" for by someone named "through the letterbox". Similarly, one package said dropped off at the door/porch but no sign of it so I asked for a refund as I assumed it's been stolen... 2 days later my neighbour gives it to me because it was actually delivered to them, but the delivery person couldn't select the proper option to let me know so I had no idea.
My delivery status with Amazon is frequently something along the lines of "left in the mail room". I live in a free standing single family home in a neighborhood where every one has their own mail boxes.
They don't actually care. They usually eat the cost and send you another one. I guess it's cheaper than the cost of requiring signatures, at least once we're constrained to the subset of the population who can order things online.
I bet someone identified this as a substantial line item that was trending up and they want to push Rings out into the world to try to deter future growth and losses. Who knows... the acquisition might have paid for itself in cost savings.
I look forward to Ubiquiti's upcoming "UniFi Access" line of access control hardware (e.g., an electric bolt controller with a front-facing door camera embedded in a nice package). Self-hosted like all UniFi gear, meaning video and data are not exfiltrated to a third-party cloud. Plus, it will be managed by and work alongside all of your other UniFi equipment.
There's definitely a need for a secure (based on actual cryptography) door entry control system.
Most of what I've seen in the field is either HID iClass (no idea how secure they are) or Mifare Classic. The latter doesn't even attempt to use the card's crypto features (which are broken, but it would've at least been an attempt) and just uses the UID of the card which is broadcast in the clear and even the card's datasheet explicitly warns against using it for any kind of security.
In the commercial space, sure. In the residential space, it would be a pretty small market. A door lock is there to slow down an attacker, or to force them to make a destructive entry via a window. Going much beyond long screws to prevent kick-in, and good tolerances to prevent trivial bump keys is rarely cost-effective.
I've talked to a few people who were victims of burglaries, and the value of the stolen stuff never worried them. The violation of their home was what worried them. It messes with you when you know someone broke into your home.
So people probably don't worry about cost-effectiveness of their home security system, they just want to feel safe in their home.
Even if cost is no object, every commercial electronic entry system I've ever seen has had at least one door with a bypass with a conventional key, in case the electronic entry system fails. And any electronic lock with a manual lock in parallel with it can never be more secure against attacks like lockpicking than the manual lock alone.
Of course, there are security benefits if you have a cleaner/dog walker/whatever and want to give them access you can revoke without the cost of changing your lock. Or if you're running a commercial installation like an office or AirBnB.
Still, I don't think electronic door locks will become mass-market until someone makes one so reliable it doesn't need a mechanical bypass key, which might be impossible.
You can pin a lock that's practically impossible to pick by permanently blocking when one attempts to pick them. Yes, the owner needs to drill the lock after such a picking attempt, but it prevents non-destructive entry.
The problem is that with insecure crap flooding the market there’s no way to tell the good stuff (if it exists) apart from the garbage. It’s not like they clearly explain how it works or publish the code. Worse, people involved in this usually come from a physical security background and the electronic aspect of the system somehow gives them a false sense of security where it’s actually even easier to break than picking a good mechanical lock.
I’ve seen hotels and student dorm rooms using insecure systems (the latter of which I exploited as a teenager to make a second keycard to sneak into my GF’s room without having to borrow her only key. How easy the attack was worried me quite a bit).
Exactly this. Locks only keep out "honest" people. I used to work in the access control space with a commercial bluetooth lock and app and our goals were always the following: 1) No systemic vulnerabilities (each user had a digital key specific to them, the lock and the time) and 2) Make a stone through the window the weakest link in the chain.
But residential space is full of potential targets, so it's useful to make your space look like a less attractive target. Oversized hinges and kick panels, security film on the windows, etc.
Of course, the best bang for your buck is still the simple stuff - a few motion detecting lights, some security company stickers and a clean, well-kept yard.
If you haven't checked it out, there was a Citations Needed podcast episode about this recently. It's a great show, self described as about "media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit." It's usually an interesting listen.
My suggestion for porch piracy is for everybody in the neighborhood to leave a few random looking packages on their porch. It would greatly raise the effort of a thief to figure out which package is worth stealing.
it is not in your best interest to aggravate these people as someone who is more than willing to walk up to strangers home and take stuff can just as equally damage the property or worse.
your options are
1) schedule package deliveries to days someone is home
2) schedule deliveries to drop box locations that some services support (amazon locker for example, ups store)
3) ship to someone trusted in the neighborhood
4) ship to work if allowed
5) fake camera, signage, combination thereof
6) buy locally
There is a youtube video out where someone created a decoy package and left it on their porch until someone stole it. The theif opened the package only for it to explode glitter everywhere.
This is kind of like the classic book "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury. There is a scene where a character is running down the street, and a ubiquitous tv show is on that tells everyone to look out their window for the dangerous person "Right now!" (with their photo shown) so that you can find and capture anyone running away through the city, with everyone coordinated.
The police "working together with Amazon" to offer a rebate is the sentence in the article that gave me the "Oh shit" moment. It's basically police surveillance state through the backdoor of commercial incentive...
Banditry/highwaymen have been a feature of societies with high inequality for a long time. It's a big reason that people congregated behind city walls since time immemorial.
These cameras are our new city walls and guards, and given a continuation the trend toward greater inequality, these sorts of technologies will become even more ubiquitous.
I think bandits/highwaymen would be those who steal by physical force. Burglars steal surreptitiously.
And I think the main reason the wealthy build the walls is because they're the only ones who can afford to. Everyone's safety is improved by hiding behind some good walls.
> I think bandits/highwaymen would be those who steal by physical force. Burglars steal surreptitiously.
Fine, add burglary to the list. The how matters less than the why. Addressing the why makes us consider how the structure of society incentivizes the crime. Camera systems are also going up in public spaces to deter robberies.
Bruce Schneier's had a blog post a few years back about the increase in copper theft. His take was that copper is too valuable and a segment of the population too poor for it not to happen. The same reasoning would apply to porch piracy.
The people who engage in porch piracy are overwhelmingly well off from what we've seen. It's not the poor kid down the block you have to be suspicious of, but your middle class neighbor who probably needs to have an intervention.
Despite the physical nature of it, it's an almost white collar crime.
Really? Judging by the security cam clips occasionally posted to Nextdoor in my neighborhood, it's usually nearby residents (sometimes repeat offenders) who are known to have drug dependency issues, teens walking around hitting multiple houses, or the occasional drunken asshole walking home at night and deciding to vandalize or steal the box that's still sitting on the porch from earlier in the day.
But of course the whole thing about anecdotes and data applies so this may not be the norm. I'd be interested to see data on these sorts of thefts.
I have seen so many deals on Ring security system and not surprised my entire community is on Ring (since its closer to a Costco) and we are the only household without any kind of security system atm.
Yes Ring allows anybody to transfer the device to their account once they steal it. No confirmation email to original account owner.
Even worse, this clears all of the video from the original account holder SO YOU CAN’T SEE WHO STOLE IT!!!
The whole point of owning a security camera is gone. No footage.
Its just a fundamentally poor product. And given all the other poor privacy measures - I’ll never buy one again.