- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
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Why would you expose such a camera to the web?
Because people want to watch from some other location?
People with little or no technical knowledge just want to buy a cheap camera, turn it on, scan a QR code or something and then be able to watch their dog being bored at home from the comfort of their office in the city or some such.
Life is so much easier when you just assume that the cheap junk you buy has your best interests in mind.
It doesn’t always need to be automatically set.
Back when the very first chinese IP cameras started arriving in the west in the noughties, after we’d only had the first gen very expensive professional ones from the like of Axis, they nearly all shared the same firmware. This had factory set credentials of admin / admin and a common port (8080, iirc)
Back then, uPnP was commonly also enabled by default on routers, so the camera would ask for the port to be opened automatically and the router would just do it, allowing the internet into the camera. A simple scan of IPs on port 8080 would yield a lot of prompts with the distinctive login page for this firmware and around 90% of the time, the default credentials would still let you in, and you could see the camera.
Fortunately, routers have improved and uPnP was recognised as being incredibly stupid and isn’t seen much now and is disabled by default if it is. Some IP cameras have improved also, but there’s still a lot at the lower end that have almost no security, or prioritise convenience or cloud solutions first.
(I researched the above when I found one of my company’s cameras broadcasting and tried to educate people about it back in the day, but I doubt it did much good)
The ability to monitor those spaces remotely is pretty valuable, and to back your security footage up onto an off-site device so it can’t simply be stolen during a break in or similar.
This may be true for industry and rich assholes, but I doubt it is necessary for the average home camera? I mean why expose a camera to the web, that covers a scene where you would get naked?
The opposite is true - the average person cannot afford to have a person onsite watching the cameras, so unless they can view them remotely, there’s pretty much no point to having them. If they’re not exposed to the web, what reason would someone have to install them in the first place?
So they’re just exhibitionists?
I’d think that they’d have them as a) a deterrent and b) to catch footage of a crime being committed.
Both of which can only really happen if the person they’re capturing is a fucking idiot, honestly. These things tend not to be difficult to disable / hack
;)
It’s a nice feature to have but risky. I know a few people with security cameras accessible through internet, I’m sure any of them not only don’t have the knowledge to detect if someone else have access to their cameras but the possibility haven’t crossed their minds.
I definitely lack those abilities so I would air gap the hell out of the entire system.What about an indicator that shows when someone is using the camera?(but in Hardware so it can’t be hacked). And maybe add a controll panel somewhere so you can disable them as soon as you come home.
I think most people who have security cameras want them recording, because you don’t know when you’ll need it. Having a camera that records when you know it needs to be means you already know there’s something going on, which is often the opposite case for a security camera which is to notify you when something you don’t know it’s happening happens, or at least something you don’t expect.
That having been said, I don’t have one because I’m not nuts, and if I did I’d at least cover it before changing in front of it, but whatever I guess!
With a upnp router, you don’t have to manually open any ports; it can be done automatically by the camera or app. Meaning that just by adding certain cameras to your internal network, they’re automatically open to the Internet.
What kind of idiot would network them on a web connected router?!
The average consumer.
The kind that want an app to see what’s going on in their home?
If I want to feel good my first thought isn’t ‘dilotted!’.
That’s not what a healthy sane or responsible adult thinks.
If that us your first thought, you do in fact have a problem that may need to be addressed.
Because you don’t know much about cybersecurity.
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