If the firmware is not open and buildable, then it can only be an untrustable black box.

If you don't want untrustable black boxes hanging around, then your options become pretty limited.

You can DIY something with an SBC like a Raspberry Pi or whatever. You can hang USB cameras off of your computers like it's 2002 again. You can try to find something that OpenIPC or thingino or whatever supports. (You'll never finish with this project as the years wear on, the hardware fails, product availability ebbs and flows, and the scope changes. Maybe that sounds like a fun way to burn time for someone, but it doesn't sound like fun to me.)

Or, you can accept that the world is corrupted -- and by extension, the cameras are also all corrupted.

The safe solution is then actually pretty simple: Use wired-only cameras that work with Frigate (or whatever your local NVR of choice may be), keep them on their own private VLAN that lacks Internet access, and don't worry about it.

The less-safe solution is also pretty simple: Do what everyone else is doing, and just forget the problem exists at all. Switch your brain off, buy whatever, and use it. (And if there's an area that you don't want other people to see, then: Don't put a camera there.)

(We probably are not as interesting as we may think we are, anyway.)

I've installed Thingino on my cameras such as this. Cheap camera + custom (local only!) firmware is a good solution imo.

No guarantee that it'll be perfect either, obviously, but it's open source and actively maintained. Highly recommended.

Good thing some tapos do have alternative firmware like thingino.

If you call up your contactless payment provider, most will send you a physical device that will do contactless payments on its own, for free even. You can tape it to the back of your phone, or anywhere else for that matter.

I think when your political views cloud your ability to take in information on an objective level, it might be bad.

I think it's hard to say. Grok is pretty good and also fairly free with good usage limits.

Every single AI company in my opinion is committing fairly grave misdeeds with the ruthless scraping of the internet and lack of oversight.

Not to mention the shady backdoor deals going on with big tech and the current administration.

Grok is also pretty bad with its whole gas turbines in one state and datacenter in another and some possible environmental issues

It's more of a pick your poison at this point

It's worth interacting with all models. In my experience, for programming questions grok delivered better answers than ChatGPT (and Claude) often enough that at some point I wasn't sure which model I should be asking first.

No, because it allows us to evaluate the type of person you are. For example, I can tell you're a member of Bluesky.

Which AI providers have access to real-time Twitter data?

Per the article, the attacker can restart the camera and potentially find the accurate position of it. However, if the attacker can be physically in proximity within the camera range, they can MITM it and intercept the video feed. So it depends on your friend's threat model. If the camera is recording something in a public location and they don't mind the location being exposed and potentially the video feed (like plenty of live public cameras), then it shouldn't be an issue. Otherwise, they need to disable it until it gets fixed.

not necessarily worried, but like put on some pants before entering the room

If it's isolated from the Internet, no.

As @tehlike said in a sibling comment, it looks like it is supported by https://thingino.com, so you can 'update' the firmware to a more secure (and FOSS) one!

Yep

A friend once asked me to do some pen-testing on a machine he was running on his home network. He said I'd need to come round to his house to do this as he didn't want to provide access to the machine via the Internet. Fair enough.

When he opened his front door the conversation went something like this:

    Him: "Ah hello, thanks for coming round to do this. It should be fun, come in and we can get started."
    Me: "OK, but I'm already done."
    Him: "What?"
    Me: "I'm done. I've already got root on the machine and I left a little text file in root's home directory as proof."
    Him: "What? But ... what? Wifi?"
    Me: "Nope. Let me in and I'll explain how."

The short story is he had an PoE IP-based intercom system on his front gate. I remembered this from when he was going on about his plans for his home network setup and how amazing PoE was and how he was going to have several cameras etc. I also remember seeing the purple network cable sticking out of the gate pillar whilst the renovation work was being done and the intercom hadn't yet been installed.

I'd arrived 45 minutes early, unscrewed the faceplate of the intercom system and, with a bit of wiggling, I got access to a lovely Cat-5 ethernet jack. Plugging that into my laptop I was able to see his entire home network, the port for the intercom was obviously not on its own VLAN. Finding and rooting the target machine was a different matter but those details are not relevant to this story.

I suppose I got lucky. He could have put the IoT devices on separate VLANs. He could have had some alerting setup so that he'd be notified that the intercom system had suddenly gone offline. He could have limited access to the important internal machines to a known subset of IPs/ports/networks.

He learned about all of the above mitigations that day.

I've always wondered just how many people have exposed their own internal network in a similar way when trying to improve their external security (well, deterrent, not really security) but configuring it poorly.

I have my cameras connected to a N150 server running hostapd and dnsmasq and no IP forwarding. That server runs Frigate. I figured if I need a server anyway it might as well be the AP.

It's a little bit of a pain to set up the cameras because of the mobile app. I have to connect to the AP on my phone and as it doesn't have internet access my phone nags me, and this specific model doesn't have an external antenna. If it did I think it might be the ideal setup.

do you happen to have a guide on how to achieve this - I am fairly technical but still configuring Vlans and moving devices there would be good with some step by step instructions.