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I bought a Dropcam when they were a new thing. When I realized they did literally everything via a cloud service and would be a brick without that service, I wa

I bought a Dropcam when they were a new thing. When I realized they did literally everything via a cloud service and would be a brick without that service, I was furious. The incredible arrogance of a company making a webcam that sends your video to their servers, and provides no means to use the camera in a secure/local fashion, was astonishing to me. I still can't believe something like Dropcam is such a huge success. The level of security awareness the general public has is terrifyingly small, and companies are taking advantage of it to produce brickable devices. It is the legal variant of ransomware...They can hold your data hostage for any reason and at any time. You're completely at their mercy, with regard to pricing and availability, and you have to trust they won't fall on hard times, or get tired of running the service. This is the next front in the battle for electronic freedom, and lots of folks (even nerds) don't seem to realize it.

toomuchtodo 11y ago
> I still can't believe something like Dropcam is such a huge success. The level of security awareness the general public has is terrifyingly small, and companies are taking advantage of it to produce brickable devices. It is the legal variant of ransomware...They can hold your data hostage for any reason and at any time. You're completely at their mercy, with regard to pricing and availability, and you have to trust they won't fall on hard times, or get tired of running the service. That is the difference between tech professionals and the general public. We care, others don't. Make it work, make it just expensive enough folks will buy it to fix their problem while you clean up, profit. If you want things to change, it'll only happen with regulation.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- pdkl95 11y ago
  > We care, others don't. That's not a justification to add data stealing features and obfuscated dependencies to a remote, probably short lived server. We understand the nature of those features, others don't.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    I'm not justifying it. I'm explaining why it plays out in the marketplace.
mhurron 11y ago
> arrogance of a company making a webcam that sends your video to their servers, and provides no means to use the camera in a secure/local fashion I basically say the same thing about every 'smart home' device. I would love to be able to query my thermostat to find out when and how long it turned the heat/AC on and whatnot, but I only want it to talk to my local wifi and devices. I don't want it to use a cloud service at all for anything ever. I don't have that option, so I don't use them.
- SwellJoe 11y ago
  After the Dropcam fiasco, I wondered if there would be a market for secure smart devices with an open API. To me, it's an obvious benefit and one that I would buy (whereas I won't buy the cloud-based devices of this sort), but I suspect the ease of use of something like Dropcam trumps all of the other considerations. I even considered doing a Kickstarter to build something in that space; the technical side, both hardware and software, is actually very, very, simple these days. I mean, a thermostat is a temperature sensor, a clock, and some switches; the kind of thing electronics nerds put together when first learning. The smallest Arduino could more than handle the task (for the prototype, and a dedicated device could be manufactured in quantity very cheaply). Controlling switches and sensors in software is also very simple. Making a beautiful UI (which I think is a big part of the appeal of Nest, Dropcam, and the like) is more challenging, for me, but perhaps there's a UI/UX designer out there who has similar inclinations. I never thought I'd want to be in the home automation business, or the web cam business, but this kind of thing is just so offensive to me, that whenever I think about it, I want to do something.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    I haven't tried it personally but I know a few people who think highly of SmartThings [1], which is a relatively open platform. I've also experimented with Raspberry Pis. However, to be honest, there are a fairly limited number of "smart" things I can do around my house which would be genuinely useful. [1] http://developer.smartthings.com/ http://developer.smartthings.com/
    - 11y ago
maxxxxx 11y ago
I hope there will be a trend where the computing power and storage goes from the cloud back to the customer's site. The internet should only be an addon for connectivity but not be needed for the device to work. Good old PCs weren't so bad after all. You had all your data and software locally and could do whatever you wanted.
- cududa 11y ago
  The good old days.. I remember ~2007 everyone making a big brouhaha about moving crap tons of stuff "to the cloud" and I felt so morally outraged that in this future I'd have no control over the uptime, accessibility, or core content based on my own actions - it'd be left up to someone else completely. I think it was a couple years ago I finally stopped resisting and said "fuck it" - signed up for Spotify, shut the hodge podge of syncing/ home NAS solutions I was using and just got a Dropbox account.
- mikestew 11y ago
  See my other comment somewhere on this page. From my POV, Synology is in a really good place to pull this off. You can have one of their little boxes serve audio, video, keep your notes ala OneNote, all accessible remotely if need be. With just a liiiiiitle more, it could be your IoT hub. Others outside Synology write stuff for those boxes, evidence that it's not locked down, so I suppose with enough hacking one could get a DropCam to work on a Synology box. But it would be a hell of a lot easier if Synology had a list of plug-and-play devices that they either build themselves or partner with another manufacturer. The latter is unlikely to happen, given the rent-seeking behavior we see out of manufacturers.
mrexroad 11y ago
counter point: i pre-ordered dropcam for the reason that it was limited to cloud-use only. I wanted something dead simple to use so my wife / house sitter / etc could easily move it as needed, we had access anywhere without configuration, and devops/it being handled by someone else incase i'm not around. Classifying their cloud-only product design decision as "incredible arrogance" quite a stretch... if anything, sounds like incredible ignorance on part of buyer? To your point about it being a brickable device... I figured by the time the product was "bricked" (e.g. company going bust, product end-of-life, etc), that the hardware would be so out of date that it'd be time to replace it anyway. With that said... after Nest acquired them, there's been no new meaningful features, no decrease in price, no new camera features, etc. I cancelled the "DVR" plan and will be finding an alternate system later this year.
- blacksmith_tb 11y ago
  I went with a Xiaomi Yi for all those reasons - it's a quarter the price, and I doubt Xiaomi will be very inclined to share my data with the powers that be in the US (and their sharing it with the powers that be in the PRC is not likely to affect me). Of course, it's inherently absurd that these devices don't allow you to stream the video off of them yourself, it makes them e-waste in the making. Possibly someone will figure out a way to install friendlier firmware on them via the micro-sd card...
- seanp2k2 11y ago
  Ubiquiti just came out with cameras and a DVR device (atom-based) to store the content with you: https://www.ubnt.com/unifi-video/unifi-nvr/ https://www.ubnt.com/unifi-video/unifi-nvr/
  - baseten 11y ago
    I've been looking at the ubiquiti nvr for a bit as i like their wireless stuff but i'm not sure what cameras i'd want. The reviews of the newer micro cameras are crap and the new-new g3 ones they just announced aren't delivering til fall.
- SwellJoe 11y ago
dangoor 11y ago
It seems like the complexity of getting around NAT/firewalls is likely to stymie a lot of potential users. Making a cloud service is a bad idea for all kinds of reasons, but it simplifies this important aspect of getting the device up and running.
- SwellJoe 11y ago
  Yes, that's absolutely an issue. And, it would even be OK, for me, to have that be the default, as long as they provide some other means of dealing with the device. WiFi isn't hard, at all. So give me a local web UI, and a way to store things locally or remotely using some standard protocol. That's dead simple to implement, and routers and printers have been doing it for a couple decades. Simply making the device usable without the cloud service would have been enough for me to not be so angry with Dropcam, and enough for me to feel like this is not a failure of ethics in the tech sector. I've owned a number of devices in this category; the first was a Panasonic Petcam, which worked great for me, for many years. It had the ability to email me videos and photos, save to arbitrary FTP storage, etc. This was over a decade ago! If they could manage all that back then, why is it so difficult now, with networking tools being so much more advanced today?
  - brbsix 11y ago
    There are plenty of cameras like what you're describing on the market today. Modern incarnations of the Panasonic Petcam. Search 'WiFi IP camera'. You just don't hear about them because they aren't hyped to high hell like Dropcam.
    - SwellJoe 11y ago
      Yes, I've got a couple. I was sort of changing the subject to other home automation devices, without really being clear about that. Nest is clearly the market leader in the home automation category; at least for thermostats. I'm sure there must be others, but Nest is the only one I see at Home Depot and Lowes. I think they've executed on their plan remarkably well, so taking them on with something that is a much lower margin product (a hardware device that doesn't hold the consumer for ransom for the monthly bill) would be extremely difficult, I think. And, because they do so much of their thinking in the cloud, their devices can be dumber/cheaper. So, they win on two fronts, as long as consumers don't mind being fleeced in this way. And, yeah, hype has a lot to do with it. How have products like Dropcam and Nest generated so much buzz? I guess people genuinely prefer them, and consider the user experience worth the price (both in terms of money and in terms of privacy and choice).
ageitgey 11y ago
> I still can't believe something like Dropcam is such a huge success. The level of security awareness the general public has is terrifyingly small I think you are totally misjudging this market. To the average person, a Dropcam is empirically far more secure in practice than many alternatives have proven to be. It's certainly what I'd recommend to a friend. A few years ago, Foscam Wifi cameras were popular with parents. You could buy one for <$100 and they worked over wifi and had no service you had to buy. But then they were hacked by the thousands[1] with repeated major security issues over multiple years[2]. There were numerous news reports of parents finding strangers yelling obscenities at their babies in the middle of the night using the camera's talk-back function. This happened to multiple people I knew in real life. This led to numerous articles like this one[3] telling parents to update passwords, disable UPnP, tweak router settings, update firmware, etc, to prevent future hacks. But to a parent who's baby was woken up in the middle of the night by a hacker, they are probably just going to throw the hacked camera in the trash. By comparison, Dropcam is a totally integrated solution that requires no user-initiated updates, no network configuration and is backed by the reputation of Google. To the average parent that doesn't want to spend their life reading Foscam forums, that's a much more attractive solution and much less likely to get hacked due to not being updated or properly configured and secured. Dropcam/Nest/Google produces a product that works really well right out of the box with almost zero configuration and is relatively secure. The non-cloud alternatives do not. Until someone offers a solution that "just works" like Dropcam, consumers will keep opting for the cloud-based solution. Yes, it sucks for electronic freedom. But that's not the main feature that matters to the market. [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/08/13/how-a-creep-hacked-a-baby-monitor-to-say-lewd-things-to-a-2-year-old/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/08/13/how-a-cre... [2] http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/01/bug-exposes-ip-cameras-baby-monitors/ http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/01/bug-exposes-ip-cameras-ba... [3] http://www.brockthompson.com/blog/3-ways-protect-foscam-hackers http://www.brockthompson.com/blog/3-ways-protect-foscam-hack...
- msh 11y ago
  Totally agree. I think there are a lot of people on HN who dont remember that just because they can easily set something up regular people can't do the same thing. Of cause having dropbox/dropcam simplicity comes with downsides but for regular consumers its not a question between self hosting and cloud, its between having something that can do this and not having it at all.
narrator 11y ago
Ironically, I was at a presentation by a Chinese surveillance camera company and they were saying that they are moving their image recognition and processing to the device from the cloud because the bandwidth and centralized processing is not scalable enough. Just as a general engineering matter, the devices will get more smarts.
fludlight 11y ago
Welcome to your next fridge.
- SwellJoe 11y ago
  Yeah, I made some cheesy jokes about this on April Fools Day: http://thingmin.com http://thingmin.com
jack-r-abbit 11y ago
This is why I have decided against the Dropcam/Nestcam. We currently use the (now end-of-lifed) Logitech Alert system. Each camera has its own storage and you can option to have that offloaded to a network device. The entire system functions without any dependency on their backend. For free you even get live streaming (which does depend on their backend). However, for something like only $80/yr you can also access the video stored on the cameras for playback. And that one fee gets you all the cameras in your network (where Dropcam charges more... and per camera). I guess Logitech could do it cheaper because their backend just connects you to your cameras so they don't have to handle the data storage/streaming. And even though they end-of-lifed it, they still work. I plan to use them until the wheels fall off. Was hoping to switch to Dropcams, until I researched them more to find out they are cloud-only.
awesomerobot 11y ago
Every time I see a new security hardware startup I immediately look for what their products can do without a cloud service. 9/10 the answer is: absolutely nothing. In 2-3 years it'll be in a landfill, not because the hardware is obsolete, but because the firmware made it so. Landfills full of hubris.
- PhantomGremlin 11y ago
  Landfills full of hubris. Landfills full of unicorn poop.
spoinkaroo 11y ago
Have you found an alternative product you prefer?

toomuchtodo 11y ago

> I still can't believe something like Dropcam is such a huge success. The level of security awareness the general public has is terrifyingly small, and companies are taking advantage of it to produce brickable devices. It is the legal variant of ransomware...They can hold your data hostage for any reason and at any time. You're completely at their mercy, with regard to pricing and availability, and you have to trust they won't fall on hard times, or get tired of running the service. That is the difference between tech professionals and the general public. We care, others don't. Make it work, make it just expensive enough folks will buy it to fix their problem while you clean up, profit. If you want things to change, it'll only happen with regulation.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
pdkl95 11y ago
> We care, others don't. That's not a justification to add data stealing features and obfuscated dependencies to a remote, probably short lived server. We understand the nature of those features, others don't.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  I'm not justifying it. I'm explaining why it plays out in the marketplace.

mhurron 11y ago

> arrogance of a company making a webcam that sends your video to their servers, and provides no means to use the camera in a secure/local fashion I basically say the same thing about every 'smart home' device. I would love to be able to query my thermostat to find out when and how long it turned the heat/AC on and whatnot, but I only want it to talk to my local wifi and devices. I don't want it to use a cloud service at all for anything ever. I don't have that option, so I don't use them.

SwellJoe 11y ago
After the Dropcam fiasco, I wondered if there would be a market for secure smart devices with an open API. To me, it's an obvious benefit and one that I would buy (whereas I won't buy the cloud-based devices of this sort), but I suspect the ease of use of something like Dropcam trumps all of the other considerations. I even considered doing a Kickstarter to build something in that space; the technical side, both hardware and software, is actually very, very, simple these days. I mean, a thermostat is a temperature sensor, a clock, and some switches; the kind of thing electronics nerds put together when first learning. The smallest Arduino could more than handle the task (for the prototype, and a dedicated device could be manufactured in quantity very cheaply). Controlling switches and sensors in software is also very simple. Making a beautiful UI (which I think is a big part of the appeal of Nest, Dropcam, and the like) is more challenging, for me, but perhaps there's a UI/UX designer out there who has similar inclinations. I never thought I'd want to be in the home automation business, or the web cam business, but this kind of thing is just so offensive to me, that whenever I think about it, I want to do something.
- ghaff 11y ago
  I haven't tried it personally but I know a few people who think highly of SmartThings [1], which is a relatively open platform. I've also experimented with Raspberry Pis. However, to be honest, there are a fairly limited number of "smart" things I can do around my house which would be genuinely useful. [1] http://developer.smartthings.com/ http://developer.smartthings.com/
  - 11y ago

maxxxxx 11y ago

I hope there will be a trend where the computing power and storage goes from the cloud back to the customer's site. The internet should only be an addon for connectivity but not be needed for the device to work. Good old PCs weren't so bad after all. You had all your data and software locally and could do whatever you wanted.

cududa 11y ago
The good old days.. I remember ~2007 everyone making a big brouhaha about moving crap tons of stuff "to the cloud" and I felt so morally outraged that in this future I'd have no control over the uptime, accessibility, or core content based on my own actions - it'd be left up to someone else completely. I think it was a couple years ago I finally stopped resisting and said "fuck it" - signed up for Spotify, shut the hodge podge of syncing/ home NAS solutions I was using and just got a Dropbox account.
mikestew 11y ago
See my other comment somewhere on this page. From my POV, Synology is in a really good place to pull this off. You can have one of their little boxes serve audio, video, keep your notes ala OneNote, all accessible remotely if need be. With just a liiiiiitle more, it could be your IoT hub. Others outside Synology write stuff for those boxes, evidence that it's not locked down, so I suppose with enough hacking one could get a DropCam to work on a Synology box. But it would be a hell of a lot easier if Synology had a list of plug-and-play devices that they either build themselves or partner with another manufacturer. The latter is unlikely to happen, given the rent-seeking behavior we see out of manufacturers.

mrexroad 11y ago

counter point: i pre-ordered dropcam for the reason that it was limited to cloud-use only. I wanted something dead simple to use so my wife / house sitter / etc could easily move it as needed, we had access anywhere without configuration, and devops/it being handled by someone else incase i'm not around. Classifying their cloud-only product design decision as "incredible arrogance" quite a stretch... if anything, sounds like incredible ignorance on part of buyer? To your point about it being a brickable device... I figured by the time the product was "bricked" (e.g. company going bust, product end-of-life, etc), that the hardware would be so out of date that it'd be time to replace it anyway. With that said... after Nest acquired them, there's been no new meaningful features, no decrease in price, no new camera features, etc. I cancelled the "DVR" plan and will be finding an alternate system later this year.

blacksmith_tb 11y ago
I went with a Xiaomi Yi for all those reasons - it's a quarter the price, and I doubt Xiaomi will be very inclined to share my data with the powers that be in the US (and their sharing it with the powers that be in the PRC is not likely to affect me). Of course, it's inherently absurd that these devices don't allow you to stream the video off of them yourself, it makes them e-waste in the making. Possibly someone will figure out a way to install friendlier firmware on them via the micro-sd card...
seanp2k2 11y ago
Ubiquiti just came out with cameras and a DVR device (atom-based) to store the content with you: https://www.ubnt.com/unifi-video/unifi-nvr/ https://www.ubnt.com/unifi-video/unifi-nvr/
- baseten 11y ago
  I've been looking at the ubiquiti nvr for a bit as i like their wireless stuff but i'm not sure what cameras i'd want. The reviews of the newer micro cameras are crap and the new-new g3 ones they just announced aren't delivering til fall.
SwellJoe 11y ago

dangoor 11y ago

It seems like the complexity of getting around NAT/firewalls is likely to stymie a lot of potential users. Making a cloud service is a bad idea for all kinds of reasons, but it simplifies this important aspect of getting the device up and running.

SwellJoe 11y ago
Yes, that's absolutely an issue. And, it would even be OK, for me, to have that be the default, as long as they provide some other means of dealing with the device. WiFi isn't hard, at all. So give me a local web UI, and a way to store things locally or remotely using some standard protocol. That's dead simple to implement, and routers and printers have been doing it for a couple decades. Simply making the device usable without the cloud service would have been enough for me to not be so angry with Dropcam, and enough for me to feel like this is not a failure of ethics in the tech sector. I've owned a number of devices in this category; the first was a Panasonic Petcam, which worked great for me, for many years. It had the ability to email me videos and photos, save to arbitrary FTP storage, etc. This was over a decade ago! If they could manage all that back then, why is it so difficult now, with networking tools being so much more advanced today?
- brbsix 11y ago
  There are plenty of cameras like what you're describing on the market today. Modern incarnations of the Panasonic Petcam. Search 'WiFi IP camera'. You just don't hear about them because they aren't hyped to high hell like Dropcam.
  - SwellJoe 11y ago
    Yes, I've got a couple. I was sort of changing the subject to other home automation devices, without really being clear about that. Nest is clearly the market leader in the home automation category; at least for thermostats. I'm sure there must be others, but Nest is the only one I see at Home Depot and Lowes. I think they've executed on their plan remarkably well, so taking them on with something that is a much lower margin product (a hardware device that doesn't hold the consumer for ransom for the monthly bill) would be extremely difficult, I think. And, because they do so much of their thinking in the cloud, their devices can be dumber/cheaper. So, they win on two fronts, as long as consumers don't mind being fleeced in this way. And, yeah, hype has a lot to do with it. How have products like Dropcam and Nest generated so much buzz? I guess people genuinely prefer them, and consider the user experience worth the price (both in terms of money and in terms of privacy and choice).

ageitgey 11y ago

> I still can't believe something like Dropcam is such a huge success. The level of security awareness the general public has is terrifyingly small I think you are totally misjudging this market. To the average person, a Dropcam is empirically far more secure in practice than many alternatives have proven to be. It's certainly what I'd recommend to a friend. A few years ago, Foscam Wifi cameras were popular with parents. You could buy one for <$100 and they worked over wifi and had no service you had to buy. But then they were hacked by the thousands[1] with repeated major security issues over multiple years[2]. There were numerous news reports of parents finding strangers yelling obscenities at their babies in the middle of the night using the camera's talk-back function. This happened to multiple people I knew in real life. This led to numerous articles like this one[3] telling parents to update passwords, disable UPnP, tweak router settings, update firmware, etc, to prevent future hacks. But to a parent who's baby was woken up in the middle of the night by a hacker, they are probably just going to throw the hacked camera in the trash. By comparison, Dropcam is a totally integrated solution that requires no user-initiated updates, no network configuration and is backed by the reputation of Google. To the average parent that doesn't want to spend their life reading Foscam forums, that's a much more attractive solution and much less likely to get hacked due to not being updated or properly configured and secured. Dropcam/Nest/Google produces a product that works really well right out of the box with almost zero configuration and is relatively secure. The non-cloud alternatives do not. Until someone offers a solution that "just works" like Dropcam, consumers will keep opting for the cloud-based solution. Yes, it sucks for electronic freedom. But that's not the main feature that matters to the market. [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/08/13/how-a-creep-hacked-a-baby-monitor-to-say-lewd-things-to-a-2-year-old/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/08/13/how-a-cre... [2] http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/01/bug-exposes-ip-cameras-baby-monitors/ http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/01/bug-exposes-ip-cameras-ba... [3] http://www.brockthompson.com/blog/3-ways-protect-foscam-hackers http://www.brockthompson.com/blog/3-ways-protect-foscam-hack...

msh 11y ago
Totally agree. I think there are a lot of people on HN who dont remember that just because they can easily set something up regular people can't do the same thing. Of cause having dropbox/dropcam simplicity comes with downsides but for regular consumers its not a question between self hosting and cloud, its between having something that can do this and not having it at all.

narrator 11y ago

Ironically, I was at a presentation by a Chinese surveillance camera company and they were saying that they are moving their image recognition and processing to the device from the cloud because the bandwidth and centralized processing is not scalable enough. Just as a general engineering matter, the devices will get more smarts.

fludlight 11y ago

Welcome to your next fridge.

SwellJoe 11y ago
Yeah, I made some cheesy jokes about this on April Fools Day: http://thingmin.com http://thingmin.com

jack-r-abbit 11y ago

This is why I have decided against the Dropcam/Nestcam. We currently use the (now end-of-lifed) Logitech Alert system. Each camera has its own storage and you can option to have that offloaded to a network device. The entire system functions without any dependency on their backend. For free you even get live streaming (which does depend on their backend). However, for something like only $80/yr you can also access the video stored on the cameras for playback. And that one fee gets you all the cameras in your network (where Dropcam charges more... and per camera). I guess Logitech could do it cheaper because their backend just connects you to your cameras so they don't have to handle the data storage/streaming. And even though they end-of-lifed it, they still work. I plan to use them until the wheels fall off. Was hoping to switch to Dropcams, until I researched them more to find out they are cloud-only.

awesomerobot 11y ago

Every time I see a new security hardware startup I immediately look for what their products can do without a cloud service. 9/10 the answer is: absolutely nothing. In 2-3 years it'll be in a landfill, not because the hardware is obsolete, but because the firmware made it so. Landfills full of hubris.

PhantomGremlin 11y ago
Landfills full of hubris. Landfills full of unicorn poop.

spoinkaroo 11y ago

Have you found an alternative product you prefer?