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I have this idea of a system I would like to have in my house. It contains cameras in every room that are constantly watching where people are and relaying the
by dustinmoorenet 8y ago
I have this idea of a system I would like to have in my house. It contains cameras in every room that are constantly watching where people are and relaying the coordinates to a central server. That server makes decisions on if lights should be on or if A/C should be running in that room. But I would never buy this system. I would have to make it myself. I am hopeful that open source software and hardware can produce individual components that I can trust to piece together.
- jasonkostempski 8y agoEven if you build it, knowing guest may never feel completely comfortable visiting your house.
- fouric 8y agoThey should feel more comfortable than an equivalent system built by a company that is looking to profit off of your data - and additionally, you can give the guest stronger guarantees that when you say that the system is "off", it actually is.
- ggg9990 8y agoThe chance that a random implementer has a security vulnerability is much higher than that Jeff Bezos is listening to me watch TV. A private system is more vulnerable to target attack and an Amazon system is more vulnerable to mass surveillance.
- fouric 8y agoThat's true - and I suppose that some people are much more concerned about the former threat than the latter.
- bluGill 8y agoYou are on the right track, but I don't think you are quite right. Amazon like systems are more vulnerable to mass surveillance. Your vulnerability isn't a targeted attack: you are not valuable enough to be worth the effort to figure out your system. As an attacker on your system I'd have to figure out how to break in, and then how to use the hardware you have. You are more valuable as part of a botnet - attacks that already exist. (if you are a politician then maybe, but that person is also vulnerable to a targeted attack on their amazon system - probably more so because the target is easier to figure out).
- Anon1096 8y agoAnd what exactly does this "vulnerability" mean in real terms? Let's be honest. No one cares what conversations are going on in your house _unless_ you're someone specifically targeted. There's little use in mopping up data with no goal.
- bluGill 8y agoIf mopping up everybody's conversations is cheap enough Russia/Iran/China/(insert your favorite large evil) does. If you happen to run of political office 15 years from now having all your conversations available to analyze will be useful. If they don't like you, you might find some out of context snippet of "private conversation" all over social media killing your campaign. (or alternatively the blackmail threat if you don't X) That is they will target everybody because they know in a few years that will include somebody who they currently think is a nobody. Of course as AI gets better and cheaper they may eventually listen to everything to see what who can be targeted automatically for what.
- darpa_escapee 8y agoEconomic espionage is a mainstay of intelligence agencies, so you don't even need to play the potential politician scenario out. Just working for a company that an agency is surveilling is enough to make you worth targeting.
- pessimizer 8y agoIf I'm using a dragnet to grab every conversation and filter it for things I personally care about, your conversation could make you someone I want to specifically target. As a random example: let's say that I want to kill someone who lives in your neighborhood. I could analyze your conversations, comings and goings to figure out when and how to kill that person, and blame it on you. I could on a continual basis run numbers on everyone emitting data in your neighborhood, until someone had arrived at a point where their friends would testify against them on the basis of conversations with the potential patsy, that patsy had no alibi, and tailor the murder on the basis of the means that the patsy had available to them at the time. I could also just be trying to figure out if you were a homosexual, or muslim.
- MikkoFinell 8y agoWhy not just program it in Rust if you want to guarantee that the system doesn't have any security vulnerabilities?
- darpa_escapee 8y agoA secure language does not protect you from insecure design. I could very easily build a system in Rust with gaping security holes, purposefully or accidentally.
- icebraining 8y agoNice troll
- kinsomo 8y ago>> Even if you build it, knowing guest may never feel completely comfortable visiting your house. > They should feel more comfortable than an equivalent system built by a company that is looking to profit off of your data - and additionally, you can give the guest stronger guarantees that when you say that the system is "off", it actually is. They won't, because they'll be concerned the person that implemented it is a creeper. When regular people think "cameras installed in the room," they think this: https://www.bustle.com/p/airbnb-host-was-caught-with-a-hidden-camera-set-up-in-the-room-now-airbnb-has-banned-them-for-life-6666798 https://www.bustle.com/p/airbnb-host-was-caught-with-a-hidde... Distrust of a person is more more immediate in visceral. Distrust of a company is more distant and esoteric. The former usually trumps the latter.
- blakes 8y agoI've made plans for essentially this, but using infrared sensors to track occupants rather than cameras. There are many methods for occupancy tracking without cameras. IR sensors, antennas in the walls, NFC (bleh), proximity sensors.
- econochoice 8y agoFrom what I gather, if you need fine-grained location information in a building, you can do this without cameras and just a handful of strategically placed wireless access points. Less likely to be seen as creepy and such systems already exist. If you just need 'is a person in this room' or 'how many people are in this room' levels of data, solutions to this problem have existed for decades. No need to over complicate a solved problem.
- daveFNbuck 8y agoThis assumes you don't leave your phone in the charger as you wander around your house.
- bluGill 8y agoIf you are cleaver you can use the wifi signals as a radar and find people/objects even when they don't have a wifi device on them. I'm pretty sure all current technology only works with the have a wifi decide on your person. It is significantly easier to do this and for the most part good enough.
- ConceptJunkie 8y agoSounds far-fetched to me. If you are cleaver, you are also likely to get stuck in a coffee cup billboard or Eddie Haskell will trick you into insulting your Spanish-speaking friend.
- toomuchtodo 8y agohttps://www.engadget.com/2017/10/09/origin-wireless-motion-detection-breathing-rate-sensor/ https://www.engadget.com/2017/10/09/origin-wireless-motion-d... Not only can you detect motion and objects through physical mass using WiFi spectrum with a properly equipped device, you can detect if someone is breathing. “What's more, this "Time Reversal Machine" technology is essentially just some clever algorithmic work with little burden on the processor, so it can potentially be added to any existing WiFi mesh routers via a firmware update. In other words, security system vendors should take note.”
- ythn 8y agoSuch a system would be a huge GDPR nightmare. You'd need consent from every visitor to your house to collect data on them, and also you have to delete it if they ever request you to. Best not to even try.
- fouric 8y agoDoes the GDPR even apply to private individuals like that?
- jacquesm 8y agoNo, definitely not.
- ggg9990 8y agoOK, the GDPR conversation has officially gone off the deep end. The EU does not care about your server with videos of your house.
- jacquesm 8y agoInteractions between private individuals are out-of-scope. The following processing is outside the scope of the GDPR: - any activity outside the scope of EU law (e.g., activities of a Member State in relation to national criminal law); - any activity performed by Member States when carrying out activities in relation to the common foreign and security policy of the EU; - any activity performed by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity; - any processing by the EU itself; and - any activities performed by national authorities for the purposes of prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of criminal offences, or performance of judicial functions. https://gdpr-info.eu/art-2-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-2-gdpr/
- mygo 8y agoYou don’t need to use cameras for this. A simple speaker and microphone is all you need to make a functioning motion sensor. Just exploiting the doppler effect. And even better, you can do it all outside of the human audible spectrum. And it can work with capturing motion around corners, too, since sound bounces off walls. I’d recommend something like this in every room, or even IR sensors, over cameras. You don’t want to capture video of your children jerking off.
- tomatsu 8y ago> A simple speaker and microphone is all you need to make a functioning motion sensor. You could just use an infrared motion sensor. They are dirt cheap and widely used for controlling lights. The AC unit at work has one, too. So, all of this already exists. Without spying capabilities, that is.
- myth_drannon 8y agoWell that's what www.aerial.ai is doing using wi-fi signals
- dalbasal 8y agoOn making, not buying... A lot of home automation stuff seems like something that would be fun to make, but not something I really want to have. I mean, the AC might be a good energy saver (a smarter thermostat) but that's not something I want, more like something that I would buy if it was cheap and practical enough. To some extent, this is a phenomenon of early technology. It feels full of potential, so you want to play with it but it doesn't really do anything you really need yet. The early web was ki d of like that. We made sites because we wanted to make sites, moreso than because we wanted to have them. Home automation though... Im kind of skeptical that this goes anywhere useful. The useful examples people think of (eg remote close all the windows and lock the doors) are more about mechanisation than automation.
- manmal 8y agoAt my house, we have blinds installed on every window, and every evening I go around the house, pressing 12 switches (2 for every blind, because UX is obviously optional) so it's perfectly dark in the bedroom. In the morning, I go around the house and press those 12 switches again, to let the sunshine in. Now that's a task I would love to automate! Alas, remote controlling those blinds would be a major hassle since AFAIK I would have to install 6 wifi-enabled devices and tear holes everywhere (not even sure there is a powerline near) - and likely do all the programming myself. Thanks but no thanks.
- amenod 8y agoIf it bothers you enough, take a look at ZigBee switches. Not sure I understand how you operate the blinds (since the current switches are apparently not on powerlines?), but you could still make a centralized solution to control them over ZB. There's https://www.home-assistant.io/ https://www.home-assistant.io/ if you don't want to program (much), and probably others. And you will smile every evening and every morning for the next few years, thinking of the time when you had to do it manually... not to mention, it's cool. :) You might need to invest something in these devices and controller though.
- manmal 8y ago
- crooked-v 8y agohttps://www.home-assistant.io https://www.home-assistant.io doesn't have computer vision, but can use motion sensors and the like to tell where people are, and use that to activate/deactivate devices. It's all open source and runs entirely locally.
- ReverseCold 8y agoPIR sensors can tell you whether there are people (or pets) in a room. Never tried one, but they should work pretty well.
- nathancahill 8y agoCheck out https://www.home-assistant.io/ https://www.home-assistant.io/ Open source, gets you most of the way there.
- Semaphor 8y agoI actually used to have a solution with home-assistant, find (uses wifi signal fingerprinting for location) and hue. It worked okay with very little work (sometimes 1-5s delay turning lights on/off) but I never cared enough to put more work in to get it better. I think "find" and similar tools are now much more advanced so it might work better out of the box now.
- Bartweiss 8y agoThere's a whole class of tech like this for me. An Alexa/Echo/etc, a fitness tracker with GPS and sleep monitoring, a maps program that learns my routine and integrates with a weather app, and so on. And ideally? All of it integrated. It actually sounds nice to say "I'm going home", and have Maps say "today that will take 35, should your oven start preheating when you're 20 minutes out?" IoT devices are overrated, but I can absolutely imagine a critical mass of integrated tools being very useful. But I'm not even slightly willing to do that. It's too much information and too much risk surface. I'd pay a hefty premium to get local-data-only versions of these products, but no one is offering that, and it doesn't look like they're going to start.
- GFischer 8y agoMaps currently does do what you're saying - Google knows the time I'm going home and displays current traffic information and estimated time to arrive, at least for me. Not yet preheating the oven though :)
- stef25 8y agoSame. But it gets such obvious things wrong. Instead of "traffic to [daycare center] is light" it says "traffic to [some weird company name probably registered in the same building] is light". Waze also knows where I'm going in advance and most of the time it gets it right, like every Thu evening "are you heading to [evening school] ?". My weekly schedule is exactly the same 99% of the time but sometimes it still makes obvious mistakes. If you need an AI for that it must be a very simple one, yet it still fails. Google maps also auto saves my parking location most of the time but other times it doesn't, for reasons unknown. Things like that make it hard for me to have faith in future versions of this stuff.
- GFischer 8y agoThe bizarre thing is that Waze is owned by Google. People speculate they haven't merged information due to regulatory reasons.
- 8y ago
- pcunite 8y agoThe Personal Cloud is what we should be building for ourselves. Servers running in your closet at your house.
- beenBoutIT 8y agoAny idiot who breaks into your home would be well positioned to steal your server along with all of your memories and use them for ransom/blackmail/etc.
- floren 8y agoAs opposed to any idiot who breaks into your IoT provider's server? An encrypted hard disk with the key on a USB stick would be enough, just keep the key somewhere separate and you'll only have to plug it in when there's a power outage.
- nacnud 8y agoWhat about embedding into the walls themselves?
- toxik 8y agoSo like a computer then.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoI like the idea (though I think with enough abstraction, you could have it also replicating itself to "regular" cloud). The main fight needs to happen at application level, not infrastructure. Cloud services are already mostly transparent and interchangeable. But applications aren't. The problem is, it's the application vendor that owns the code, determines where's going to run, and asks you to send over the data. How it should be working, is that you own the data and determine location of computing, and own or rent code to be run on that data.
- ctrlc-root 8y agoIndeed, I'm working on something similar: https://github.com/CtrlC-Root/mdcs https://github.com/CtrlC-Root/mdcs
- masklinn 8y agoIR camera would probably make this simpler than a visible-light camera. You want to know if there are people in the room, you don't really care who they are specifically.
- atomical 8y agoI thought this was going to be sarcasm until I got to the end. It sounds like a project where the security would make it too much of a burden.
- kinsomo 8y ago> I have this idea of a system I would like to have in my house. It contains cameras in every room that are constantly watching where people are and relaying the coordinates to a central server. That server makes decisions on if lights should be on or if A/C should be running in that room. But I would never buy this system. I would have to make it myself. I am hopeful that open source software and hardware can produce individual components that I can trust to piece together. You don't need cameras for that, just motion sensors. > That server makes decisions on if lights should be on...in that room. You don't need a server for that, just a motion-sensing switch. They can be totally offline. My office has them to shut off lights automatically when a conference room becomes unoccupied. https://www.homedepot.com/b/Electrical-Wiring-Devices-Light-Controls-Motion-Sensors/N-5yc1vZc32r https://www.homedepot.com/b/Electrical-Wiring-Devices-Light-... It can get annoying if you're not moving much, but the key point is: no camera or server required. > That server makes decisions on...if A/C should be running in that room. Ecobee thermostats can already do that using motion/temperature sensors. They run fine without an internet connection. https://www.ecobee.com/room-sensors/ https://www.ecobee.com/room-sensors/
- carbocation 8y agoMight be cool to add thermal sensors to that, so the lights don't shut off because you're not moving enough.
- sgwae 8y agoAdd in voice, image recording to get gov income as well.
- flyingcoder 8y agoThat would still mean that the lights would go off if my boss was the only person in the room.
- FreeFull 8y agoThat's alright, he doesn't really need the light anyway.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- iaw 8y agoOpenCV + some kind of industrial controller could do this. hackaday.com/blog/ will have some details on how people set up computer home controllers as well as working with OpenCV
- blitmap 8y agoHow to determine Presence is a very interesting topic.
- sizzle 8y agoThis is eerily similar to the concept of a 'cookie' seen in the Black Mirror episode, White Christmas. (Spoiler Alert) A cookie is a device "that is inserted under the clients head by the brain and kept there for a week, giving it time to accurately replicate the individuals consciousness. It is then removed and installed in a larger, egg shaped device which can be connected to a computer or tablet (to automate their smart house controls as if the house was knew their personal preferences moving from room to room.)"
- burntwater 8y agoI want to say "that episode really freaked me out" but... That's true for almost every episode of Black Mirror.
- sizzle 8y agoI get freaked out every time someone on HN proposes a tech not too far removed from Black Mirror plots. Great show!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gerdesj 8y agoYou might consider investigating say ESP8266 or ESP32, MicroPython, Raspberry Pi, OpenHAB, MQTT, OneWire and wave goodbye to your free time!
- scotty79 8y agoI had exactly same idea just about the lights but am too lazy to even try to implement it. Plus sensors require power and that requires cables and that's way too much bother. Low tech alternative solution from my friends? Get LEDs. Never turn off the lights. This way the room you are going to will always be lit.
- partiallypro 8y agoAnd then the distro will be abandoned and be an open sore for hackers. IoT devices are a mass grave of abandoned Linux distros.
- zeptomu 8y ago> "That server makes decisions on if lights should be on [...]" Why would you even want such a system? My flat uses the Button-Framework which provides a really convenient UI/UX. The edge between 2 nodes (rooms) has a button (a haptic device to switch between boolean states) at around hand-height that you can press to switch the light on or off. It works quite well (it uses a switch-system technically) and the user decides by her/himself if the light should be on or off and just presses the button after careful reasoning. Granted, it doesn't use Docker, but it really works well and needs low-maintainance. My model is running since 23 years and I never had any issues - it's even open source.
- samb1729 8y agoIs there a Github repo?
- collyw 8y agoHaven't burglar alarm systems been doing something similar for years?
- akerro 8y agoYou can literally make it on Arduino or Raspberry Pi for like 100$ and self host it in your LAN in Docker with no Internet access.