This has always been a concern I've had around WiFi anything in security systems. Sure, they're great for easy installing in an existing structure, but between jamming and battery replacement, I've just never been a fan. I'm also old and don't trust anything, so that just adds to it.
Been saying this for a while but the RF world is wildly under-explored on the consumer side. The military has been doing electronic warfare for ages but it's only now popping up in the consumer industry.
An example: all wireless protocols can be trivially jammed by just spamming noise, like anything else, but most can also be smart jammed by various methods: spamming disconnect packets, malformed packets that crash the device, noise jamming very specific parts of various transactions, like the alignment section of OFDM QAM on 4/5G, etc. This means, instead of needing some multiple of the targets transmit power to cover a wide area, you can use as much or less power than the target which is extremely bad from an EW standpoint.
We need to build smarter wireless protocols that can both resist casual assholes, but also higher sophistication adversaries up to and probably including nation state actors for the safety of our infrastructure.
And yes, that means insulin pumps probably shouldn't have radios in them.
We need to start wiring houses for this stuff. It's absurd that we don't treat data cabling as fundamental as plumbing at this point.
A lot of homes are at least partially wired. The "phone line" cable in homes built in the last decade or so is almost certainly cat 5.
This sounds like a great idea, until you try to re-terminate that cabling and see how much abuse the electrician put the drop through. I’ve seen 6-8” of sheathing removed and all the remaining pairs untwisted wrapped back around (or just snipped entirely).
Sparkies love yanking really hard on data cable. Dunno why.
You can remove the “data” qualifier — they yank hard on any and all cable.
In my pre-divorce house, it turned out that the flippers who had done the renovations on it did things like put phone and coax jacks in every room that were not connected to anything.¹ Well, there were wires in the wall, but they just went deeper into the wall. In my current apartment, I put in about 50' of Cat6 since the 1920s construction walls kept the wifi signal from reaching from the living room where the fiber drop was to my office off the back of the kitchen. When I buy a house again, one of the first things I’ll do is run ethernet through the whole place.
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1. The other irritating thing was discovering that the light switches were attached only to the faceplate which in turn was attached only to the drywall.
When I buy a house again, one of the first things I’ll do is run ethernet through the whole place.
Good call. Although, I just had it done recently and I was pleasantly surprised at how noninvasive it was (the electricians worked really hard, so that's part of it). We moved things out of the way for where we wanted the jacks installed and they ran the cables through the wall with a minimal amount of holes. Definitely would have been even easier if we didn't have anything in the house at all, but there was way less ceremony on my part than I was expecting.
I guess I got lucky then.
So many homes with a coax in every room too.
There's always MoCA.
We need to start wiring houses for this stuff.
We already have. Powerline is a thing, and for smart home stuff you don't need high bandwidth.
I don't understand why powered IoT devices (lightbulbs, switches etc) don't use powerline for network access.
Would this be vulnerable to an adversary plugging a device into your exterior electrical outlets?
Back in the noughties plugging in a TV was enough to break some powerline ethernet.
To elaborate, the power conditioning circuits in flat screen (often plasma) TVs would interfere with the non-60hz signaling of the powerline ethernet. That's certainly not the same as breaking into the network, but it may have been enough to knock devices offline.
No. Powerline ethernet was pretty obviously going to have security issues along these lines from the go considering the lack of clear boundaries inherent in sending data over wires connecting to a public grid and included cryptography from the go. I know Homeplug devices have been on AES since the mid-2000s using either passwords or push button config and G.hn had something similar going on.
Some of the pre-IoT home automation system did use powerline for communication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X10_(industry_standard)
I'm unsure, but my gut tells me there's regulations/building codes that require landline cabling in (new) residential homes, and of course, not data cabling. Like I said, it's just a hunch, though.
You're suggesting there is building code requiring the omission of data cabling. I'm not even sure how this would be phrased. Especially given that phone cabling is just Cat5 cable now.
Data cabling is omitted from new builds because it doesn't sell homes and is just a cost.
The only recent comparison I can think of is how some cities actually required lead pipes for drinking water for decades.
You're suggesting there is building code requiring the omission of data cabling
I don't think so. I think he's suggesting that without a code that does require it nobody is going to bother including it even though they really should.
Worked for a res-electrician for about 6 years. We would often strongly suggest that people run cat5e (it was years back now) to many locations for future proofing layouts and connections in the house.
Very very few people had interest in the slight added expense of the cable and labor to do as such -- all insisting that they only needed it to / from cable modem area to their aspirational wifi router location.
all insisting that they only needed it to / from cable modem area to their aspirational wifi router location.
This is like turning down indoor plumbing and instead putting a nice heated, carpeted breezeway out to an outhouse you rent.
Building codes (a long time ago) also didn’t require electrical wiring or plumbing, then we decided they should.
The problem is that wiring standards change.
Ideally, you put conduits in the wall then upgrading cables is easier.
FCC fines for jamming the spectrum are...nontrivial
I can assure you they don't give a shit. The FCC has been completely asleep at the wheel for a decade.
Yeah if you rig up a 1kw tube amp and start splattering a big chunk of the FM boardcast band, jam their cash cow mobile networks or run around with a GPS jammer near an airport you'll get a near immediate PP slap but beyond that they'll maybe send a car eventually. They don't have the ability to detect and locate this stuff in real time and, IMO, probably shouldn't for privacy reasons.
Rest assured they do. If you look up FCC violations in urban areas you can find out that they are quite adept at triangulating violators.
"A first offense is a misdemeanor punishable by up to a $10,000 fine and/or up to a year in jail. Subsequent offenses are felonies punishable by up to 2 years in prison. In practice, this might result in only a civil action by the FCC. But it is forbidden by Congress and can be punished by imprisonment." https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/94617/is-deliberate-....
Not sure why everyone is linking me articles on the CFRs, long abandoned listening posts too far from anything to matter at all, and the few one off cases where someone did something dumb enough, long enough, that it got the FCCs attention, which is newsworthy because they usually don't pay any attention.
You can fuck with RF as much as you want, as long as you A: don't do it constantly, B: don't do it in the same location every time (at home), and C: don't do it in a band belonging to someone who has their FCC field office's number on a post-it note and has paid the FCC lots of money.
Yeah I always recall this article http://www.arrl.org/news/view/amateur-radio-sleuthing-pins-d...
The FCC told the police they didn't care, it took a bunch of HAMs running around to find the source and politely ask them to maybe fix it or at least consider turning it off if someone else complains again.
For ISM, yeah the FCC don't give a shit.
Marriott was jamming for years, until they were forced to stop. Keyword: years.
If someone is making temporary jamming attacks (even on GPS or cell), unless you do it at your house or stationary, you ain't getting caught.
I know 'a friend at the hackerspace' who did a .25w GPS spoof to make the city look like it was in Moscow, Russia. Nobody responded.
Specifically, Marriott was deauthing rather than just plain jamming.
Deauthing is an application-soecific jamming.
There's lots of types of jamming, not just white noise static.
I can assure you they will give a shit if you make enough, ahem, noise that people start complaining. Not that it's not fun to mess around though. Think about those little stickers that says your device must accept all blah blah. You just have to be able to talk to them so they can.
The amount of Uber and Lyft drivers that have told me how cellular reception near sports stadiums are atrocious tells me that these FCC fines are not deterring those with sufficiently deep pockets.
Different root cause - stadiums concentrate an absurd amount of people in a very small space, and people aren't going to a stadium to watch sports, they are there to make selfies, videos, even livestreams for Instagram, Snapchat or Tiktok so they need a lot of bandwidth.
Ideally, the operators of such venues would go and place an appropriate amount of picocells inside the stadium, but these cost a ton of money to install and they are only used maybe once a week for two hours, so there is no financial incentive for the providers (particularly if the general public has gotten so accustomed with a baseline of enshittification that they don't even protest any more).
For example, take the Munich Oktoberfest. The Theresienwiese is 42ha large and fits about 600.000 people without tents or ~200.000 in the full Oktoberfest buildout - and each year, every provider literally spins up hundreds of cells of all sizes, to accomodate the up to 20, 30 terabytes of data each day that all these people create [1]. But since that is two weeks of full load, it's worth the effort in the end financially.
[1] https://www.golem.de/news/netzabdeckung-mobilfunk-beim-oktob...
AT&T has microcells in a box that you can get them to install for you large events and then return at the end of the event. You can even set who is allowed to connect so you can demonstrate your cell device works at a trade show while not having to deal with other cell phones.
I don't know why they don't bring them to sporting events and then take them out at the end. Probably labor.
When I worked for Cingular Wireless pre-AT&T, we had everything from femtocells (the last 2 stalls in the bathroom don't have service) to full cell sites with their own power source on 18 wheelers they'd roll up for big events, and a dedicated team of engineers and techs to support it. It was a huge help, but at the end of the day bandwidth is still finite no matter how many cells you stick in and around the stadium.
But that's clearly just because of 10s or 100s of thousands of mobile devices in the area, why would they care about that?
Even when there are no events in those stadiums?
It might be the word of these drivers against the stadium owners/operators, but I am still willing to entertain these accounts enough to see people perform preliminary investigations.
I would like to see signal strength maps across different times of the day and week for each of the major cellular providers in an around these venues and compare them to comparable maps for busy downtown areas.
I assume some of this data is already collected by each individual cellular service provider for their own network in order to access performance and areas of future investment.
I think it can be done by sending de-authenticates. No signal jamming required.
The FCC uses the word “blocking” and institutes the same fine.
FCC rules forbid hostile use of the frequencies, that’s also what forbids jamming.
Everyone is supposed to get along and play nicely, and jamming is the definition of not doing that.
Intentionally sending disconnects/de-authentications too, if the intent is denying lawful use for someone.
Criminals committing felonies usually don't really worry about FCC fines.
If you’re caught jamming spectrum to disable security cameras to invade someone’s home and steal property, you’re going to get more than fines.
Kicking in doors is also illegal.
People don’t do it because it’s a quick way to land in hot water with the FCC.
You don’t want federal crimes because you jammed someone’s wifi
Jamming 2.4 GHz spectrum is unlikely to ever warrant an FCC response.
Virtually every microwave I've tested is an excellent jammer for 2.4 GHz. It even has a user interface for how long like you'd like to jam communications!
I'm legally allowed to "jam" your WiFi so long as I am using the spectrum for communications because I am licensed user unlike the majority of 2.4 GHz users. Even if you file an FCC complaint they aren't going to do anything.
Now if you move up to 5+ GHz range it really depends. If you start jamming the DFS bands it'll eventually get noticed.
Unless it's a very old microwave it should not be leaking RF into the surroundings because that RF is energy targeted at warming up food and liquids.
I bought my microwave in 2014. It was top of the line. I warm up a cup of water and I can watch every 2.4 GHz device drop off from my AP for that time period.
You have a defective microwave, you may want to get that checked out.
that RF is energy targeted at warming up food and liquids.
By pumping microwave energy into the water molecules. At around 2.45GHz[1]. So it doesn't take much drift and crappy shielding to crap all over adjacent spectra. This is extremely well documented and "they should build better microwaves" hasn't reached give-a-shit level for most of the world.
[1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0031-9120/39/1/00...
I wasn't aware you could be licensed for 2.4 GHz broadcasts. What's the process on that, and what does it allow you to do? (Besides jamming others I guess)
As others have mentioned I have an amateur radio license. About 50 MHz of our allocation overlaps with the 2.4 GHz band used for WiFi. I think there is some overlap with the 5.x GHz bands as well.
You can also petition the FCC for an experimental license provided you have a valid reason. It isn't uncommon to see experimental licenses with allocations like 2 MHz - 60 GHz provided no transmission is 24/7 or unattended.
They're probably talking about having an amateur radio license. You just need to pay $35 and take a test, nothing else is required. The test question bank is open so you can pretty trivially memorize enough of it to pass, though given that the tech license is mostly regulatory, that's equivalent to studying.
http://www.arrl.org/getting-licensed
If you do that though, you get a bunch of bands from DC to light where you can argue with old people about gout and the government.
Hell, one of my customers had one of the best 2.4GHz jammers I'd ever seen at their house. It was one of those portable handsets for hardwired phones that were still common in the 2000s before everyone started ditching land lines.
They had lots of complaints about the quality of wireless they had in their house. I dropped in more access points even after everything worked perfectly when I was there. Then they got a call when I was there and everything stopped working. This was before 5GHz was really common, but B/G/N would just stop functioning.
Last apartment I lived in (long ago), I switched pretty much everything WiFi to 5GHz (11a...not the fancy stuff we got now) when one of the neighbors bought an off brand Chinese baby monitoring system that clearly wasn't playing by the 2.4GHz rules and shit all over the spectrum. I probably could have gone the FCC route, but it wasn't them it was the guy with the dodgy microwave or whomever moved in next and 5GHz solved the problem.
How is the FCC going to know I jammed my neighbors wifi? This is a serious question, you can practically run any red light you want where I live without any repercussions.
Is there an FCC overlord watching these signals?
This is taken a lot more serious than running red lights, and yes, they will get you. A guy in Florida was using a jammer in his car to block phones when he was driving. They found it.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/fla-man-fined-48k-for-jamming-cel...
That guy was not jamming WiFi
Also he ran the jammer every day along a very specific route. It's like robbing the same liquor store 3 nights in a row. Eventually even the laziest cop just waits around back for you to show up.
Those are all either offline or too far from anyone to be able to detect, let alone triangulate, a wifi jammer.
Two ways
First way, they get reports from people/companies/band users and will maybe act on them. This assumes it's in a band they care about, people report stuff in the ham bands all the time but they nearly universally ignore those.
Second way, you interfere with something safety critical, such as an airport, where they may have installed equipment to monitor RF in particular bands.
TL;DR: unless your neighbor is an RF professional and can determine that they are being interfered with instead of "huh, the wifis no workie...shrug", they just won't do anything.
Huh? Breaking into someone’s house is already a felony pretty much everywhere.
I think it’s more likely just a bit harder to find a known good RF jammer than a rock. And a rock was usually fine. Or used to be, anyway.
Facebook tries to sell me RF jammers pretty much nonstop.
Aliexpress sellers will happilly mail you whatever RF jammer you want.
I have a devious idea:
A device that looks like solar-powered garden lights, but it has a wifi jammer built inside, and you plant them outside businesses such as banks, in the perimeter of their buildings (banks usually have large setbacks and include huge planter boxes (as bollards - see fed reserve SF that had to remodel the planter boxes because OWS folks were camping in them) to keep vehicles from ramming through doors
But "jamming-bombs" might be really interesting.
Is it illegal to spam noise on any frequency? Whats required? the SSID youre attempting to jam?
If so, just scan for networks and pick one... then spam it with auth requests with a rotating table of MAC addresses/IMEIs etc...
I can't speak for all banks, but while our branches have Wifi (sure...you need to carry around an iPad...fine) the customer critical systems are wired for this reason. There's also WiFi monitors and 'wireless IDS' systems and pretty smart techs that know to look for stuff like that (because your devious idea is not remotely new to us).
And if we think someone is pulling a stunt like that, we can call the FCC direct, and when we do, they do care, and they bring pretty impressive tech when they show up. Sometimes, as I understand it, with the FBI in tow.
rogue ap detection has been around for a long time. you make the jammer hop between all the plants randomly. (its just a stupid video game mechanic and fun to think of RF/IR grenades.
(have micro RF 'jammers' that are the size of peas (they just emit enough RF noise to the local APs - - and throw a handfull in an area so RSSI RTLS is moot for the main jammers....
(more of a comic cyber - Ronin type comic that happens in a retro future Tokyo) https://i.imgur.com/jBc4jtv.jpg
Sorry. I thought you were talking about something more nuanced than being a low-grade dick. Sure, you can probably drive the secops guys nuts for a while, and definitely piss off the customer service folks, which pisses of customers. But no one is going not be able to deposit their check or get some $$$ out of the ATM machine.
Kinda judgemental...
I used bank as a blanket example, OWS DNA...
or take out a Blackrock office...
I was just saying that cyber crime/terrorism/activism are all going to use the same tools against the same folks sooner than you can drop a packet.
are all going to use the same tools against the same folks
You mean just like it has been forever? Gosh, I guess we need to figure out that thing we've known about for decades. Thank gawd someone omn the internet clued us in.
And the idea Blackrock somehow doesn't have better opsec than we do. They have and order of magnitude more money than us, and far more reputational risk!
Bless your heart.
You're wonderful at speculative 'what if' conversation.
And banks and blackrock seem to trigger you for some reason. Oligarchy Sycophant much?
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But seriously, yes I am sure Blackrock DOES have great opsec... but that doesnt preclude them from being a desirous target.
we need more OWS, and less smart-ass flippant comments, such as yours, as well as things I have said in the past (Ill own I get flippant and emotionally irrationally at times - but seriously - private equity doesnt need a hair-cut, it should be scalped.
That energy is better spent creating a passive 4G IMSI catcher. 5G will probably have countermeasures against this. Your market would be surveillance systems which would pair IMEI identification with video or events like jamming.
Been saying this for a while but the RF world is wildly under-explored on the consumer side.
Not really, it is, but nobody gives a shit.
Before zero-trust was the latest cool buzzword on the block, there was the Jericho Forum[1].
I vividly recall attending a Jericho affiliated event where one speaker was banging on about how insecure those bluetooth phone dongles were.
Nothing changes. Security remains an afterthought.
But back to the topic at hand, security camera, home WiFi, asking for trouble really. There are some things for which you really should just run a damn cable.
Why do you think there are so few attacks given the wide surface and long known vulnerabilities here? Maybe there are simply even lower hanging fruit to further your scam or espionage than intercepting these communications?
Barrier to entry, mostly. Implementation of most RF attacks historically required expensive SDR equipment and strong knowledge in a highly specialized domain.
Even many WiFi attacks which can be executed by off-the-shelf WiFi hardware require specialized driver/firmware hacking to execute, since most WiFi firmware isn't designed to send frames "out of turn" or with the wrong flags set.
This is all evolving rapidly and I fully expect this to be one of the hottest topics in coming years. Flipper Zero is an obvious example of the change here - it was absolutely nothing new hardware or software wise, but providing easy access to standard BLE primitives and years-old sub-Ghz radio chipsets triggered a variety of meltdowns.
More powerful SDRs and basic "building block" libraries for SDR are only becoming cheaper and more available every day.
I suspect that there are many many attacks, but we don't hear much about them because they go undetected.
People are routinely being tracked via bluetooth for example but very few people think about it or bother to disable bluetooth because of it. Companies (and anyone else interested) just get to scoop up all that data and use it for whatever they feel like.
but most can also be smart jammed by various methods: spamming disconnect packets
At the very least for this particular case, WPA3 mandates Protected Management Frames (PMF) to prevent de-auth attacks on Wi-Fi networks.
It’ll be called 802.11w deeper in the options. Be sure to test your gear during configuration.
Some car brands sell vehicles that open with a button push on the door, if the key is just nearby.
Standard kit now is you get an RF extender that bridges the distance from a key inside someone’s house to the car; then the car just lets you open it and drive it away. Much faster and simpler than the old slim Jim ways!
The key needs to be continuously present for the car to continue running. Unless I’m missing something in your story?
I don't think any car keyless ignition requires the key to be present to continue running. You don't want a car to shut off on the highway if someone drops the key behind a metal object or the battery dies.
If you start a car, and then take the key out of the vehicle, you will get a message like this: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Jo6gzVfAElc/maxresdefault.jpg
You will be able to drive the vehicle until it is put into park or shut off, and you won't be able to drive it again until the key is present again.
This has stranded some people who have done the following:
* start the car
* get out for some reason
* leave the key by accident
* get back in the car and drive away
* park at their destination
* they are now stranded without a key
My car beeps whenever the key is not detected in the cabin while the vehicle is running. It would be very hard to leave the key behind by accident.
My experience is the same. I suspect one would have to really not pay attention to manage to do this. e.g: stereo up, car already dinging for other reasons, absent minded driver, etc.
Even more surprising: fobs that don't work if the key is in the ignition.
My 1996 Mustang had a bad battery, so it would barely start. I took the remote fob off the key ring and left the car running, but locked it (using the physical door-lock button). When I came back later, the fob would not open the door.
WTF? Had to have another key brought from home.
Another good one: If you open the back door of a Mini Clubman (or the regular Cooper, most likely) and then accidentally drop your fob into the car and close the rear doors or hatch... the car will re-lock itself and you're fucked. This is great when it's a hot day and you just put a dog in the car, which is in the sun. Now you get to break a window. Yay German engineering.
Not true for any car I’ve ever seen.
once it’s started and in drive the key isn’t needed.
Mine works this way, you get a warning that it’s going to shutdown in a few min without the key.
What model vehicle stalls if it can't find the key? That seems like a severe safety problem - you mean it would brake if the battery dies on the key dongle?
At least in the two Hyundai's I've owned with this type of system - an Ioniq hybrid and a Kona EV - it drives just fine once started even if you chuck the key out the window.
The car turning off is not at all the same as braking. It actually seems LESS safe to me to allow the car to move far beyond the key, because leaving the key behind (Thus stranding yourself) is more likely to occur than the battery dying.
My first experience with owning a car that had the wireless key surprised me. I had a Toyota Tacoma that needed to be moved. Someone more freely available jumped in and was able to start it because I was fairly close. They drove around the block well out of range and it never stopped running.
This was surprising to me. In a previous car, I had a remote start that would specifically kill the engine if you pressed the brake without the key in the right position. So the stopping the engine was something that I just assumed would happen as well. Unless there's a concern about just having the engine stop while actively being driven???
Unless there's a concern about just having the engine stop while actively being driven???
The majority of cars depend on the engine to provide power assist on the brakes and steering. Without power assist the physical effort required to stop and steer goes up significantly. Suddenly having the control dynamics of a multi-ton chunk of metal change dramatically while at speed isn't something most people are capable of responding to correctly. Having the engine stop in the middle of a busy intersection is another way to have a bad time.
I had a remote start that would specifically kill the engine if you pressed the brake without the key in the right position.
Being able to start the car remotely and being able to put the car in gear and drive without the key in the ignition are independent features.
AFAIK my '07 Mazda can drive away without the wireless key. It beeps to warn you when the key is getting out of range.
I have a push-button car made by Hyundai and one made by Nissan. Both can be turned on with the fob inside the vehicle. You can then leave the key behind and drive away.
The dashboard will immediately warn you that a key is not present (audio and visual icons), but both cars will not do anything to immobilize the car after the key has been left.
Signal from the key just needed to start, not a keep-alive. Might depend on make/model. Chances are good an automaker doesn't want to shut off a car at speed just because the key misses a keep-alive ping.
The device is actually two sets of equipment. When the unsuspecting victim parks and locks the car, a thief standing not far away holds the first device, which is used to pick up and amplify the electronic signal as it is sent between the car and the key fob.
That signal is relayed to a second device, which tricks the car into thinking that the key fob is near the car. That disarms the security system, unlocks the door and authenticates the engine to start.
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-mystery-car-steali...
Sadly no. I've driven to a place with my wife, and then she drove off, with me having the keys in my pocket.
It'll keep running. Can you imagine if it stops detecting the keys because the coin-battery is dead and the car all of the sudden stalls?
Only when you stop the car and then try to start it you'll notice.
And the fix for this is for the keys to go to sleep when not being moved for x minutes. I can put my keys next to my car and walk away. After x minutes I cannot open my car anymore unless I wiggle the keys.
No, the fix for an attack that extends the readable distance via a relay is to use timing information in the authentication process between the key and the car.
Car: "please respond to challenge blah" Key: ENC(car-public-key, SIGN(blah)) Car: "too slow"
Physics itself limits how quickly you can do a round-trip to a device that's a certain distance away. If the timeout for the operation is set near enough to those physical limits, a relay attack won't work.
the latency auth trick requires very fast timings, to distinguish between 5 ft and 25 ft... 20 feet difference is like 20 ns.
(the attacker's parts don't need to be high delay themselves, could be a pair of gain antennas and amplifiers.)
You could of course use a phase difference instead of trying to measure sub nanosecond timings, but honestly it sounds like a nightmare to get right. Distance travelled by light will probably turn out to have very little in common with how we think it ought to work.
Seems easy to defeat. I shake your car to make the alarm go off, hide, wait for you to pick up your keys to disable the alarm when you see no one there, use RF extender while your keys are active to unlock and steal the car.
There will be pushback because people leave their keys in the car. Hell, I probably know a dozen people who've told me "oh, I just leave the car keys in there". This is the kind of customer friction the car companies hate, so they likely won't do it, no matter if it's the 'right' answer.
Even with that, this is a feature I'd be turning off. If your $75-125k car is vulnerable for 5 minutes per day at a predictable time and location, that's plenty of information for would be thieves.
Keyless entry + keyless start means your vehicle could be gone before you've even got your shoes off after you get home.
Damn that is clever, and something I hadn’t even thought of before. Plenty of people get home and throw their keys by the door, this would absolutely work with a range extender. Does anyone know why keyless became the norm? Cheaper to manufacture than physical keys with electronic security features?
My understanding is this is rapidly being replaced by NFC phone tapping, at least that's what Hyundai is swapping to.
Annoying though, I've really enjoyed not having to dig through pockets to open the car :(
Damn, that sounds so much worse. My Tacoma already has keyless for me to worry about, but at least that doesn’t require an internet connection.
I know that NFC itself does not require an internet connection, but the whole point of requiring a smartphone at all here is to have an app that millions of people MUST install, to collect data to sell. I won’t at all be surprised when they arbitrarily lock NFC keyless behind a required internet connection.
I’m tired boss.
You don’t need an extra app to install a car key in your wallet (if on iPhone). Well, for BMW this is the case, I think Tesla uses a separate UWB solution that is app heavy (but your phone is more like fob and NFC tap isn’t necessary).
I'd compromise with hands-free door unlocking, but some harder method to start the engine.
Most "keyless" cars still have a physical key that you can flip out from inside the fob for dead battery emergencies, so there's no cost reduction. It's just customer preference. I know I'd never want to give up keyless entry and push start, it's just so handy to leave the keys in my pocket.
That only works for some cars, newer fobs (> 2015) turn off after not moving for a while to make these attacks less reliable. You can get a faraday cage box if you have older fobs.
This has been going on for a while. It is surprisingly easy with some brands
Standard kit is a $15 RFID blocker box from Amazon, to keep near front door and put car keys in.
I remember the days before wifi routers came with randomized passwords. We walked around with a backpack that connected to open wifi, logged into the admin page with the default credentials, and changed the wifi name/password and the admin password.
We were evil kids and possibly part of the reason there are randomized passwords now.
Anyway, this is basically the same attack, just with a B&E and a lot more temporary. I'm actually most surprised that these devices don't appear to do any buffering when a connection is lost. And even then, the internet will not stay active if the thieves just go to the neighborhood junction box and pull the plug on the house.
:sigh: too much reliance on technology...
Security has never been a concern for consumer devices. When I was a kid the local telecable remotes worked on all of the boxes in my neighborhood. I used to sneak up to people's windows and changing their channel. I bet my dad wondered where his remote was.
A friend of mine had a telescope in his upstairs room, the window of which overlooked a lake with several other houses in view across the lake.
1: Get the other house's TV sighted in the eyepiece.
2: Move your eye out of the way and hold the remote control up to the eyepiece.
3: ...
4: Move back and observe the confusion.
I am so skeptical of this story but I want it to be true so badly.
If I shine a laser through, does it really focus on the sighted spot? Does the coating on the telescope not filter IR? I thought most did maybe not. Could I shine a flashlight through and illuminate the room? How is that not the same?
1. Optics are symmetric, so it will shine on the spot with the same total power, which might not be noticable.
2. Maybe! Cheap ones might not even have a coating.
3. You can do this! See (1) for how much brightness you can expect.
If it worked, it’s due to televisions having a relatively low activation threshold for user comfort, so you don’t have to aim the remote accurately, or often at all! Often secondary or even tertiary (or more) IR reflections will trigger television functions. For a quick sample, try aiming your remote at the opposite wall and seeing if the tv turns on. I don’t doubt this story, but I also believe it would have worked merely by pointing the remote at the TV, telescope or no.
For a quick sample, try aiming your remote at the opposite wall and seeing if the tv turns on.
But first make sure it isn't radio controlled. The remotes at my old house were all assigned a cable box and you could control that box with its remote from anywhere in the house.
> For a quick sample, try aiming your remote at the opposite wall and seeing if the tv turns on.
But first make sure it isn't radio controlled.
Based on my experience, this isn't actually a problem for people interested in trying it with their TV as RF remotes included with STBs, streaming sticks, etc., still have IR transmitters built in to control the TV.
Specifically, the actual device (e.g. cable box) is controlled with RF signals (often bluetooth) but the power and volume buttons are often controlled via IR because those are functions of the TV and most TVs have IR receivers. TV power/volume can also be conttolled via HDMI-CEC in theory, but in practice I've run into compatibility issues more often than not that way whereas doing it over IR just works.
For #2 - Assuming it's not a spotting scope or similar, filtering IR wouldn't have much benefit. An IR filter might even hurt for the typical star gazing type usage, depending on the equipment used. Cameras for looking at things in the night sky often explicitly lack IR filters (often at massively increased cost) to increase sensitivity to any available light.
Very much this. Any IR filtering on a telescope would not be a very favored option. There is so much interesting stuff to see in the IR range. To your point about lack of IR filters, there are places that offer a service to have the IR filter removed from your DSLR. You can just add an IR filter to your lens to have it back to "normal".
It is the same! Sounds like it's time to craigslist a cheap telescope and engage in some fuckery of your own!
remotes are not lasers, since a laser would only worked if you point at the small ir receiver with high accuracy. Instead remotes are regular IR which is allowed to scatter.
I used to have a TV-B-Gone universal remote with only one button - OFF (oh hey it is still a thing https://www.tvbgone.com/). It was glorious, I used it in airports back when they had TVs all over the place, in hotel bars, in airport shuttles. It came with a booklet warning you about dangers of using it in a crowded sports bar during large sporting events...
Okay that's ingenious. I love it.
My neighbor and I moved in the same week and happened to buy the exact same doorbell unit. Every time someone rang the doorbell at either of our houses, the doorbell in the other house would ding too. It took us several weeks before we realized we were both answering the door every time someone came to one of our doors.
It was an easy fix, but hilarious.
I remember that being the norm as early as about 15 years ago.
Thus the reason behind the security mantra, "If it's not secure by default, then it's not secure".
Because normies know very little, if anything, about IT security. And to be fair, they shouldn't have to. When you buy a house or a car, how often do you take time to examine the mechanism in the door locks, and check to see how easy it is to pick them? Or do you rely on the locks generally being secure, albiet far from Fort Knox-grade.
check to see how easy it is to pick them
Never, based on how easy some cheap locks are to pick.
I pick locks for hobby and agree with this statement
Ah ha. Are you a toool member per chance ?
No, I started last year, by myself, didn't actually know this organisation, I just get training locks on shops and unlock them, I also see that they are specifically in US, I am from Italy, so there is no one of them around me :(.
I occasionally watch The Lockpicking Lawyer videos on YouTube, and I also agree wit6h this statement.
That is true, BUT people are willing to learn about securing their cars and houses. They will take precautions. People do change their locks, buy security systems for their cars take care that they do not leave keys lying around. They are willing to make an effort to lock their doors, keep and eye on things. They will avoid buying things with weak security.
When it comes to IT they expect someone else to do it. The problem is no one else cares about your security as much as you do.
There was a thing 2-3 years ago around me where you'd go in Mcdonalds and they had several SSIDs in there called MCD0NALDS MCDWIFI MCDOONALDS MCRONALDS etc. If you connected to any of them, the sign in page would Goatse you.
I suspect it was a plug in ESP32 dongle or something hiding in the restaurant.
So kids might stumble upon it on their cartoons tablet when getting a Happy Meal?
Some prankster would feel bad when asked to explain themself to a parent or detective.
They likely would never had to explain themselve anyway. The fact the device is found doesn't mean the prankster would get caught. It is not like they will look for fingerprints and ADN for a small prank.
I do miss the days of hacks that are primarily just there to mess with people.
A friend and I made a yagi antenna from a threaded rod, some nuts, and a Pringles can. We never really did anything with it, but it was interesting in the early days of who did/didn't have WiFi. The branch of the Fed put out some serious signal back then though. I remember passing it on the highway, and received more packets from it than from home networks from slower drives in local neighborhoods.
I miss the days of open-by-default wifi. I remember my uncle's internet connection was provided by a coffee can taped to his window that he threaded his antenna through, and when I first moved out of my folks house, living close enough to neighbors who paid for me to torrent movies.
Of course it's less useful now, even the cheap prepaid mobile phone plans will get you a usable internet connection.
I miss the days of open-by-default wifi.
So does every wannabe be l33t hax0r.
Backpack? I used to walk around with a Nintendo DS that had a mod running off of a microsd card
We were evil kids
Not to me. As far as I'm concerned, you improved the status quo by punishing the laziness of corporations. They half-ass the products with complete impunity. You showed them what happens when they do that.
I remember driving around, getting lost, then finding a neighborhood busting out my laptop and figuring out where I was via mapquest in order to get home many times.
Also made sure to check my myspace. Never did anything particularly evil. Definitely downloaded some movies off Kazaa via my neighbor's wifi, because it was faster than my wifi.
Realistically, if you're going to have wireless security gear, it needs to detect when it's being jammed and immediately sound the alarm. That's the only way it's even remotely viable. Just recording people stealing your stuff isn't enough.
My experience with cameras is as follows.
Flipping a house in gentrifying neighborhood. House burglarized a total of 3 times.
After first time, installed cameras covering every possible angle.
Both 2nd and 3rd time - They wore masks and did so in the early morning hours (3am-5am) Had several people case the house without masks. Either they didn't notice the cameras or they didn't care.
3rd time I had some choice words for the foe through my Video doorbell and let him know I would be there before the police and suggested he be gone before I get there. I got there in 10 minutes flat ready to beat him to a pulp with a tire iron.
I wish we instituted harsher punishments for thieves when they get caught. It may be unpopular opinion, but I am glad I have the right to kill someone and defend my property if I see fit if they're in a ski mask ready to take my things.
The big problems with cameras is police don’t care about the videos because they don’t care about property crimes anymore. Maybe the police will care later after enough home owners get fed up?
You are making stuff up. Please show me where police or the law on burglaries is being handled differently. It’s a felony and always has been. These cases are investigated.
Here's a fact for you. I handed police the video evidence of the bonehead showing up earlier without a mask to case my house then came back 30 minutes later with a mask on but same clothes in full HD glory.
In a stroke of luck, I also saw him a few minutes after I arrived onsite (did a drive around the neighborhood) and he took off. I literally saw which apartment building he disappeared into.
Lets say there are 12 units in a building (it's a smaller complex built in the 90s) it would not take them long to catch this guy.
They did nothing. I gave them his face in HD and where he was located.
They did nothing because "the victim saw the perp run into that apartment building" doesn't give them probable cause to do anything except walk the halls if someone lets them in and hope to run across the guy.
What did you expect them to do? Search all twelve apartments without warrants?
That's not how the constitution works.
I'm asking for a basic investigative inquiry. Not a full blown warrant. It's completely logical that the offender went to hide back at home.
Now, of course no one could have answered or they could have told the police to go away, but knocking on someone's door doesn't require a warrant.
Maybe he would have been dumb enough to open the door himself.
In any case, hope the $200 camera he stole was worth it. Almost cost him his life.
You would kill a thief for your 200$ camera?
Yes, absolutely.
He had on a ski mask and appeared to have a metal object in his hand on the video.
How about knock on some doors? "Have you seen this guy?"
No one said they had to go inside. BTW, these apartments I am referring to are completely open. Anyone can access. They're ghetto.
aaaaand there's the racism I was expecting.
I think ghetto is a perfectly fine description for a 2 star apartment complex that hasn’t been renovated since 1995.
A variety of races are residents, I’d imagine. But nice try.
Your understanding of how policing works is pretty flawed. Cops need warrants to go into any apartment. Also just because someone ran into an apt complex does not mean they live there. You need more probable cause to justify a warrant. What did you want the police to do pull everyone out of there apartments and hand search.
I am pretty sure it depends on the neighbourhoods, the frequency of these cases, staffing, frequency of other kind of crimes and your own ethnicity as a victim.
Parent commenter is not making it up, this just really depends on what neighborhood you live in.
With the destruction of the middle class it's true for a lot more people than it used to be.
In my experience, I got the vibe of "we don't give a shit"
Oh yeah, and before anyone says that is what insurance is for... HA! They don't cover that shit.
I’m not sure you have that right. Killing somebody for taking your things is murder. If you want to lie and say you feared for your life you could get away with it. But it’s still murder. And you’d be getting away with murder. So Mr law and order. Might want to bone up on the whole law thing.
You don't know what they're willing to do to take your things. Are you really going to sit around to find out?
If you feel in danger, the most logical action is to flee, not fight. You might think that acting violently would be warranted and a good solution but it is only if you are 100% sure of winning. In any other case it can cause escalation and harm to your family.
If you like the protection of the law stay within the bounds of it.
Well, I'm in Texas, so....
It's instinctive. Your looking at living with PTSD the rest of your life after a home invasion. Should defo be more harsher punishments. Love and aggression live very close in the brain, so if you ever get kids you'll know what kind of feelings get stirred up
I sympathize with your mentality, but you most certainly do not have that right. With a few very limited exceptions in Texas, in the US you have to be defending against a deadly threat. Breaking into your home with ski masks is usually seen as a deadly threat, but that doesn't apply to a flipper house when you aren't even inside.
If you arrived to the house and killed them with a tire iron you would likely have been charged with murder.
I strongly recommend reading The Law of Self Defense by Andrew Branca.
Will do. I actually started staying in the house just prior to the sale to prevent any further issues. With my vehicle onsite, had a lot less activity going on.
Between my vehicle and the “I’ll shoot you” signs, no one disturbed the residence.
It was a pain sleeping on a blow up mattress for two weeks.
dont rely on cameras.
one of my favorite moves, is to deposit, carbon or marking chalk, on the sill where tha sash covers it. window entry means you get it all over everything, and maybe leave prints.
My favorite anti burglar move is to have dogs.
They make more mess than the chalk thing, but they're way softer and more fun.
I've heard that dogs aren't a great way to deter people from breaking in. I'm not entirely convinced about that though. I imagine many people would be put off by dogs especially the larger ones (this guy agrees https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtwD-c9hn58)
Where did you hear that?
It's also highly dependent on the dog. A chihuahua maybe not so much, a big Rottie maybe yes.
It seems like a weird thing to generalize. It's like saying "people are good or not good at fighting". Well, which people fighting how?
Mainly stories from people who were caught so perhaps not the best sample. (like this one: https://www.kgw.com/article/news/investigations/86-burglars-...)
Dogs aren't always a deal breaker for criminals, especially little dogs (which tend to be the loudest). Barking dogs can even be a signal that owners aren't home to shut them up. The idea that neighbors or police are going to investigate a barking dog and catch a bad guy is very optimistic thinking. Kind of like how people just ignore car alarms even while being annoyed by them.
A quick Google search says the opposite, statistically significantly so.
My neighbor has Guineafowls which will tell the entire neighborhood something isnt right. they also lay eggs a bit smaller than a chickens egg. I presume its not possible in a first world city though.
My city (Seattle) allows up to three fowl or certain kinds of livestock even in the fairly dense residential areas (the law is left over from many years ago, but backyard hens have become kinda fashionable in recent decades). But you can't keep a rooster, because it's too noisy. I suspect that keeping watch-fowl would have the same problem, neighbors would file noise complaints against you.
Even more fun; I have a dog who likes to rest his head on the window sill, so if I combined the two methods, the mess would be indescribable!
a firearm is way better imo. you can prevent AND permanently solve the problem from happening again both at the same time.
If the guy is in your house, and you're in a position to shoot him, you have not prevented the problem. The problem has already happened.
If there are enough people ready to shoot then people are far less likely to enter in the first place.
And before you say deterrence doesn't work, just put a sign outside proudly proclaiming your residence to be a gun free zone. Go for it!
I don’t have a fundamental problem with private possession of firearms and in fact own one but boy is this not the “Solution” to any problem and I think it’s a terrible look for responsible gun ownership.
If I put that sign in front of my house, nothing would happen. The implication that somehow I would suddenly be robbed left and right I don’t think holds that much water to begin with but especially doesn’t make sense in many places people live, like a small town like mine. Just going to confuse the neighbors.
On the other hand, guns are high on the list of things criminals like to steal. A sign saying that you have one in the home could get your home broken into for that reason.
They are breaking into your home to steal your things or harm you, being armed with a firearm prevents that from happening.
If they still continue to break in after seeing you are armed with a firearm, you can just simply just shoot them once they get inside as your life was in danger and you also solve that from ever happening again from that person.
Where do you live that you have the experience to choose a favorite anti-home-burglar technique?
Alaska, the other thing is that not only are police hours away, but anything you have to do like shopping, is at least hours away, and if you have electricity , its unreliable unless you go off grid.
old school methods, and a distinctive character to alaskan criminality, help finding those responsible
What's the character of Alaskan criminals? How different from the lower 48?
"Alright, perp seems to be wearing 10.5 Nikes. Put out a bolo on any adult male wearing size 10.5 Nikes."
...with very specific wear, and scuff patterning, ie a shoeprint, in colour
Do Wi-Fi cameras not revert to normal cameras when jammed? I guess they have little to no onboard storage?
If I were guarding against this, I'd run wires. Everything else feels like a band-aid attempt. I love WiFi, but I hate WiFi.
I would run wires too, but you're just shifting the problem. Now someone can cut the power, rip the camera out of its socket, follow the wires to the hard drives, and take them with the rest of their loot.
The weak point is always the network connection. My cameras are PoE backed with a UPS, and the footage is replicated locally and to the cloud, but that replication still requires a network connection (which is also on battery). So, if someone jammed the cell network, cut my wired uplink, and then removed every drive they found, they can successfully prevent me from seeing them. I'll still know that something is happening, I guess? Plus they can always just wear masks.
The real point here is, even if you capture a super-clear 1080p picture of the criminal(s) face, the police mostly won't care. It's just a little security theater that you put on for yourself, and sometimes your insurance company.
if you capture a super-clear 1080p picture of the criminal(
That's why you figure out who they are and publish it on social media/other sources.
PimEyes.com is reverse image search using facial recognition. There’s a chance you could identify them using a service like this. I’ve found the names of random people in the backgrounds of my photos this way. It’s a bit hit-or-miss, but when it works, it’s like magic!
I don’t know that they’d have the skill or patience for this. If you’re running cables to other rooms, they’re not going to start tracing wires everywhere (to potentially find the wire connected to a router anyhow)
Why bother with that if you can just cut the mains power to the house...
Ideally you'd have hardwired cameras with a battery backup that store to local drives with a cloud backup.
This requires significantly more upfront and ongoing costs... and most criminals aren't sophisticated enough to cut power or jam wifi. Lots of times they won't even wear masks.
The average property crime is still an opportunistic smash and grab. Stick up wifi cameras are an affordable "good enough" for most cases.
Why were we trying to get them on camera again? Just sound the alarm already!
Accessible wires are a perfect intrusion point. Blast 6 kV from a modified defibrillator and you'll fry everything that doesn't have lightning strike-grade arrestors - most ESD protection circuits are only capable of dealing with dead shorts and static electricity coming from people walking over carpets.
Basically, if you want to burglarize a building with a decent protection system, simultaneously employ WiFi and mobile phone jammers, attach a high-voltage generator to the phone and power line and fry everything attached, then enter and ransack the building. If you're lucky, the alarm system will be so damaged that not even the sirens will sound, and as you cut the phone line and jam mobile backup, the alarm system can't alarm anyone either.
The worst thing is, you can get all of what's needed here for a few hundred bucks on the Internet or make it yourself.
Fascinating. "Accessible" here seems to mean, "physically connected to the mains"?
Further, I was sitting here typing "surely a wifi jammer is more accessible", but if modifying a defibrillator is easy, maybe it really is even more theater than I thought.
Of course, in the real world, some of these mitigations will be a deterrent. But point taken, for a dedicated attacker/target, you're going to have to get more creative.
"Accessible" here seems to mean, "physically connected to the mains"?
Accessible as in "physically accessible to an intruder". In Germany's urban areas, it's more difficult as we tend to bury power and phone lines, but on the countryside, it's bare power wires and trivially openable jumper boxes for the phone lines.
For a house, you'll have a lot of different entry points to run destructive power attacks as well: outdoors sockets or lighting fixtures, cameras, wifi APs, solar cells, basically everything that can be reached without a larger ladder should be considered an entry point for a determined attacker.
Further, I was sitting here typing "surely a wifi jammer is more accessible", but if modifying a defibrillator is easy, maybe it really is even more theater than I thought.
it's easy from a pure technical viewpoint but incredibly dangerous. A defibrillator dispenses >300 joules worth of energy in a matter of milliseconds, that's around the same order of magnitude as a 9mm pistol bullet - this is also the reason why automated defibrillators will warn you to not touch the person while it dispenses energy: it's enough to send a healthy person into serious cardiac problems.
And if you're messing around with the mains power supply wires, typically these are fused for hundreds of amps. If you manage to touch an exposed wire, you die.
That's why these kinds of attacks aren't commonplace, because a burglar will simply go for the neighbor that doesn't have an alarm system installed... but once everyone has upped their game, the burglars will as well. In Germany, for example, bank robbers escalated to ATMs... they pump ATMs full of explosive gas, blow it (and with it, often enough the building...) up and take the cash that's flying around, then drive off in a high-speed car [1]. In some cases, the power of the explosion is bad enough to threaten the structural integrity of the building [2].
[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/report-mainz/geldauto...
[2] https://www.zeit.de/news/2022-06/18/nach-geldautomatenspreng...
It's easy to imagine devices that wouldn't be subject to this. They'd have storage and wired connections. A central server would send an alarm if it lost contact with the cameras for a time.
But naturally anything like this wouldn't exist in default consumer land.
But naturally anything like this wouldn't exist in default consumer land.
Wired cameras hooked up with power over ethernet has been around almost as long as I have!
Even when they do have onboard storage, it's de-emphasized because they want to sell cloud subscriptions and storage.
Who needs onboard storage? As is well known [1], among other things, the network is reliable, latency is zero, bandwidth is infinite, and the network is secure, so there's no reason to incur the extra costs of onboard storage.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_compu...
Many are SD-optional. Personally I would (and have) never deployed one without local storage. It just doesn’t make sense, but having seen people with some of the lowest end devices, it is rarely even mentioned even when they do have a microSD slot.
I picked cameras that have this for this reason. But if someone knocks out the wifi from a distance and then gets closer and destroys/steals the cameras, I'm SOL. My neighbors probably have cameras though, so it could be a bit trickier to get away without being seen at all.
Some have microSD media, most probably do not.
Recovery rates from theft are abysmal and expected return likely lower than value of the cameras. Arrest rates are single digit at best.
Burglary perps are primarily worried about a 9mm penetration to their skull by a $100 hi-point.
So, NRA sticker?
Advertising you have guns is a good way to get your house/car/etc broken in to for the explicit purpose of stealing guns.
How are you going to find the house that has weapons worth stealing but doesn't have a safe?
Such houses are extremely rare. I'm going to assume you have never attempted this silly scheme for obtaining free guns. Most police cars have a shotgun under the front seat; have you tried looting those? I don't recommend it. This has to be the most ridiculously out-of-touch comment I've ever seen on HN.
And yet, over 250k guns are stolen every year (in the US), mostly from houses and cars.
There's a variety of things going on here:
1. The bar for "gun worth stealing" is often "any gun". Just in the same way that the bar for stealing a car is "any car". Thieves aren't exactly targeting Kia and Hyundai because of their great resale or scrap value.
2. The vast majority of houses with guns aren't keeping them locked up in safes.
Mostly from cars, because paying Billy to tell you where his truck will be parked tomorrow night is how you buy a gun from Billy without a background check. Not saying this is right; just saying this isn't "theft" but rather a different law being broken.
2. The vast majority of houses with guns aren't keeping them locked up in safes.
This is false. Source or gtfo.
Source
22% in a safe
https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/essays/per...
The 2016 survey found that 46 percent of gun owners stored all household guns locked, of whom 22 percent stored them in a gun safe or cabinet, 13 percent in a gun rack, 6 percent in a locked gun case, and 5 percent in another locked location
Cabinet = crowbar opens in seconds
Rack = easier than a cabinet
Mostly from cars
It's like 50% from cars, yes. Still well over 100k stolen from houses
Curious how stat considers if gun is stored on person instead of safe.
Also the reason why people end up with guns in cars is often because of dumbass laws like forcing you to abandon the weapon before going into a liquor licensed restaurant, park, daycare, post office, etc. Theyd rather the gun get stolen and carried by a crim than a licensed carrier walk into the post office.
Removing carry restrictions I think would significantly lower accounts of unsecured (car) storage. Only takes one time of going into post office or picking up your kid at daycare and now you're tossed into stats of someone who doesnt keep all guns secured at the home safe.
Curious how stat considers if gun is stored on person instead of safe.
No idea, I'd guess it doesn't get included in the numerator or denominator
Also the reason why people end up with guns in cars is often because of dumbass laws like forcing you to abandon the weapon before going into a liquor licensed restaurant, park, daycare, post office, etc. Theyd rather the gun get stolen and carried by a crim than a licensed carrier walk into the post office.
Yes I think this is pretty much correct.
Such houses are extremely rare.
No, they are not. The most common storage system I've encountered is a wood cabinet with a framed glass door. Some people have safes they'll keep some of their guns in: it's where you keep the nice ones to prevent hanger rash. The rest are near a door, on a night stand or behind a truck seat.
Trophy antlers work even better.
Find a neighborhood with a lot of hunters. There will be zero burglaries.
No. Literally in deer hunter ground zero. The meth heads break into empty vacation homes and pole barns routinely, working on behalf of local theft rings. When they think a home is empty they'll go after it, like anywhere else.
A gun rack of full of long guns is a prime target.
I believe the goal is deterrence rather than forensics. Hopefully thieves will see your fancy security system and choose a different house.
The issue is when they see the sign, and that means they know that RF jammer tool they bought will work.
If you’re going to put up a security system sign, make sure it’s for a system that works differently than the one you actually have.
It's also worth noting that you can buy signs and stickers on ebay for way less than the actual system, and you arguably get most of the benefit from the visual indicators.
You are not deterring by having good video after the act! Your video camera recording or not is not relevant to deterrence.
An excellent observation! If deterrence is the goal (and I'm suggesting it often is) then a fake camera is often just as good, but cheaper!
"They have an expensive camera so they have money"
Actually true. “I don’t have security cameras so I can catch burglars, I have security cameras so I can watch back the recording of me blowing them away!”
I worried about this when installing 7 cameras on my home.
For what it is worth, more recent nest cameras have battery backup and buffer up to an hour of video if the WiFi is out (https://store.google.com/gb/magazine/compare_cameras?hl=en-G...)
So in theory if the perps cut the power you are ok, and if they jam the WiFi you are ok too.
A month or two ago 3 guys actually did try to break in (without jamming) and the police took the videos but still weren't able to catch them. It gives me some.hope that perhaps one day maybe they do catch these guys and it serves as evidence.
I now have the cameras hooked up to Home Assistant so if they detect a person (and not e.g. a fox) and we are out, a Raspberry Pi starts playing loud barking noises and a few lights turn on. During our breakin attempt, the guys were on their 7th (!) attempt at kicking in our front door and you can see from the videos that within literally a second of a light going on (...when we woke up) they turned and ran off so signs of life from the inside seems to be a strong deterrent.
What is it good for if they knock out cameras from being able to report activity to a person? Video probably will not help catch the bad guys.
I use cameras with ethernet and PoE, those are also cheaper than wifi. On the other side of the cable there is PoE injection, ethernet switch, recording and object detection server, all connected to a UPS battery. If power goes down, I still have cameras and network running for a few hours, notifying and alarming if anyone trespasses. When power goes down, I also get notification with snapshot of the incoming electricity box on the street, to know if it was local issue caused by a person, or something else.
Yes I was originally going to use Ubiquiti cameras and PoE for this (Ubiquiti cameras store data locally too so a single chunky UPS would cover everything) but for me the problem was the cable runs. They were just not really feasible in my house without considerable work - there was no easy path to run cables under floorboards or through loft spaces etc - I would have had to cut channels in interior brick walls, install conduit, replaster, repaint, then pull the cables through etc. For one camera location I would have had to go through a bathroom too so would need to retile! It would have been the gold plated solution yes, but would have required significant work and disruption to install.
With WiFi cameras I was just able to spur into nearby power which was already wired into the house. Each camera took maybe 30 minutes to do a neat clean permanent install. Running ethernet and making good would have taken many days potentially weeks, and as others have said it is mostly about deterrent and peace of mind.
It is easy (and kinda fun!) to get paranoid and get carried away planning all this stuff out and thinking about "what if..." scenarios, but ultimately home burglaries are typically just opportunistic things without much premeditation or planning. Sure if you are a specific high-risk target and people are going out of their way to target you then sure go ahead, but you'd probably just be better off with dogs at that point!
Ubiquiti have a great name for switches. I have some. Unfortunately they chose not to provide an MJPEG stream on their cameras, which make's is very inconvenient (Read computationally non viable) to get the still images if you want to process the images with your own AI. And proactive camera security should be doing this and not relying on the AI that might be built into the cameras running on their tiny computers.
Dunno about you, but my Ubiquiti cameras work perfectly well with Frigate and it's "AI" detection.
With Scrypted I could even plug them in as HomeKit Secure compatible cameras.
Yeah the integration/API was one other reason why I eventually didn't bother with Ubiquiti cameras (even though I have Ubiquiti WiFi APs and switches and management console already). Nest has a reasonable API (although it appears not to allow changing floodlight settings)
The point here is to send them to some other house before they actually get into yours. Not to catch them. To some extent, catching them means you were not dissuasive enough in the first place.
Yep.
For me as well it was quite reassuring to be able to piece together exactly what happened.
So rather than just being woken up by the noise of someone trying to batter the door down, I was able to go back and piece together 3 or 4 minutes of what happened - the cameras caught their car arriving, caught them going down a side road, caught them climbing over a fence at the back of my house, caught them trying to climb up onto the roof, caught them creeping around in the garden looking through windows, caught them trying to kick the door in, and then caught them running off and driving away.
I had enough that I was even able to write a post mortem with timestamps etc. This helped us make some security improvements, but for me personally it helped me process the whole situation - it was less traumatic for me to feel like I at least had "complete" info and was in control and generally feel less victimised and helpless.
That's a very good point yes. Understanding and satisfaction that the defenses worked (and how they worked). Closure basically. Far better than the alternative (of a big mess in the house and not knowing how things failed - not being any better prepared after than before.)
Can you give us a product list? I’d like to build a similar set up. What kind of cameras and what software are you running? Great setup
Not the GP but I have more or less this with all Unifi gear, a Dream Machine Pro and PoE switch in the network cupboard, a Flex PoE switch in the loft with 4×G5 Bullet cameras plugged into it.
Unifi restricts choice but everything works in a few clicks and both the web app and mobile app management interfaces.
So in theory if the perps cut the power you are ok, and if they jam the WiFi you are ok too.
Steal the camera
Always an option. Mine are in the eaves of the house, so about 5 meters up from ground level. So now they have to block the WiFi AND bring a ladder AND anything else they need to break in.
Totally possible of course, but why not just burgle the house next door that doesn't have any cameras. You don't you need to outrun the bear, only the other humans nearby.
In general plausible signs of life does sound like a good response. All the more so if they really make sense related to sensory input. In service of making the next home seem like an easier target than yours.
I always wished that a lot of home automation stuff would use powerline networking. Especially things like the relays I have on my lamps.
I guess an ESP8266 costs way less than all the chunky passives required to do powerline comms though.
Powerline doesn't work across phases, which is in itself a huge pain with US split-phase service.
Ubiquity had some power line equipment on a newer standard that was sensitive enough that for many homes there were enough cables running in parallel the signals would propagate between phases enough to work. Some other vendors still sell the tech - it's come a long way from X10 in the '70s!
You also have plug in phase couplers that you can put wherever you have a 220v appliance like a dryer or range. Handy especially for older houses where running new cable can be a significant challenge.
True, but older houses are also less likely to have 220V runs in the first place, I think. That might be a Baltimore thing, though - not sure I've ever seen one in residential here, but this is also the city where municipal gas service was born, so it isn't a surprise for gas-fired ranges and dryers needing only 110V service to be ubiquitous here.
I don't know if I'd want to depend on incidental capacitive coupling to carry signal between phases. I guess if it works it's likely to go on doing, but I feel like there's got to be some pretty sharp bandwidth constraints for noise, especially in residential...
I’ve read that this can be solved with a couple capacitors to jump the phases. Just a high-pass filter. Could be an embedded in a 240v device if you want to avoid messing with household wiring.
Powerline networking is really noisy, the electrical wires are basically antennas. It may be easier to monitor and interfere with than wireless protocols.
There are powerline home control protocols. X10 is the big one but it is old and flawed. UPB and PLCBUS are new ones but they are proprietary. Insteon is interesting one that can do wireless and powerline but recent products have dropped powerline.
I think Matter is going to kill need for powerline. Matter goes over Wifi, Bluetooth, Thread, and Ethernet. Thread is low-power mesh like Zigbee, but should be able to use Wifi or Ethernet to bridge gaps.
IEEE 1901 can't be jammed as easily, though. 500mbps half duplex may not be amazing compared to normal WiFi, but it's plenty for a bunch of security cameras and an IoT sensor or light bulb here or there.
In every IoT scenario other than window and moisture sensors, you generally have access to a plug of some kind. I'm honestly surprised that HomePlug isn't built into IoT devices more often.
Single pair Ethernet would be a great option for home automation.
I think it is mostly used for industrial applications at the moment, but don't see why it cant be used in consumer applications as well
Insteon is alive and does a great job of propagating over powerline and dual band versions even have a little radio for hopping across phases.
And for ethernet and PoE stuff the cost is all in the jack, it needs filtering and magnetics, etc to comply with the new fast standards making it usually one of the most expensive components on the board, often many dollars for the one component
Wireless anything related to security is pretty dumb. Wired is better!
What prevents the same thief from just cutting your "wired" fiber/DSL/whatever? Or the power, for what is worth.
Holding/bringing a device that disables every camera is significantly different and less risky than climbing up on ladders cutting each cable going to each camera.
As for cutting power? UPS/battery backup. That's defeatable too. At some point you have to say you've reached your limit. Generally you just have to be more secure than comparable targets, though.
Someone using WiFi jamming on poorly thought out security is looking for easy targets, not complicated heists.
You can wear a mask.
I disagree. Possession of a jamming device is illegal in many jurisdictions. Wirecutters are not.
I could kill all data communication in most buildings out there just by sneezing in the wrong cabinet (personally experienced). And then what are your wired cameras going to do? If the answer is "make loud noises", well, that's pretty much exactly what wireless cameras could also do.
There's a reason 'professional' alarms generally prefer wireless connection and battery power (and loss of connection is generally an alarm-raising event).
I guess wearing mask is a good way to circumvent that too.
This is the way.
When I design factory automation systems or surgical robots it's all wired.
Anything mission critical needs to be, or the mission is not critical.
Truth.
Wired and wireless systems are not all that different in terms of what they transmit at this point, but wired systems have the advantage of keeping their communication stream isolated in the wire as opposed to the shared EM spectrum. It's essentially another layer of security. Can someone tap the wire? Sure, but it requires extreme physical proximity that an RF attack does not.
Would it be reasonable to put a WiFi camera in a faraday cage with a micro WiFi transmitter attached to Ethernet? I was thinking about that because my WiFi gets bogged down with too many cameras and thought it might be nice to still use cheap WiFi cameras but make them effectively wired.
That's quite the Rube Goldberg machine for something that already exists at a reasonable pricepoint (PoE cameras).
At that point, why not just run Ethernet to your cameras?
That's why I ran Ethernet cables and used PoE cameras. It's a pain to install but worth it.
Same, with the switch and nvr on a ups
I skipped the NVR and just relied on the SD cards on-board each camera.... I was able to store almost 1 week of motion-activated footage, which was enough for me.
Seems like someone should make a wifi security cam that has several hours worth of internal storage to cache video when wifi is unavailable. Storage is cheap is hell. A 4GB micro-SD card adds like a dollar to the cost of a mass produced embedded system and could save a few frames per second for hours.
Supplement your regular security cameras with some camo field cameras and you will have some hidden redundancy.
>Seems like someone should make a wifi security cam that has several hours worth of internal storage to cache video when wifi is unavailable.
That's exactly what the cheap wifi security cameras do. They capture the video on onboard microSD cards and wifi is only for viewing of that data. If you loose wifi, it will still record.
Don't all cameras do that nowadays?
It’s actually hilarious how easy it would be to catch the criminals if they don’t take extra precautions like wearing masks. Just have some fake wifi looking cameras in easy to spot locations and use wired real cameras.
Hardest part would be finding a consumer system that still uses hardwired cameras
Hardest part would be finding a consumer system that still uses hardwired cameras
POE cameras grow on trees. Sold individually or in kits complete with POE NVRs. If you're handy you can put up a decent system, completely independent of any cloud service, for ~$1000.
Is there anything out there comparable to Unifi these days? Most all their cams are POE and something better would be an easy consideration for those of us not all-in on the iot systems out there now.
Wifi cameras are cheap junk. You still have to run a power line anyway... why not ethernet and PoE?
A lot of homes are wired for power but not Ethernet, so WiFi is easier. For a couple of cameras I installed recently, I just had to drill a single cable hole for one, and feed the power through an existing cable hole for the other - there were already sockets in appropriate places to connect them.
To run Ethernet, I'd've had to run the cable through two rooms, around a fireplace and kitchen appliances, and probably have to drill an additional two holes for each camera (and ideally figure out a way to run the cable out of sight). It's not really worth the extra effort when the cameras record locally (microSD) and they're primarily a deterrent anyway.
Many use photovoltaic and battery now: https://www.cnet.com/home/security/best-solar-powered-home-s...
Any tips for Bluetooth jamming to keep our beaches boombox-free? Asking for a friend.
Sounds like an excellent way to get a hefty fine from the FCC!
it's pretty easy to do this. you can can just send deauth packets using a card that supports it. I tried it out on my ring cameras, which resulted in the camera being knocked offline temporarily.
You don't even need a card or a laptop. You can send deauth frames with an ESP8266, if the camera runs on 2.4 GHz, of course.
It mentions flooding wifi with traffic so real traffic can't get through. Do they have access to the network, or are they just blasting the target spectrum?
The ones I've seen usually just spam the spectrum with noise, since it's easiest and totally effective, and there's no need for them be sneaky or clever with their emissions since it's very very rare the victim would have a way to notice, and you don't need more than a few watts.
That seems logical - And how easy is it to (reliably) detect jamming to route that straight to an alarm?
It all comes down to how sophisticated the jammer is. Blasting noise over your signal? Sure. Using a careful understanding of the protocol and selectively sending blocking messages at certain times to fully disrupt signal? Much less so
Wyze cheapo wifi cameras work so well. Of course it's a risk there, this is not the first time it's happening. What are the easy to use ip cameras, esp that I can power over POE? I want a cheap one too. I don't see how wyze can sell them for $30 (without poe with only wifi). Is there a decent $50 poe camera?
I have reolink PoE cameras which I really like (work well with HA too), although they're a bit more expensive than 50$.
Just move to Japan where you don't need cameras.
Lockpickinglawyer had a video about Simipfi's doorbell product a year or so ago, and I've been watching out for my neighbor ever since. She put up stickers /advertising/ the waveband her security is contingent around, and I'm just glad it hasn't failed yet.
I use Wyze cameras with SD cards, so while WiFi will jam online monitoring, there will be a record of the bulgrary.
How much of this can be mitigated with PMF enabled WiFi cameras?? Or is it an actual frequency jamming??
I’m fairly certain that I have seen this in our hood. Basically someone or something will cause the motion detection to trigger, and then the video cuts out. Sometimes it goes black, sometimes it’s noise. In the most recent case it was someone whom I don’t recognize walking his dog and holding what I thought was a phone in his hand, and 3 different cameras did the same thing in order, going to white noise.
We didn’t get the cameras for security, we got them to watch the feral cats in the area to help catch them for TNR, but security is a nice extra, so we are considering replacing the Rings with something wired.
Minnesota doesn’t generally have a reputation as a hotbed for technology
I don't understand why Minnesota is catching strays for a problem that affects the entire country. The hot new tech is the problem here, not Mark Tyson's cute naive northerner strawmen.
Companies like ADT hopped on the IoT bandwagon because it's cheaper and it gives the sheen of advanced technology. In reality, wireless security systems are far more vulnerable than their older, wired alternatives. You can jam them. They can simply drop connections on their own due to interference. Many of them rely on cloud services that introduce their own points of failure (that's not really Wi-Fi's fault, but with one form of bullshit usually comes the other).
Edina is notorious in the Twin Cities because it's where the old money lives - it's immensely wealthy compared to almost everything surrounding it. 100% of the blame rests on the companies taking rich-person home security budgets, and using it to install low-end Wi-Fi cameras. The victims here could certainly afford a wired solution, and I'd hazard a bet that they paid enough that a wired system could have been installed.
Don't see the point of security cameras. They don't prevent theft and if anything marks you as someone afraid of theft, thus wealthy enough to have goods to steal.
I am more afraid about a fire that would burn stuff and memories. I have offsite backups of my photos but I am not sure I would have the energy to go through all of them to reprint photo albums.
I’ve got to say, this is one great thing about remote work. No worries about my house security.
Earlier cameras did not have WiFi but used to have a local SD card onto which they'd record and overwrite. It would be dead simple (and inexpensive) to use such a camera with a buffer of a few days that would transmit using WiFi once a day or so instead of relying on real-time transmission. Wonder why these fancy solutions don't have such a simple mechanism but rely on an inherently unreliable medium...
This is why it's important to ensure your cameras have redundant flash storage using something like an SD card. In this way, you have local footage on the camera whether it's jammed or not. So they'd have to tear the cameras down too, which is much more invasive than a simple WiFi jammer.
I had this happen to me when I was being harassed, back when I lived in the Bay Area. RF security cameras are a bit useless.
3M security film is a nice analog home security feature that should be used in addition to cameras
Somehow first reaction of everybody here is: "it isn't just me, using wireless for security camera actually is a bad idea!"
I have a couple of security cameras around the house. Started with wifi cameras but switched to wired ethernet for the newer one because of unstable wifi and high latency... Looks like there's now one more reason that was the right choice.
Home security systems used to call out to the local response center using your existing phone line, you could jam the outbound call by tying up the phone line.
Is anyone else using the StalkedByTheState security system? It runs on Jetson SBCs and works with the full sized yolov6 and yolov7 models.
Super proactive detection and response
This gives me an easy solution idea. A few wired ESP32 in HA configured as a baysian sensor, if several or one goes offline someone's jamming or something is wrong.
Wifi canaries.
I mean my $25 Wyze cameras keep recording to the SD card even when offline. Is it going to help during, but I can watch them of my house after I guess.
Axis cameras are all wired-only.
Maybe install a camera on your mailbox out by the street that takes a snapshot of every car that goes by so you can see if someone is watching the house or cruising by regularly. Might give early warning and also capture license plates and maybe faces.
This headline feels like it belongs in a Cyberpunk setting.
Obviously there’s a market for alarms that sound off when it detects wifi or other frequency jamming.
Can't wait to see the Mel Brooks version, where it's strawberry smeared on the camera lens.
Looks like SimpliSafe became aware of this problem as far back as at least 2019 and made a blog post about it.
How do the crooks know that it is down though?
Use wires ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
At the end of the day its security theater. Having a video of the crime won’t prevent it or even lead to solving it most of the time. If you want actual response to active crime you are going to need someone who is paid to preferentially show up to your property and they should be in a guardhouse nearby.
Regardless of that we all should have cameras running everywhere all the time
It is only recent history that cell phone cameras have become ubiquitous and it has caused a huge shift in the authorities ability to squash their abusive behaviors
In the same way that TV played a fundamental part of progress in the civil rights and Vietnam wars, one of the best tools the average person has to hold people accountable is to control the narrative via video
My only concern is that gen AI will mean that nobody will ever trust video evidence again. I hope we get some kind of signature based crypto verification on recordings to prove they aren’t fake. Like every device is keyed to authenticate the recordings it produces
I would like to opt out of this nightmarish safety hellscape. I never use the phrase Orwellian because it’s so often misused, but yikes is this some 1984 badthink.
I think the distinction is who controls the tools. Everyone having their own cameras is very different from the party controlling cameras around everyone.
Sometimes it's both, like in the case of Ring doorbell cameras. I may install a camera and think I'm in control, until my footage in the cloud is subpoenaed without my knowledge for an alleged crime I have nothing to do with.
I went with a doorbell with local storage (Eufy, in my case) for this very reason.
My knowledge of the law here is virtually nonexistent. It seems likely that I could still be subpoenaed to turn over footage under some circumstances. But at least I'm in control of that footage and it's not automatically being given to some third party.
Ring doorbell cameras don't even need subpoenas.
https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/security/amazons-r...
(Although Amazon claim to be "sunsetting" that as of a couple of weeks ago: https://www.npr.org/2024/01/25/1226942087/ring-will-no-longe... )
That's a meaningless distinction in a world with room 641A, rubberstamp FISA warrants, etc. If the party wants the data, it can get it; whose disks it is stored on is an irrelevant implementation detail.
I held this same opinion until recently but I've come to realize that it only disallows citizens from recording in public -- that is, if this opinion were adopted in policy, the police could use said policy against me to prevent my filming of police activity.
I'd also like to opt-out of having cameras everywhere in public but the fact of the matter is they are here to stay. Additionally, most of the cameras which capture your image in public are not cameras which you installed and they're not cameras which you have the authority to remove. Adding your own cameras to the mix is functionally equivalent to exercising your freedom to speak; really, to document, in this context.
At the least we could have legislation to prevent police from creating mass surveillance networks, ie keep the process limited to individuals.
I don't know about should, but given that cameras and microphones and processors and power and communication are all probably going to continue to get cheaper and smaller and lighter it seems to me that this is nearly inevitable. So the question really should be - how do we adapt to it? How can we try to mitigate the harm (through social, legal, and/or technical means) and steer our changing society closer to a future that we'd actually want to live in?
Yeah, not only are cameras going to get cheaper and smaller and lighter (and way more ubiquitous as a result), but there's other factors to consider too. Face recognition is also getting cheaper and more ubiquitous (and other similar technologies like gait recognition and even skeletal kinematics identification).
The privacy implications are astounding. But, as you say, this is all inevitable (I intentionally left out your "nearly" there), and it's a very good question about how that's going to change society and whether we (I) want to live in that.
And from elsewhere on the HN homepage right now:
"Before he was George Orwell, he was Eric Blair, police officer" -- https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/05/books/review/george-orwel...
Today's "nightmarish safety hellscape" is brought to you by (amongst others) Toby Roberts, a former technical surveillance officer at the UK's Eastern Region Special's Operations Unit, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation where he's the official "Maker In Residence". -- https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/09/rpi_maker_in_residenc...
Cryptographically verified recordings don't sound practical to me (sensors and video processing electronics sound like a lot of hardware to put in a secure element), but I'm sure we will see generative AI inflating away the value of blackmail material soon; one mitigation for this could be cryptographically signing material and then publishing the signature long before it becomes practical to fake it (i.e. the past, increasingly), then periodically creating signatures with new algorithms in advance of the discovery of practical attacks on existing ones.
The only thing that'd need to be in a secure element would be the signing keys. This has existed for a while for digital cameras. Canon, Nikon, and Sony have all brought still image solutions to market for use in situations like photojournalism or forensic evidence collection.
Device signing can be used very effectively to tell if a particular devices was involved in an action - but it is far more difficult to tell if some non-specific device was the source or whether it was generated. When it comes to fabricated video evidence we'd need to establish a circle of trust that included every camera ever produced but was somehow secure and unforgeable. We've seen this approach break down previously with Diginotar[1] - it really only takes on weak link in the system to compromise the verification. At the scale with which cameras are demanded it seems unreasonable to expect a centralized signing administration to be able to keep their tokens all completely secured.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiNotar
Stopping short of that, there'd still be value in being able to cryptographically prove that your home surveillance video (or dash cam video) came from _your_ camera and is unaltered from the original recording.
I think going forward, the "circle of trust" for the next "capital insurrection type event" video evidence will be founded on multiple videos of the same scenes from multiple angles and from devices owned by un related individuals.
Although, the biggest category of cameras these days is cell phones, and all (most?) of them have some sort of hardware trust store with private keys that are extremely difficult to extract, so it wouldn't be to much of a stretch to consider having Android and iOS default camera app being able to digitally sign photos/video - all without "a centralized signing administration" and piggybacking on existing token security methods...
I don't think that the signer would be able to verify the authenticity of the data that it received from the sensor and image processing circuitry unless they were able to authenticate each other securely. I know that an attack on a system like you proposed would still be expensive, but it would become more attractive if its characteristics were overplayed (and would then be subject to legal challenge). Forensics, of course on the other hand is based on experts saying "yes, by all accounts this appears to have happened".
Any idea of trying to prove that a random video isn't fake by crypto verification is very, very brittle - the trust relies on having almost 100% certainty of key secrecy from a global, heterogenous system of low-margin commodity manufacturers.
Like, ok, every device is keyed to authenticate the recordings it produces, using a unique key signed by the manufacturer - as long as a few valid device keys ever leak from the device or the manufacturer, any fake video can get signed with a valid key from Camera#1234 from ShenzhenCameraCorp567, ltd.; you're not going to make every $1 camera module in cheap embedded devices tamper resistant.
This seems conceptually similar to certificate authorities.
Kind of, but the requirements on such a system are far stricter than what we get (and expect) from certificate authorities. For example, the CA system doesn't fail in its goals if I publish (no matter if accidentally or incidentally) the private key for *.mydomain.com; but the proposed image verification scheme does become useless if one of the many manufacturers does that; the CA system doesn't fail just because CAs will issue a certificate to phishing sites run by some criminal, but the proposed image verification scheme does become useless if some manufacturers will issue a "camera" certificate that can be extracted and used in some criminal's Photoshop workstation instead of a real camera.
For web CA's to work, all you need is that the single certificate for the site you're choosing to visit is good - but if you want to use a similar system to verify trustworthiness of viral images originating from strangers through social media, you need 100% of the camera certificates to be valid - if there are any leaked certificates, then manufacturers of fake images will use those; and on the other hand if you "revoke" everything from any compromised manufacturer, people won't just replace their cameras, they'll simply keep posting data with their valid-but-invalid certificates and you'll either have to automatically mistrust lots of genuine true content or be vulnerable to fake data, and most people will choose the latter.
Yes, and then governments will require that any sale of recording devices are registered so that footage can be traced back to.... undesirables who undermine the great leader.
Sadly, you're not wrong as expecting a police officer to do anything with the footage is just a farcical notion. Which really makes me wonder what police were doing when they were requesting footage from Ring directly. We've been told directly by detectives that they are too busy to look at emails with evidence. There must be some other purpose for them wanting the footage other than solving crimes. I just don't know what it is
Solving different crimes. The ones you might get a promotion or some other gratification out of.
If you're in a city with 1,000+ home burglaries a year, nobody cares that you clear one and arrest some meth head. But, solve some gruesome or politically-tinged crime and you're holding a press conference and getting praise left and right.
We do the same thing as software engineers. Every large company has some lore about what types of work get you promoted, and many engineers prefer to work on that.
Actually crime against persons (murder, assault, armed robbery) have higher priority than simple burglaries. Having your property taken away is infuriating but no one can argue that stoping a violent criminal is more important.
Maybe?
First, a lot of simple assault arrests are for objectionable but ultimately trivial stuff - people getting into drunken brawls, spitting on each other, and so on. A series of burglaries targeting a local small business can be far more devastating to the owner than that.
But your argument also doesn't hold because it's clear that there are property crimes that are investigated with zeal. For example, in the SF Bay Area, a person was recently charged with "hate crimes" for taking down some pro-Palestine signs. I'm not making some political point here, but we can agree that the investigation wasn't motivated by the severity of the crime, right?
What size is the city with 1000+ burglaries in a year? What is the value of the houses they target? If there are several million houses in the city than 1000 might be close enough to nothing to ignore. However if there are only 2000 houses in the city 1000 is half and enough to get attention - you bet the police care about solving at least some of them.
Often the police know who the criminals in town are. However they lack evidence to prove anything. Thus a camera feed showing an already known criminal is enough to get their attention as while they might not care about you directly they criminal who hit you may have also hit a high importance target but they cannot prove it in court - thus convicting them of hitting you helps them for cases they cannot prove.
If football players get robbed while on tv playing in a game, you or I have zero hope to prevent a burglary short of an armed guard or a few dogs.
I'm always astonished when a cop shoots someone, the body camera video is released within a week. I was nearly killed by a bad driver and it took 5+ months to get the video and the driver was already processed by the kangaroo court.
This is probably the answer. And so how can we exploit that to get OUR case worked on? Involve the journalists sounds like one. Message your city hall people might be another. Take to twitter? What else? Offer a reward (thus getting more response from all the rest - not to claim the reward but to blab about it) What else?
Not true at all. Police love footage that provides anything useful when they have time to work on a case and, importantly, the footage is actually useful.
A lot of DIY security camera installs provide useless footage: Cameras are mounted too high to catch faces, lighting is bad, license plates are blurry, and the list goes on. If you can actually catch faces, license plates, or anything else identifiable then it goes into the case.
That's a polite way of saying your case isn't a priority for them. Caseload is high and most departments have to filter and prioritize aggressively.
Unfortunately, anything involving e-mail evidence gets messy very quickly because e-mails require legwork from specialists to verify and admit with a proper chain of evidence. Forwarding an e-mail to a police officer or sending them a screenshot of something might be useful as a hint in an active case, but it's not going to meet the bar for admissable evidence unless they can get more resources on it.
The first points make a lot of sense, but the email problem you raise is not a real issue - if they wanted a digital forensic chain of evidence, they could easily ask for the disks from the camera system.
I was responding to the parent commenter's complaints that police wouldn't look at e-mails in some case (not related to video).
The police don't have any procedural rules against looking at emails, those rules are for juries.
but your assumption to this point was incorrect.
Nice you mention "Cameras too high to catch faces". Also AI detection of people will work better if filmed more horizontally. I lot of people are afraid their cameras will be damaged and want to mount them higher. In reality theives most likely don't give a shit about the cameras. And they are cheap enough they could be considered sacrificial.
i guess i could have worded that more clearly. the email wasn't the evidence. the email was just providing information for the detective on who to talk to with much more information that would not have a questionable chain as you're suggesting.
Your detective in your city on that day may have been too busy, but that’s just an anecdote, not a survey of the thousands of cities and police departments and their response to home burglary footage.
The majority of murders go unsolved. The vast majority of rapes go unsolved. Police regularly don’t even spend the money to process DNA samples. I’m not an expert on this topic but it seems to me that the police in big cities largely don’t do their job.
The problems you mention are extremely hard.
Rape is s notoriously hard crime to prove and murders are either done in gang neighbourhoods where there sre few cameras and people don't talk to police.
I don't know of any actually actionable improvement ideas to improve solve rate.
I believe your knowledge of how police actually work is at odds with the reality of the situation. Your reference to "either done in gang neighboourhoods.." indicates that at least as it pertains to the U.S. you are ill informed.
Police juke stats and in a number of urban centers are effectively a legalized gang.
you must of have read over the "detectives"--pural--part of that sentence. I have had a burglary in one home, and then a few years later had a home invasion where the person was very obviously identified to the police. The responding officers were able to look him up, have a positive witness ID made, and then see that this was a "bad guy". No arrest made.
Only if crime isn’t punished. If it is, I.e. the video is used to track down the thief and put them in jail for 20 years, it definitely stops the problem.
20 years for burglary? Sheesh
What the West refuses to learn from other countries is that you can literally eradicate crime by eradicating criminals
Which countries would you suggest emulating?
Singapore
And the best way to address that is the root cause of why the criminals are criminals in the first place and imprison the few that refuse to change.
Also, non-Western countries generally don't have a great track record with things like gay rights, women's right, etc. So I'm mostly happy that we do things the Western way and not otherwise.
Poor Asian seniors in San Francisco go around and collect cans for refund. Other people break into cars and still others mug people.
Give the car thieves 3 chances and the muggers zero.
What non-west country has no crime?
Singapore
its not like you just do it by accident?
neither was your posting of a comment that didn't further the conversation in a meaningful way.
assault gets less time than that, and i'd hope that getting attacked physically would rate worse than the loss of possessions on your chart
oh we do agree that assault should be way higher in ranking. That being said, burglary can quickly turn to violence. I just dont see why we should entertain that normal well behaved people should tolerate even a tiny risk from people who clearly does not know how to behave, but I guess I am just weird, valuing the rights of people who behave properly over those who commit violent crimes (and yes, burglary is violent)
Who said or implied that?
I guess thats kinda implied when thinking burglars should be let out faster than 20 years(or at all). Unless there is a way to garantuee no re-offending
nah out the same-day and released on a plea or technicality as long as no-one was hurt and no weapons involved.
I had 2 (stolen) cars pull up out the front of my house and 6 teenagers swarm my house (whilst several stayed in the cars) in Brisbane, Australia.
I was notified by the motion alarm in my driveway and then my front door and was able to hit the Siren button and scare them off.
Without that, I would have had 6 "armed" intruders inside my house with myself+partner+4 year old.
The camera system prevented the crime being far more serious than it would have been (both cars+valuables stolen and maybe a stabbing or 3).
We just got new windows in our home, replacing aging double-pane glass with newer, much better insulating triple-pane glass. However there was an option to get added sound insulation and my SO is sensitive to noise, we added that.
I was also considering the safety glass option, given that we had a porch door with "all" glass (just a small wooden frame). I'm a distracted and clumsy at times so I was worried about running through the glass in the door. After talking to the window manufacturer, I learned that I didn't need the safety glass option since the extra sound insulation meant the construction was laminated, hence acted much like a laminated safety glass.
Haven't tried to break them yet, but after helping getting them mounted (about 50kg for a 1x1m window, heavy!) it seems to me it'll take some effort to get through them. Proper anti-burglary glass is likely much better, but wouldn't surprise me if a group of teens would struggle.
Anyway, wasn't my primary consideration but I sleep slightly better at night compared to the old windows which could easily have been shattered with a simple rock, including the porch door.
edit: Also sleeping much better due to the sound insulation. The triple-pane does most of the damping I imagine, but between them it was a vast difference. I had three ~10 yo boys running around screaming (or playing as they'd say) 10m from my wall, and once I closed the new window to my room I could barely hear them. Not at all like the old windows.
edit 2: We also got the option for IR blocking, it adds just the slightest blue tint but cuts 60% of the IR. Made a massive difference in keeping especially the living room cool during summer.
You’re a salesman’s dream. You bought into all these features that are incrementally dubious in value, but magnitudes higher in price.
The three-pane glass and IR filter were definitely not of dubious value.
The windows have a U value that's significant lower than what the old would be due to the three-pane glass. The lack of cold flowing compared to the old windows was very noticeable as we got them mounted during the winter, so had an almost direct comparison. This winter we had a week below -25C and even then it was hardly any noticeable "cold shower".
The IR filter was incredibly noticeable when opening the porch door on a bright and sunny day when outside temps were roughly same as inside temps, holding one hand behind the main window and one in the door opening in direct sunlight. The difference in radiant heat from the sun on each hand was striking. It was also very noticeable on the living room floor during summer if the porch door was left open for a while, standing with one foot on a patch lit by the window and the other on a patch lit by direct sunlight. Though it wasn't unexpected given the blackbody radiation from the sun[1].
The additional sound proofing I'll agree on though. It wasn't that significant on paper, IIRC listed as 5-6 dB reduction, maybe less.
But we had waited and bought them during a 50% off campaign which included the extra options, so we went for it as it didn't add that much after the 50% reduction and my SO is really affected by noise.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight#Composition_and_power
You’d be surprised, good windows add so much qualitatively but also quantitatively (reduced heating and cooling). It’s hard to imagine it but it’s real. I’ve been experienced it first hand.
Woah are things out of control down there? Sounds like GTA Los Angeles.
Super cool! I have a proactive security system as well and can also set off alarms. I've set this up for other people, but it seems that people tend to stop with setting up the detection system and I've yet to see someone I know take it to the response stage.
Inspiring, thanks for sharing!
Having a photo of my hot and run driver at least got me insurance coverage.
I propose HN have a smart edit detection feature where it allows small edits for a longer period, to correct spelling without xhanching the manning.
You should be covered by your own insurance who turns to the other driver's insurance to get back the money. And your insurance will send you the money even if the drivers is not known, provided you have called the police so that hit and run is registered. So that photo isn't usually necessary although it helps your insurance getting its money back.
We have security cameras (that can read license plates) which caught a woman who backed into my car and drove away just last week.
I hear this a lot and it's the wrong expectation. Cameras are not security theater, AND they often won't stop a crime. I don't think people in security industry expect that or sell it to do that. That said, I have seen a dumb ass thief who assumed no cameras were present in a commercial building suddenly notice a camera staring right at him, who then aborted his operation. We had great pics of his unprotected face, which helped police identify and charge said thief. So the value of surveillance is partially preventative, but almost always the value comes in understanding definitively what happened and how it happened. Often this can be the observation of entry attempts that inform an iterative improvement process for security. Hardly theater.
Yep.
Dashcams don't prevent traffic accidents. But they _do_ make it much much easier for the not-at-fault party to make their insurance claim.
It'd be nice of home security cameras "stopped crime", but they are much more useful in documenting your insurance claim. Which is still worthwhile (assuming you have insurance to claim on).
What else do you need except that you got stolen n items when doing your insurance claim?
Literally a police report would be sufficient for burglary claim and you’ve never needed video evidence for that.
I know of at least 2 countries where police will be immediately dispatched to a robbery in progress if a person is caught on camera by the alarm system and the owner confirms it's a robbery (e.g. on a phone call). By law, police won't be dispatched unless a person is caught on video, due to false alarms.
I know this because that's what happened when my home was robbed and I was out of town. Fortunately, since the police response was quick the thief didn't have enough time to take anything (!), as he must have been in and out in 2 minutes at most.
It also helped that there was no jewelry or cash inside the house, of course.
Sadly it is becoming kind of moot nowadays with so much spam that less and less people are answering to unsollicited calls. I know I don't so the police would just ring my phone and I wouldn't know about it. Not that I would want to but having a security system in my house would probably not be an high enough incentive to start answering these kind of calls.
That's why my alarm company's call center number is on my contact list. I even configured it to bypass "do not disturb" mode.
Although unsolicited calls are not a problem here, fortunately.
To add to sister comments, solving a burglary is rarely tracking the thieves down in their agit and getting back the goods Hollywood style.
What people expect:
- triggering an alarm so the theives don't spend the night looking at every nook and cranny of the house
- having proof that it was burglars and not the drunk neighboor forcing his way to the wrong house (if so, you'd also want proof of that though)
- get the cops and insurance to be on board and have the incident processed swiftly. "solving" here basically means getting the insurance monney to buy the missing stuff.
Or just the police not even trying to solve it. In my city, it's inconsistent. A neighbor's alarm activated by accident and 3-4 policemen arrived quickly. Yet a friend's house was actually burgled, they took an ipad which tracked itself to two addresses in a nearby suburb and the police said "sorry, we won't check that out, you should have had cameras". I have a feeling the police prefer to solve crimes by talking to people and browbeating them into revealing things rather than using technology, so I was surprised they recommended cameras.
I have the cameras to prevent surprises. If someone walks near my house I immediately get their picture on my phone and/or tv using home assistant with frigate.
This is my use case and setup also. If there's someone in my yard I want to know. If I'm not home it additionally kicks off other automations that make my place look less tempting for an attack.
Edit: it's also very useful to me to keep video logs of my shop and other areas. I can easily go back to see what happened if something goes wrong (stuff falling, me forgetting stuff somewhere, figuring out why there were big car tire tracks across my yard, etc).
Could be useful for insurance/liability purposes though. Same reason for a dashcam.
1) Deterrent alone is not too shabby.
2) You might be right about some places and are definitely wrong about quite a few others.
Having clear face images of "troubled youth" known to the cops has led to arrests in Australia, for one.
"video verification" by a monitoring center via cameras can greatly improve police response times, and private security companies are often specifically in the business of video verification systems. There isn't really a dichotomy here and cameras can be an important compliment to a security response arrangement.
Increasingly, cameras are the way that security companies dispatch their guards. They are far more actionable than traditional intrusion alarms. Depending on the police department, alarm reports with video may be treated as crimes in progress while intrusion alarm activations alone are not.
Unfortunately the technical standards around video verification are not widely implemented and so in practice it usually requires getting your intrusion alarm, surveillance, and security response all from the same vendor. There are common standards but the consumer security industry today is heavily organized around walled gardens and there isn't much adoption of the industry standards outside of commercial.
In the commercial world these types of systems are often referred to as "pre-intrusion" since the monitoring center observes the cameras in realtime and, in theory, could dispatch guards to suspicious activity before any intrusion alarm would be triggered. In the consumer world, for cost and privacy reasons, the monitoring center usually only receives video after the activation of an intrusion alarm.
Can always use dummy cameras with a led. First it started with the ADT signs and now people are putting up cameras. If your place has neither then you’re a greater target.
Generally they are in and out in a few minutes long before police or a security service can dispatch someone.
My system has a large battery backup for an old lantern or something, recording, 4G fallback, is wired, and I regularly spend time outside.
All of which is invalidated by people staking out a place and wearing a mask.
I saw a burglar with almost all of my neighbors things and appliances. Thought they were moving or upgrading and waved.
My favorite part of the beginning of the pandemic was going to the bank in a hankerchief like an Old West bank robber. Just as effective today as back then...for hiding your identity just slightly better than Clark Kent taking off his glasses.
They also didn't do anything from a disease perspective either, unless it was a disease transmitted by large quantities of spittle.
WTF? Did I accidentally make enemies of the Bandana Fashion Gang?
On a health-level, how is this remotely controversial? Bandanas--especially draped "bank robber" style--are simply a bad choice:
-- https://pubs.aip.org/aip/pof/article/32/6/061708/1068115/Vis...
you brought the health thing to the conversation trying to drum up whatever. nobody wants to have the mask conversation here. again. you're either for or against and nothing anyone here says will change your mind. so just don't go there.
There was another HackerNews story about smelling diseases. I have the rare ability to smell coronavirus, (I've diagnosed probably a dozen people correctly.) That said, if I'm wearing an n95 mask it's harder for me to detect and with n99-n100 masks I don't perceive anything at all.
From that observation I infer masks are effective at eliminating virus transmission, which is quite extraordinary given the virus is so small.
Do you have a sense of whether you can distinguish between the five endemic named coronaviruses?
And whether you can distinguish between those and rhinoviruses / adenoviruses / etc?
There was another poster on that thread who said they were able to smell colds. I wonder if this is just extremely common and / or if we can all be trained to do it like with wine?
This inference doesn't really make sense to me. I bet putting a cigarette in your mouth, or a chopped onion in front of your face, would achieve the same frustration of this ability.
Dude, re-read the thread:
1. You specifically framed it as during "the beginning of the pandemic."
2. You brought up people wearing masks (implicitly for health concerns.)
3. You said those particular masks were amusingly ineffective (for disguising identity in the bank.)
4. I wryly noted those particular low-quality masks were indeed ineffective in multiple ways. (The health concerns that motivated them in #2.)
I can't make you enjoy my reply, but stop acting like this is some kind of shocking non-sequitur leap into forced realms of conversation. You more than set the stage yourself.
not once did i mention health. i compared them to clark kent and glasses as a disguise. not really sure what you're reading, but you're really wanting to push something that's not there. enjoy
This brings up another point, which is that one of the best things you can do for your security is to be well known by your neighbors. If no one knows your appearance and habits then all kinds of crazy stuff can go down while you're away and your neighbors won't know anything's wrong.
It is not always enough. Like for example my ex sister in law once held the door open for the burglar who were getting out of the building with her own TV. She only realized that when she went upstairs and found her door open.
Doesn't this actually support the argument? If she had known her neighbors she maybe would have questioned this stranger carrying out a TV, or at least given notice to their appearance.
It is quite common to seek help from friends when moving in and out, it could be the result of a sale in the second hand market, etc. I don't think knowing your neighbours is enough. The burglars were quite polite and I have to clarify it happened in Switzerland where most people don't necessarily assume malice by default. Not a country where you risk being shot for stepping in a property.
On the other hand, if a place has visible cameras and ADT signs, do they have valuables worthy of protection and worth the risk?
Yes. I saw an interview with a burglar in the UK. He said he preferred properties with alarms and other security features because they were much more likely to have valuables worth stealing. And, as he pointed out, nobody cares about an alarm going off in a city. It just gets ignored.
Here we live in a surveillance state where the cops don’t arrest anyone unless they have money to steal. Worst of three worlds.
With security ops like this, it is important to understand that they are not targeting joe schmoe. They are targeting specific orgs/people that have a lot to lose.
Using the "Lockpicking Lawyer" as an example: "Oh they can get into a security shed, who cares." It's not about meemaw's security shed, its about a cop's trunk with guns in it.
They did that too. Neighbor was a cop. Took all his gear, uniform, weapons, etc. Was demoted to motorcycle cop after that.
People should by now have learned from all the footage on NextDoor of burglars ignoring obvious cameras. Mine are wired, but I'm not fooling myself that they're going to be all that useful if something happens.
The other glaring flaw with cameras is that they always face perpendicular to the street, so even if the getaway car has plates you'll never get a shot of them. Not that the car isn't stolen anyway...
It is good for insurance claims.
Approximately 6 years ago, I saw a face detection demo, which detected the face of a man behind a snow mask while running in the night with minimal lighting from a side-shot. I think seeing the eye and nose geometry was enough.
The only time the system saw the face was from another camera in the same system head-on. I don't remember whether it was masked or not.
If this is available for defense, it can be made available for civilian applications, too, but it won't be, because then you won't be able sold it to that price because of depreciation.
$200 gets you a PoE camera. Solves your wifi and battery complaints with a single cable.
glibly ignoring the easy to install part.
There are wifi cameras that will store video locally when the wifi is out, although I can see it'd be a problem if they get stolen while the network is jammed and they don't have a chance to upload.
This is something Eufy can't make up their mind on. The doorbells and some cams transmit wirelessly to a base. Then they released new cams that do it locally and don't work with the base.