Notices by Seth Hanford 🐡 (ckure@infosec.exchange)

If you, like me, are trying to withstand the buffeting winds of doom and gloom that is the current state of world news... but are also concerned that in an age of collapsing sources of trustworthiness that you might be misled by the news and don't want to lose out on curated, open and federated sources?

May I recommend setting up a "list" on Mastodon or what have you (I'm on a glitch-soc instance) and setting the list to "Hide from Home"?

I find this works really well for the amazing news-centric timelines that are essential to my keeping up to date, but which I don't need to see hour by hour. I keep all these folks at hand, but I can actively choose "I wonder what is up in the world today?" and can doomscroll intentionally and not by default. Engagement on my terms feels really good rn.

I know who needs to hear this, but I'm not sure they follow me on here.

You can't wrap a Linux shell safely.

I know you're going to try. I know that it's super easy to just like pass arbitrary text through your cute little CLI tool or web interface or whatevs.

But the perl CGI folks couldn't do it, the web servers couldn't do it, the network device folks couldn't do it, nobody can do it.

It's not a good pattern. Please. Stop.

(This message brought to you by the PSIRT Council and our generous donors: $ () {} && || ` ; > < ../ and so many others that I can't remember them all even though I've been watching you fail to do this well for over 2 decades)

@ryanc it's a good cause, I love Sneakers, and I think you've put a lot of thought into making the screenshots accessible and effort into making it very watchable. I'm in.
https://infosec.exchange/@ryanc/113039048229129925

@ryanc yep for sure. I’ll only have the one spot where I can’t do wired for same reasons. The other location is at the door and only recently can you find wired bells that are affordable. Mines much older and I haven’t looked at what’s available & unlocked these days.

@ryanc my amcrests are a little older, but generally the dome and bullet cams all do what you're asking. I have various experience with a pretty wide variety of 2/3/4MP bullets & domes.

I also have an Amcrest floodlight cam sitting here on my office floor because it's a location where I don't have a good ethernet route but I do have a security floodlight already (ASH26-W). Weather is just getting good enough to install it so I don't have first-hand experience just yet, but it is Wifi and I'm expecting it to be mildly challenging, just like the wifi doorbell I use an AD110. For both of these, I expect/have experienced to have to setup an account at first to provision them, and then reconfigure them to push/pull to a local server.

On the Dahua(?) front, I understand that they do things like setting alert zones & such a bit more easily than Amcrest, but the differences are likely in software -- hardware probably whitelabeled.

And I understand re: corporate ethics. I just mentioned it because it tends to be the next question, but didn't want to assume/presume. And yeah, at the end of the day there are only so many options commercially available.

@ryanc last time I looked, Dahua, HikVision, and Amcrest all fit the bill (I think Amcrest are white-label of one of those, prob Dahua). There are select models where ONVIF is a challenge, but largely they should all match for you. I tend toward Amcrest and know it the best of those 3.

When I see people list local-capable/POE/ONVIF, I also commonly see a bullet point for "company doesn't support oppression" factors, which tends to be the next differentiating factor among the leaders that overlap with your requirements.

@SwiftOnSecurity The only thing we need to sort beforehand is: Tay is now a billionaire. We don't need more of those in charge.