-----Original Message----- From: PLUG <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Chuck Hast
>The usual culprits in the big box stores. >Arlo, Lorex, NiteOwl, etc. >My brother in law bought Arlo, I looked at it and said nothing. Oh My God that stuff is horrendous. Do a search on Home Depot's website for security cameras. $100 for a 2MP (1080p) camera combined with a motion detection light by Blink. And of course, the light is some square POS that does not take an Edison bulb so when the LEDs in it start getting dim the entire light and camera needs to be unscrewed from the side of the house and thrown away. You can buy a separate motion detector only light from HD for like around $25 for the base and replaceable bulbs then pair it with a real camera with good resolution for cheaper than that. Plus all that big box crap is all Chinese made and since it's all cloud-based the cameras have to connect to the Internet, and I'm quite sure the Chinese government sees all of those video streams. Geeze people, Hikvision is state-owned. >The only thing I am interested in PTZ for is WX cams. Here in OK we have a lot >of that and a PTZ cam comes in handy >to look at what is going on out in >remote area. OK you piqued my curiosity on that - I've seen WX associated with weather for a while online now - what exactly does the abbreviation WX stand for? >As I recall the guy put the code out there for folks to use. >He used it to give the police a better idea of the times it was happening and >video of the vehicle. They then were able >to be there at the right time and >catch him. But before the ZM video nothing was happening. Unfortunately we have this thing in Portland OR now called "road dieting" It is something that city planners dreamed up, they shrink major arterials in the city down from 4 lanes to 2 lanes claiming it "increases safety" Of course all it does is tremendously increase congestion and so as a result people start shortcutting through the residential neighborhoods. In response to that the city set every residential neighborhood street speed from 25Mph to 20Mph. But needless to say there's not enough police on the force to patrol every single residential street. The people living in neighborhoods are ballistic about it because they went from having a neighborhood street with practically no traffic to having a neighborhood street that now had a steady stream of cars on it. The city planners who dreamed this up finally admitted that the entire idea was to slow traffic down and that the people in the neighborhoods would just have to suck it. I just laughed my ass off about it because the same people in the neighborhoods now who were complaining about traffic were the ones who voted in the road dieting. So now they got speeders in their neighborhoods. Should have known better than to vote for the road diet on the arterial 3 blocks away from your house when the city came around asking if you wanted it. People need to quit being so stupid and anal about this stuff. You don't want speeders in the neighborhood, then ease congestion by widening arterials. And yes, that DOES mean people are going to drive fast on the arterials. That's their purpose. Out West from Portland in cities like Hillsboro they understand this stuff and you go out there and see miles of empty farmland where they are platting out subdivisions and new business parks and you see 4 lane roads everywhere in the cornfields. No road dieting out there! >I just cannot believe you can leave a windows box unattended for any length of >time. You actually CAN do this with Windows XP. I've done it. But the catch is that the system has to be COMPLETELY patched, I use one of the Unofficial Windows XP Patch sets (sometimes called the Unofficial Service Pack 4) and it CANNOT be accessible from the Internet. And, obviously, you typically either have to use an old commercial application that is really very very stable, or you have to use an app you wrote yourself, typically with Visual Studio 6.0 or earlier. The typical application for this is Point of Sale cash registers. POS software is actually in a pretty sad state of affairs these days because all of the current cash register vendors have moved to the Cloud, as a way of getting recurring revenue. Most of them will sell you PC's with Windows IoT on them and cash drawers and all that. But needless to say the small business retailers don't want to be stuck paying ongoing revenue for a flipping cash register so many of them use older antique cash register software programs that were written in XP days and sold as "perpetual licenses" >I am sure that they have >corrected things but something that calls home >(MS) and feels like working on a car with the hood welded shut just does not >sit right. Not to mention the monetizing >of the desktop. You actually CAN do this but NOT with Windows 10 Desktop. You can do it with Windows Server (obviously) but the expense is too great for hobby use and also if it's connected at all to the Internet you have to patch it periodically. But, then again, if Ubuntu or any other Linux OS is connected to the Internet, you have to patch that periodically, also. But for smaller/hobby use you can do this with Windows IoT (formerly Windows Embedded) They even have a version for the Raspberry Pi that is free to use, here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=53360 Assuming of course you can find a cheap Raspberry Pi which these days is a pretty tall order. Windows IoT doesn't have all the call home to mommy stuff and is designed for embedded systems use where they have to run unattended. I've never tried booting it myself, though. The problem Microsoft has is that nobody wants windows on anything other than an x86 platform because they all want it to run software like QuickBooks and other stuff that is just refreshes over and over of antique software programs the vendors monetized. So yeah, if you want to write a .NET application for a gas pump or EV charging station and run it off a Raspberry Pi they will turn themselves inside out supporting you. But as for getting access to the source code of current windows - well you either have to be a government and use this program: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/securityengineering/gsp? Or you have to get it from a leaked source. Windows XP source code was leaked a few years ago. I suspect we will see windows 10 source leaked years after MS stops supporting it. MS also periodically releases "antique software" source like that for GW-BASIC and MSDOS and I wouldn't be a bit surprised if some of these leaks like the XP leak had tacit support from Microsoft, as a way of pushing customers to stop using old software. But as far as Windows 10 Desktop, connected to the Internet so that your security camera can stream to some server on the Internet - oh yeah, that is all Ring Doorbell stuff and it's all toy stuff and not stable enough to be unattended. Ted
