Anker's Eufy Cameras Caught Uploading Content to the Cloud Without User Consent [Updated]

[MacBH928]

The problem with FOSS is it gets zero support compared to paid options. I’ve seen it talked about so much in the FOSS community where they say you can’t expect developers to give much support because they’re doing it for free. If I’m using a product, I need it to work. Just because the product is free doesn’t mean I’m OK with it not working. I like open source, but there needs to be some sort of financial incentive for the developers to support the product.

Yep... agree. I love FOSS when it's really a viable option. But except for the most popular and widely used handful of products, it's almost always a situation where using an open source application results in a huge time investment to tinker with it so it works properly.

I've been in I.T. as a career for around 30 years now, and I still experience it regularly. So I can easily see how FOSS solutions are usually just non-starters for more casual users.

As one example related to this whole topic? I wanted to stop using Eufy's supplied app to monitor their cameras, so I tried to install and configure ZoneMinder. I got my C24 cameras configured in a mode where they streamed H.264 video constantly on my LAN and got ZoneMinder to grab that video and save/process it. But 2 days later, my server had crashed because ZoneMinder completely filled the drive space. I reconfigured it so it was in its own disk partition (so filling it up wouldn't affect the rest of the server's OS or other apps running on it) and tried again. In 2-3 days, ZoneMinder crashed again. The clean-up process was a laborious matter of deleting each video clip's entry from the mysql database it indexed them all in. Hours more work tweaking all the complicated settings to make it properly detect motion so it wasn't saving too much useless footage. But ultimately, I never did get it to reliably erase all of the oldest content to make room for new when the disk was getting full. I finally gave up because I just didn't have more time or energy to invest in getting it right. Went back to Eufy's included solution.

I am not sure what you mean when you say support. Big corporates surely do not respond to their customers, FB has like 1 billion users, i really doubt they respond to each of their user's emails. Most companies rely on community effort to answer each other questions.

I would like to think of software as "professionally" done and a lot of FOSS software is. Convenience, usability, user friendliness, and reliability is where it is. I actually like Firefox more than Chrome and PiHole and VLC are solid maybe better than paid options. Even paid products have issues like crashing or not working correctly.

The problem with FOSS is that it is created by developers so they make it bare bone because they know how to fix it if it does not work they do not think of the average user. There are developers who actually prefer to use the text based terminal over gui!

I think FOSS problems could be fixed if the community collaborates together. We need 1 browser, 1 OS, most software we only need 1 option meanwhile FOSS developers are more worried about forking a fork of a fork that was forked from another fork. There is like 16 Linux distros all claiming to be the "light" linux version. If we concentrate the efforts we actually can give up the corporate products and average users need to donate. $1 makes all the difference, $1*million users = $1 million dollars.

 

[kingtj1971]

I am not sure what you mean when you say support. Big corporates surely do not respond to their customers, FB has like 1 billion users, i really doubt they respond to each of their user's emails. Most companies rely on community effort to answer each other questions.

I would like to think of software as "professionally" done and a lot of FOSS software is. Convenience, usability, user friendliness, and reliability is where it is. I actually like Firefox more than Chrome and PiHole and VLC are solid maybe better than paid options. Even paid products have issues like crashing or not working correctly.

The problem with FOSS is that it is created by developers so they make it bare bone because they know how to fix it if it does not work they do not think of the average user. There are developers who actually prefer to use the text based terminal over gui!

I think FOSS problems could be fixed if the community collaborates together. We need 1 browser, 1 OS, most software we only need 1 option meanwhile FOSS developers are more worried about forking a fork of a fork that was forked from another fork. There is like 16 Linux distros all claiming to be the "light" linux version. If we concentrate the efforts we actually can give up the corporate products and average users need to donate. $1 makes all the difference, $1*million users = $1 million dollars.

I wasn't the one who specifically talked about "support". But at least with some of the higher-end commercial products, paid support DOES give you a toll-free number you can call for assistance when something goes really wrong. I used to work with a company running VMWare ESXi for virtual servers, for example. Thanks to a strange bug involving one of their network card drivers, it took the entire system down a couple of times. The last time it happened, there was some data corruption so it refused to boot back up. We were *really* happy we had paid support to walk us through some command line options to repair the disk and get it going again, and to advise us of a work-around until they had a patch for it. I don't think I could expect that level of support from a FOSS virtualization solution? (Well, maybe via a third party selling support agreements ... but feels a lot more sketchy counting on them to have the level of knowledge needed if something does go wrong?)

I agree though... programs like VLC and FireFox or even FileZilla FTP are excellent! They're the shining stars of open source, really. Everyone mentions them. There's so much that's .... less than those, though.....

 

[MacBH928]

I wasn't the one who specifically talked about "support". But at least with some of the higher-end commercial products, paid support DOES give you a toll-free number you can call for assistance when something goes really wrong. I used to work with a company running VMWare ESXi for virtual servers, for example. Thanks to a strange bug involving one of their network card drivers, it took the entire system down a couple of times. The last time it happened, there was some data corruption so it refused to boot back up. We were *really* happy we had paid support to walk us through some command line options to repair the disk and get it going again, and to advise us of a work-around until they had a patch for it. I don't think I could expect that level of support from a FOSS virtualization solution? (Well, maybe via a third party selling support agreements ... but feels a lot more sketchy counting on them to have the level of knowledge needed if something does go wrong?)

I agree though... programs like VLC and FireFox or even FileZilla FTP are excellent! They're the shining stars of open source, really. Everyone mentions them. There's so much that's .... less than those, though.....

when you are a company you probably pay hundreds of thousands of dollars so they will pay attention to you. They won't pay attention for the $10-20 subscriber

 

[0134168]

They updated the app.

 

[Jay42]

I agree. While I might like the convenience of remote access, I don't think any manufacturer can be trusted. Those that aren't flat-out crooked are still careless and sloppy when it comes to data protection and security.

But note that even a switch our outlet from an unscrupulous vendor may still have a hidden mic or camera. Most of us aren't going to be interested in buying units to tear-down, so we have to rely on reviews from trusted sources, and there aren't a whole lot of them.

I am prudent but not paranoid. I'm willing to run the risk that a Kasa smart outlet I bought for $6 does not have a secret mic that directly feeds Beijing. Not so with a cloud-connected camera in my house.

 

[vegetassj4]

I was wondering why my Eufy vac kept trying to go into the bathroom, I thought it was a glitch.

People were laughing 👀

A Roomba recorded a woman on the toilet. How did screenshots end up on Facebook?

Robot vacuum companies say your images are safe, but a sprawling global supply chain for data from our devices creates risk.

www.technologyreview.com

 

[patsio]

4.5.4​

Jan 10, 2023
1. Added web protal control switch and live stream authentication.

Adds another level of security, hope it's enough though.