The other blog posts on the site have the full (well, developing) story. Unfortunately I was only able to link one, and I was having a tough time coming up with a title so I used an excerpt from this post.
True... but I've wondered how Wyze was making money on their $20 cameras with free cloud storage of events for 30 days. It's not exactly a free product but doesn't cost enough for what it does. I'm going to go unplug all of mine right now.
That turns out to be the same as "give us 30 days to pull any information we care about from your camera feed" - unless they decide it's worth making a copy, in which case they have forever.
"I'm not blaming business leaders per se, as they are at the mercy of large historical and economic forces that limit what can influence them and the options open to them to choose"
I'm frustrated by the continued conflation of understandability and excusability. A band robber's motives are understandable, but we don't excuse them. However, while the systemic forces acting on business leaders make it understandable when they make mistakes, but we must draw a sharp line between understanding and excusing.
We can't credit leaders in good times, while also excusing them when systemic failures corrupt them.
I wanted to purchase a few of the Wyze cameras for my house because of the price ~$20 each. At first, I thought this price could be a loss-leader strategy for more lucrative services (premium or longer cloud storage), kind of like Ring but with much cheaper hardware. Alas, when I found out that the cloud storage is free for 30 days I was skeptical. How would you make money from this sale?
I'm not a paranoid person. I do have Ring doorbell, a P.O.S Samsung camera and Alexa in my house. My rationale is that since those cameras are for outside of my home, I wouldn't care about being spied upon. But if the Wyzes are used by the CCP for surveillance foreign territories, this could spell a lot of trouble. For example, a week prior to the Pearl Harbor event, the imperial Japan phoned Japanese-American in Hawaii to ask about the weather, troop movement, military vehicles movement. I can't imagine if those outside cameras are used for the purpose, the intelligence gathered is paramount.
You could argue that since everybody is carrying a smartphone with camera nowadays, it wouldn't take much effort to "spy" foreign territories simply by checking social media uploaded. While it is true, would it be more devastating if they can see every thing anytime/anywhere they want?
The intent of the post is not about security vulnerabilities but actual espionage, it will be beneficial if the author simply presented the whole case instead of providing a teaser like this. They could have purchased a catchy URL, as is the standard practice nowadays, but it’s good to always come out with the proper case. Ow with this teaser I cannot help but think that it’s more of a PR move, unless proven otherwise.
The AAA was by far the best most luxurious terminal a programmer could have. The Guru XL could display 66 lines of 170 characters, and came in either portrait or landscape orientation!
The submitted title, "Wyze was committing espionage against American citizens in the United States", wasn't informative. The actual information here is merely that someone believes something and says they will release evidence "over the next week".
The bigger problem is that this article says nothing—it is merely an announcement of an announcement:
we now believe at this time, and this evidence will be released over the next week, that Wyze was committing espionage against American citizens in the United States
That somebody "now believes something at this time and this evidence will be released over the next week" doesn't come close to being a substantive submission for Hacker News. Here we can wait for the actual information. "Over the next week" sounds like they plan to dole it out in pieces though, which is also not good for Hacker News. (Tricks to get page views generally aren't.)
Yup, this seems pretty likely to drop off the front page now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Which means HN users with Wyze devices will likely be in the dark about just how bad this is (only taking the company's official word) until the WSJ exposé.
