sterwill

Over a decade ago, I created an AWS ELB to serve a production API. It was HTTPS-only, using an Amazon-signed certificate served from ACM for my employer's domain. Right after deployment, logs showed a regular pattern of 404s trying to POST/PUT to my API at paths I didn't support. Thousands of requests per hour, and they continued for days. It didn't look like a DoS--the paths looked like someone else's API.

I got curious what all the traffic was, so I added a route to the API that saved some of the uploaded data. It was live home surveillance video and photos! Indoors, outdoors, baby monitors, living rooms, etc. It was pretty easy to find which vendor's hardware was doing this (from headers, paths, watermarks) and I reached out to their security contact to let them know what I found. They responded generically but didn't seem to care that much.

In short, because HTTPS was required, and an ELB gets assigned IPv4 addresses arbitrarily, I can only conclude that a whole fleet of home security cameras were sold across the US that hard-coded the IP address of their cloud server and had certificate validation disabled.

Does this result in programs more frequently erroring/crashing because they can't allocate? I don't know how well many of the programs I frequently use on my desktop (Firefox, GNOME desktop, JVM + IntelliJ, Slack, etc.) handle allocation failures. I'm not sure they would do much better than crash, but I know the default OOM killer settings work well for me. About once a year a real runaway process (usually a throwaway program I'm working on) gets OOM-killed, and that's fine with me.

Same here. I enjoyed Q3A, but I spent so many hours playing TF/MegaTF.

How does grandma install all of that on macOS?

I flew to Belfast in the mid-2000s. I don't remember the security screening as being that unusual (for an American), but the terminal architecture was interesting.

I have 2 Reolink PoE cameras, and they just hopped on the network with DHCP and I used a web browser to configure them. No app needed. I did install the app later, once the cameras were safely on their own VLAN, and I could connect to them by internal host name or IP address.

I've never looked at what the Android app is doing on the network, but maybe I should. I usually just keep it open for a few minutes when I'm waiting for a delivery or I hear someone ring the doorbell, so I'm not too worried about it piping lots of video to Reolink HQ. I haven't noticed much of a battery drain having used it earlier in the day.

I bought Reolink PoE cameras because they support standard RTSP and I could put them on their own VLAN where they can't get to the Internet. I can still use the Reolink app to view them when I'm on the LAN, or through Wireguard when I'm not. I use ffmpeg to save streams to a big disk. Works great.

Not bragging, but I bought the Blender Book!

Same here. I used Debian back in the 90s, switched to Ubuntu for more regular releases, but the ads from apt were the final annoyance. Debian 12 has been excellent.

I hope they stay in it because I love my 1 Gbps Google Fiber service. Install was great, it's super reliable (compared to Spectrum cable Internet), and the price is nice. I don't even own a computer or switch with network ports that can do > 1 Gbps, but 20 to the home is impressive.

Google Fiber gets this right. They say my Internet package will cost $70 and every month the total I get charged is $70.

On my old 2014 Mazda 3, you could SSH in over USB Ethernet as root, and just edit the timeout delay in the console JavaScript files. That was great.

I like having the ABV in big print so I can avoid the super high ones. It's a bonus for me!

My Reddit user experience is similar to yours. I paid for rif years ago because it's simple and fast, and I don't want to see ads. I'll gladly pay Reddit for an ad-free experience if I can use an app that's better than their own, but if they don't want to take my money, they'll lose me as a user.