If the NAS is outside of your home, where do you put it? Only the 1% own multiple homes and asking your parents or friends to hold it would just be...weird and complicated.

And then you'd need to keep a separate NAS in your home, for the camera pointed at the NAS in your parent's house of course.

Suffice it to say, it kind of makes sense to let Ring store all of the video in one central location since they can just hire armed guards to keep it safe. If you yourself can afford armed guards, you're probably not in their target market.

There are LOTS of reasons why you'd want redundant off-site backup.

Ring can hire all of the armed guards in the world, and it won't protect your data from Ring.

With the density of modern storage media, the secure box could be quite small, much smaller even than a typical residential safe. And it needn't necessarily be accessible like a typical safe. If you design it right, it needn't even have a door that could be pried open with sufficient leverage.

It could at the same time be disguised. It could be bolted to a concrete wall, covered with a fake electrical conduit box (which would help disguise the wires going into it), then completely covered over by drywall. To find it you'd need to gut the house, and in the unlikely event that the thief found it they'd still be left with a hard nut to crack.

It's not even expensive. I have a couple of NASes in my home, but it would take a pretty intensive search to find them -- certainly more than a thief has time for. (I don't hide them to keep them from thieves, I hide them to keep them out of sight and out of the way for aesthetic reasons.)

But that convenience comes with a cost.

That aside, I am pretty sure that in ‘typical’ consumer deployments, cutting power and/or cable from a house will disable and debilitate most alarm and security systems.

What the user was actually doing on their home VPN be largely opaque to the ISP. They might be able to make educated guesses like "this much traffic over this period of time looks a lot like somebody streaming a movie off their NAS", but that's pretty crude. I'm not sure they could really monetize that sort of data.

On the other hand home VPNs being common would probably increase the how much uploading the average user did. These sort of residential connections are almost always asymmetric because ISPs are counting on people downloading far more than they upload. By empowering users with home VPNs, the balance of upload/download might be upset in a way that isn't profitable for the ISP.

As for upload amounts, you are probably uploading less data, not more, because you don’t have to upload 100% of the data to the cloud to access 1% of it on demand.

If a device manufacturer could count on you having VPN access to your home network they could make it trivial to set up and use. You’d open an app or visit a URL, log in, and you’d have access.

I think that any solution that includes a VPN is going to lose out in convenience even slightly against a solution that doesn't, and in a market where convenience and ease of use goes above all else, it would just not work.

No, it really isn't difficult without the cloud. All the cloud does is make it a bit more convenient.

It has good margins and could afford to market heavily and invest in feature development vs anything else. As a result an alternative might well be great for users, great for the world, and also an unsuccessful business.

Doubly so because it's essentially already solved. Setup a standard NVR and portmap it. The marginal gains are just in making it more secure (few care, obviously, or ring wouldn't exit) or a little easier to configure.

I'm not sure how meaningful that actually is. I know that it's reasonably easy because I've done it a number of times, but I have zero interest in making a productized solution.

It's not the easiest solution but the trade-offs are necessary.

Likewise with the poor state of router security.

2) Keep the associated private key protected to your preference of security and convenience.

3) Decrypt the videos when you want to view them (if you're comfortable storing the private key on your phone, the only difference to the end user should be lag -- unless they lose the private key).

That's what I did for a friend. We hid it in a kitchen cabinet behind canned items and ran a VGA cable to the living room TV on the other side of the kitchen wall. No one would know it was there.

or 7-zip encrypt video chunks and upload using above method.

In both cases, you can control the server and the data. You can hand over data that is applicable to the period of time in question and you still have your local copy.

Or even just if the power or internet was out. The whole point of these things is to be able to see what's going on when something unexpected happens.

If the power is out the camera is out (unless it's on a UPS, in which case the storage can be too...).

If the internet is out your cloud storage is out-- this is a problem that a local solution doesn't have.

Ring isn't a "third party", they're the party from which users (of which I am one) buy the cameras and the services that go with them.

One of the services is being able to see live views from your cameras, or watch stored videos, from anywhere through the app. This is very useful if you're away from home. Storing videos locally wouldn't support that.

Of course it is--don't fall for the okeydoke. Encrypt with a passphrase. Provide the same passphrase in the app. Ring's central server exists only to pull streams on-demand and route them directly to the app. Ring can still even store VOD data if you really want; they don't have the ability to perpetuate the panopticon through it, though.

There, I fixed it.

Are you saying Ring already offers this capability?

Yes, it would be slower, would require video encoding/rescaling near the local storage, but it would actually be secure that way.

How do they do that if the app is halfway across the country? They have to go through a common server.

But let's go ahead and go with your assumption that they are. You can still have a secure connection from your doorbell camera to a mobile app anywhere in the world. Both your app and your camera connect to an intermediate server. This server merely acts like a proxy, passing packets between the two. Using a standard TLS handshake, the app can establish encryption with the camera without the proxy in the middle being able to decrypt the traffic. When the camera is initially setup, it can generate a TLS certificate that the app can download and pin (Since the app and camera will be on the same Wifi network), so that the proxy server can't try to present its own and intercept the communications.

If you need me to go into greater detail, I can. But this is definitely a solved problem.

EDIT: Another way to think of this...apps like Signal and Wire let people talk to each other by each client connecting to a central server to send and retrieve messages, but without the ability for those central servers to intercept the contents of the messages through public key encryption. The camera-to-app connection would work basically the same way.

Sure it does.

The Internet is a global wide area network that connects computer systems across the world.

Perhaps you got confused and thought that the internet only connected you to Amazon? :)

Smarm aside, I really wonder how you ended up thinking this?

You're not the only person I've encountered that seemed to think cameras had to upload 'to the cloud' to be useful. E.g. after posting cute animal footage from my cameras ( https://people.xiph.org/~greg/troups.webm ) I got a number of comment from people along the lines of being surprised that I'd hand footage of my home over to amazon which made no sense until I found out about how ring worked.

This is quite surprising to me, because the bandwidth involved and the requirement for working internet connectivity makes remote storage seem really costly and unattractive to me and I was surprised to learn that's what products like ring were doing.

Please save your patronizing for someone else.

> You're not the only person I've encountered that seemed to think cameras had to upload 'to the cloud' to be useful.

I've explained exactly what I think the issue is, and a number of people have given useful responses. You haven't.

If the camera doesn't have internet connectivity, I can't see what it's seeing when I'm away from home. That's a requirement, as I have already said.

But they also keep recording while my internet connectivity goes out.

My cameras in aggregate also produce a lot more data than my internet connection could support-- about 180mbit/s during the day-- but that presets no problem for remote viewing because I only few a couple cameras at a time remotely. (I also can view the much lower bitrate substreams, while the full resolution is recorded locally.)

Having all of your cameras constantly uploading stuff to someone else's computer so that you could use your own client device (presumably, a smartphone) to look at a copy of stored videos (or a live feed) from someone else's computer? Wouldn't it be a bit more efficient to skip a step and stream straight from a computer within your home?

It really boggles my mind why anyone tech-savvy would not only agree to this ineffective approach, but also pay a monthly subscription for that service.

Not if I'm away from home and can't talk directly to that computer because it's behind a firewall and my ISP won't let me run Internet-visible servers using my home Internet connection. (And even if the ISP would, while I, as a techie, might be willing to set up my own streaming server and poke a hole in my firewall for it, I'm not sure the average user would be able or willing to do that.)

> It really boggles my mind why anyone tech-savvy...

I wasn't talking about average users.

> and my ISP won't let me run Internet-visible servers using my home Internet connection.

I'll give you that one. I know that Google Fiber has an exception for such use cases. From: https://support.google.com/fiber/answer/2659981?hl=en&topic=...

> However, personal, non-commercial use of servers that comply with this AUP is acceptable, including using virtual private networks (VPN) to access services in your home and using hardware or applications that include server capabilities for uses like multi-player gaming, video-conferencing, and home security.

I know that other ISPs in the US are somewhat shittier in this regard.

Looks like my cameras, all outdoor, average about 7mbit/sec each-- most of my cameras are 2 or 4mpixel ones though the number is inflated by a couple 12mpixel wide angle cameras. I'm sure I could tune the bitrate a bit more if I tried, but already I turned them down until just before there was a noticeable reduction in face intelligibility at the end of their range.

Yes. Plus ISPs (or at least US ones) won't allow you to run an Internet-visible server using your home Internet connection.

That's not entirely the case. I've been running internet-visible servers from home for decades. My current ISP (Comcast) doesn't have a problem with that, even contractually, as long as you aren't running publicly available services, and I've never had a problem with any of my prior ISPs.

Most ISPs don’t seem to care if you’re not using a ridiculous amount of bandwidth. Many will sell you a package that explicitly allows it. I currently have access to live view and recorded video from my security system and haven’t had any problems at all.

In the case of wide adoption of such a thing I imagine the ISPs either offering a more expensive package, or clamping down and offering their own version of the service through some monstrosity of a modem/router. It’s probably the latter that motivates most of these companies to use “the cloud”. There’s certainly ways around the problem for a motivated company, though.

The ToS says you can't, but it isn't enforced.