28 comments

  • badatnames 15 hours ago
    Worthy thread to ask: is there such a thing as a white label IP camera (or similar) with a supported open firmware? Not asking for open source, but something close to plug and play that nonetheless has a way of stripping the rootfs as desired for bespoke use in a manufacturer-supported way.

    I have looked around before but I only found genuinely dev-oriented kits that weren't even in a shell, and crazy priced.

    edit: seems there are some options now (or I missed them before), e.g. https://www.goodcam.io/#for-independent-developers

    • zrobotics 10 hours ago
      Not exactly open firmware, but something like ONVIF on an isolated network is pretty close. An ONVIF camera should talk to basically any NVR (network video recorder), there are several open-source ones available.

      There are tons of ONVIF-compliant and cheap PoE cameras, and with this setup you really don't care about the security of the manufacturer firmware since you aren't exposing them to the network publicly. However, you do need to be extra diligent when configuring your VLAN/network segmentation.

    • radredgreen2 9 hours ago
      I wrote Wyrecam (https://github.com/radredgreen/wyrecam) to solve this problem. It works as well as Apple HomeKit works, which isn't all that well. Firmware supports wyze v3 (ingenic t31).
    • makefu 13 hours ago
      There is also https://thingino.com/ which has a clear set of supported cameras. The installation is straight forward if you choose a cam with SD-Card flashing support. I upgraded two of the Sonoff Slim Gen2 without any issues.
      • jonah 6 hours ago
        I bought the cheapest PTZ camera they have listed and, as you say the install was easy. The interface is useful and it does what it says on the tin.
      • sgc 11 hours ago
        I also use thingino and it was very easy to use. It has wireguard support, but I just set up my firewall so cams are only accessible over tailscale.
    • jokowueu 1 hour ago
    • tehlike 13 hours ago
      You can get close.... I guess...

      Some cameras do support thingino, so you can override their firmware. Then there's this: https://openipc.org/supported-hardware/featured

    • nozzlegear 14 hours ago
      Seems like the shop is broken?

      > Stránka nenalezena

      > There's been a glitch...

      > We're not quite sure what went wrong. You can go back, or try looking on our homepage.

      • badatnames 14 hours ago
        Huh, it was working an hour ago. The outdoor 8MP variant was around the 85 euro mark.
      • cenamus 14 hours ago
        Czech for 'page not found'
    • numpad0 12 hours ago
      Not exactly what you have asked for, but ESP32 based M5Stack and Seeed Xiao modules might fit the bill. They are not so expensive, are Linux-free, and there's no report so far of secret ping home features in the SDK.
    • kevin_thibedeau 4 hours ago
      You would be better served using a USB capable camera behind an RPi to have assurance that broken firmware isn't compromising your network.
      • ButlerianJihad 4 hours ago
        I was working with Raspberry Pis, starting with a college honors project, around 2018.

        For a while, I thought about building a network of surveillance cameras around the interior of my home. The Raspberry Pi seemed like a tempting platform to hook up a bunch of cameras to it. Sadly, I could not find a backend surveillance app or system that was suitable for running such a network. The best one I found was some kind of modular Linux app that was for-pay, and actually seemed based in Russia or something, and personally I wasn't comfortable about handing over my domestic surveillance needs to Russia!

        I also considered exterior sensors, such as a camera, or perhaps a nice little weather station, outside on my balcony, running on the little Raspberry Pi.

        Then I recalled two things: I live in the Sonoran Desert, where the desert highs can go up around 115℉, and any plant on my balcony was guaranteed to wither and die, not to mention the blowing dust and thunderstorms we have.

        I determined that there was basically no way to house or protect a Raspberry Pi, as well as supply it with connectivity and electric power, and keep it outside on the balcony in conditions where I'd benefit from those active sensors. Sad but true!

    • em3rgent0rdr 14 hours ago
      ESP32-CAM
      • LastTrain 14 hours ago
        I so want these to be a viable solution but man my experience so far is that it can barely be made to work and only in the most favorable environments. Compare that to the blink cameras I used to run outside where it occasionally went below -20F and they still went over a year on a couple batteries.
    • ece 6 hours ago
    • xiconfjs 14 hours ago
      Thank you. Ordered one to play around and see if this is a viable alternative.
    • TaLiTr 14 hours ago
      I wish... The best I've found is https://openipc.org/ which is a very manufacturer unsupported way of reflashing certain chips with open-source firmware. It seems very fiddly as only certain SoCs are supported and good luck finding out if a specific Chinese camera has one.
  • grommz 18 hours ago
    The US Department of War IP adresses baked into the firmware is the bigger story here. Note to self: never buy a Korean security product.
    • hhh 18 hours ago
      I do know of at least one company who has black-holed the entire DoD ip space and are using it for internal space, which is why I gave a speculation warning... it's really strange regardless.
      • anonymars 16 hours ago
        Interesting -- seems like the side effect would be to basically prevent use by the DoD but not really anyone else. Bonus points if they sell a "government" version for higher cost
      • accrual 17 hours ago
        I also know of a company who does this. The reason in their case is they act as a network concentrator, bridging hundreds of client IP spaces, so this helps them avoid conflicts with their own space without having to NAT constantly. There is still a lot of NAT for the more common ranges.
        • inigyou 13 hours ago
          If they converted to IPv6, they could easily have a globally unique address space. Real globally unique, not probabilistic.
          • oasisbob 8 hours ago
            The fact that the network concentrator co uses DoD v4 address space to avoid conflicts implies that their clients are bringing v4 addresses, so IPv6 is utterly irrelevant in this situation.
      • Arrowmaster 6 hours ago
        I don't remember which but one of the major US cellular networks was using the DoDs 7.0.0.0/8 internally. It was never an issue since the DoD kept that /8 offline but the IPs would show up in traceroutes. I had to tell many people to ignore it.
      • ec109685 15 hours ago
        Yeah I wanted to do that at previous company. Got talked out of it, but it's nice have all those ips available.
      • ErroneousBosh 17 hours ago
        I recently troubleshot an installation for someone where at some point in the past they'd picked 1.1.1.0/24 as their address range because "all that 192 stuff was silly and too complicated".

        You know, I'm not sure I can explain how I feel about this properly without waving the shotgun around.

        • mr_mitm 15 hours ago
          I had a gig for a contractor of some banks once. One of the banks was using 5.0.0.0/8 internally. I asked the guy if it doesn't lead to issues. All the time, he said. When they first came in, they just assigned each bank 1.0.0.0/8, 2.0.0.0/8, and so on. Number ten feels really lucky, he said.
          • inigyou 13 hours ago
            As long as it's strictly separated from the internet it works. The Internetwork Packet Exchange, used for cellular roaming, is a parallel global internet with its own addresses and allocation policies.
          • prerok 13 hours ago
            This story is so silly it must be true. Thank you, made me laugh out loud.
        • tracker1 16 hours ago
          LOL, they should have just used a 10.x space instead if they wanted slightly simpler numbers.

          On the shotgun, or adjacent, I do tend to prefer ammo classes for my nets... 10.22.x.y, where x may be 1, 38, 45, etc. Allows for site to site vpn with friends/family a bit easier to remember.

          • zrobotics 10 hours ago
            I dunno, seems like it could be a bit vague. Does 45 refer to 45 Webley or 45 GAP? Could possibly also refer to 45 Colt I guess, if you're boring. But 45 Colt, 45 ACP, 45 Colt Government?

            Also, just in case this comment isn't pedantic enough, 10.22 would be a firearm range, not an ammo range. And AFAIK they only ever chambered that for .22 rimfire cartridges. ;)

        • jabart 17 hours ago
          Didn't AT&T do that and Cloudflare made them change it when they aquired that space?
          • tracker1 16 hours ago
            I got a "home" Verizon box, and the first thing I did was change the DNS setting... 1.1.1.1 wasn't working, and I wanted to change it back to default. Verizon's tech support are idiots... they literally wouldn't give me the default DNS IP because they were concerned about security.

            Google's DNS worked fine, but Cloudflare's didn't. No idea if they ever fixed it... I'm using it as a backup for my main connection, eventually I'll setup autofailover on my router (OpnSense). For now, I just swap the cables.

            • hackernudes 15 hours ago
              Quantenna used 1.1.1.1 for RPC to their wifi chip in their SDK by default. Should not have been exposed to global routing but of course people screwed that up.

              https://medium.com/@mrtcve/atts-misuse-of-cloudflare-dns-ip-...

            • ethin 12 hours ago
              My ISP won't give me the router credentials because they claim that that would somehow risk their network interconnectivity or something. I have no idea how this makes any sense since a router (shouldn't) give me that level of access, but maybe I'm missing something?
              • bityard 10 hours ago
                If the router is also the modem, it can have diagnostic stuff that could (I am careful to point out: theoretically) cause them a big support headache in one way or another.

                Also, I had a DSL modem back in the day with its own terrible NAT built-in. I managed to log in (I may have been given the admin password from a friend who worked at the ISP, allegedly) and once I put it into bridge mode, I was able to acquire multiple public IPv4 addresses via DHCP.

                • ethin 7 hours ago
                  Really? I didn't know ISP-provided modems could even do that, I assumed they were like routers and isolated to the local network and what the ISP gives them access to. I just wish they would give me more than "well it's for security and it's corporate policy" or something, it just seems like some excuse, and their remedy is "buy your own router" (which isn't an option for me, too expensive).
            • Melatonic 12 hours ago
              Or they didn't want you to know the IP(s) so you could easily block it

              Sounds like they blocked Cloudflare but couldn't block Google

          • ErroneousBosh 15 hours ago
            Funny enough their problems really began in earnest about seven or eight years ago...
        • cyanydeez 17 hours ago
          Sounds like someones on the path to sovereign citizenship. I can't wait for our cyber-sovereign citizenships who deny various IP ranges coming from the government's domain naming system.
        • inigyou 17 hours ago
          Yet another thing ipv6 solves. Yeah you can do the officially supported fdXX:XXXX:XXXX:... but you can also just pick something like 1::1 and it's unlikely to conflict with the current global range.

          If you're gonna do that, though, it's better if you use fd00:... or one of the other assigned ranges so it's still in the standard range. OSes use this as a heuristic for source address selection.

          • Matuzy 17 hours ago
            > Yet another thing ipv6 solves. ... it's unlikely to conflict with the current global range

            I'm not familiar with IPv6's details, could you elaborate on this? To me, this reads like you're saying that IPv6 solves the problem by having low adoption rates rather than an actual function of the protocol.

            • inigyou 16 hours ago
              All global IPv6 addresses start with 2. This is by design. Pedantically, 3 is also reserved for global. Some other prefixes are also reserved, like fd for the ULA (local) range.

              The point of IPv6 was to make the addresses so long they are easy to manage.

              • SV_BubbleTime 16 hours ago
                >The point of IPv6 was to make the addresses so long they are easy to manage.

                lol, there is no doubt that had a massive opposite effect. To the point of nearly killing it in terms of willingness to adopt.

                • tracker1 16 hours ago
                  I know that on my hosted server, I never bothered to set it up, because I didn't know how to properly configure or sub-net it. I know it's skill issue, but really feels significantly more complicated and even harder to understand than NAT even.

                  Not to mention, at home, most of the ads I do see (PiHole) are IPv6 addresses.

                  • DrewADesign 15 hours ago
                    It seems to have absolutely terrible ergonomics as a technology, in nearly every conceivable way.
                    • inigyou 14 hours ago
                      It's literally impossible to avoid long addresses being long or short addresses running out. One of those is a worse problem.
                      • DrewADesign 12 hours ago
                        The length isn’t the only thing that makes the ergonomics suck. The lack of backwards compatibility sucks. The “you don’t have to use NAT anymore” is great theoretically, but it renders a lot of casual network maintainers mental model of network security obsolete without a clear and simple alternative. The shorthand is not intuitive (though it’s not CIDR-level counterintuitive). Really, there’s way too much about working in IPv6 that’s not intuitive with even very solid IPv4 network knowledge.

                        So yeah, having to relearn a bunch of basic network knowledge that worked just fine for decades is a PITA, and I’m 100% positive a design process that focused more on the people that need to configure networks could have yielded a much friendlier, and therefore a much easier to adopt standard.

                        • ndriscoll 9 hours ago
                          Instead of forwarding a port to a specific machine on the NAT page, you allow incoming traffic on that port to that machine on the firewall page. You'll want to add a stable IP to the host (in addition to the SLAAC rotating privacy IP if it already has one. One interface can have multiple addresses). That's pretty much it, except now you can allow the same port to multiple machines, where previously you could only forward to one (helpful for gaming, voip, etc. Wherever p2p works well). Firewall should already default deny incoming traffic just like ipv4.
                          • ssl-3 7 hours ago
                            That sounds easy, but I think you just inadvertently demonstrated the quagmire that many seem to perceive.

                            Suppose I've got a machine on the LAN and I want to open it up to the world on port 1025 with IPv6.

                            This can't happen with SLAAC? It has to be a new address? Does the ISP pick the prefix for that address? And one can't centrally-manage that address (because people keep saying that DHCPv6 isn't worth stuffing around with)? What happens when the router fails over to a backup ISP? How does dynamic DNS fit in with all of this?

                            Those questions don't really exist with IPv4, wherein: One can just set up a static DHCP assignment, forward port 1025, and [optionally] set up dynamic DNS -- and this all happens within the confines of a single home router.

                            • ndriscoll 6 hours ago
                              If it's MAC based SLAAC, it'll be stable, so you could use it. Otherwise you add a stable address. You could use DHCP if you want. If you're using a backup ISP with dynamic DNS, your failover should be the same as ipv4. You can already have ips from both prefixes on the interface. You're also way past clueless home user stage if you have that setup at all, so I can't imagine ipv6 is the stumbling block.

                              Things would be nicer if NAT66 were used by default for home users though so the question of prefixes would disappear, and it'd perhaps match the "more advanced" home user ipv4 mental model. You'd just use e.g. fd00::2 as your server address.

                        • redeeman 11 hours ago
                          you fling around words like "network maintainers" quite casually, dont you? :)

                          its really extremely simple, just dont NAT, is that really so hard? just because you dont NAT, doesnt mean you have to let the traffic pass through, that is also an extremely simple concept, no?

                          • DrewADesign 9 hours ago
                            Fling it around?

                            There are a shitload of people who maintain networks, like home or small business networks, that aren’t network administrators. Most of those people are not prepared to have their Chinese WiFi cameras, myriad smart appliances, and heck, even home computers easily individually accessible from the internet. It’s an extremely simple concept, no?

                            • ssl-3 7 hours ago
                              Lack of NAT doesn't imply lack of firewall, though.

                              And home routers have firewalls that block inbound connections by default -- including with no-NAT IPv6.

                              • DrewADesign 5 hours ago
                                But lots of people want to do things like open up a few ports for a gaming console. You can obviously do it, but the inside network/outside network/poke a hole/simple ip addresses mental model makes it harder for people to just get frustrated and disable it. Of course absolutely nothing is impossible or more difficult from a technical networking perspective using IPv6. People want to learn as little as humanly possible to solve their problems. If the default easiest path is ‘disable the firewall, and suddenly you can use the LAN pvp mode with your 6th grade classmate’ then you better fucking believe that’s exactly what they’re going to do. The “well it’s not really that complicated” perspective is the main reason adoption of user-facing FOSS is lightyears behind commercial options.
                            • LocalH 8 hours ago
                              NAT is good. It's CGNAT that's bad, because that's NAT imposed on subscribers, and not NAT that they control.
                  • unethical_ban 14 hours ago
                    No network is "smaller" than /64. All end-networks are /64.

                    Split subnets at four bit chunks.

                    Allocated networks, like to a home or small office, should be /56 or /60.

                    Then you have to think about link-local addresses and privacy addresses, and how to hand out IPv6 and configure DNS: SLAAC vs. DHCPv6 or some combination.

                    I have a rough draft of a beginner document but it's not ready. :)

                    • zrail 14 hours ago
                      (Pedantically) Maximum prefix length of /64 is only required if you want/need SLAAC. If you're assigning static addresses or using DHCPv6 for assignment you can go as small as you want. It's not weird to see /127 for tunnel subnets, for example.
                      • unethical_ban 14 hours ago
                        I didn't want to encourage non-standard behavior, but you are correct. Tunnels are a common use the same way /31s can be used in IPv4.

                        Going smaller than /64 is against best practice and unnecessary. People coming from IPv4 need to understand that trying to be careful with subnet sizing for purposes of preserving space is not a thing in IPv6 below /64. Maybe if a residential user has a /64 from their crappy ISP settings they'd need to do it, but not in a properly configured scenario and certainly not in enterprise.

                • inigyou 14 hours ago
                  How many /24s does your organisation have? With IPv6, one block is almost always sufficient.
                  • ErroneousBosh 13 hours ago
                    It's mental that my fairly techy-orientated but otherwise pretty standard UK ISP provides me with a /48 as default.

                    So I have 1.2 million million million million IPv6 addresses available.

                    That ought to be enough, eh?

              • ConceptJunkie 15 hours ago
                The point of IPv6 was to make the addresses so long that we don't run out of them in 20 years or so.

                There fixed that for you.

                • ralph84 14 hours ago
                  The problem is NAT solved the same problem more easily and cheaply. It was at the cost of making it difficult for every host to talk directly to every other host, but it turned out most of the people building networks didn't want that feature anyway.
                • inigyou 14 hours ago
                  We already ran out of ipv4 about 15 years AGO.

                  64 bits would be enough to avoid run out, but hierarchical allocation would still be a problem. 128 bits is long enough for many levels of hierarchy. (And yes, you can subnet all the bits, not just the first 64)

            • vitally3643 17 hours ago
              The argument is that IPv6 addresses are UUIDs and any random block is unlikely to collide with any other random address.

              It's not about low adoption, it's that there are unimaginably many IPv6 addresses.

              ...which is a major reason for why it has low adoption

              • Matuzy 16 hours ago
                Thanks for the reply. I'm reminded every now and then of the magnitude of the address space in v6. Then I do nothing with that information and slowly lose appreciation for the size again :)
            • unethical_ban 16 hours ago
              Respectfully I don't think they explained it well.

              fc00::/7 is for "Unique Local Addresses". Basically, private, non-globally-routable addresses from which you can freely pick space. Kind of like RFC1918. It's deliberately huge and you should only use as much from it as you need. The idea being that if you merge with another organization or connect to them via VPN, it's unlikely your addresses will collide like with RFC 1918.

              There's even a website (sites?) to register your ULA space on a volunteer basis to reduce collision chances.

              • inigyou 14 hours ago
                If you can't remember 192.168 you definitely can't remember a randomly picked ULA. So just use fd00. It's not any worse than 192.168.
                • unethical_ban 14 hours ago
                  True, I was thinking more about the allocation discussion than the "easy to remember".

                  Anyone in IT who allocates 1.1.1.0/24 because 192.168.0.0/24 is hard, should be allocated to trash pickup.

          • kowbell 17 hours ago
            "all that 192 stuff was silly and too complicated... but this fd00: stuff is easy peasy!"
            • iso1631 17 hours ago
              192.168.0.0/24 -> fd00:0::/64

              192.168.1.0/24 -> fd00:1::/64

              192.168.2.0/24 -> fd00:2::/64

              192.168.240.0/24 -> fd00:240::/64

              It's not a great idea, but its no harder.

              No need to mess around with setting up DHCP, remembering if your router is top or bottom of the subnet, and if you want 500 devices on a single subnet that's no problem.

              Now if you still need ipv4 then yes, ipv6 is stupid as you have double the pain for none of the gain, but if you are ip6 only then its far easier.

              • ianburrell 4 hours ago
                The proper way to do ULA is to generate random 40-bit ID. Then your ULA are likely unique. Which means that if you want to connect or merge with another company, the networks are distinct.

                IPv4 has a lot of trouble since everyone is using 10/8 space for corporate networks.

              • tracker1 15 hours ago
                One thing I don't appreciate... Is the nature of NAT protected my internal/home network before... now, I have to actually configure firewall settings etc. to protect IPv6 issued addresses internally.

                I know you can just block inbound non-established connections, but it feels like an extra step and complexity. Not to mention, that I really don't understand how IPs are supposed to be provisioned to devices on IPv6. Is there like a 50-100 page book you can recommend "for dummies" on IPv6, that hopefully contains at least a tiny amount of how to configure a common router and/or linux host.

                • tredre3 15 hours ago
                  > Not to mention, that I really don't understand how IPs are supposed to be provisioned to devices on IPv6.

                  SLAAC is the only way that works across all IPV6 devices. In that mode, the router advertises the prefix and the device assigns its own address (prefix + its mac address).

                  DHCPv6 exists but is poorly supported. It sucks for people who like assigning IPs individually from an authoritative place (through static dhcp entries on the router). But people like us are "doing it wrong", you see? We must accept that in this brave new worlds an IP means nothing.

                  • tracker1 14 hours ago
                    Which doubly sucks in terms of assigning a DNS name to an IP/PC... and/or opening the assignment to less restricted access... feels just problematic to me.

                    Again, I don't know any of IPv6 enough to use it really right or wrong.

                  • inigyou 14 hours ago
                    And there's always static configuration, useful for servers.
              • SV_BubbleTime 16 hours ago
                I doubt any endpoints are entirely ipv6.

                So it seems like it helps ISPs and large networks router… but they never had problems with address space running out at the high levels and almost all likely need to support v4 anyhow.

                I think it’s been long enough to be honest that ipv6 was a spectacular failure by complicating an already complicated system into something no one actually asked for.

                No human said “hey, networking sucks. Please make it much harder at my level!!”.

                • toast0 14 hours ago
                  > I doubt any endpoints are entirely ipv6.

                  Lte and 5G can be v6 only, usually they also have NAT64 and DNS64 so you can get everywhere, but the less stuff that needs v4, the smaller their nat boxes are.

                • tracker1 15 hours ago
                  I'm largely with you... I would think they'd take the IPv4 block and have a direct/virtual block that just extends it to more addresses... so it could be an IPv4 NAT or IPv6 direct.

                  like 1.1.1.1/192.168.45.4 ... for a router that understands IPv6, that's the direct route to the sub-network, otherwise it will have to use IPv4, and the subnet route is treated as NAT and otherwise isolated.

                  To me, that would make more sense... then internal IPv6 might be practically limited to 10. and 102.168. in the nearer term, but adoption would be MUCH simpler in practice, and distribution would mostly already be established, however unfairly, but can then be broken into single addresses and vNext adoption could be that much quicker as a result of piggybacking.

                  • ianburrell 3 hours ago
                    An alternate to IPv6 would have been to store the NAT addresses in IPv4 somehwere. But the IPv4 options are fragile and normal NAT would likely destroy them. It would still require rewriting all of the networking and software. It would have engrained NAT everywhere and made lots of routing problems, like is that your or mine 10. network.
                  • pbhjpbhj 8 hours ago
                    >limited to 10. and 102.168

                    I assume you meant 10.x.x.x and 192.168.x.x -- (and 172.16.x.x?), ie the standard subnets for home router-modems (which are non-routing and so can't be used on the internet).

            • Multicomp 13 hours ago
              Agreed 100%! I know there's tough challenges to making this reality, but if https://serverspace.io/about/blog/ipv8-explained-what-we-kno... could be an IRL thing, I would buy company network equipment and use computer OSes that supported this draft standard.

              It's a much better compromise and ergonomics to migrate from IPv4 to an IPv4 respecting successor, where IPv6 is just the academic snobbery and utterly alien mental model for not-enough benefits.

              For the same reason Unix stuck around and beat up its own successor Plan 9/inferno. That inertia even decades later is the same reason IPv4 still beats IPv6.

              IPv8 is more of a linux to unix than a plan 9.

            • inigyou 16 hours ago
              you can use 1234 if you want, that's also unused space
      • makr17 16 hours ago
        I used to work somewhere that did that. Several of us in Eng pointed out that it was likely impossible to sell anything to DoD personnel since the reply would route internally. But I don't know if it was _fixed_, was still an issue when I left.
      • bflesch 18 hours ago
        This will trip up most SOC workflows in funny ways, and I like it.

        IPs having a global distinction between public/private is a convention, but local routing can widely differ.

        Same with the "China Cyberattacks" - the guys sitting on top of my outgoing fiber can simulate any IP address they want to me.

      • kotaKat 18 hours ago
        there's a couple subnets I (ab)use in the DOD IP space for my home network knowing they'd never put them on the open internet. it's also fun to throw logging for a loop if someone digs.

        22.0.0.0/8 - it's basically free real estate!

        • walrus01 17 hours ago
          the entirety of 10/8 and 172.16/12 and 192.168/16 wasn't large enough for your house?
          • xoa 17 hours ago
            >the entirety of 10/8 and 172.16/12 and 192.168/16 wasn't large enough for your house?

            Just to chime in agreeing with sibling comments, the issue is when it's not about just your house and you're deep into self-hosted stuff with a lot of different properties and businesses other people's houses all sharing resources. Without a lot of coordination and consideration, which in practice doesn't really happen easily given the adhoc nature such things tend to organically develop out of, and all the random stuff that wants specific addresses at least for setup, it actually gets pretty easy to run into collisions. Allocations typically are definitely inefficient in many respects but also made sense in the context they were first done and of course can be a certain amount of effort to change.

            In an ideal world I sorta feel like "IPv6" should have been more along the lines of <12 octet prefix>:<IPv4>, everyone gets a prefix or set of prefixes that they actually own and are consistent worldwide, or at least only change when geographic location changes, and then can just have the entire 32-bit IPv4 space for LAN however they want. Then you only have to care about prefix between LANs and it could all be extremely automated, internally you only need to use something that looks like IPv4 with the network hardware transparently able to handle prefixes for WAN. Backwards compatibility story would be a lot more straight forward too. Oh well.

            @kotaKat: that's a great idea and I don't know why I forgot I played with that like 15 years ago. Really handy as a backup space that almost certainly won't collide with any commercial hardware at least.

          • ErroneousBosh 17 hours ago
            I work for a large organisation that has various blocks scattered around 10./8, some with highish values for the second octet and some with lowish values, so say 10.129.0.x/24 and 10.3.0.x/24 to pick just two out of a couple of thousand.

            But one of our vendor networks uses 10.32.x.x/32 for various radio gateways, and the radios themselves all locally expose (this is where I give away too big a clue as to what I do) 10.0.0.101 as a management address that emits important link status data.

            So you can imagine what a godawful bùrach everyone's routing tables are.

          • kotaKat 17 hours ago
            i deal with a lot of nerds that are all interconnected with one another and nobody can agree on a common subnet for their houses when we all decide to exchange routes internally. ;)
            • myself248 14 hours ago
              I deal with a lot of nerds, but starting in about 2008 we all segmented up the 10.x space and each of us has a /16, with each site we manage having typically a /24 or /22, so nobody overlaps. We can light up tunnels between each other and never have a collision. We have a little internal registry on a private wiki, and it's been serving us well for... oh dear, almost two decades now.

              Crucially, we set aside the common 10.1 and 10.10 ranges as nonroutable, so any devices that default into those have to be dealt with before they can live on the wider network.

              Newcomers get handed a block and have to renumber, or NAT into it, or whatever, but they cannot emit bogons. At a small scale (first-name basis), this works.

        • cryptonym 18 hours ago
          I have seen ISP doing CGNAT on DOD IP space.
        • bityard 10 hours ago
          The CGNAT space (100.64.0.0/10) is also free real estate for container virtual/overlay networks when you don't want to (or can't, thanks to IT) use the RFC-1918 subnets.
        • webstrand 15 hours ago
          I also do this, except 7.0.0.0/8 instead. Its great for not conflicting with hotel wifi dhcp.
    • walrus01 17 hours ago
      > Note to self: never buy a Korean security product.

      The Canadian Navy very recently made a major choice and agreed with you

      https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=hanwha+oc...

    • edwinjm 12 hours ago
      The DoWD owns such a large chunk of the IP space, it can very easily be a coincidence
      • antonvs 5 hours ago
        That they used a public IP as an internal IP? That’s simply a mistake.
    • dev_l1x_be 17 hours ago
      Or Korean IoT products. The ones I was working on had insane approach to security.
    • RajT88 16 hours ago
      As if domestic products aren't a hot mess of security issues and sloppy engineering. Lol
    • KPGv2 15 hours ago
      > Department of War

      n.b., it's the Department of Defense, just like the Kennedy Center doesn't have Trump's name attached, and the large body of water by Texas is the Gulf of Mexico.

      • BLKNSLVR 5 hours ago
        100% correct

        DoW is a nickname if anything. I'm surprised Hegseth hasn't requested 'Secretary' get nick-named to something more masculine sounding.

    • lardosaurusrex 17 hours ago
      just buy stuff you can put your own firmware/os on because it's either just the worst security in the world (aka anything not from china) or, well... china.

      and while i currently don't hate china as much as i do US rn (because canadian; sorry) i can also say -- due to being an aforementioned leaflandian -- that due to very personal experience i have zero faith in anything from china that has the ability to connect to any type of network :')

      And so yeah at this point if I can't at the very least get a whatever-wrt firmware (preferably a proper linux distro nowadays; not to say the *-wrt firmwares aren't a real OS but, y'know) on the device i just avoid them entirely since, well... it's all i can do at this point because even if there were baked in hardware-based backdoors i as an individual can't do much more than that.

      • prox 16 hours ago
        That sounds horrible. I got an old PI4, would it make for a decent router, if at all possible?
        • myself248 14 hours ago
          It's not quite ideal hardware due to only having a single NIC, but you can slap a USB NIC on it and make it work, if that's what's handy.

          Old thin clients are typically in the same hardware class, and probably cheaper by the time you add the exploding MSRP of a Pi, and a PSU, and a case and heatsink, and maybe some storage that doesn't suck ass. But if you already own the Pi, yeah, go for it.

    • kingleopold 17 hours ago
      Note to self: never buy any Korean hardware or software product.

      /S

      • walrus01 16 hours ago
        Note to self, never buy any hardware product, move to a yurt in the woods, start an alpaca ranch, write a manifesto
        • zrobotics 10 hours ago
          Oldie, bur relevant.

          Tech enthusiasts: My entire house is smart.

          Tech workers: The only piece of technology in my house is a printer and I keep a gun next to it so I can shoot it if it makes a noise I don’t recognize

  • dev_l1x_be 17 hours ago
    Not surprised, many of these vendors are doing crazy things, insane defaults, broken security, hardcoded values. Security is not a priority, I get that, but at the very least some baseline check would be nice (no hardcoded credentials for starting)
    • snoman 17 hours ago
      As they say: in IoT the S stands for security.
    • folkrav 16 hours ago
      There’s some irony to security not being a priority for security cameras. Different kind of security I know, but still.
      • daneel_w 16 hours ago
        There's also some irony in people happily ignoring that so many of these products live-stream the inside view of their homes and offices to some foreign corporate cloud - and in the case of suspiciously many Chinese security cameras, a state-backed corporation's cloud. Because, wow, it really is convenient.
        • glitchcrab 10 hours ago
          Which is exactly why alll my cameras live in their own VLAN with no internet access, regardless of how trustworthy the company may be. Better safe than sorry and all that.
    • awakeasleep 15 hours ago
      How can there be a baseline check when you operate by getting the most inexperienced cheapest person possible to do the work?
    • gxs 13 hours ago
      Especially these days there’s really no excuse

      Add a skill to your repo that does some basic checks at least, not that hard

  • tehlike 16 hours ago
    A rule of thumb, put your cameras on a separate VLAN and never give that vlan internet access.

    Least you can do.

  • RyJones 19 hours ago
    When I cared, I found out that a lot of OBD-II dongles shipped with the same MAC, which gave you access to everything on a bunch of websites.

    You can curse the storm, but the wind will come.

    • netsharc 18 hours ago
      how did "same MAC" lead to "access to everything"?

      Was the website's security based on MAC, which presumably is supplied by the client? If so, I guess.. typical IoT.

      • RyJones 18 hours ago
        buy any dongle that sells for under $100 on amazon. they all have the same mac, and come with 'bespoke' apps to let you do things to your car. those apps are all thin wrappers on code widely shared; they use the MAC of the dongle as the keystone for ID.

        Short story: buy one cheap dongle on Amazon, dump the MAC (00:11:22:AA:BB:CC IIRC; it's been 15 years since I cared) and you have auth to all of the apps everywhere.

        Reminder: the Bluetooth logo comes, mostly, from self-certification.

        • andreareina 17 hours ago
          Amazing! I have the same MAC address on my luggage!
        • londons_explore 17 hours ago
          I bought 3 from 3 different vendors and they all have totally different Mac addresses.

          Internally they're all Bluetooth to serial chips, and another pic16xxxx chip which does serial to canbus.

          I guess the Bluetooth serial chips probably have programmable Mac addresses, but equally they normally ship with a globally default one unless you flash a different one onto it.

        • inigyou 17 hours ago
          Why do the apps need auth?
      • 1718627440 14 hours ago
        How does this even work? A website doesn't know your MAC, that is only known in your local network.
  • salvador-odil 1 hour ago
    what a good blog to read. Have you found answer on why they use the same token across these bunch of files? Maybe they are tying to adopt the agentic code writing? One interesting questions, what does that gh token give access to? It is only read from private repo, is not it? You said "admin" privileges earlier.
  • Kim_Bruning 3 hours ago
    I generally run security cameras on a separate VLAN and use something like frigate or other floss dvr tool for them to talk to.

    Never let a cheap networked security camera touch the actual internet. %-/

  • pak9rabid 14 hours ago
    Perhaps they should just drop the 'security' from the name and simply call it a camera.
  • sodapopcan 16 hours ago
    This blog's misuse of the external link icon irks me.
    • kyle-rb 15 hours ago
      The CSS selector they used (`a[href*="://"]::after`) is meant to only target only external links, but assumes any internal links will be using relative paths like `href="/about"`. The problem is that this site uses absolute URLs (`href="https://hhh.hn/about"`) for its nav links, so every link ends up with an icon.

      You could fix this by adding an exception to the CSS rule so it skips links starting with your site's name:

        a[href*="://"]:not([href^="https://hhh.hn"])::after
      • AlienRobot 15 hours ago
        rel="external" solves this.
    • hhh 15 hours ago
      will fix it tomorrow
  • IshKebab 17 hours ago
    LLMs have truly killed obfuscation. It only worked previously by making things extremely tedious but AI doesn't care about that.
    • llm_nerd 17 hours ago
      And it's worth considering that obfuscation only ever worked against casuals for whom tedious was a bridge too far. Nation state actors and criminal hacker groups, on the other hand, consider the tedious entirely worth it.
      • phh 17 hours ago
        Yes, obfuscation was always a matter of cost: how much money do you need to break the protection? LLM just decreased that amount by a lot.

        (Yes ok, RSA4096 is technically a matter of cost, you just need an infinite amount of money)

        • TeMPOraL 14 hours ago
          All security is always a matter of cost. Clown theater starts once you lose track of it, and start doing security for security's sake.

          RE obfuscation and nation states - nation states have finite budgets too, both in terms of resources and attention. They can crack any system at any time, but they can't afford to crack all of the systems all of the time.

        • jaggederest 15 hours ago
          The cool thing about cryptographic security is that it's an asymmetric amount of cost for both parties - to encode is cheap, to break is many orders of magnitude harder, unlike obfuscation where the difficulty is approximately symmetrical.
      • inigyou 17 hours ago
        Pirates checked Denuvo, once considered the king of DRM.
      • walrus01 17 hours ago
        > consider the tedious entirely worth it.

        Entirely without LLMs, I'm imagining an office of North Korean compsci graduates doing astonishingly tedious tasks, for whom an office job on a basic Linux computer and slightly better diet and nice apartment put them in the top 1-2% of living standard in the country.

    • p-e-w 17 hours ago
      On the bright side, even a small local LLM can easily improve garbage code like that.
      • orbital-decay 16 hours ago
        I'm 100% confident in hardware companies' ability to make infinitely incompetent software given infinitely smart agents. They do it because they don't care about software, not because they lack tools. No agent can turn them into software companies if they don't want it themselves.
  • whalesalad 18 hours ago
    I bought some ambient room lighting recently. You cannot control them without a proprietary app. This bugged me ... so I grabbed an APK from the Google store, unpacked it, and found essentially keys to the kingdom: api keys for the backend, api keys for shopify, etc. Haven't done anything with this knowledge yet.
    • Ecsta 17 hours ago
      There's a lot of public keys that don't give you any special access, unless the dev is really bad.

      Anyone who cares about security will be using App Attest or the Google store equivalent.

      • JTbane 17 hours ago
        >Anyone who cares about security

        I have something hilarious to tell you about IoT apps

        • tclancy 17 hours ago
          A Venn diagram like a 6th grade boy's graffiti of boobs.
          • dhosek 15 hours ago
            Just as a pedantic aside, people often use Venn diagram when they mean Euler diagram. A Venn diagram always has the overlapping circles and use shading or labeling describe the set relation. Euler diagrams let the circles describe the relation so two non intersecting sets in a Venn diagram might share the left circle green, the right blue and leave the intersection blank or grey. An Euler diagram will have two disjoint circles.
            • tclancy 9 hours ago
              A. I love a pedantic aside

              B. I love that Euler is pronounced “oiler” which is North American slang for a drunk. I’ve been trying to find that constant my whole adult life.

        • sophacles 16 hours ago
          The "S" in IoT stands for security!
          • yako21000 15 hours ago
            That one made me giggle!
        • cute_boi 15 hours ago
          Most of these companies try to penny pinch and give task to hardware engineer. As a result there are lot of security issues with IOT devices.
      • CodesInChaos 15 hours ago
        > Anyone who cares about security will be using App Attest or the Google store equivalent.

        Why? I rarely have security objectives where remote attention would help, and it has a huge impact on user freedom. For B2C attestation is just an evil captcha.

    • zrobotics 9 hours ago
      Ugh, that's a new low. I can't think of a single good reason a lighting app would need shopify api access.

      That said, I've done some consulting work on shopify stores, and I wouldn't be shocked at all to see something like that at all. The bar for code quality that a lot of low end consultants/designers deliver is just abysmal.

    • vhiremath4 6 hours ago
      What lights did you get? I have Oasis. Love them but same thing would rather control them through a central bot or something.
    • tehlike 16 hours ago
      Another rule of thumb - i know it's not always the best since some products are really nice aesthetically - is to buy only local smart stuff, for example, zigbee/zwave.
      • petepete 16 hours ago
        I live by this rule*. Being able to pick up stuff from IKEA that's well supported, well designed and really affordable is a huge advantage.

        *almost, I have two things that need an app. My Vaillant boiler and my Yale alarm system. Both apps are terrible, but I have a 10 year warranty on the boiler and my alarm is up to scratch from a home insurance point of view.**

        • tehlike 16 hours ago
          Yale alarm? Can you link?

          Vailant boiler - I wonder if there's a debug interface you can use. Not knowing specifics of your model, i foudn this: https://github.com/jayme-github/esphome_vaillant

          Codex can help probably further heh.

          • petepete 15 hours ago
            It's a Yale Sync

            https://yalehome.co.uk/yale-sync-hub

            It's not really something I want 'home rolled', I just want it to work.

            Same goes for the boiler really. If it stops working I can phone Valliant and they'll send someone round to fix it.

    • dev_l1x_be 17 hours ago
      In many cases it is bad to publish this info because they might come after you. There used to be a company who shielded the “researcher” from the legal consequences, can’t remember the name though.
    • inigyou 17 hours ago
      Everything can be controlled without a proprietary app. Hope you reverse engineer the protocol and publish how to do it.
      • tehlike 16 hours ago
        Or claude/codex can.
    • fragmede 16 hours ago
      Have you actually tried to do anything with them though? The keys are in there, but may not grant you any real extra access beyond what your user is actually allowed to do via the app.
      • avgDev 16 hours ago
        It is still pretty nice, you don't have to install yet another app to do something. People did this with Mazda app as it allowed them to start the car without subscription. They 'fixed' it.
    • inisirex 16 hours ago
      [flagged]
  • jwithington 15 hours ago
    I've seen these systems at US defense industry tradeshows so I'm guessing they are in use somewhere.
  • dare944 13 hours ago
    > Why would Hanwha Vision need anything remotely related to the DoD? Is it possible that their CI is provided by some centralized team at their parent company Hanwha, where the needs of their sister company Hanwha Aerospace cause the shared platform to have these entries in the CI environment variables? Or maybe because of their other sister company, Hanwha Defense USA, where they make other large scary steel machines

    Or... the Department of Warmongers (nee DoD) addresses on the device are evidence of a supply-side attack targeting the DoW and carried out using the aforementioned github admin token.

    ... I mean, while we're in here speculating about truffles and all.

  • ButlerianJihad 5 hours ago
    Back in the mid-1990s, I was working at an ISP and also at a consulting firm. The consulting firm's #1 business at the time was to get businesses connected to the Internet, where these businesses already had significant LAN buildouts.

    Now these were the days before IANA had officially assigned those "Private IP Network" numbers. Nobody had any private IPv4 space to work with! So the choices consisted of: make up some numbers and hope they don't conflict, or go ahead and register your IPv4 space and get public netblocks assigned, even if you're just using them privately.

    So, needless to say, we encountered some bonkers configurations, and a lot of our job was undoing some really awful configurations in order to make them compliant with actual Internet connectivity, and so that different office LANs would interoperate properly.

    We were also big advocates of security, firewalls, and the venerable "DMZ/Bastion" setups from back in the day, so those Private IP Network assignments would've been really useful, along with NAT, but we simply didn't have those tools at our disposal, and our clients were basically registering huge IPv4 blocks that they really didn't need to ever use.

  • asveikau 15 hours ago
    My cameras are analog rather than PoE or IP based, but that's just because I set up the initial iteration of the system a long time ago. The standard now is to give your camera an IP address.

    With many IoT type things I block access to the public internet. I think with cameras specifically a lot of people even set it up physically on a different network that can only talk to the NVR.

    But tldr, basing the cameras on IP invites some of the things in this article. Anyone deploying these devices needs to think about securing them.

  • bryanrasmussen 11 hours ago
    it's not a bug, it's a freebie!
  • kiddico 15 hours ago
    I have yet to find a pattern for when the author chooses to capitalize things.
  • limsungkee 14 hours ago
    This kind of open source expands the world.
  • hexxt-git 15 hours ago
    true open source!
  • qweqwe14 14 hours ago
    Why would you write like that? Not capitalizing the first word of a sentence makes the whole thing less readable. So that you can feel special? Really?
    • explorigin 14 hours ago
      Who hurt you? It's his own blog. Let him write the way he wants.
  • David_runai 11 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • joka88xj 16 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • hnscum 14 hours ago
    [dead]
  • that_guy_iain 17 hours ago
    I bet someone returned that security camera.
    • mikey_p 16 hours ago
      No, if you read the article the author was downloading firmware from their website and still found the token.
  • aizk 17 hours ago
    Department of War IP address? I feel this should be making headlines!
    • CodesInChaos 16 hours ago
      Abusing IP ranges which were assigned to an organization but aren't actually used on the public Internet as private addresses is pretty common. Sure, it's bad practice, but not a big deal.
      • TeMPOraL 13 hours ago
        Of course this looks entirely different when your corporate superstructure has a long and active history of developing military equipment.
  • caruasdo 16 hours ago
    I know you're a mastermind when it comes to security, but you should provide more context about the tools and methods you're using in your article so we can better understand what it's all about and not have to Google every single step you're taking.
    • dust-jacket 15 hours ago
      Oh I thought exactly the opposite!

      I feel like every security blog (or even just tech blog) I've read recently has had paragraphs and paragraphs of largely LLM generated explainer waffle. This felt refreshingly focused and to the point.

    • hhh 15 hours ago
      i’m not a mastermind, and I agree it could be more accessible. I treat this blog as somewhere to just dump my thoughts as unfiltered as I can while still being useful or entertaining, maybe for some other posts I will go more into depth
    • sophacles 16 hours ago
      Seemed perfectly reasonable to me. Not everything has to be written for a target audience that includes you, besides you were able to look up what you needed it seems. Another tactic is to feed the article to your favorite LLM and interrogate it about what you don't understand.