The 'Million Dollar Sighting' contest will reward people for putting up cameras in their home and capturing irrefutable proof of extraterrestrials.
  • dark_stang@beehaw.orgEnglish
    43·
    9 months ago

    Ah yes, a doorbell camera with an effective distance of 5 meters (about 16 freedom feet) is definitely gonna create proof of extraterrestrials visiting.

  • frog 🐸@beehaw.orgEnglish
    24·
    9 months ago

    My security camera has been picking up a lot of really weird creatures wandering around recently. They seem more playful and curious than dangerous, although some of them definitely seem quite destructive.

    The government says these creatures are called “children”, and they’ve known about their presence on this planet for some time. 👁️

      • frog 🐸@beehaw.orgEnglish
        10·
        9 months ago

        I hear that solution works for pretty much all strange and/or unidentified phenomena, including clouds and darkly coloured delivery drivers? Shooting things is truly the answer to so many of life’s problems.

  • mctoasterson@reddthat.com
    17·
    9 months ago

    Apart from the warrantless video surveillance it is even more insidious than that. Read up on Amazon Sidewalk. Amazon is trying to grow its Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) mesh network. The exact details of how it works are of course proprietary and black box. But what we do know is it can amount to a side network that isn’t transparent to the actual owner of the device, nor can you manage or block any of the traffic at your router (its a discrete network). You can opt your devices out manually, which I would recommend doing if you actually use any Ring or Echo products.

    • Link.wav [he/him]@beehaw.org
      10·
      9 months ago

      Amazon Sidewalk

      I just looked it up. How extremely creepy. My brother just put some ring cameras in his house. I’ll show him how to disable this tomorrow. It’s just evil that it’s not opt-in.

      Every day, I feel better about my decision to quit Prime and distance myself from this awful corporation.

    • meseek #2982
      10·
      9 months ago

      These are the same guys being sued by the FTC for basically creating a massive surveillance network to price fix the internet? But how can their cameras be bad??? /s

  • Crotaro@beehaw.org
    16·
    9 months ago

    That’s crazy! The rules of the contest are so hard to enforce in favour of contestants, let alone the whole issue of pressuring people into installing cameras that automatically send footage to police and probably Amazon as well.

    I really hope a team of VFX artists (who already has cameras installed anyway, so no additional cost for them) makes incredibly convincing footage and somehow makes it look like it was part of the raw camera capture.

        • jarfil@beehaw.org
          6·
          9 months ago

          Technically, “automatically” would mean it gets sent all the time, while “without consent” would mean it might’ve got sent on request, just without consent.

          • Crotaro@beehaw.org
            3·
            9 months ago

            Fair enough. In both cases, it’s without the camera “owner” consenting, and that’s the main problem.

          • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
            2·
            9 months ago

            “Automatically” would be a perfectly reasonable word choice if a request from the police is granted without interaction. In all honesty even if a human has to send it, if the process doesn’t allow them any kind of autonomy or authority to decline the request, that probably qualifies, too.

            • jarfil@beehaw.org
              2·
              9 months ago

              Hm, I guess you’re right. That’s an interesting reflection on the concept of “automation”.

              • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
                1·
                9 months ago

                I think automated means “no human”. I don’t think automatic necessarily does, especially if humans don’t have agency.

        • Devi@beehaw.orgEnglish
          2·
          9 months ago

          As Jarfil said, it’s not automatically doing anything. The police can get a court order to get footage. It’s only given in very limited circumstances, like if the owner goes missing, or the camera might have spotted a significant crime, and it’s not just ring but basically anything. If you are suspected of a serious crime police can get your internet browsing history, they can bug your house, they can dig through your bins, and yes, can request the clips taken by your ring camera.

          It’s happened 11 times this year. That shows how rarely courts give these orders.

          The idea that Ring is some evil thing that’s doing anything different is just scaremongering.

  • shiveyarbles@beehaw.org
    12·
    9 months ago

    I am concerned about the government seeing my gf, who’s a model, visiting me from Canada in between shoots

  • plistig@feddit.de
    6·
    9 months ago

    Are there any doors around Loch Ness in need of a door bell? Could solve some questions!

  • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
    5·
    9 months ago

    lol they’re not even willing to stake the million dollar prize they definitely won’t have to pay with a lump sum payment. It’s actually 50k x 20 years.