You’re being pretty stubborn about your positions but you’re misinformed/ignorant.

There are SO many Wi-Fi access points that aren’t routers, but a combo router is what most home users buy or get from their ISP. So that’s what you think is “most” when in reality the consumer market is dwarfed by commercial.

TP-Link has Omada which is not as enterprise as CISCO but it definitely supports small and medium sized businesses, which are at the greatest risk to vulnerabilities due to low IT department skills.

Until ads are responsible and don’t carry risks of injecting malware and trackers, I will block them without prejudice.

Even back in the day they would try to hijack your browser, redirect you to some random page, destroy ability of your back button to take you out, and throw up a ton of popups.

I don’t think blocking them is an asshole move until ads are served responsibly, without threatening my security or privacy. When, and if, that day ever arrives I will stop blocking them because I understand that most sites subsist solely off ad revenue, at least in this current Internet model we live with.

You don’t NEED tap to pay. I literally never use it, ever, unless I have a card with a bad chip (happened once).

Forgetting your wallet like a dummy doesn’t mean you NEED tap to pay, it means you need to remember to bring your wallet.

Also, there is nothing you NEED the Costco app for, an org like that can’t lock things behind an app to function because their customer base is too broad, they will inevitably have old people with T9 Nokia bricks still. It might have been the most convenient way to achieve it, but it’s not a requirement - even if that particular sales associate didn’t know how and would have to phone a friend.

All that to say I’m not trying to convince you to use gOS; I fully recognize that security is on one end of the spectrum from convenience, and we all choose where we want to be on that spectrum. But I felt the need to counter your claims… Nobody NEEDS tap to pay smh. If you care about privacy at all you wouldn’t be linking cards to apple or Google, adding yet another layer of giant data collection to some of your most intimate data.

Out of curiosity, do you know how many people opt not to get them? USA has a growing prevalence of vaccine hesitancy/anti science that gets concentrated amongst regions/social groups. It’s an issue IMO because you get areas with low herd immunity, but if we didn’t have that problem and the vast majority of people were on board then having them be voluntary wouldn’t be an issue to me. In the current state of affairs I think it’s too dangerous to have them be voluntary in the USA.

Sounds to me like you need better pans that don’t have paper thin ass bottoms

Wireless cameras offer an easier vector for people to get into your camera feeds. Biggest risk to this is a poorly secured network in the first place, but the risk is still there.

Also, wireless is going to be inherently a worse quality video stream, and constant video traffic being sent over your Wi-Fi bogs down your entire network.

All that being said Wi-Fi cameras are just fine and as long as you have strong Wi-Fi security you’re really not at a real risk unless someone very savvy is specifically targeting you, in which case you’ve got bigger problems.

I have probably a dozen cheap wireless cameras in my house (to keep an eye on pets) and I have them spaced over two access points and honestly I don’t notice a difference on my Wi-Fi at all, but I’m sure it’s worse than if I didn’t have them. All my exterior cameras are wired, but that’s more because I want better quality streams and I’m running a wire anyways so might as well be PoE. Only exterior wireless camera I have is my doorbell but that’s because I didn’t want to run a new wire to it.

Overall wired cameras are much better quality, but they’re not as convenient. Make the decision for yourself based off of your priorities. Real tough to get a wireless camera with the fidelity needed to capture license plates clearly, but if you don’t need that then why worry about whether your gear can achieve it or not?

There’s no reason to try and salvage a ring camera. Their business model is subscriptions and data collection; I’m not aware of any projects to flash them with custom firmware, and my guess is they’re locked down hard to prevent it because that’s their entire revenue model, you’re free to keep looking but I’d bet it’s a dead end or at the very least much more than an afternoon project.

Get a Wi-Fi reolink and connect it to an ONVIF capable NVR. You can use a paid solution like blue iris on a Windows machine or there’s plenty of free options for any OS of your choice. You can probably directly access the feed by navigating to the camera IP but I’m not sure, I don’t use mine that way. Without some kind of NVR software you won’t get a lot of the features people like such as notifications and two way talk, object/person recognition, etc.

Is this a troll post?

-OP doesn’t specify model

-if you are even considering flashing it that means you can remove and modify it

-change Wi-Fi password and don’t reconnect it

-smash it and install a normal doorbell or something else that isn’t spyware

What am I even reading here

Don’t take it personally. You think your neighbor wants to record you and your dog specifically? I mean, it’s possible, but it’s likely they just want to be able to see who comes to their door, or have a general idea of what’s going on around their house. I have my locally hosted reolink doorbell set to trigger on zones if things enter my driveway or approach my door, because that’s what I care about. I get a bunch of crap with kids playing in the street running onto my property, people’s dogs straying off the sidewalk, and the occasional vehicle turning around. But I also figured out what kids were doing dong dashing, and have record of what deliveries were suplexed WWE style onto my doormat so I can more easily handle stuff damaged in shipping.

If you hear some crazy shit outside you probably get up and look out the window, don’t you? Well, a camera means you can go back and see what happened all the time. It’s a no brainer why people want them now that they’re cheap and accessible.

Most people don’t have any idea how bad cloud cameras are for overall society, and they’ll probably roll their eyes and think you’re crazy if you try to dive into that conversation with them out the gate.

They’re legally within their rights to do what they’re doing, so you can dislike it all you want but there’s not much you can do about it without some pretty diplomatic conversations. And a passive aggressive note left about them watching you and your dog isn’t going to help your case, at ALL. First you’ll have to become friends with them so they trust you, then find a way to educate them and change their minds.

Honestly? It can’t, really. There’s some very accessible things people can do on the user side such as good password management practices, but even something as “simple” as firewall rules quickly devolves into technical stuff that most people have no idea how to deal with.

The reality is that the Internet, computers, applications are all incredibly complicated. How they interconnect is incredibly complicated, and the vast majority of people don’t even understand what an IP address is, what the function of DNS is, what a MAC address is and how it’s different than an IP address, etc. So, you can maybe point them to a guide that they can follow to set up wireguard to access their music folder when they’re out, maybe, but since every network is different, how do you make sure they’re setting it up securely without copying and pasting routes that make them less secure? You have to understand what you’re doing to be able to see if in a specific use case you’re not causing an issue.

I dunno. This is a really tough nut to crack. There’s no “guide to learning cyber security.” If you know nothing and want to learn more, you just have to learn about networking, Linux, firewalls, active directory, everything.

If you’re looking for something incremental all you’ll find is incremental learning of specific things. Like, look up the LPI Linux Essentials study guide if you want to just learn some Linux stuff. Then spin up a bunch of VMs of different distros to play with, and look at some other Linux stuff. And more Linux stuff, until you feel like you understand Linux pretty well. But, that doesn’t make you good at cyber security… Because there’s so much more than just knowing Linux. So no, there’s no incremental guide for what you’re looking for - you just have to learn many things, and you can come from whatever direction you want to start from.

If you want to learn safely then just don’t expose anything to the Internet. Keep it all local, and yeah you might introduce some insecure setups or applications, but you’re not really under any more threat of network intrusion than if you never started. That sucks though because we want to access our shit from outside the house, right? But that’s the choice, if you want to stay more secure until you’re more educated. And yeah, honestly it’s kind of undergraduate qualification level to start understanding things well enough. Sorry, that’s just the reality I think.

Best option is to recommend people self host their camera feeds. People aren’t going to give cameras up, myself included, but keeping it all out of the ring/nest/netvue or any other cloud system is the way to go.

People can record in public, and that includes the area around their houses. Having 100s of thousands or millions of cameras sharing feeds with law enforcement for warrantless surveillance or corporate data hounds for more people tracking is the issue.

This is a blanket statement that doesn’t really hold up.

Commercial off the shelf cloud service based smart home = control over you.

Fully self hosted smart home = control over your house.

Oh it’s definitely easier if it’s on Wi-Fi. I mean, ask 20 people on the street if they even know what zigby is and you’re gonna get 20 blank stares.

But for people who are into this type of thing either to regain control of their networks, to optimize their networks, or both - it’s objectively the better choice in most ways other than easy mode adoption.

Personally I have a TON of small Wi-Fi devices that are constantly transmitting (cheap interior cameras for keeping an eye on pets all over the house - all my security cameras are hard wired) so I try to limit new Wi-Fi traffic onto the net if I can help it.

It’s more about having fewer devices on Wi-Fi network IMO.

Until Wi-Fi 5, only one device could talk on Wi-Fi at a time, and even with 5+ the number of devices is limited by a ton of factors, so the more devices you have chattering the slower everything gets as devices wait their turn to speak, have collisions, time out, try to speak again, etc.

You can mitigate this through several different methods, but removing randomly transmitting devices will always be a benefit.

Zwave, zigby, all of those all operate in a different band so it’s better for your internet connection to wireless devices if you can offload stuff into those ranges.

No. But they’re really inexpensive and link up to people’s Amazon accounts so it’s easy to manage your books, if you are a person who likes to use Amazon for that.

I’ve had two Kindles, the first was before they had touch screens, and I loved it (this was a long, long time ago). Even with the hard case eventually I broke the screen after many years of travel and use, and hated the one I replaced it with. Awful piece of garbage, I wanted to return it and get one with physical buttons but they didn’t make them any more and I was too lazy to do second hand searching. I’ve never used Amazon to buy e books but I got a lot of free ones over the years (mostly cookbooks) and it was handy to be able to just download them directly to the device, but I prefer to manage books over USB and that always worked fine.

E-ink is amazing. Battery life lasts for ages, which really is what you want for a dedicated reader. There’s other types on the market, but it’s hard to compete with Amazon’s prices and feature set - especially because they sell ones that are ad-supported and that REALLY drives the prices down for people that are willing to have their lock screen be an ad that goes away when they wake the device, which is an easy compromise for most.

My Kindle just collected dust now, I use a supernote as a note taker and I use it for ebooks also. It was about $500 USD - granted it does way, way more than a Kindle, but yeah. I could probably get an ad-supported Kindle for 1/10 the cost, maybe, not sure what their prices are these days. Not saying that competing dedicated readers are in that price range, they’re not, but Kindle dominates the market due to brand recognition, advertising, and as far as I know they were the first to really offer a product like it in the first place so they’ll always have a big piece of the market, like iPods did in the MP3 player space vs objectively superior competitors that came after it.

Noteworthy perhaps, but one is based on analysis of facts and the other is based on principle. I think they’re both valuable points of view, but they’re not actually debating the same points IMO even if they think they are.

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Depending on what you’re running on it or how you connect it to the Internet or your home network, you’re going to be at more and more risk as time goes on.

What’s the harm in upgrading now, especially if you barely ever use it?

I hate win 11 and there’s a lot of downsides to running it, but they’re going to quickly become a minor issue when compared to the risks of running an unpatched OS that is that huge of a target for exploits. Just trust me on that, the risks are going to get more and more real because attackers KNOW there’s a huuuuge number of businesses and consumers that just won’t upgrade and they’re frothing at the mouth to take advantage of the next few years of opportunity.

There’s a version of Windows 10 called LTSC (long term servicing channel) that will continue to receive patches, just no new features, that you can stay on for probably the length of time you’ll have that laptop. Since you barely use the laptop it’s probably perfect for you. You can easily find out how to obtain and activate it for free, securely, with a simple search - I won’t link to it here. One of my servers is running it because it’s old hardware and runs software that requires windows. It’s a really good option for people that don’t want to or don’t have hardware that supports 11, but want something secure and functional.

The slider you’re mentioning is specifically for cloud sync, correct. But as far as I know Word still does the thingy where it will periodically snapshot and allow you to recover previous versions.

I’m not 100% sure because I don’t use it at home anymore but I still do at work.

Supernotes are my preference. They are e-ink, and have an option for a smaller size than remarkables. Constant great software/firmware development, durable, and e-ink. Downside, if you care (I do not) is they’re b+w only.

Can side load android apps, they sync fine, work as e-reader, etc. Good stuff.

Remarkables are good I think but they have one foot in the digital artist niche and one in the note niche, whereas a supernote is firmly in the business/meeting/note niche.