> Nobody "deserves" to be the victim of false advertising or broken guarantees, particularly when they can reasonably lack the necessary contextual knowledge to analyze them beyond face value. Most people do not have the time or the aptitude (which is developed through more time) to become a system administrator of nontrivial local computing resources, but still derive significant value from being able to things like remotely viewable cameras.

You're right - that the government *should* do their thing and stomp down on companies with death-penalty-level fines and jail for the C levels and BoD. But lets be 100% real. Only 1 singular bank executive went to jail during the 2008 banking fraud crisis, and that was in Iceland.

The governments will not act in our best interests. That's transparently evident that we're in it on our selves and each other. I wish it weren't the case, but wishing something so does not make it so.

> The lady mentioned in the article, the one who owns a pet-boarding kennel a few minutes down the road from her house, has her life materially bettered by being able to access cameras remotely, and her life is not materially bettered by becoming a sysadmin to get that except for the fact that she is downstream of bad actors.

No doubt. But I'm surprised that there hasn't been a company who sells a on-prem video solution. Oh wait, there is. A cursory search showed me this https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08329JN9B for $560 with HDD. The cloud here is an optional thing.

This user decided to go with cloud-only crap for the convenience. And it's more convenient for the company to renegotiate the "deal". You pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

> The solution to this is not "well, everyone should be a sysadmin". The solution is "make the consequences of being a bad actor so petrifying that companies avoid doing so."

Or you realize that our country is very much "Caveat Emptor", and defend yourself appropriately, knowing legal remedies are few and far between. And if they ever do get a legal remedy, I'm sure they'll get a $10 voucher to buy more of the Cloud-crap.

Hardware that isn't tied at the hip to someone else's computer is already available. It's just not as cheap.

> Candidly, I echoed a lot of the sentiments of your post when I was younger, more self-absorbed, and more confident of my ability to attain sufficient expertise in all walks of life to never need help. My attitudes changed as I grew older and it became clearer that I was just as fallible as the next person, just on different axes. I hope you get the chance to attain perspective, too.

What is this self-help garbage doing in the middle of criticizing cloud-locked hardware being at the behest of a company? You do know that there are plenty of options that aren't infected with cloud-crap that are also outside of "build NVR in your basement".

If I see "Smart", "IoT" (and not a open protocol), or similar verbiage, I don't buy it. It also means I don't have to worry about data exfiltration like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/comments/y3irol/rem...

> We are, as it happens, all in it together, and the attitude your post expresses is counterproductive.

We are absolutely not "in it together". You're on HN - you see the inexorable tread towards more profit at all costs for companies. If that means squeezing customers more, so be it. But they are not our friends, nor do they see themselves as us.

The US government is effectively captured at this point. Any remedies that happen here will be long after the damage was done.

Basically what I'm trying to get at is that we need to be vigilant and not buy into these "easy cloud ecosystems". At best, they are long-term contract-mutable rentals, and should be recognized as such. To that end, I'll pay more to stay away from those devices. That's about as much as we can do.