'Oh dear me. What a pathetic weak cop to get upset about this ... I stand with Sam Kerr.'
These Video Doorbells Have Terrible Security. Amazon Sells Them Anyway
Consumer Reports – “The devices are also sold by Walmart, Sears, and other retailers—and big platforms have faced few consequences for shipping flawed products. On a recent Thursday afternoon, a Consumer Reports journalist received an email containing a grainy image of herself waving at a doorbell camera she’d set up at her back door.
If the message came from a complete stranger, it would have been alarming. Instead, it was sent by Steve Blair, a CR privacy and security test engineer who had hacked into the doorbell from 2,923 miles away. Blair had pulled similar images from connected doorbells at other CR employees’ homes and from a device in our Yonkers, N.Y., testing lab. While we expected him to gain access to these devices, it was still a bit shocking to see photos of the journalist’s deck and backyard. After all, video doorbells are supposed to help you keep an eye on strangers at the door, not let other people watch you.
Blair was able to capture those images because he and fellow test engineer David Della Rocca had found serious security flaws in this doorbell, along with others sold under different brands but apparently made by the same manufacturer. The doorbells also lack a visible ID issued by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that’s required by the agency’s regulations, making them illegal to distribute in the U.S…”
AI Is Like Water
NfX: “Water is three things. Necessary. Ubiquitous. And the same. f##king. thing. inside every bottle. AI is like water. Or more specifically, generative AI applications are like bottled water. Over the last year and a half, we’ve looked at hundreds of generative AI companies on the application layer. Many of them are the exact same under the hood. This is just the reality: there will be 100 teams trying to make the same generative AI application as you are right now. Plus there will be incumbents gunning for your market. For a long time, tech has been a differentiator among software startups. We thought that if you could build something no one else could, that would be enough to protect you – definitely not forever, but at least for a while.But what we’re seeing with AI is that tech provides you basically no protection from the start. Tech differentiation in AI is a shrinking moat. (Unless you have something that Karpathy would find enlightening, and if that’s the case, let us know).For most founders right now, you have to build an entirely new point of view around what differentiation means to you. You are going to need a clear and aggressive perspective on how you’re going to win. Think distribution. (But incumbents will eat your lunch here too, so the old rules don’t apply.) Think brand. Messaging. Marketing. GTM. Pricing. Customer service. You can’t graft all this on at the end anymore. You’ll need to develop a key insight about how you will be creating value for your end users in a way that no one else can. You’ll need to focus on the heartbeat and emotion of the people you’re building for.You’ll need to give them a why. Or something they need… or at least something they think they need…”