Thursday, May 12, 2022

Video Doorbell Cameras Record Audio, Too

 Winery: cupitt estate


Vladimir Putin’s glitzy $989 million megayacht seized by the Italian government


Video Doorbell Cameras Record Audio, Too Consumer Reports: “Millions of video doorbells have been installed in U.S. homes, letting people chat with visitors without going to the door, and keep an eye on package deliveries—along with random wildlife and their own neighbors passing by. Ring doorbells and similar devices are so ubiquitous that you might expect to be recorded on other people’s video feeds every time you walk or drive down the street. 

What you might not be aware of is that video doorbells can record audio, too. Whether you’re standing on your stoop and arguing with your housemate about whose turn it is to take out the trash or passing by a neighbor’s house discussing your personal life, your conversation may get picked up by either your own doorbell or someone else’s. And if you do own a video doorbell, you may be inadvertently recording audio from unsuspecting neighbors as well. Some of these recordings can be useful.

 For example, they allow friends and neighbors to leave messages—on purpose—when the video doorbell owner isn’t home. But critics warn that these doorbells erode our privacy, too. And, once you’re aware that you’re being recorded, they can chip away at the expectation that we can go out into our neighborhoods and speak freely. But how likely are you to really be recorded on these devices? To find out, we measured just how close you need to be to a video doorbell for it to capture your conversations…”


Follow the saga as my neighbor chooses to install 3 security cameras to monitor my property and I install countermeasures to defeat his cameras YouTube 




ExitReviews – “Find out how long products last, where they break, and how to fix them.” Via Reddit – “Learn how products performed over their lifetime, where they break, and how to fix them. It’s simple: You upload your broken product and quickly describe how long you owned it, how often you used it, and where it failed. Let’s keep corporations accountable, and start caring about the amount of waste we produce!”

Dan Stone – Measuring the extent of self-reviewing at the New York Review of Books from 1963-2022: “Since its 1963 founding, the New York Review of Books has been considered a bit clubby. Richard Hofstadter’s quip that it ought to be called the “New York Review of Each Other’s Books” is the most enduring line on the topic. Using metadata from all 59 years of the NYRB archives—spanning some 1,228 issues containing 17,268 articles about 31,579 books—I measured just how much of a “Review of Each Other’s Books” it has been. In short, my view is that Hofstadter was right. A hefty portion of the books reviewed in the NYRB have been contributors’ books. Furthermore, most of the contributors have had their own books reviewed. But there are a number of different ways of adding the numbers up. Each says something slightly different about the intersection between contributors and the reviewed. I look at:

  • The proportion of reviews of books written by prior, recent and contemporaneous contributors
  • The proportion of articles written by contemporaneously-reviewed contributors
  • The relationship between the number of reviews a contributor has written and the chances the contributor has had a book reviewed

If you are not familiar with the NYRB, you should know it is a tabloid-sized magazine that comes out about every two weeks. 

Each issue features a series of longish reviews of mostly books and freestanding essays. What gets reviewed generally ranges from the highbrow4 to the upper-middlebrow.5 Instead of having a formal writing staff, the editors turn to outside contributors, some more frequently than others. Back in the early days of the magazine, its roster of writers read as a Who’s Who of New York Intellectuals…”


Above the Law – How the Pandemic Has Reshaped The Role Of Information Professionals: “Knowledge services is one of the most valuable roles at any law firm today, whether everyone might realize it or not. 

Much like all firm functions, however, it hasn’t been immune to the pandemic. We recently sat down with Carolyn Bach, the Senior Manager of the Knowledge & Research Program at LexisNexis, to discuss how the pandemic has created new opportunities in the knowledge services sphere, the most significant trends impacting knowledge and information professionals today, and what we can expect to see changing in this area in the coming years…”


Not all shade is the same: Gardening when there's little sun