Amazon’s indoor camera drone is ready to fly around your house
Next up: cameras. Amazon's crazy indoor, flying drone camera—the ambiguously named "Ring Always Home Cam"—is actually for sale now in the US. This was announced a full year ago, but now it's available "exclusively by invitation" for $249.99. This is a "Day 1 Edition" (read: a beta product). So Amazon isn't letting just anyone buy it. You can request an invitation to give Amazon money on the product page.
In case you've not had enough dystopian future products:
Amazon’s Astro Robot is Straight Out of the Jetsons
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Tork on Wednesday September 29 2021, @05:27PM (3 children)
I bought an 'Amazon Fire' TV on Prime Day a few years ago. It advertised "Youtube!!" on the box. A month or two after I got it Amazon got into a squabble with Google and REMOVED THE APP FROM MY TV. I was never compensated for this loss of functionality. This is reason #2 this drone will not be in my place.
I wanted to order an Apple TV with an Amazon gift card but Amazon wanted to push its video service so it refused to sell Apple's set top box. This is reason #3 this drone will not be in my place.
Granted these are two more reasons than I need, but it is fun to vent once in a while. If anyone's curious I'm also steaming mad at Amazon because they refuse to follow delivery options and now I live in a building that's an attractive target to package thieves. :)
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday September 29 2021, @07:24PM (1 child)
Many years ago now, I had a DNS name, a free account at DYNDNS, and a router that would automatically log in and update the account. That ability was programmed into the firmware. Then DYNDNS changed their policies and renamed things, breaking the crap out of that arrangement. It may have been for the best anyway, because a while later, I started getting threats from the MAFIAA, passed through my ISP, alleging that they'd detected piracy on the connection that the ISP wouldn't link to a name for them. Sure don't need to hand my name to the MAFIAA by running a web server with all kinds of identifying info. Also, somehow inbound traffic on web ports no longer gets through, and the ISP is playing stupid about it, saying it should work and they have no idea why it doesn't.
I also gave a "smart" TV a try. Went for the smallest, cheapest model there was, a 24". It mostly works okay. Can't block ads on it, however, because it's not fully under my control. And about a year ago, something changed at YouTube, and broke that TV's ability to connect to it. Before that, the TV's behavior changed. Started demanding that I log into YouTube, or select "guest", when previously, it had just gone straight to the site.
I also tried an RCA brand tablet from Walmart, when they were rolling out their answer to the Amazon Fire stuff. They were selling the tablet for $35. It worked for a year and a half, until the battery failed. It is difficult to find replacement batteries for it, and they cost more than $35. I cannot be sure whether the tablet is also dead. I've had batteries take my smartphone with them when they died. So the tablet has been gathering dust in my closet ever since.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Freeman on Wednesday September 29 2021, @08:24PM
For your non-conforming devices ad-blocking needs:
https://pi-hole.net/ [pi-hole.net]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 30 2021, @07:29PM
what a stupid fucking slave.