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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
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Amazon’s Indoor Camera Drone is Ready to fly Around Your House
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
You are in a maze of UUCP connections, all alike.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by turgid on Wednesday September 29 2021, @06:00PM (7 children)
When I was at school, when I was 16, we studied 1984 by George Orwell for English. It had a profound effect on me.
I used to worry, but calm myself by thinking about it rationally. In those days, if anyone was wealthy enough to own a PC privately it was probably a 286 or 386sx. Amigas and Atari STs were popular in the home. No one had heard of the Internet. There were modems, which were expensive and slow (1200 baud) and sometimes people used them to access their banks from home, or maybe BBSes.
The thing was, the pervasive audio and video surveillance of 1984 would have needed video cameras and microphones everywhere, plus a lot of processing power and bandwidth to get it from the world to the watchers. Furthermore, it would have required authorities to force people to have surveillance in their own homes, and in those days ordinary people cared about privacy and freedom.
That, of course, never happened.
What did happen was that, for fun and convenience, as technology advanced, computers got cheaper, cameras got smaller, processing power increased, people got connected on the Internet. The people themselves willingly and enthusiastically invited the surveillance into their own homes and they paid to have fast connections to the network!
Obviously, they didn't think (irony) that they were handing over surveillance tools to a totalitarian state. They thought that they were finding convenient ways of communicating with each other (human mating/reproductive behaviour being quite a driving factor as always) and they didn't understand that the companies they were customers of (sometimes free at the point of use, making money by harvesting data) were watching, recording, analysing and sharing that data.
Out of sight, out of mind: you can't "see" Farcebook et. al. harvesting and analysing your data, or sharing it, so you don't worry about it.
Human nature got us here. Not as in the novel, through force by a totalitarian state, but through our own limitations and weaknesses. We brought it on ourselves and most of us are oblivious.
Ignorance is bliss as a great man once wrote.
We are the dead.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 29 2021, @07:29PM
The crying shame is that although some humans like me have read and grown from your sharing this, so too will scrapers' bots.
Thank you nonetheless for sharing these expressions of your thoughts.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by BsAtHome on Wednesday September 29 2021, @07:34PM (2 children)
The totalitarian state seldomly comes as a surprise. Most of them are welcomed by the people cheering the change. Then silence falls.
And, history is told by the survivor(s).
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 30 2021, @09:10AM
That's bullshit.
It's more the case that propaganda and censorship drown out or suppress other voices, so everyone thinks that they are alone.
A small percentage will truly agree with the regime, but we've all seen how quickly such things collapse the moment control wavers.
You are not alone. Most people think things like Ring or Drones-In-My-House(TM) and mass internet surveillance are absurd, unwanted, unnecessary or dangerous. But the corporate media never gives those people a platform. It just castigates them for being luddies, or conspiracy theorists, or $(ENEMY_OF_THE_STATE)-$(DE_JOUR) at its convenience. Or better yet scapegoats them for problems.
Learn to tune out the corporate message and pay attention to opinions in (unregulated) comment sections. Those are closer to the true swell of ground opinion than you realise.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by DannyB on Thursday September 30 2021, @08:53PM
Red states passing new voting laws which enable the legislature to arbitrarily decide the vote was corrupt and declare what the outcome will officially be.
Not realizing their short sighted idea may just be creating mechanisms for tyrants to come into power and stay there.
Every day I think maybe dividing by zero will work this time.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 29 2021, @07:52PM (1 child)
Sometimes I wonder if these surveillance companies are encouraged to perform the tasks the Constitution prevents the government from doing. They're popping up quite frequently.
Tyranny via private enterprise.
(Score: 5, Informative) by HammeredGlass on Thursday September 30 2021, @12:01AM
'Fascism should rather be called corporatism, as it is the marriage between the corporation and the state' (paraphrased) - Benito Mussolini
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 29 2021, @09:09PM
A remarkable satire. [thenewamerican.com]