Originally Posted By: snowcrash
A year or two ago I bought a Foscam outdoor IP camera for $99. I thought it was pretty good and took a moment to wonder how I might get a such a decent camera for so few dollars.

Well, I'd say it's less that it's a nefarious plot and more likely that it's a piece of junk like all Foscam products, and built using dirt-cheap labor by a company that does no advertising.

Originally Posted By: mlord
I like having devices connected to my LAN -- mostly of my own build/programming. But I'm not at all interested in anything that "requires" a cloud server. That's just asking for trouble.

This. I don't use any IoT devices with cloud servers. The biggest advantage is better performance when in the home. I tried Wink for a while just to test it out, and hated the lag I got from my commands going out to the net before coming back and going to my lights. It seemed like a stupid design, and I didn't like that being in the cloud anyway.


At the moment, even if you're not concerned about the security aspects, the IoT is a complete mess of competing "standards" where everyone is far more interested in getting their piece of the pie.
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Matt