I feel your pain!!!
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Oh! We are so fortunate to have such an outstanding expert on parenting and human evolution with us today!
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I use a webcam with my baby only at home (Iâm not checking him on the net when Iâm out) and it enables me to see when he wakes from a nap without him having to start crying. Itâs much nicer to go and get a smiling happy baby than one whose already starting yelling because I didnât know he was awake. The cam also meant I could see when he was face down in vomit but not crying about it.
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They make decent toys. (Iâd prefer to have a ssh root shell on them but anywayâŚ) We used them in a CCTV deployment in one facility and they worked to full satisfaction.
The name is fairly irrelevant to the deviceâs performance.
Did you ever have to get out of bed to check on something? It doesnât matter if it is a baby or a server, having the supervisory console powered up and on hand, or even just a glance away, is more than useful.
Most of that time, however, the parents did not have to do with grossly limited sleep time. With todayâs demands, every minute counts.
The remote supervision capability can be pretty handy. The details are about the implementation. Iâd be in favor of physical configuration switches or jumpers for allowing some remote stuff, that can be pretty much unhackable (save the option of firmware reflashing, but that can be also switch-enabled) without physical access. And if you got physical access, all is lost anyway (or at least the complexity of the task goes several orders of magnitude up).
Same here. Nothing off-the-shelf though, so dad had to cobble together something from discrete transistors. I should take a look if we donât have the remains somewhere, it was a bright orange painted box named âlittle spyâ. Some of the wiring is still nailed to the walls.
Who are you to decide?
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When I was a kid my parents set up a series of mirrors. And a couple of tin cans and string⌠
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Maybe they will expand their product line, so you will KNOW when baby is hiding a load in that diaper.
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Agreed. Pretending that baby monitors have some sort of measurable negative (or positive) impact on children is ridiculous. Itâs one of those things that is so context dependent that itâs almost pointless to argue about.
The ONLY negative thing I have heard about monitors is that, in the first six months, they contribute to an increased risk of SIDS because they give parents a false sense of security. It was pretty wishy-washy though, not a strong link.
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Christ what a late stage Capitalism!
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I am a sysadmin⌠um yeah, too often to count, and going back to the waning days need to drive in to the server room to see why it is offline. Even now it is still get up answer the phone (or they will call again) boot up, start vpn, etc, to see what is b0rk3d.
When the kid woke me up I was at that point UP and had a much harder time getting back to sleep than he did.
Then where I donât really blame the parents is the technology. Does this stuff really need to be internet/cloud capable? Mostly cause I trust the security of a lot these companies about as much as a rot13 cipher.
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yeah, everyone should know the NIST recommendation to use Double ROT13
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Or reach next to the bed and open the already logged on laptop with the console on top. Or merely glance at a screen on the night table with the supervisory data; that is also a quite soothing thing when one wakes up in the middle of the night, sees everything dark green, and knows itâs safe to sleep again. Dark green/yellow/red scheme is a plus here; a utility can be used to update the videocard palette to day/night brightness.
It could be handy. But Iâd be in favor of having it off by default and require some setup to get it working as a rudimentary intelligence test.
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Umm no. no no no. Before I got to application support that would be a console that would take up a room. Sorry I was on a team supporting 10Kish servers (and that was roughly half or the winboxes).
The 24x7 monitoring team took care of all that. If I got called it was already past the basic checks of is this a false positive and I had to do some actual digging checking at that point.
I was on about a 1000 times smaller op. I was however the only operator (for a bit too long).
Ahh, the dreaded âwake up and try to make sense of the blurred letters dancing in front of your eyes, without having enough time for the coffee to kick in, praying to all the deities that protect the admins for it to be something simpleâ.
Been there. My condolencesâŚ
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Fair enough, but anyone whose idea of âparenting a certain wayâ involves setting up a cloud-based video surveillance system for a child who is two doors down the hall, really has no grounds for acting surprised and shocked when it turns out that someone else is able to participate in the âsurveillingâ.
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I wonder why a false sense of security would contribute to an increased risk of SIDS? I donât see the connection. Parents are suddenly putting their babies into the crib with a pillow over their head, because monitor? 
I feel like in a lot of cases, where it wasnât just done to be able to add a marketing buzzword on the package, the internet/cloud capable thing was thrown in for lazy phone app capability. Much easier to send it to the cloud and back down to your phone, then to futz around with connecting directly to the device on your home network without exposing it to the internet, right? SighâŚ
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Many modern devices with a camera and microphone, that are also connected to the internet, have security flaws somewhere in their pipeline and are capable of being hacked. Are you also making an argument that people that use devices, fitting the above criteria, should similarly have no reasonable expectation of privacy?
Taking the framework of your argument to an extreme, you can also âhackâ someoneâs home by breaking in and planting a bug - does that mean people should have no reasonable expectation of privacy in their own home as well?
And so on.
Your argument is simply blaming the victim, instead of discussing the point of the article, which is the unfortunate shortcomings in certain electronic devices and their real-world consequences. Itâs not really appropriate to extend that into an ad hominem criticism of the parents themselves.
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Unless some asshole hacked into it and started messing with the kids on the other end. The kid in this story will most likely get over it (hopefully). But still, our society has moved into this weird space where to some people think it is ok to inflict their douchebaggery on total strangers that could be half a world away and the response from the general public is a collective shrug because they werenât inconvenienced (or perceived inconvenienced) by it.
BTW, not attacking your comment @mallyboon, just ranting and raving.
If anyone needs me, Iâll be in the Angry Dome.
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Yeah, count me in with the people who think this baby monitor thing has gotten a little out of control. I know things can happen. SIDS is real, your kid could fall or something. So I understand the desire to have something there to alert you. And yeah, depending on the kidâs needs it might be more important. Kids with certain disabilities may need to be monitored also when caretakers are around because⌠abuse. Anyway, yeah, people have reasons for wanting to be able to monitor their kids even if it does seem a bit over the top sometimes.
But even if the monitoring thing is a bit overkill, it doesnât excuse creeps hacking in to mess with kids or take pics of them for pedo fodder.
The thing is if the technology is there and people are having it sold to them being told it will make them safer, then it shouldnât be making them LESS safe.
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