
The US reportedly considering blacklisting Chinese surveillance firm Hikvision - bluedino
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/22/us-reportedly-considering-blacklisting-chinas-hikvision.html
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rasz
Hikvision makes _very cheap_ good quality network cameras ... that you have to
deploy behind a firewall to avoid
[https://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2017/Sep/23](https://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2017/Sep/23)

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thefounder
Like the US really cares about surveillance or dictators...if they care they
could stop selling weapons to SA or stop US companies selling surveillance
products & services. I mean the very US companies that helped build The Great
Firewall. What US is really concerned about is that China has a big market
share in this industry and will only get better. Maybe the next time SA will
buy from China instead of US...it's really just about old good $$$

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novaRom
I have a mixed feeling about this new technology war. On one side I think
China being a quite poor country has a good chance to improve life of millions
of its people if it continues to innovate in AI and Robotics. On the other
side, these technologies can be used easily to control all the people,
restricting freedom of speech and debate, thus inevitably leading to
economical deadlocks and wrong decisions, at least while real people do decide
yet.

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pmlnr
This I actually agree with. Tried one, and while the hardware is surprisingly
decent, the software has holes like an Emmental.

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pjc50
If we're going after surveillance firms, how about the Israeli firm exploiting
human rights activists or the Saudi firm making wife-surveillance apps? Or is
it a radical concept that we should do this based on a system of rules rather
than arbitrary executive decisions?

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mc32
As long as you keep them on their own air gapped network, they should be okay.
Arecont are just too expensive.

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SEJeff
The Ubiquiti cameras are of a much higher build quality and don't have these
issues albeit are a tad more expensive. I have Foscam, Hikvision, and Ubiquiti
cameras. I've stopped buying anything but the Ubiquiti cameras due to the
quality being that much better.

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yardie
We looked at them all and went with Hikvision. Ubiquitous does not at the
moment make a comparable camera. I can get 4-10MPixel HKV cameras and the
unifi G3 tops out at 1080p.

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SEJeff
The Unifi G4 Pro tops out at 4K, but is not a cheap camera. Like the G3 Pro
however, the build quality is extraordinary. I mounted it to my masonry garage
on the outside and love run it via PoE to a Unifi 8 port PoE switch inside my
garage (which in turn goes through conduit into my basement and into a 48 port
switch :D

[https://store.ui.com/products/unifi-protect-g4-pro-
camera](https://store.ui.com/products/unifi-protect-g4-pro-camera)

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wil421
I went with a full Ubiquiti UniFi setup and the UniFi Cameras. One of the
reason was the reported backdoors and phoning home stuff the cheaper cameras
were doing. If I were to get them I’d put them on VLANs with no access to the
internet.

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cypherg
fucking buggy ass vulnerable cameras are constantly exploited for IoT
botnets....good riddance.

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scohesc
Remember everyone - if you're looking to buy any cheap surveillance/camera
gear and you're smart enough to block it from phoning home to the dirty
communistic reds, you better buy it very soon and quickly as most cheaper
surveillance equipment is basically re-branded Hikvision technology anyways!

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yardie
The grey markets cameras are worse. Not only are they rebranded Hikvisions,
they also don’t update the software at all. I bought a cheap camera from
Monoprice that is really a Hikvision. And even shows up in their discovery
tools. Except the firmware is 4 years old. I can’t get security updates and
since it’s not Hikvision I can’t flash it with their patched firmwares.

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paulkon
I've had to unbrick gray-market hikvision cameras that were flashed with
hikvision firmware for a friend. Best to keep them on their own subnet along
with a small zfs cluster and drop all new outgoing packets.

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yardie
By design our camera network is unroutable. If you want To watch a feed you
get it from the NVR. I trust these cameras as much as I trust any cheap IoT
device.

