Neighbors
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The NYPD is joining Ring's neighborhood watch app amid privacy and racial profiling concerns
The NYPD is joining Ring's Neighbors app despite concerns about privacy and profiling.
Now Ring requires public requests from police seeking surveillance videos
Ring is making a significant change to how it plans to handle video requests from law enforcement agencies in the US.
Ring launches its cheapest connected doorbell yet
The new camera doesn't have a battery, and costs just $60.
Ring's Neighbors app exposed precise locations and addresses
A flaw in Ring's Neighbors app exposed precise locations and addresses, compounding earlier privacy issues.
Ring will introduce end-to-end encryption to address security concerns
Ring says it wants to make its products
Ring update gives you more control over police video requests
Ring is acting on its promises to improve privacy and security in 2020. The Amazon brand has introduced a Control Center in the Ring mobile app that aims to deliver more control over access and sharing. Most notably, there's a toggle to opt out of law enforcement video requests -- you don't have to wait to receive one before making a decision. Ring is unsurprisingly encouraging customers to leave it on (it has police partnerships to maintain) in the name of neighborhood security, but it's at least acknowledging that some users are uncomfortable with serving as de facto eyes for police officers.
Amazon's Ring reveals where it's partnering with law enforcement
Amazon's Ring security service now works with 405 law enforcement agencies across the US. Today, Ring released a map showing every police department it's partnered with, as well as details on when each partnership began. The hundreds of departments listed have access to Ring's Neighbors Portal, which allows them to request footage from Ring's video doorbells.
Ring's Neighbors app is a modern take on neighborhood watches
Smart doorbell company Ring, recently acquired by Amazon, wants to drive a new style of neighborhood watch. Neighbors is a standalone app that takes the quasi-social networking aspect of the Ring app and breaks it out into a standalone application for Android and iOS, no Ring hardware required. It isn't the only app to do so -- there's also Nextdoor -- but that shouldn't make it any less useful.
Airbnb allows neighbors to tattle on noisy guests
Airbnb says most of its users are "respectful travelers," but just in case an issue does come up, it's giving those who live near a rental a place to voice concerns. The company's new initiative, Airbnb Neighbors, gives folks a tool for voicing concerns about noise, parking, use of a common space, suspicious/criminal activity and general concerns. Once a complaint is received, it gets a case number and Airbnb reviews the issue. If necessary, the company says it will follow up with the listing's host.
Zombies and Turtles found on ESRB
More ESRB hints abound, as the website known for destroying the dreams of excessively violent young children is now listing two more heavy-hitters for the Wii's Virtual Console service. First up is the SNES cult-classic Zombies Ate My Neighbors, which nicely fills up the senseless-violence-involving-zombies genre that the Wii was heretofore lacking.Next up? The game none of you ever beat. Yes, the original mind-numbingly difficult Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the NES appears to be slated for a shiny white console near you, and this time, we're gonna finish that game once and for all.We hope.[via GoNintendo]
Software lets neighbors securely share WiFi bandwidth
Instead of fighting about property lines and whose dog is keeping everyone up at night, researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign want you and your neighbors to get together and share your WiFi signal in a method that supposedly delivers better performance to each individual user. Assistant computer science professor Haiyun Luo and graduate student Nathanael Thompson of the school's Systems, Wireless, and Networking Group have released a free download that analyzes local airwaves and exploits unused bandwidth from one network to complement ones experiencing heavy usage, but always gives users priority access to their own signal. Part of the two-year-old PERM project, the application uses flow-scheduling algorithms to determine bandwidth allocation, and has so-far undergone testing on Linux clients and with Linksys routers. Security is obviously a key concern in such a sharing setup, so PERM developed the software to both "preserve a user's privacy and security, and mitigate the free-riding problem."[Via PCWorld]
