When all else fails, blame it on the cloud? It seems like that’s the script for just about every outage that makes the news lately, like the Wyze camera outage this week that kept people from seeing feeds from their cameras for several hours. The outage went so far that some users’ cameras weren’t even showing up in the Wyze app, and there were even reports that some people were seeing thumbnails for cameras they don’t own. That’s troubling, of course, and Wyze seems to have taken action on that quickly by disabling a tab on the app that would potentially have let people tap into camera feeds they had no business seeing. Still, it looks like curiosity got the better of some users, with 1,500 tapping through when notified of motion events and seeing other people walking around inside unknown houses. The problem was resolved quickly, with blame laid on an “AWS partner” even though there were no known AWS issues at the time of the outage. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: security cameras, especially mission-critical ones, have no business being connected with anything but Ethernet or coax, and exposing them to the cloud is a really, really bad idea.
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Sensor Net Makes Life Easier For Rice Farmers
Rice is cultivated all over the world in fields known as rice paddies and it is one of the most maintenance intensive crops to grow. The rice paddy itself requires a large part of that maintenance. It is flooded with water that must be kept at a constant level, just below the height that would keep rice seedlings from growing but high enough to drown any weeds that would compete with the rice stalks for nutrients. This technique is called continuous flooding and a big part of the job of a rice farmer is to inspect the rice paddy every day to make sure the water levels are normal and there are no cracks or holes that could lead to water leakage.
This process is labor intensive, and the technology in use hasn’t changed much over the centuries. Most of the rice farmers in my area are elders with the approximate age of 65-70 years. For these hard working people a little bit of technology can make a big difference in their lives. This is the idea behind TechRice.
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