Comment by jwrallie
15 days ago
Trying to find an affordable camera / baby monitor that was both secure and offline was a tough one for me, it seems every single consumer oriented camera has a remote access functionality (= a backdoor) nowadays, and the baby monitors that don’t use wifi are only secure through obscurity with some of them being as easy to hack as buying the same model.
I ended up with an Amcrest IP2M-841 and Tinycam on Android (as I understand using RTSP), and blocking internet access of the camera through the router. As I found out, just connecting it to the internet will automatically connect to servers for allowing “easy setup” of the remote access feature.
I got me a hand me down...It was a Motorola and had no Internet access. All I had to do was replace the battery.
Lots of the radio baby monitors are trivial to listen in on with RTL-SDR kit.
There is such a difference between listening in from within radio range vs across the entire internet. I have basically 0 worries about the neighbors; they have their own lives.
My consumer-grade “walkie talkie” had a very short range in a city, like one block.
Had the same requirements, I used the DXR-8 PRO from Infant Optics.