Comment by jandrese
2 days ago
It probably makes close to no difference in development or production, but it does significantly cut down on the number of tech support calls from people who can't figure out how to set the password, or immediately forget the password they set. If it has no password then you can just plug it in an have it work. Sure it's totally insecure, but its also trivial to install.
Generating a password that is unique to the device and print it with a sticky label on the underside of the device isn't exactly rocket-science, and ISPs somehow figured this out at least two decades ago, which was the first time I came across that myself. Surely whoever developed this IP-camera has an engineering department who've also seen something like this in the wild before?
Yep, but if you do that you need to staff a help line with people who can say "turn the box over and look at the sticker, no the sticker with the numbers on it, it's white with black letters and says PASSWORD in a big font, no the password isn't literally PASSWORD, it's the line below that with the strange letters, yes, to type that one you need to hold the shift key and press 3..."
Remember that ISPs often have people who come to your home to hook stuff up.
Yes, which costs money, which is exactly my original point. It's not because "Oh I'm so hassled because customers are dumb", it's "No, hiring people to do support would cost us money, which we don't want".
> Remember that ISPs often have people who come to your home to hook stuff up.
I can't recall a single time a technician wasn't required to come to my flat/house to install a new router. I'm based in Spain, maybe it's different elsewhere, but I think it's pretty much a requirement, you can't setup the WAN endpoint or ISP router yourself.
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