Daniel Tapolow

Nest’s Dropcam outage reveals the downside of online-only IP cameras For a few hours last night, Dropcam users couldn’t access their camera feeds at all. Some Dropcam and Nest Cam users may have felt a little less secure last night, when a service outage rendered the IP cameras inaccessible for several hours. The outage also affected other Nest products, including Nest Learning Thermostats and Protect smoke detectors. Nest acknowledged the outage at 9:28 p.m. Eastern time, and restored service at 12:48 a.m. The Alphabet-owned company hasn’t explained exactly what caused the lengthy outage, but is encouraging users to contact customer support if problems persist.   For Nest thermostat owners, the outage was a small inconvenience, preventing remote control via Nest’s mobile and web apps. Users could still adjust the temperature directly on the Nest itself, just like a regular thermostat. However, Dropcam and Nest Cam users don’t have that kind of offline fallback. Accessing the camera feed requires an Internet connection to Dropcam’s servers, rendering the cameras worthless during an outage. Not surprisingly, local Wi-Fi access for Dropcam is one of the most popular user requests. Still, Dropcam has insisted that this feature isn’t worth doing. “While we recognize there are times […]

Falling TVs send a child to the ER every 30 minutes Chris Stein / Today Children under 5 are most at risk from TVs toppling over on them. All TVs, whether it’s a flat-screen or older model, should be anchored to the wall to prevent tip-overs, researchers urge. Enormous flat-screens are in millions of homes, but come with a risk that many parents may not realize: children can be seriously hurt in a TV tip-over. The number of kids injured by a TV falling on them grew 125 percent between 1990 and 2011, according to a new study of emergency room records that calls for greater prevention efforts. Overall, more than 17,000 children under age 18 were treated each year for various TV-related injuries in ERs across the United States – that’s one child every half hour – during that time period, the study released Monday in the journal Pediatrics found. Between 2000 and 2011, 215 children died from injuries caused by a falling TV. “This is a serious problem,” said the study’s senior author, Dr. Gary Smith, a pediatrician at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, told NBC News. “A child’s dying once every three weeks from a TV tip-over. The

“People walking right up to your house in the middle of the day and steal whatever packages you have on your porch. There has been a steady increase over the years of these style robberies and as of now it has paid off for the thieves. With no way to prove who stole your property, you are stuck being the victim. My wife and I know all too well how annoying or even dangerous this can be because last year a woman stole 3 packages right off of our steps. Little did she know that our house has a security camera system where all I had to do was review the footage and send a copy to the police and local new station. We had our packages back and the thief caught in just a few days and come to find out that we were not the only victims on our block. Without that footage there would have been no action we could have taken to retrieve our property.” Daniel Tapolow owner of Infinite AV