mergeconflict255
James: [00:00:00] Before we get started today, we have a special sponsorship. In fact, it's not even a sponsorship because this person's not even paying us. It's actually one of our good friends at Bharti  that's right. He is the creator of. Happy weather and rough two amazing applications built with Xamarin, which is very, very cool.
He's sponsored the podcast before, but the reason that we're doing this sponsorship at the beginning is that he actually just wrote a 200 page book on independent. App development. Bartee was a longtime developer, went independent developer all up, left his job. Did everything started up happy weather and his 200 page book, which is called, keep going, is coming out today.
The day that this podcast releases, it's an absolutely delightful journey of his applications going from early windows and windows phone, all the way to. Android and next for iOS, it's a journey and full transparency every month, every sale, every dollar he made and the struggles that kept him up at night, and also that he celebrated for merge conflict listeners.
That's every single one of you here. He's giving us $15 off that's bonus. It's only $10 off normally, but for all of our listeners, $15 off, you can go to. Merge conflict.fm/keep going. I want to read a passage here from it because I think it's super duper awesome. And really, I think really hit me near and dear there's on the very beginning of when he was creating an application and talking about how he is creating.
Different features and he was worried that other people would copy it. This is, regardless of people actually copy them. It's, it's actually liberating. When you accept that features can easily be copied and better than any time experiences. However, can't nothing beats the original. Think of yourself. The best version of you is you.
If you have, or try to be someone else you're at best a runner up, I wasn't confident then. Competition was a scary concept today. The only competition I'm in is with myself. I'm not worried about losing users to other apps. I expect users to switch. Heck I encourage it when we're not a match. I know better to be peer pressured.
Then to be peer pressure to stay away from my vision. I'm not going to change for them. And I don't want them to have to adapt. Either people have different tastes and preferences. The good news is there's a lot of people and not many need to get what you're doing so you can keep doing it built for a specific person and you'll have an audience.
No matter the competition, you have an alternative. That's really early entry in the book. I highly recommend you check it all out. I'm actually reading it. And as Frank knows, I don't read books. So that means it's very, very special and I've enjoyed every single word that I've read. Thus thus far good emerge conflict, FM slash keep going.
I'll put a link in the show notes for $15 off the book and support independent development. If you like books, it's going to be awesome and you will enjoy it. It's either Virgin. So it's an ebook. You can just download it. It's on Gumroad, which is something that Frank uses as well, the SaaS applications.
And there's a very long, amazing sponsorship because we like Bharti. He also gave him. Awesome. Talk at Donna confidence. You long ago, Frank, you didn't know that was coming. Did you. 
Frank: [00:03:28] Not at all. And I'm excited because a late breaking news be something I'm very, very interested in because when you're an independent app developer, you're kind of independent and you have no idea what other people are doing and how they're doing it and how they're feeling about it and all that stuff.
So I'm. Really looking forward to getting another perspective on all that. I'm just revising, I guess that's what we're doing on this podcast too. So what a perfect fit. I 
James: [00:03:58] think it's been fun, you know, all these years to talk about our journey and the things that our ups and downs and as we're learning and stumbling through things and attempting to become experts, um, there is some transparency.
I really like, uh, Barney actually, like I said, he goes through and he talks about his actual download numbers. He talks about the dollars that, that not only came in, but. That he took home at the end of the day and how that was, was going through. So I think that's very, very fascinating. We've never really gotten to that granular level, I would say.
Um, but you know, that's a day in life of a developer. Well, my favorite podcast episodes was under the radar when, um, Dave was a David, right. That's been a while since listen, podcasts that he was releasing, I think C plus plus, or one of the rent plus plus apps. And he documented like the journey of.
Getting in submitting and waiting for approval and releasing it and then going live. And like, it, it was a very, I was like, I've lived this and I'm listening to someone else live it and their journey and their struggle. And, and that to me is very fascinating. 
Frank: [00:05:00] Yeah, in terms of promoting the competition, that's a great podcast to listen to also under the radar.
So shout out to that, uh, and that passage that you read was really interesting too, because I kind of see it as we each have to find a way to stay sane in the very weird and competitive app store world and writing these apps. With, you know, all the excitement of all the conferences and all that stuff that are once a year, the rest is just a lot of alone time, just, you know, trying to find your way through the store.
So again, the more perspective that you can get on that, and I'm just way too bashful to ever talk about numbers and dollars. I just can't do it. 
James: [00:05:42] Yeah, no, I hear you. It's a, it's something. We were going to talk about Google. I go, or. Build coming up. There's a lot of things going on. We have WWDC coming up. I figured today, Frank, we would talk about.
Home security. What a 
Frank: [00:05:55] segue, unrelated topics, or are they no. What we'll find a way to call back to the, in the beginning, the 
James: [00:06:05] issue right. Really is with an app in general. So let me go ahead and break this down and where we're at, because I'm not necessarily that fascinated in home security. The real topic today is talking about security itself and.
Authentication and end to end encryption and video encryption. And Ooh. 
Yeah, 
Frank: [00:06:23] I love that stuff. I am here for the end-to-end encryption stuff. So home security, I can't wait for a home security story. These are always hilarious. Yeah. Because 
James: [00:06:32] you know, there's always all these big bullet points in marketing biz, which is everything's encrypted in military grade and 128 bit and all, you know, all these things and.
Uh, this week, um, there was a security flaw, or I would say a software bug, a backend bug with the UV security cameras. Now I actually am an owner of the UV security camera systems in which, um, this did not affect me or so I think, or no, or who knows what happened? Uh, it would have been about 3:00 AM my time, so everyone would have seen darkness outside of the door.
Um, but. Um, I was always in the hunt and search for like a smart doorbell and some security cameras in and around the house and the. The UV system, um, was from anchor. And I know anchor the company a and K R and the UV security line. And I have some of their other products that have been good. The nice thing with UV is that they are a single purchase, um, system with a hub that records the videos.
So you don't have to pay for a subscription service, and there is no subscription to store videos either. It's all on this hub that, um, has internal, um, Uh, tiny, you know, flash memory of 16 gigs on it for their outdoor cameras, for their indoor cameras. Um, they just record on an SD card because they're indoor cameras.
There's no need for them to be doing any neurotransmission. They just connect to wifi directly. Nope. 
Frank: [00:08:02] Okay. Okay. This is, this is, uh, I, I wasn't expecting that actually, because the, the few cameras that I've been buying have been, uh, purely cloud, they don't do the hub approach. So that's really interesting.
That's actually new to me. I've been doing the, find the cheapest one on Amazon, blindly subscribed to whatever service they have. And look at me. I can control the camera from the internet, so I don't really pay that. Much attention. It's actually, I have no idea where videos are stored. I'm realized 
James: [00:08:36] yeah.
Some server in some country. Oh, that's a good question. And that's what drew, it drew me to it because I was looking at rings and all these other ones. I was like, I am not going to pay another. Thing. And, and, and there are really, really expensive, closed circuit systems that you can buy kind of like if you were sure in a store, but, but those are all wired.
And this attracted me because the outdoor cameras are battery powered. So you install them and you can just plug them up or put a solar panel, tiny little attachment that they have to, and there's no wires. There's not, you know, nothing at all. And they will just last forever and they will just go, or the batteries last six to 12 months.
And they do all the things that you would want. You can open the app, you can view the feed and all that stuff. It records clips, and they're all stored on that little device, which is great. And you can clear it out with a click of a button Frank, or download it to your phone. And, and to me, this, this has been great.
I've had it for, I don't know, nine months, 10 months, something like that recommended. So like 
Frank: [00:09:32] it. So what have you gotten the most of cars, dogs running by people. Oh, what's this thing. Recording bears. Have you gotten embarrassed? 
James: [00:09:45] Some deers, some deers. We had lots of cars, so many cars. Yeah. 
Frank: [00:09:52] Camera's get so distracted by these cars.
I'm semi interested in the like object recognition on the security side of all this, like just for those clips, because I sat one of these up at my parents' house and all it does is watch the cars. 
James: [00:10:09] Yeah. So one of my favorite features that does do machine learning on device for object detection, the indoor cameras do, uh, I think a few different ones.
They do that do people and they do pets and they do, they might do cars, but, or, and then all motion, the, all the other cameras do people, or sometimes the trees, but people, people, or all motion. So what I have set up is all the cameras. I do only show me people. Um, but then at night it automatically turns into all motion mode.
Okay. Because obviously at night and night vision, which it has built into with, with IRS, right. It's only so good. So that's one of the things is I get very minimal things during the day because it's only doing people. Mostly. I have a lot of videos of me walking outside the house, and then at night it's all the cars going up and down the street and.
And it, because it's like, I'll just do everything it's better to, it's better to be safe than, sorry. That's, I'm assuming their, their motivation there. Um, but yeah, but that's kind of what we do, but sometimes yeah, there's there's uh, critters or cats or whatever around, um, nothing. No, no terrible shenanigans.
There, there has been a person that, uh, that like. That Dave come by one time and tried to open the car door, just kind as this unlocked, but, um, but nothing, nothing terrible. And that was the thing is like, you don't know, cause that would have happened anyways, but I just wouldn't have known about it and wouldn't have been a big deal.
But now I do know about it because the camera told me, so in a world where if a tree falls, et cetera, et cetera, and it was, let me get back to. To back 
Frank: [00:11:50] that hack there there's a hack. So let me just give a takeaway from that rant. Um, so you have a lot of data, it sounds like sitting on a server. So what was this hack where people hacking into your server or were they hack, stirring into the live feed and by hack?
I mean, it sounds like this is actually just a security mistake. What happened? 
James: [00:12:11] So, yeah, this is a great question. So, uh, so apparently I, uh, I woke up everything was fine. Um, 12 hours went by and Heather and her apple newsfeed found an article that said, if you own UV security cameras, turn them off and on and reboot them and blah, blah, blah.
And it says that he bug let you fee security, camera owners, access strangers feeds. Now here's what the official statement from UV, which, and anchor, which said due to a software bug. During our latest server upgrade at 4:50 AM Eastern. So one 50 our time, a limited number 0.001%. Um, I don't know how many people that is quite a bit of our users were able to access video feeds from other users, cameras.
Our engineering team recognized this issue 40 minutes later and fix it an hour after that. Um, and apparently this. This affect the most people. And the reason that I heard and most people did is cause there's a lot of people on Reddit that said, oh my goodness, I logged into the application. I don't see any of my cameras, but I see like someone would be in New Zealand.
They're like, I see these people in Florida and I see inside their house and I can see all their past recorded videos and nor outside their house. Right. And that's scary. It seems like most people. It was unintentional. Right. You open the app. You're like, whoa, what's going on. Get out of there. That's you know, I'm imagining.
Yeah. If someone that's hacking it is trying to hack. And then, you know, I've seen those videos where people hack in to whatever video cameras and then they have their microphones. So they say something or scare you or whatever. Right. That's creepy and bad. And that's why you don't have cameras inside of your house.
Pro tip. Don't put a camera in your house. I don't, I wouldn't, I don't do it. I have an indoor camera it's in the garage, but you know, and it. Staring at cars and that's it. You know what I mean? So 
Frank: [00:14:02] I, three cameras staring at me right now, but I guess they're not security cameras. They're not supposed to be on.
I get angry when they're on. Yeah, sure. So, so for an hour and 40 minutes, if you were one out of a thousand people, you saw someone else's. Cloud account. They basically swap the club account tokens or something silly like that accidentally 
James: [00:14:25] is that 1.001. 
Frank: [00:14:29] Uh, oh, I'm sorry. You're right. That would be sorry.
Cause it's it's percent right. So two more zeros. Yeah, one out of 10,000. Nope. Still doing it wrong. A hundred thousand, a hundred thousand, but let's go with that. You know what I swear. I promise I would never do math on the air. Okay. Some notes. So not, not a lot and an hour and 40 minutes, it sounds like.
And the semi honest mistake to me, you know, um, it honestly sounds familiar. I feel like there was another story like this, where accounts got kind of swapped around accidentally. Um, but I'm grasping at straws to try to remember what it was and the company fixed it as quickly as they could. I don't know.
I don't know how I feel about this. Of course. Wish the world was error free, but as we're all getting like these ridiculously cheap devices and using very sophisticated networks to do things that are going to be hiccups like this, you know, I don't think this is the last that we'll have of these kinds of things.
James: [00:15:39] But Frank, I am told. On the website that it has military grade encryption hundred 28 bit, and then encrypted data and footage can only be accessed into blogging into the account. Ooh. 
Frank: [00:15:53] Oh, okay. Well, here we go. Here we go. Now we can go down the encryption rabbit hole of how should their account system actually work to guarantee that no one.
Bye bye. The laws of mathematics are allowed to see your videos no matter, even if the account tokens get swapped. Okay. So, uh, they say they have encryption. What did they say? They're encrypting. 
James: [00:16:21] They say that they are, um, using 256 bit encrypted connection. 
Frank: [00:16:29] Hmm. So they're using SSL. Good for them. Yes. 
James: [00:16:33] As military grade AEs two 56 data encryption ensures our footage is kept with private military grade on transmission and storage.
So on the wire it's it's encrypted. 
Frank: [00:16:45] Yeah. Right. So when you say encrypted, you, you have to first ask, but where's the key. Who has the key. That is everything that is, it doesn't matter how you encrypt it. Like who has access to the key who can decrypt it because an encrypted thing where the key is not really encrypted.
So it's sounding like they're sharing some keys and they're not actually doing end to end encryption 
James: [00:17:13] here. So my, my assumption is how this works is because they also recommended rebooting the system. And then also logging out of the app and re logging into the app. Is, does this mean that this encryption, that they're saying are the key, right?
The encryption is encryption it's standard encryption. You can encrypt anything, but you're right. The key is what matters. I think this is a great point to talk about here is, is this is the key is on. The server and my device to enable it somehow, which means when I log in a key is created and that key is probably associated with my log-in.
And when I open the app, it says, Hey, this email address, whatever hash has this key. And that is correlated to this other device or whatever. And you are allowed to view these videos, I guess, and unlock that encrypted bed or whatever. 
Frank: [00:18:16] And I would say that that's actually a pretty decent, it's not perfect, but that is a pretty decent form of security right there.
If they are doing it that way, my guess is they're not exactly doing it that way though. My guess is that they're sharing, um, a key a bit more that like, um, all videos from that camera use a certain key or something like that. And that's why. They're just in the transmission, they're just using SSL. That's why, when you were given access to the right URL, you're able to just download that video, that kind of stuff.
I like, um, where I'm getting hung up is on the end, the end part, because if we take a step back and the end encryption is more of a thing in a chat scenario where you have two people trying to communicate with each other. And what you want to guarantee is that no one can decrypt that chat. Other than those two people.
And in a home scenario, w w who are your two chatting people? You have the camera that's producing video. So is the camera encrypting anything? And if it is, what key is it using? Then who's receiving that data is my phone receiving it or someone's server receiving it. And in that case, do they have the decryption key to that camera or is it more of a public key, private key thing where they can, um, only kind of transmitted along, along with it's a public key.
Or all these other very fun scenarios, but it really does come down to who's doing the encryption. Who's storing the key and who has access to that key. Yeah. 
James: [00:19:59] Cause they never say anywhere that it's end to end encryption encrypted, that they'd never seen that anywhere. And that's, that's, that's what apple says when we'll get to home kit and home kit secure video is it's end to end encrypted, which means.
Even apple cannot see your video, but if you fi has the key, they can see the video. 
Frank: [00:20:23] Yeah. And we could imagine a wonderful world where, um, um, just my phone has the key to unlock that video. You, he can't see it. You know, the moment it's out of the camera, no one can unsee it. No one can see it except for me, because I have the gate on my phone, you know, it's not even on a server.
Or anywhere the problem is that is super inconvenient because you want other people to be able to view that video. You want to be viewed that video, um, on different devices or through a web interface. So at some point you are going to give up that key and upload it to a server, and then it becomes a matter of how does their account system work.
Uh, can it create. Uh, subordinate keys from that, or I keep using the word key, but I should be using the word certificate here also in different places, because a key is, um, decrypting the data, their certificate is proving. Uh, who's allowed to access that data and who's not allowed to access that data.
And. You know, so like that opens up a whole nother can of worms and those two can be related in such a way that, um, you need both to be correct. 
James: [00:21:38] Yeah. And, and, you know, my assumption here is that they, they have a sharing mechanism. So let's say you just install that cam I could invite you to be a kind of my part of my family.
Right. Which means that you could see all my cameras because I'm shy or specific cameras. And I can say, Hey. You have access to two of my six cameras, Frank, and you would see them in your app and because I've enabled it. And if I, if I take that away, they would go away. So my, what I've been thinking is happening is that each camera has its own certificate or handshake that it's allowed in.
My account basically has here's all six or whatever. Let's say six of them there. And those six are associated with my account. Right. So my account says, Hey, you can see all this stuff. My assumption that probably what happened is that somewhere in the backend, when they rolled out a server update, something that shuffled around, like whatever my account was that it was associated with that, it's kind of like some keys flip, flip, flopped it around.
That's my assumption of what happened there. 
Frank: [00:22:45] And I keep trying to imagine how that would happen from a database standpoint, because. I have made database mistakes. I have made database mistakes in production servers at big telecoms. And my friend got very upset with me and I didn't know what to do anyway.
Uh, so I'm trying to imagine like what they did. I'm like, what are they using? Like integer index. And then they put it into a new table and that changed the row ID in some queries were going against that. I don't know, but you know, Databases. I can, I can easily see this kind of mistake. He was good with everywhere.
Everyone don't use integers. You're going to mess up if you use integers 
James: [00:23:27] anywhere. Yeah. Or, or something happened where they created too many F I don't know. It's very, very fascinating. Okay. So, so something went obviously wrong in this scenario because this shouldn't have happened. However, yeah. They're not the first ones that has happened too.
Right. And you know, when we. Started looking at different doorbells. I doorbells and cameras. I am under the assumption with these systems because it's not closed circuit. If it's open circuit that anything could happen to any of these at any time, which means I'm never going to put a camera in. That was just like, I don't want a washer and dryer.
That has wifi. I don't need, I don't need that to be, I don't need my washing machine Frank to be on the internet. That doesn't seem very smart at any regard at all. Um, in general, like basically anything I, I'm not about it, but this is worse because they can see and listen and hear. So I don't even want microphones lingering around, you know what I mean?
Frank: [00:24:32] Okay. Okay. I, uh, you know, when you first started on this, I thought you were being a little bit of a worrywart, but I think you're starting to win me over because I have thrown caution to the wind with outdoor cameras. And I don't even consider that or doing any encryption. I assume there's just a server out there with a bunch of.mov files that anyone could watch if they felt like it, you know?
Um, because. A lot of these services you just don't pay for. I don't know how, I don't know who's paying the bill. I don't understand any of the economics behind this, but I do know that you're not guaranteed any form of encryption or safety. So it's, you're, you're just one server accident away in that scenario.
James: [00:25:20] And I think that in this scenario where the data is stored, like on an SD card or it's stored on this hub and it's not stored on their server, That that removes one of the fees. Obviously I think what's actually happening is I don't think that the, the video is uploaded. Right. I think what's happening is I think the hub.
Is like exposing like an IP address locally and their server is the proxy that you're streaming. But yeah, I mean, that's, that's what it's doing, right. Instead of having an IP address, it needs something publicly available that my phone can talk to outside of my wifi network. So it has to have a public UV through port that's generated right with that auth token that's I think what's happening.
Frank: [00:26:05] Yeah. And now we can actually talk about  encryption again, from a different perspective. From before I was talking about kind of storage, uh, either locally or a storage on a server in this case, you're streaming it through the app and this is half the reason I get these little cheap cloud cameras is because I don't want to like expose ports on my home network.
It's hard. I used to be able to do it. UPNP was never a thing. It never works. And so all of these things proxy that data. So again, the question just comes down to who is doing the decryption. Are they proxying encrypted data or are they. Proxying um, un-encrypted data, my guess is it's un-encrypted only so that they can down sample the data.
Yeah. These cameras are picking up way more data than you necessarily want to stream to a little device or something like that. And the easiest way to have that feature is to be able to decrypt the video down, sample it and send it along its way. And so in that case, I really doubt it's end to end, but I could be surprised.
But if it was under hand encrypted, we probably want to have this leak. 
James: [00:27:18] Yeah, no, no. I think, I think you're right in that regard. And, and because what they do say is that these cameras also support home kit, secure video, which is something that I was not necessarily aware of. And there is this home app. I don't know if you've seen it on your iPhone.
Frank, maybe deleted the app. Have you there's a home button. Have you seen this? 
Frank: [00:27:38] I, I set it up. I set up multiple homes with multiple rooms, like my dream homes. And I tried to put light bulbs in each one, but I, I still haven't bought a home device, so no. Yeah. You 
James: [00:27:51] know, home kit is like the, uh, home automation that doesn't really work with anything.
Uh, 
Frank: [00:27:58] or does it. Uh, I, I honestly haven't checked in on it in a while. What they need to do is just support Alexa. Like they just need to get along you too. And it would be such a deal changer. I would use the app all the time because Amazon's app is terrible and I trust apple to write a better app. So I kind of wish things just got along, but they don't, I kind 
James: [00:28:20] of fell in love with, um, And on iOS F actually, when you swipe up from the bottom, I have my Phillips Hughes connected the hub connected to it, and all my light bulbs show up.
We only have three light bulbs. We use that a lot, but they actually show up the most recently used ones show up in underneath the brightness thing. So I might not care and you can easily turn that on and off of that, I have to going into the home app at odds. It's very delightful. Uh, and my echo B is on there.
So basically I have Hughes echo B, and now I have these. And the apple TV also too. Here's the interesting thing about home kit and home kit secure video home kit does seem to support more, does support the Phillips hues. They have like very strict requirements. It's like, it can only do these things, but the apple TV with the security camera.
Um, it is the thing in your house that does the, um, the AI machine learning. On it stays in your house. Right? So they, I mean, cause that way they're like, Hey, if we do it for you, then these devices can just be a dumb, you know, video camera and we'll do the processing, the UV app and the UV devices do it automatically.
And they're communicating to the hub, but let's just say you had a camera that had none of those things while your apple TV is just sitting around just doing nothing. And I apparently. The goal, because I think what's fascinating is the idea of a home kit, secure videos that you have a video camera that supports home kit, and you should have the option to set it up in home kit or not set it up at all.
Does that make sense? 
Frank: [00:30:02] Um, or, sorry, are you saying you don't want apps? 
James: [00:30:06] All right. So you can S so you should be able to set it up in home kit or set it up in the manufacturer's app, right? Like, so in this ideal world, I should be able to set up my UV camera only in home kit or only in the UV app or both like, what would that be duplicate, but why would I have it in two apps?
Right. Um, 
Frank: [00:30:25] well, what's the situation now. That's not the situation. 
James: [00:30:28] The situation for euphoria at least is that you have to set it up inside of their app first. And then from the app, it connects it into home kit. I think testing. Yeah. 
Frank: [00:30:39] Yeah. I mean, that makes sense. If you think of it from the healthcare perspective where apple keeps trying to write these apps, where other apps feed data into them.
Yes. You could even say that's what apple TV is in some ways. So that, that, that makes sense. From a design conceptual perspective, I haven't done it myself. I keep wanting to get one of my cheap little IOT devices to talk to a home kit, but I have not succeeded. Yeah, and I definitely haven't tried a video camera through it.
In fact, you talking about it here is honestly the first time I heard that you can do video cameras in home kits. So that's kind of blowing my mind to start with. And 
James: [00:31:21] apparently how it works is, is, is that it's sampling video at different. Rates and the camera's doing obviously the motion detection and turning on and determining when to send feed to, and from home the home app.
But if you have the home app open, it turns them all on and sort of sampling them and shows you previews in near real time. I think it updates every 10 seconds. Uh, basically it gives you another frame. If you have the app open or you can click on it and, and it. You know, it shows you, it shows you everything you want and what's cool is that you can, um, You can set it up to record when you're at home, when you're away and you use only the iPhone's location, you're giving apple the location, right?
You're not giving you for your home location, right. At any, in any way, but you can set up home and away mode and you can have it stream. Oh, enables streaming a video. It can have it record video, which is sorted. I cloud automatically for you. Um, one there's different. You actually have to pay apple for different things, but it's all unlimited storage, but certain cameras based on certain plans, it's a little bit weird.
You can fine tune the notifications. You can do face recognition, which is kind of cool based on your photos and in different things like that. But. It did put my cameras into different modes. Like it turned off certain features or not different features. Like it, it basically, if it doesn't fit into the home kit, it puts it into a home kit mode, which is like, this is the mode that apple requires the camera to be in, to work fully, but it actually works really well.
And my favorite part is that on my Mac, I can see all of my cameras right from the home app on my Mac book, which is kind of mind boggling. Awesome. 
Frank: [00:33:12] Nah, you're making me jealous. I'm not gonna complain about the Amazon family of home control devices. I'm not gonna do it. You're making me very jealous. And just because I don't want to be too bad of a developer, I've been scrolling through the home kit documentation while you've been talking to Mike, how easy is it to just like put data into it, but you know, it's, it's a pretty nice API.
I should definitely take a look. Closer look at it and they have opened up and the do it yourself world. So they have a whole sections on here about if you are doing non-commercial stuff and they document the protocols that you can follow so that you can create devices for it. I don't know if I could switch myself completely over to it, but I like the idea of.
You know, it's that old? I trust apple to encrypt my data kind of thing. I don't know why, you know, someday apple might swap accounts too. Maybe I'll get someone else's. That's what it was. James on app store connect. One time, apple flip the accounts and people are seeing different people's apps. No.
Interesting. So they made that same mistake anyway. Um, at least now, um, at least now you can, uh, build your own apps for it and, Hmm. I'm interested. I'm interested. I trust apple to do the 
James: [00:34:36] encryption. I just don't understand how it works. Cause they say home kit secure video is end-to-end encryption to route streaming cameras, but I don't understand.
How it works, because if, if I, if I connect them, like how does it communicate? You know what I mean? Like how, how does it work? Cause I don't, it says that whole kit for routers will have a virtual network. Right. That makes sense. Like, how does. 
Frank: [00:35:09] It works. Yeah. Got it. You know, and it's such a wild, wild west with those cameras.
So I've been talking about, about those, the cloud enabled ones, but, uh, simple IP cameras are really popular right now. They've come down in price too. But they all have like their own super custom weird streaming protocol. There's technically a standard, but they all support different levels of the standard.
So it really does make me wonder what camera's like that work in home kit. I'm kind of doubting it. They probably need to, as you say, go into home kit mode, whatever that means and do whatever the app wants. Maybe in that home kit mode is actually using a different set of encryption keys. That's why I can't do things simultaneously.
Maybe it's under Apple's control like that, but at the same time, it's such a wild, wild west with those cameras out there. I don't know what the trust at what level. 
James: [00:36:05] Yeah, it does say that. According to this, you need a home hub and a home hub is an iPad home Potter, apple TV that's around on your network.
So the question I have is are they in this case? Right? They are routing the UFA is routing traffic through their servers. I guess the question is when you set up home kit, is it like, Hey, you fee, instead of using your server use apple server, which is actually my apple TV, which has probably some secure apple, I P magical thing, which is going through it, I guess that's maybe that's how it works.
Frank: [00:36:47] It would be nice. I would be okay with that scenario. That sounds logical to me. That's kind of what I was saying about the keys. I get hung up on that terminology, but that's what I, uh, yeah, so, and that would explain why you don't really want to run this on your iPhone. You need to have a device that's always on so it's can do like ping pong, keep each other alive kind of thing.
Probably. I am curious when, when you were talking about the AI stuff, Uh, I I'm still really unclear on, is the camera doing it is my apple hub doing it is my iPhone doing it is UV doing it. It sounds like it's a little bit all over the place because that has security implications too, because to learn, you need to be able to decrypt.
So where did it get the key, you know, that kind of stuff. 
James: [00:37:41] It's a very good question. I do not. No, 
Frank: [00:37:49] what a world we live in why? And try to know James, because, because do you want, okay, going back to you made a strong argument for, if you are going to have interior cameras do close circuit wires and no cloud or anything, do you think there's ever going to be a point in the future where you will change your advice and say, you know what?
The cloud is secure? 
James: [00:38:15] The thing is. I, I would like to believe, so the question is, I don't even know how to test it. You know what I mean? Like how do I, I've had people that say, Hey, you, you, you can, you can actually see that UV is not sending your actual video to their servers, because if you unplug the, the hub from the internet, you and you're on wifi, you can still stream.
Right. So. It's doing something, which is like, Hey, if you're on wifi, if your phone's on wifi and you can connect locally, just stream over the local connection. Obviously, if you're not on wifi, you wouldn't be able to do it because it doesn't communicate. But the question is yet can home kit do that right?
Where I plug certain things. And I know, but how do I even monitor my network traffic? Like, I've seen all these reports of people going through and diagnosing and looking where this server and new it's community with all these servers. I'm like, I don't know until. Like, I would like for apple to sell, I guess, sell a router again.
And if that's the case, then maybe I'll feel secure about all my network traffic, but I don't know, man. I'm just, I think the thing is in any, in anything that can see and listen, just assume the worst. So don't put one in your bedroom or monitoring your little kids or, you know, or your animals or, or anything that does, you know, I don't know personal data.
I don't know. I guess I don't even, I don't even know if I could trust my computer that I'm on. I was so freaked out. I was mining some doge coin. Um, and I, I was okay. I was like, okay, well, my dose wasn't mining very fast. It was just an experiment to see how them one process or when. And then I was like, now I felt dirty.
So I'm just reformatting my entire machine. So I just did it just reformat the entire machine. Cause like, I dunno, I have no idea what this command line thing is doing. I just reformatted everything, even though I created a separate account and ran it under that separate account, I'm like, I'm reformatting everything.
I dunno. I trust anything anymore. 
Frank: [00:40:17] Uh, you can trust Docker pro to anyone out there, do your mining under Docker, 
James: [00:40:24] but that's my, I actually am windows. I booted up a hyper V. Uh, Linux machine. So not WSL, but I just went into hyper V and I said, give me a new Linux machine. And five seconds later, I had a brand new Linux machine.
And then I started mining there and then it worked, but it was very slow. It was only like 1000, whatever the, it was like 0.0, it was like 0.2 dose a day or something. That's not fast enough for me. More dose, any more dose anyways. Uh, I, I would like to think. 
Frank: [00:40:56] I've been scrolling through. Apple has a very large home.
Okay. Um, uh, protocol specification, and they have whole sections for IP cameras. And I've been scrolling through trying to find what are the details here in the, uh, security configuration and all that. But I haven't quite fully figured it out. As far as I can tell from their spec. It goes through the same amount of encryption is all other data.
That you would be transmitting through home kit. So it looks like they have a kind of a unified security model. They'll take my word for it. I'm just kinda getting the gist of it here. But at the same time, I also noticed you can create your own controllers for the apple TV. Ooh. I need to start doing that.
Collect 
James: [00:41:40] that. Yeah. There's a lot of, there's a lot of these things where I think these are really great. Like API APIs and great features and just have never had anything that really supports it. And they like, honestly like the rec. Okay. So the requirements, right? Or like you have to have an iPhone or an iPad, right touch with this version.
You have to have a home app set up on these things and you have to have an apple ID. iCloud, you have to have a home hub and you have to have a secure video camera. I have to have the support, a plan, whereas like I just bought a UV camera and I plugged it in and just worked in five seconds. Right. So, yeah, there's a convenience versus the security.
And I don't think a lot of people. Are always taking that into consideration, um, all the time, but, uh, yeah, it's, um, I'm hoping that, uh, it opens up a little bit more and they obviously have to have a lot of restrictions too, because to do recordings with, uh, iCloud in the home kit, secure video, you need to actually in the two terabyte plan to do up to five cameras.
And I have seven cameras, six cameras, so that doesn't even work for me. So, boom, arbitrary. 
Frank: [00:42:40] That's the very, very top limit five cameras. 
James: [00:42:44] Okay. For our home kit to be on your account, correct? 
Frank: [00:42:48] Yeah. Oh, that's sad. I could think of more cameras. 
James: [00:42:52] The, the thing is streaming video and storing video clips don't require an iCloud storage plan.
If you want to record your video, you need the plant or whatever. I don't know. It's weird. Like if they don't go with gasoline, it's complicated. Right. Just like, you know, I feel like we'll get there, but what I want is probably apple to make a camera. That's when I feel pretty good about it, I think. 
Frank: [00:43:16] Right.
Uh, you just had to mention that router. They used to make, it was absurd in size, but I kind of love the old airport extreme. 
James: [00:43:24] Yeah. They need a router and a camera I'm in. Yeah. 
Frank: [00:43:29] Apple. You know, dub dub in just a few weeks, who knows. They might surprise us by not releasing AR anything and just camera's creepy apple 
James: [00:43:42] cams.
Yeah, just cameras do that. And, uh, I think it's gonna do it for this week's merge conflict. Uh, I do hope that we get some really good, a good dev stuff, but we will be back with a good Google IO. And of course, uh, Microsoft build updates, lots of Donna and Maui stuff down at six off on the way. So very exciting stuff happening there.
So we'll put out an episode about that next week, sneak peak. Um, if you want an early access. To our Google IO talk, you can become a Patrion subscriber, go to patrion.com/merge conflict FM. We're just going to merge conflict.fm. That's where you find all of our links for all the things, but that's it just going to do it for this week's merge conflict Frank, until next time that's Magnum 
Frank: [00:44:24] and I've pranked her.
Thanks for listening. Peace.