Gear Friday: Ring video doorbell

People might be reluctant to press your buzzer if it means they'll be on camera. Photo / Supplied

A video doorbell? Oh yes, there are such things, and Ring sent a sample of their eponymous wireless video doorbell for testing.

The idea is to monitor the front entrance your abode when you're at home and away, via smartphone and computer apps. No need to get up and open the door for visitors, you can just watch and hear them on your phone instead.

The Ring was easy to set up, although it's on the large side with a metal case (mine was silver) and could be tricky to fit on some door frames. Design-wise, well, it's nicer-looking than your average electric doorbell but it does stand out a bit and arguably fits modern houses better than older villas.

It can be powered via a rechargeable battery (a USB cable is supplied for this) inside the unit, or via low-voltage current for electric doorbells, which involves adding a protective diode to the Ring's connectors.

Once charged and hooked up to your Wi-Fi network, you simply download an app for your smartphone or tablet, and wait for someone to show up at the door.

One feature of the Ring doorbell that I didn't think of when I installed it is that it deters some people from pressing the button because they don't want to be on camera.

This is good when it comes to random door to door pests like salespeople, but less than ideal if it scares off your non-techie friends.

One acquaintance started going round the back of the house to avoid the Ring's motion sensors that fire up the 180-degree wide-angle camera, which was a bit awkward. It did make me wonder what might happen to Ring video bells during that American scourge of a holiday, Halloween, too. Dread to think what kids will record on them.

Overall though, the Ring video delivers on image quality, and the audio recorded by the microphone is fairly good too.

Videos recorded by Ring can be stored in the cloud, for either NZ$4.50 a month, or $45 a year, which is expensive - the device itself costs a princely NZ$349, and for that money, I'd expect the cloud storage thrown in for free.

Ring tells me the videos are stored securely on Amazon Web Services, and I hope they are. I wish it was possible to store recordings locally on a network attached storage box as well, although that would make remote viewing of them complicated.

A scan of the device showed encrypted traffic to the internet, but not to and from your Wi-Fi network. This is not really Ring's fault per se, it's more to do with how home wireless networks are designed and which should be fixed sooner rather than later.

As an alternative to a security camera and front door reception service, the Ring video doorbell works just fine. However, I wish it could do just one more thing: unlock the door when you want to let someone into the house, but are indisposed.

Maybe Ring should build a whole networked, smartphone operated front door automation system, with locks and motors that open and close the entrance and and... I should stop now.

Port 25 closed for email

After I wrote the column on net neutrality, emails arrived complaining that Spark appears to block traffic to email servers. In techie terms, this means traffic going via the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to servers that listen on port 25 won't make it through.

This is an inconvenience, but it's actually justified. It's not Spark's fault: you can thank idiot spammers for ruining a good thing for everyone, as always.

Ellie Cross from Spark confirmed that TCP port 25 is indeed blocked by default for all the provider's residential and business broadband connections.

There's a good reason for it, as Ellie explains:

"This is because while there are limited use cases for having the port open, the potential downside is very large.

This port uses an outdated form of SMTP connection that means the computers or devices using these connections are vulnerable and can be exploited to execute denial of service and spam attacks. Blocking port 25 by default helps protect our network and our customers. For this reason, it's standard and common security practice to block the port by providers all over the world," she said.

Internet email was designed to relay messages from one computer or server to another, until they reached their destination.

This is done with the open standard Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (abbreviated as SMTP above), which worked well in general, but was almost immediately abused by spammers to relay their rubbish to users.

Since then, things have become even worse, with spammers hijacking innocent users' computers with malware and joining thousands and thousands of them into botnets under their control.

Just like everything else on the internet of yore, SMTP sent user logins and transmitted emails in plain text, without encryption. That's quite simply unsafe in 2017.

One way to limit the damage spammers cause is to filter out traffic on port 25 from customers who don't operate mail servers, and that's what Spark is doing.

Providers are also using encryption, called Secure Sockets Layer or SSL, to ensure messages are delivered safely. Spark has set that up on port 465 for customers who want to send email via their servers; it can also be done on port 587 with other providers.

If you still need port 25 access, go to www.spark.co.nz/25 and fill in the form to request for it to be unblocked.