Amazon's Ring doorbells are surveillance devices that conduct round-the-clock video surveillance of your neighborhood, automatically flagging "suspicious" faces and bombarding you and your neighbors with alerts using an app called "Neighbors"; it's a marriage of Amazon's Internet of Things platform with its "Rekognition" facial recognition tool, which it has marketed aggressively to cities, law enforcement, ICE, businesses and everyday customers as a security measure that can help ID bad guys, despite the absence of a database identifying which faces belong to good people and which faces belong to bad people. Read the rest

Ring is a "smart" doorbell that Amazon bought for $1B in 2018, and proceeded to turn into an insecure, networked surveillance device, (possibly wired into Amazon's facial recognition system) and connected to law enforcement so that the company could advertise that owning a Ring made you a good citizen of your neighborhood, part of a mesh of relentless eyes-on-the-street that identified suspicious strangers and sicced the law on them, frontended by an app named with pitch-perfect creepiness: "Neighbors." Read the rest

Researchers from Dojo/Bullguard investigated the security model of the Ring smart doorbell -- made by Amazon -- and discovered that the video was sent "in the clear" (without encryption) meaning that people on the same network as the doorbell, or on the same network as one of its owners, can easily tap into its feeds. Read the rest

Sources "familiar with Ring's practices" have told The Intercept that the company -- a division of Amazon that makes streaming cameras designed to be mounted inside and outside your home -- stores the video feeds from its customers' homes in unencrypted format and allows staff around the world to have essentially unfettered access to these videos. Read the rest

(UPDATE HERE)

Police in Montgomery County, Texas are searching for this mysterious woman who was apparently ringing multiple doorbells in the middle of the night at a subdivision over the weekend. Read the rest

Amazon will acquire Ring, the Santa Monica, CA-based home video surveillance maker. Read the rest

Ian Schramm from Tempest Rings makes lovely videos of his work handcrafting rings from unusual materials, like this beauty made of walnut burl and inlaid with crushed blue opal. Read the rest

I previously admired a lovely and affordable silver-bronze handcrafted skull ring by Lost Apostle available from our wonderful sponsor ShanaLogic. Now it's also available in solid bronze. It comes in many sizes and costs just $55! And Shana says, "Free USA shipping on this ring!" Bronze Skull Ring Read the rest

I'm always looking for an elegant skull ring and this handcrafted silver-bronze handcrafted specimen from Lost Apostle is a beaut. "Look closely and you'll see each tooth is carved, the jaw bone tucked away behind the zygomatic arch and the nasal bones all beautifully detailed. Even the back of the jaw and teeth are carved, as is the roof of the mouth, showing the palatine bone and nasal aperture." It's $65 from our pals at ShanaLogic. "Silver Skull Ring" Read the rest