[CM30]

Take it as you will, but some of the comments in the article are saying that the only things left active are the wifi functionality to remotely switch the device on again, and that the 'camera' part is completely disabled as you'd expect.

So at the moment, it's a bit less ominous than the title suggests.

That said, I do find it irritating how many devices seem to want to be on permanent 'standby' nowadays, especially given all the talk about wasting electricity. Or the related worries about spies being able to remotely activate devices because they're not completely off.

[PeterStuer]

It says it stops transmitting the video to the cloud service. It doesn't say it turns of the camera part. In fact, from the power draw and the ABI article it seems the only things being turned of are the camera indicator led and the motion detection. Recording seems to continue at 1080p.

[dmd]

> Recording seems to continue

It has no on-board storage. Where exactly do you think it's recording to, if it's not transmitting?

[rplnt]

It doesn't have to store the video to process it?

[dmd]

No. Dropcam streams. There's no on-board storage. (Ok, maybe there's a megabyte or so - enough to store about one second of video for buffering before transmitting.)

[rplnt]

How does that negate my statement? You don't have to store (much of) the video to process it locally on the device. As an example, it's being compressed before streaming. As to whether it does something with the video is another question, but it's definitely possible without storage.

[dmd]

... which is exactly what I said. You asked "It doesn't have to store the video to process it?", and I said no, it doesn't, other than a small amount for processing.

[ausjke]

this could be technically true, if you shutdown the streaming totally, resuming it cleanly normally require a reboot, which is slow for customers, which is why the reason the encoding is kept running all the time. Been there done that.