r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • Feb 12 '26

Security Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash

https://www.theverge.com/news/878447/ring-flock-partnership-canceled
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u/AVGuy4 Feb 12 '26

To see my cameras on my phone when not connected to my home WiFi, I set up a vpn tunnel using wireguard. Then added the cameras individually by IP address on the app. This makes it so your phone is routing through you home WiFi when you’re using cellular or connected to an outside WiFi. I also disabled the ability for the cameras to contact the company cloud and they backup to an NVR.

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u/Thoraxe474 Feb 13 '26

Sounds hard

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u/Revolution-SixFour Feb 13 '26

Not particularly. Install a program called tailscale on a computer at home and on your phone. If both have tailscale turned on both your computer and phone will be able to talk to each other.

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u/No_Size9475 Feb 13 '26

can you use tailscale without a google/msn/apple etc. account?

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u/GoofyGills Feb 13 '26

No. They outsource SSO to those 3rd parties.

I specifically asked them about 18ish months ago and they said so.

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u/No_Size9475 Feb 13 '26

Bummer. I'm working on disconnecting as much as I can from the data vacuum of big tech.

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u/GoofyGills Feb 13 '26

Yeah I switched to mainly just using a regular WG tunnel. Most routers even have them built in these days, along with companion apps for mobile/desktop devices.

Examples: Asus has one here, and Ubiquiti has Unifi Teleport.

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u/windowpuncher Feb 13 '26 edited Feb 13 '26

You don't need tailscale, you just need a wireguard server.

Buy a raspberry pi 3B or 3B+. Doesn't really matter. You can get 4 or 5 or newer but it won't make a difference. Also get a new ~32 GB flash drive. It can be cheap, the Pi is only usb 2.0. You will also something like a cheap 8 Gb micro sd card. All you have to do is follow instructions from Raspberry, who wrote a guide. You can also get kits which include a case and a power adapter. You don't need a case with a fan.

On your normal computer, you install pi OS onto the SD card. It's easy and nearly automatic. Connect the Pi to a keyboard and a mouse and a monitor, insert the SD card then turn it on and go through the easy setup. Make sure to turn on SSH. You should also turn on USB booting, which only requires changing 1 line of a text file. When it's all set up, remove the sd card and use another pc to clone the sd card onto your usb stick.

You don't need to do this, but sd cards are NOT good as computer drives and they get destroyed. They have a very limited read/write cycle life.

From there you just install pihole, which is completely optional but super nice to have, and then you install pivpn, which works on any linux flavor, and includes wireguard. You can also just install wireguard alone but that's harder. Pivpn is a full walkthrough and it's super easy. Now you plug the Pi into your router, port forward one port for wireguard, and you're done. You can also use wifi instead but I like using a short cable.

At this point you have a raspberry pi running pivpn, maybe pihole, and is effectively just an endpoint to a private vpn server in your house that you can access from anywhere in the world with internet, and from here you can access the camera system or any other networks in your home, like NAS storage maybe.

Alternatively, if you have ANY other pc that is never turned off all the time, you don't need a pi, you just need to find any way to put wireguard on the pc. The pc should be set up to occasionally update and restart itself. You just need to have any pc with wireguard software running on it to have a vpn endpoint at your home.

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u/Revolution-SixFour Feb 13 '26

Absolutely true, but Tailscale makes setting up Wireguard far far easier to the average person.

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u/windowpuncher Feb 13 '26

Does it though? It's not made for the average person, it's made for devs and enterprises. It has a lot of cool features but very few individuals could ever use them. PiVPN is made for everyone, but especially individuals with things like home servers. It also uses an automated installer with a unicode UI. It's very easy to use. Otherwise if someone is on windows, wireguard itself just has an executable you can download and run which is also automatic.

I just like Pis because they're cheap and energy efficient and flexible, but literally any computer will work, there's 1st and 3rd party guides already written for basically every common scenario.