How can you tell if your alarm company's...
Neil Johnson
njohnsn at njohnsn.com
Sat Aug 9 21:54:21 PDT 2003
On Saturday 09 August 2003 07:29 pm, Tim May wrote:
>
> Cellphones are cheap enough, and monthly charges are small enough when
> N machines share the same monthly account charge (Dad, Mom, Johnnie,
> Suzy, and Alarm). I would be surprised if today's alarm companies
> already aren't making good use of cellphones.
The building where I work has a cellular interface to it's alarm system (Small
white box with a 800MHz Antenna sticking out of it next to the central alarm
panel). I think the name on the box is something like "CellSentry". It's fed
off the batteries for the alarm system so cutting off power won't shut it off
either.
I have always wondered how the arm/disarm keypad works in most alarm systems.
I would hope it would send a reasonably secure code to the controller to
disable the alarm system, but I fear that it just a nothing more than a fancy
remote relay and can be easily bypassed.
They recently added security camers to our system. Instead of using video tape
they installed a box that records 30 second snap shots continuoulsy to it's
hard drive.
Security people can access the system over the network (with a dedicated
application, no idea how secure it is) and examine the captured images.
--
Neil Johnson
http://www.njohnsn.com
PGP key available on request.
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