Secluso is trying to make a private home security camera less like a weekend-long punishment.
The open-source project, previously called Privastead, has been updated after about a year and a half of work by its maintainers. It uses OpenMLS for end-to-end encryption, meaning camera data is designed to be readable only by the intended devices, not by a random cloud service in the middle. The team says the system can now be installed on a Raspberry Pi in under five minutes using a graphical deployment tool, with a build-your-own guide for the hardware side. The mobile app has also been redesigned and is now available on both the iOS App Store and Google Play.
The interesting bit is not that another home camera exists. It is that Secluso is trying to make the private version less hostile to normal people, while still keeping the parts that privacy projects tend to care about. The camera runs a customized minimal operating system based on Yocto, and most of the stack has reproducible builds — a way to check that the software you install matches the published code. The exception is the iOS app, which remains the awkward asterisk, as usual.
Secluso also added UnifiedPush support for more privacy-preserving notifications, which is a small but telling detail: the pitch is not convenience at any cost, but convenience with fewer strangers in the loop.