Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

After more than a decade shopping at Amazon, having bought hundreds of products, this may be my very first review ever. The software in and around this device is very very bad. The security of mydlink is awful. The vendor, Circuit City, is awful. I don't know what D-Link is thinking (probably not much). First, for context, I do software for a living and one might imagine I would know more about routers, WiFi, UPnP, port forwarding, and other relevant networking concepts than most consumers of this device should have to. Second, I'm not trying to do anything remotely fancy. Just what it says on the box. Issues: The Wizard seemed unable to put the device on my WiFi network, and offered zero feedback about what the issue might be. I have an absolutely vanilla network with WPA2 authentication. The Wizard appears to be the *only* way to create a "mydlink" account and associate a device with it. (A "mydlink" account is required in order to access the iPhone and Android viewing features). The "mydlink" site itself has almost no features or controls. D-Link firmware has always been minimal, which is not all bad, but this site looks like it was written by junior high school students as a class project. The Wizard and the "mydlink" site appear to be badly broken with respect to password handling. For example, I used a password generator to generate my passwords, and this generator, for security, creates passwords that include one or more punctuation characters (slash, plus, etc.) in the password; these characters choke up one or both of the Wizard and the mydlink site (the wizard and the site accept them without complaint, but just don't process them correctly). I could systematically reproduce this problem. Passwords are sent as HTTP parameters and URL-encoded; presumably they are not properly decoded by the "mydlink" server. The Wizard was annoyingly telling me to "check my connection to the Internet", but, in reality, the HTTP response from "mydlink" was telling my computer that the data sent by the Wizard wasn't being processed properly. How do I know this was happening? Well, I watched the packets over the network. To my surprise (and mild shock), the system administration password for the camera is sent in human readable *plain* *text* over the Internet, to "mydlink" in an HTTP (not HTTPS) POST. For those who don't know what this means, it means "unbelievably bad security". Do you really want stealyourmoney.com watching your kid? I don't. Next thing was to just use a bad password. OK, "cat" anybody? That password seemed to please the Wizard and "mydlink", however .... still no video on the "mydlink" site. Just a black screen counting down from 60 seconds. OK, so I more or less gave up on "mydlink". ... maybe I can still use this from a PC... But no, it doesn't end there. In the Web interface of the camera itself (i.e., not the Wizard), it *is* possible to set up WiFi, and yes, I can get video and audio, night vision, and the quality is not bad (audio does have background noise as reported in the other reviews, but I was not bothered about that). However it seems almost impossible to set the admin password (even to something alphanumeric, with only lower case letters!) and still be able to log out and log in again. So if you are OK with an empty password field to your camera watching your kid, then fine. But if you want a real password.... OK. So after quite a few hours. A night ruined. I guess I'll just return this. Amazon is pretty good about that right? Well this is Circuit City. And they are not pretty good about that. They are awful about it. Their policy is that you need to call the manufacturer and get a "defect confirmation". Once you do that, you can call them so they can give you an RMA number to get a replacement. Have you ever tried to get a consumer electronics manufacturer to confirm a software defect in writing? Do you think the replacement from Circuit City is going to have that software fixed? (For the record, no, there is not a firmware update. Yes, I did enable UPnP. Yes I did verify that the port can be connected to remotely. Yes, I did revert the device to factory defaults ten or twenty times.) Friends in the world, I recommend you AVOID this one.