Ah, the eternal struggle of the modern consumer: buying a product that hates you back. The Fulu Foundation, led by the patron saint of soldering irons, Louis Rossmann, has officially put a $10,000 bounty on Amazon’s head. Well, specifically on the head of the Ring doorbell. The goal? To liberate these plastic surveillance rectangles from the Amazon cloud and force them to talk to a local server instead. It’s a noble, albeit adorable, attempt to perform an exorcism on a piece of hardware that was designed from the ground up to be a snitch for Jeff Bezos.

First, let’s address the elephant in the room—or rather, the $10,000 carrot being dangled in front of the world’s elite hackers. Ten grand. In the world of cybersecurity and reverse engineering, $10,000 isn’t a “bounty”; it’s a “polite suggestion.” We are talking about bypass-level encryption and proprietary firmware developed by a company with a market cap larger than the GDP of most European nations. Asking a developer to spend hundreds of hours cracking Amazon’s closed-loop ecosystem for the price of a used 2016 Toyota Corolla is the peak of “doing it for the culture.” If you have the technical prowess to successfully de-cloud a Ring doorbell, you likely already have a job at a firm that pays you $10,000 to decide which flavor of sparkling water to stock in the breakroom.

The central claim here is that users should be able to own the hardware they paid for. Revolutionary, right? But the assumption that the average Ring owner *wants* to manage a local server is a hilarious misunderstanding of the target demographic. People buy Ring doorbells because they don’t want to think. They want to pay $3.99 a month to have a video of a porch pirate stored in a giant data center in Northern Virginia. The moment you tell a Ring user they need to “configure a local PC with a Linux-based NVR and manage their own storage redundancy,” they’re going to look at you like you’re explaining quantum physics in Latin. If someone had the patience to manage local storage, they would have bought a Reolink or a Ubiquiti setup and saved themselves the headache of being an unpaid intern for Amazon’s “Search Party” feature.

Then there is the logistical absurdity of “unplugging” a device that is essentially a thin client for a web service. A Ring doorbell isn’t a “camera” in the traditional sense; it’s a sophisticated data-collection terminal that happens to have a lens. The claim that we can simply “cut off access to Amazon’s servers” ignores the fact that Amazon’s business model is built on ensuring you can’t. Even if a brilliant developer wins the bounty and releases a patch tomorrow, how long do we think it will take for Amazon to push an “essential security update” that bricks the exploit? It’s a game of cat and mouse where the cat has an infinite budget and the mouse is powered by a GoFundMe.

The Fulu Foundation is essentially trying to turn a McDonald’s hamburger into a home-cooked meal after it’s already been through the drive-thru. If you hate the “Search Party” feature and the invasive mesh networking, the logical solution isn’t to spend $10,000 to hack a $100 doorbell—it’s to stop buying the $100 doorbell. Buying a Ring and then complaining about the cloud is like buying a ticket to a cruise and then complaining that you’re on a boat.

Ultimately, this bounty highlights the “Sunk Cost Fallacy” of smart home enthusiasts. We are so desperate to “fix” our compromised privacy that we’d rather spend a fortune trying to lobotomize our gadgets than simply throw them in the bin where they belong. Good luck to the developer who takes this on; enjoy your $10k. It should cover about half of your legal fees once Amazon’s lawyers decide to interpret your “local integration” as a violation of the DMCA. If you really want local storage without the Amazon surveillance state, there’s a much cheaper bounty: it’s called a “dumb” doorbell and a peephole. It has 100% uptime and the cloud storage is located entirely within your own eyeballs. No subscription required.