
Google exposes security cameras - jacquesm
http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3A%22viewerframe%3Fmode%3Dmotion%22
======
tsally
The security cameras aren't exposed because of Google, but rather because of a
website admin that didn't know what he was doing. Google's responsibly for
this is akin to the responsibly a construction company has for building roads
to an insecure bank. :-p

~~~
karanbhangui
Lovely analogy. Is there a way of coming up with these, i've been trying to
improve my ability to do so for a long time :P

They're such useful tools in arguments.

~~~
gojomo
I like to use such analogies, but have actually found them very limited for
persuasive purposes, or only very effective with certain kinds of abstract
thinkers.

Of course, if you already agree with a speakers' point, the analogy makes
sense and helps make the matter vivid.

But when a listener intuitively disagrees, the analogy can derail discussion.
Even though in the spirit in which it was offered, it aligns one axis of the
issue at hand, with one axis of the offered analogous situation, the listener
instead may focus on -- and comment about -- every other dimension of the two
things that are wildly different.

For some thinkers, all those other differences are easy to factor out -- of
course they're different in those dimensions, and the wild variance only
serves to highlight the similarity-in-one-dimension-of-interest. But for other
fuzzier/holistic thinkers, every difference is a distraction to be considered
separately, and the attempted analogy may harden them against your point.

Worst case is when some _other_ aspect of the analogy so dominates listeners'
thought (or can be cynically flipped against you to imply you've said
something you didn't mean). This is why Nazi analogies can be so
conversationally-derailing -- whatever one small comparison was being
intended, the response is "how dare you call [Bush|Obama|Teachers'
Unions|Evangelicals|Mall Santas|etc] Nazis!"

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rriepe
Here's a giraffe:

[http://60.45.63.26/ViewerFrame?Mode=Motion&Language=1](http://60.45.63.26/ViewerFrame?Mode=Motion&Language=1)

~~~
Adaptive
It brought back a little of that early-web, fish-cam thrill when I realized
that I could actually control pan and tilt on that camera.

~~~
jacquesm
Way back in the day of the first ptz webcams we were installing one in a zoo
in Amersfoort, the Netherlands where an Elephant was about to give birth.

The webcast was tremendously popular, over half a million visitors over the
course of a few days (at the time this was phenomenal), we set up relay
stations just to be able to handle the bandwidth.

Being in a cage with a 6 metric tons pregnant elephant is quite an experience
I can tell you :)

edit: here is a panda: <http://www.sandiegozoo.org/pandacam/index.html>

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tlrobinson
<http://tlrobinson.net/bigbrother> [warning: very bandwidth + CPU intensive,
but worth it]

A few weeks ago I scraped the results from one of these searches (using Yahoo
BOSS). This page shows the live streams of a random subset of them. Scroll to
see more.

~~~
nostrademons
Could you geolocate the IPs in the scrape and then overlay them on top of a
Google Maps API? That'd be a bit more useful: security cameras in your
neighborhood.

~~~
tlrobinson
Interesting idea. I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.

Here's the list of camera domains/IPs
<http://tlrobinson.net/bigbrother/urls.txt> and the paths to the viewer page
and MJPEG, respectively:

    
    
        a.href = baseURL + "ViewerFrame?Mode=Motion&Language=0";
        img.src = baseURL + "nphMotionJpeg?Resolution=160x120&Quality=Standard";

~~~
huyegn
Dang, I didn't see your post, but it would have saved me a lot of work.

Just whipped this up last night... Here are all of the Webcams from a yahoo
search up to 1000th result Geolocated:

<http://www.huyng.com/apps/geocams.html>

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dryicerx
If anyone remembered _johnny i hack stuff_ from way back (mmm nostalgic) that
popularized using google to find vulnerabilities such as this. The
reincarnation of that site seems to be
<http://www.hackersforcharity.org/ghdb/> (lists a wealth of google
discoverable devices/services and other stuff)

~~~
mahmud
Johnny popularized the phrase "google hacking". See his "No-Tech Hacking"
session from DefCon 15: EPIC!

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CWrzVJYLWw>

~~~
tlrobinson
He literally wrote the book:
[http://books.google.com/books?id=XKgRELiphAcC&printsec=f...](http://books.google.com/books?id=XKgRELiphAcC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_navlinks_s#v=onepage&q=&f=false)

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jacquesm
I think the makers of these cameras should include a 'robots.txt' by default
that stops crawlers (or more correctly asks them to stop) from indexing the
cameras.

I highly doubt this is intended behaviour, some of these look like they were
not meant to be exposed to the general public.

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csmajorfive
Hah. I can't believe someone made an AdSense farm for these cams with this
search term as the domain. It came up towards the bottom of the first results
page for me.

[http://www.viewerframe-mode.com/inurl-viewerframe-
mode=motio...](http://www.viewerframe-mode.com/inurl-viewerframe-mode=motion)

~~~
tlrobinson
You can buy "Inurl Security Cameras"!

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shaddi
Man I remember doing this stuff /years/ ago. Can't remember where I learned
about it... Maybe 2600? Lots of sweet cameras to look at in Japan. Of course
back then I was using a dial-up connection so to be able to see more than a
frame every few seconds is a welcome improvement.

Thanks for the nostalgia. :)

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cpach
Gee, Google even suggests related searches where you can find more cameras.

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singlow
Full-disclosure equals reduction in vulnerability here, in an odd way. Because
of links about this all over the blogosphere, the google search results are
now mostly cluttered with stories about it, instead of the actual pages.
(Although you can still find them.)

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onreact-com
The quality of the images is so bad with these I wonder what "security" at all
they do provide.

Scientific surveillance studies have shown that CCTV has no positive effect on
crime. Either the crime happens elsewhere or it happens anyways and just gets
filmed.

The only thing that CCTV changed is that you have footage of masked burglars
afterwards or you catch some people having sex in the act.

Statistics suggest that catching the criminals on tape does not mean more of
them get arrested either so it's just about civil liberties being taken away.

~~~
jacquesm
I'm quite strongly against CCTV but the claim that they are not a deterrent is
false.

3% of the crimes solved in areas where CCTV systems are set up were attributed
to that. This is a pittance, but it is 3% more than would have been solved
otherwise.

The real drawback of CCTV is the 'false positive' rate, and the fact that
people that should not have access to the data (which was sort of the point of
my posted link) are able to look over the shoulder of the people in control of
the cameras. This is a serious invasion of privacy.

