HN Explorer

Tired of thieves, Portland woman lets the world watch her Obama sign (oregonlive.com)

14 points by Mazy ↗ HN
"Here's the story. We got an Obama sign a few months ago and it was stolen off our lawn within five days. Just yesterday we got another one (after searching for some time) and put it up on the lawn again. This morning it was gone, so we decided we'd make our own homemade sign and set up a camera to catch the thief in the act."

16 comments

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raganwald
well, if a woman, a webcam, and an election are involved, it MUST be hacker news. upvoted.
byrneseyeview
She's really behind the paradigmatic curve, here. First of all, this is Web .05-level technology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_room_coffee_pot). Second, it's clear that the crowdsourced participatory community has downvoted her content multiple times -- and they've expressed this webocracy-enable opinion even though she didn't bother to include a simple AJAX-based method for removing her sign. Rather than accept this and move on, she's trying to trap and shame downvoters in order to keep promoting her repost of a repost (the content of which has been hosted at numerous other occasions, already).
hhm
Because of the title I thought it was and obvious flag (what does it have to do with HN??!). After reading the article I think I was wrong. It's not very hackey, but at least it's tech news, and of a very extravagant kind.
hugh
If there's any relevant point to be made here, it's that apparently some people really don't have anything better to do than watch a yard sign.

I wonder if there's some way to harvest these attentive-moron-hours for some more useful purpose.

jcl
I'd say Mechanical Turk, but this might actually be too pointless for a Turk task.
vaksel
This could actually work as a startup idea. You setup a ustream webcam, and for $99/month the startup will have some low wage worker monitoring your feeds and in case of burglary or fire they can call police. Or better yet crowd source it and have people monitor the feed to earn "bounty" for catching a particular event. i.e. $1000 bounty if you catch some burglars in action.
kajecounterhack
I like your general idea. But its effectiveness would sharply decrease as customers began to outnumber people actually willing to sit there. Not to mention, it might not be effective from the get-go.

After all, the chance of a burglary happening is rather slim, and sitting there without being paid by the hour is sort of drab/not likely. I know I wouldn't do it.

hugh
Perhaps the idea could be adapted, though. How about throwing in a motion detector so that we only draw our human watchers' attention to the motion of things which look like human-sized objects?

You'd need, of course, to throw in some kind of key system (RFID?) so that it's turned off whenever the rightful owners are at home, and throw in some kind of penalty (after several warnings ) to make sure people didn't leave their house guests sitting around setting off false alarms, but some form of this could make a very cost-effective alternative to more elaborate security camera systems.

I'd pay twenty bucks a month for the peace of mind of knowing that nobody is breaking into my house, and that it isn't on fire.

ivankirigin
I used to work on automated surveillance. I can't wait until someone puts these services in the cloud to everyone will have access to the tools the feds are making. It actually doesn't make any sense that someone would be watching such a boring feed to catch the person in the act.

You need an intelligent DVR to find when the scene changes in a certain area, or an active system to detect if the sign has be taken. A pixel diff isn't enough considering wind, lighting changes, etc.

zandorg
A friend of mine did this for his BSc graduation project, on a Mac, and it's not that hard.
ivankirigin
Actually, it's really hard to make it ultra reliable. 30 frames per second, 82K seconds a day, possibly hundreds of cameras...10^8 frames daily. False alarm rate of 0.01% makes for thousands of interruptions.

That's the difference between a school project and a system you can sell.

pmorici
Look the person put masking tape on the window to block out the neighbor's house across the street.

If I were a sign thief and I saw this I would just stand out of frame and nab the thing with a lasso

hugh
Just wear a damn balaclava. It's not like the police are going to bother to investigate a yard sign theft, even if they have access to the footage, so stealing the sign provides an opportunity to (a) put one over on a bunch of obsessive weirdoes and (b) be briefly, locally famous.
tsbardella
One thing learned - Obama on a webcam is not sexy