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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] thread
One person has an exposed webcam in what appears to be their bedroom! http://cryptogasm.com/webcams/index.php?q=city%3A%22San+Fran...
They're not the only ones: http://cryptogasm.com/webcams/webcam.php?id=4697 And their living room where they're currently watching TV: http://cryptogasm.com/webcams/webcam.php?id=4692

Damn, this is creepy.

It's creepier than you think, currently the first feed you gave they are in bed and the guy is playing on what look like a Nintendo 3DS and he is naked...
Guy seems to be naked on the bed watching TV now.

Thankfully the camera's very pixelated.

The bedroom one is labeled "Sleep Camera" in dutch...

I wonder if it's on purpose?

Kamer means room. The slaapkamer then is the bedroom. The other one ("Woonkamer") is the living room.
Ah of course, I thought it was truncated. Using my German to translate Dutch, not always successful :) Love the similarities, "Kammer" means "compartment" or "small room" in German.
Yeah, have a look throughs omething like shodanhq.com to find webcams that are exposed. So freaking creepy.
Neat. Raleigh, NC was on the first page and I think I remember that exact camera. We used to post webcam feeds when I was an undergrad at NC State. In fact, this one time was pretty amusing (and there's a long story associated with it): http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/120_540487511649_... http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/112_540487222229_...
It's on the first page for me too. What's the story? I live and work here in the area.
tldr: I wrote a JavaScript "virus" for our school's (unofficial) message board. I was banned for years. In a thread about that webcam, I made the above facetious apology.

Longer version: premium users of The Wolf Web were granted full html/javascript abilities. I probably never would have bothered to become premium, except every year the site hosted an Egg Hunt, which involves staying online as long as you can during a 24 hour period to claim "eggs" that are randomly assigned to you. The person who gets the most eggs wins premium status for a year. Two friends and I decided to win the competition by working in shifts and we indeed won. The fact that there were veteran users, some with over 50k posts, and we won with a new alias just added insult to injury.

While playing around with my newfound html abilities, I realized that I could write an auto-submitting form; I decided to write a virus. It was totally ugly; for technical reasons related to the payload, I wrote the entire thing on one line, used the shortest variable names possible, and it was pretty much untested. The way it worked is, when a premium user clicked on a thread with the payload, they would automatically submit a new thread with the payload included. I'm still proud of one feature: it would pull recent thread titles, so they would appear to be legitimate threads that had been bumped. I call it a virus, but it didn't do much besides spread for a few days before they disabled it. Anyway, all of my accounts were promptly banned. Somehow, I used some social engineering to convince an admin who had been away to unban me. It worked, but I never used the account.

Scheming, virus writing, social engineering. Definitely one of my finer moments. I documented some of the events here: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.511920914339.213059...

I just watched two people enter their PINs at a Domino's Pizza somewhere in London. The camera in question has historic playback, too.

WTF.

Yeah. I wonder where that is. At first I thought it was actually in the City of London.
Great find! The dummy patient thing is quite creepy. I am kind of waiting for the jump scare all the time.
What an ingenious understanding of security ;) http://cryptogasm.com/webcams/webcam.php?id=4323
That is hilarious and bad and wrong. All at the same time.
Schneier has, from 2006, people pointing webcams at securid tokens!!

(http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/12/how_to_negate_...)

Here's a Stackoverflow question from someone who is expected to OCR the webcam so they can programatically use the securid token (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1983879/ocr-an-rsa-key-fo...)

And here's a really nice write up, with perl, about OCRing securid tokens. (http://perlmeister.com/lme/prod-0706.pdf)

(http://www.staton.us/electronics/web_cam_otp/index.html)

I saw the link you posted. I laughed! it was funny. Then I searched, and a whole bunch of people do it.

somebody will soon discover some murder or something
Inside a datacenter cage complete with Exadata.

http://cryptogasm.com/webcams/webcam.php?id=7779

Yeah, that's good security right there.

MOAR:

Dead bird?? http://cryptogasm.com/webcams/webcam.php?id=7972

Bird's feathers are moving slightly, seems to be alive to me, unless there's a fierce wind or something.
just moved his head
Yep. Bird started voluntarily moving. I was getting concerned.
Concerned for the bird, or concerned that someone had a webcam stream of a dead bird? :)
It's not dead, it's just resting.
The one with the bird looks like Peregrine Falcon nesting boxes I've seen on skyscrapers around here; I suspect the bird's sleeping.
The popularity of snooping on other people's lives will never cease to amaze me. Some of the sentiment in this thread is what has powered ww.com for 15 years now, and I still don't get it.

I'm not complaining though :)

Most of these cameras appear to have been set up for an organization to look at itself, or for customers to look at their own stuff. I haven't come across any that appear to have been set up with creepy creeper intent.

Yet the aggregate effect of all these inexpensive cameras is categorically different than that of any single camera alone. Today these are crappy lo-res cameras, but as bandwidth costs decrease these will become supplanted by high res cameras that can count the pores on your skin and recognition systems that do just that.

Welcome to the future, courtesy of those who are not complaining.

I guess this one is playing a joke on us? It's a feed of what looks like some old Japanese movie: http://cryptogasm.com/webcams/webcam.php?id=27115
Hmm my best guess is that it's Chinese.
Well, my ability to differentiate the two is admittedly rather limited (though I hope more accurate than a coin flip), so you might be right. On the other hand, it could've been a different movie by the time you saw it.
Taiwanese -> Complicated Letters Chinese -> Less complicated letters Japanese -> Rounder letters. Just a rule of thumb. The modern chinese letters are a simplified version of those taiwan still uses, and describe entire words. Whilst Chinese is looks more stroked, Japanese looks a little more organic, even though yes, unless you know either of them, they're still hard to differentiate.
Wow, this is both terrifying and fascinating. The FAQ mentioned viewing these is a legal grey area. Anybody know about the legality of this in the United States?
This just reminds me of the start to a terrible movie. I feel like I am going to see something bad happen.
It (publically available cameras) actually is the basis of a French thriller released in 2011 called "Aux yeux de tous"... pretty good movie!
Saw someone I know in a cam that is being broadcasted from my university. Weird.
Sun Microsystems still representing at UCSD:

http://cryptogasm.com/webcams/webcam.php?id=34899

Gosh I remember walking around my college campus one day and coming across some random computer cluster in the CS building, hopped onto one of the machines (that said "Sun Microsystems" embossed somewhere one it), proceeding to be utterly confused by the KDE applications and interface. (I was purely a Win user back then)

I'm now typing this post from an Ubuntu box that I built last week. I guess I've progressed a little bit ;)

That's one of my racks!

I've always wondered who controlled that camera.

That rack was used for the development of the Rocks Cluster system back in its heyday. Rocks creator, Phil Papadopoulos, is the brother of former Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos.

EDIT: Someone panned the camera to the other side of the room. Pardon the cable spaghetti - that rack is temporary.

This is Virginia Tech... not Haymarket, Virginia.

http://cryptogasm.com/webcams/webcam.php?id=40

I'm not sure how it does the geolocation but it doesn't seem to be terribly accurate in every case. I've seen cameras that claim to be located in inland locations that are on beaches (like http://cryptogasm.com/webcams/webcam.php?id=11495 which the site says is in a Seattle suburb but is actually on the Oregon coast)
Often, geolocation is no better than to the regional ISP.
Yep, that is the library...grad of '07
Indeed, but I think we have to realize that not all these open cameras are security failings. Some universities and towns just have open cameras so that curious people can watch. I know that Purdue had one near where the band would practice marching so that parents could see the band more frequently.