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Camera Watch: Links to Public Webcams
Mikkeles writes "From an Associated Press story: 'It sounds like a chapter out of "Spy vs. Spy": Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have launched a project called Camera Watch that lists Internet cameras that monitor public spaces, letting Web surfers try the role of bored security guard.' The site permits searching for an available webcam in the geographical region (US) of your choice. About 600 webcams of 6000 in the pipe are now available."
if we have a lot of these at movie theaters, airport queues, and wherever else there might be congestion, people can adjust their travel behavior accordingly.
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
sounds like a chapter out of "Spy vs. Spy"
Sounds more like 1984 to me.
....they were slashdotted within seconds. But seriously, how would you handle a DoS on a network of webcams? Anything over the internet is reliable enough for security monitoring given attacks like DoS/DDoS?
The site -- http://privacy.cs.cmu.edu/dataprivacy/projects/cam watch -- notes that a few of the "jail cams" had been disabled due to lawsuits.
We don't want to let you see what happens in a jail. We do want to keep an eye on you so we can more easily put you in one.
No, it would cause oscillation behaviour.
If all people look at the line and it's full, nobody goes there and now it's empty, so everyone goes there. Repeat as many times as desired.
This is why no routing algorithm takes in account queue length.
What? I'm bored, leave me alone.
"Understand you're having a little Jimmy Page trouble."
...
One of the reasons I was told that a webcam may not go over well at the college I work at is the question of "If it can be monitored, is there an obligation to monitor it?"
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
a cybercafe or from the hills of Afghanistan!!!
Well, the convenience of this shouldn't be ignored. What are the security implications of this, when intelligence gathering doesn't require an on-site visit?
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
I'm not so sure I care about public webcams. I'd like to see webcams focused on our public sector. Services like Police, Fire, City, State, and Fed. employees should be monitored at random. Screw letting the government watch us, let's watch them!
If the govt. is so ancy to be watchdogs of the private citizens in our world, we should have the opportunity to be watchdogs for these organizations at our whim.
I think that civil rights violations would go down. Police are crooked wannabe thugs anyway. Tax money would be spent more efficiently. Govt. employees are lazy.
The unfortunate downside of this is that we have CSPAN in the US and our politicians are still crooked punks trying to sneak crappy laws by us everyday.
I wish my sig link were broken so I had an excuse to manually craft a sig everytime...
You bring up some good points, however I feel they are minor drawbacks.
For example, in the case of the businessman concerned that his people want to unionize. If he really wants to see where his people go, h can now hire a prvate investigator. In fact, he's much more likely to hire the investigator than to sit around watching the webcam since he's got other things to do with his itme.
Similarly concerning stalking: A stalker sitting at home who never interacts with the stalkee does not matter, since the stalkee does not knwo that they even exist.
The stalker who uses the web to gather personal info and then decides to pay a visit on the other hand, is a problem. However, the camera is a two edged sword. If the stalker harasses the stalkee in a public place, then one has a record that can be given to the police. If, on the other hand, the stalker is using the webcam to provide him with intelligence and is going to take action outside of camera view, that's a different matter. Again, I must point out that the stalker can currently follow his victim around. The webcam might make his job a little easier, but the lack thereof does not prevent him from stalking his victims.
None of the concerns I have seen raised have suggested thatbeing watched is in and of itself the problem. Every problem scenario requires the watcher to use the information he has gleaned to harm those he is watching. The webcams aren't a problem in and of themselves. They may make cetain illegal actions easier to do, but so does the telephone. So does freenet.
There is nothing wrong with sticking a camera in a public place. The question s, do you want the police to be the only ones watching them, or do you want everyone to have access to the same information.