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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.
I like to use the World View of Live Webcams to get my voyeuristic fix. It's kept fairly up to date, and has hundreds of cams.
....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?
pfft. that was quick.
No.
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.
...on http://www.e-sheep.com
Look at the story called 'spiders', the one about al quaida.
(Forgive me, it's early, haven't had coffee...not EVEN gonna try a link...so just cut n' paste).
Don't park drunk, accidents cause people.
I don't want to see the US, give me a cam in the red light district in over in Amsterdam that pans.
I think Fox is gonna license the camera footage as a new reality tv series "World's most exciting random camera footage."
www.google.com
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I wonder how they'll police this? Honestly, I think it's a good idea in theory, like especially when dealing with troublesome intersections that cause frequent accidents. Having the public watch the cams and call in accidents as soon as they happen could be a *very* good thing. But the problem is that you'd need someone to police the people viewing the cams to make sure that if they acted on what they saw (or think they saw) that it was a real and legitimate problem.
Or maybe I'm just misunderstanding the article. I guess that at first read through, "the role of bored security guard" makes it sound like you'll watch the cameras instead of the guards, but I guess that you could be watching them in addition to the guards/security that normally view them.
But if THAT is the case, then I guess this brings up the question, is this then just for entertainment value? You know it's a sad but true fact of life that if people saw something bad that happened, they'd just be like "oh, that sucks" or laugh or whatever, and then go on with life just being glad that it wasn't them.
-Through the server, over the router, off the firewall... Nothing but 'Net!
The Camera Watch project is part of our Surveillance of Surveillances ( SOS) effort. We are constructing a repository of links to publicly available on-line webcams, where the webcams of interest are those that observe the public in public spaces. At present, we estimate there are about 10,000 such cameras displaying public places in the United States. Our goals are to assess the number and nature of such cameras, explore potential uses, and analyze and propose related policies and best practices.
Our database is just being launched. The current edition of the database has only a few hundred direct links to cameras with about 6,000 links currently queued for processing. We expect to have these included in the database over the next weeks.
You can search the database for a camera or submit a link to a camera for inclusion in the database.
Wow, 6,000 camera links queued for processing. They should write a bot to check the links for up-time-ness and verification.
I have 2 routes I can take to work. If my normal route, the fast highway is clogged up because of an accident or bad weather, I can take the normally somewhat slower alternate route. Gotta love technology.
Whats funny is when there is an accident, the operators zoom in with the cameras so you can see the damage up close LOL
Better to have everyone watching than to have the shadowy few watching... we might even feel better about ourselves and be a little easier on each other once we find out everyone else is just as fucked up as we are.
This is what TIA and Carnivore should be, if they are to be allowed to exist at all...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Can I yell "You Kids! No running in the goddam mall" remotely?
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
.... watch public places sitting in a cybercafe or from the hills of Afghanistan!!!
It's like millions of cams were used at once, and then suddenly silenced... by slashdot.
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
I discovered this a short while ago myself, and was surprised to find one within just half a mile of my own home, just off a street on my regular commute. I come within a hair's breadth of appearing on camera every morning, and I never knew it.
I keep a couple locations on shortcuts, and sometimes I check out the sunrise in other states over my morning coffee.
Too bad there isn't a webcam on their server, so we could all watch it go up in smoke live.
Do not read this sig.
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.
About 600 webcams of 6000 in the pipe are now available. /. effect.
And, of course now that this has been announced on Slashdot, within the next half-hour, there might be only 10% of those 600 that survived the
Karma: NaN
This is not a bad thing. David Brin actually discusses this in depth in his book Transparent Society."
A person watching the camera is no different than a person standing on the street corner watching people go by. Well there si a difference: the person watching on the web is a witness wwho cannot be intimidated into silence, and nobody knows if they are being watched in that public space.
I don't fear the loss of privacy, because there is no privacy in public spaces. I do like the idea that any would be wrongdoer does not know whether he is being watched or not.
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
Security guard? Maybe a collectively blind one. Ten thousand people looking at the same blurry, 10fps image isn't very helpful, at least not for identifying people. Most public cams are so lo-res and slow that unless we can get the crooks to move in slow motion and put their faces to the lens for a seconds, it's going to be limited to "hey, there's someone there, wearing something red, I think. Or maybe it's an Irish Setter, or a tomato."
As usual then, it's all about the bandwidth. High-res cameras with 30fps minimum, swivel and zoom controls, and why not toss in sound? Then maybe you've got something. That something would still be a privacy catastrophe, but at least it would be a crisp, interactive privacy catastrophe.
% grep "women\'s dorm" camwatch.htm
%
Darn.
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...
I think this fits cause a store is a privately owned place with public access. I recently installed a system with 4 panning cameras in an antique store that was having very bad shoplifting problems. There is a monitor in plain view of people entering as well as tape recording and streaming via a web server. The shoplifting instantly stopped. Motion detectors autodial the 2 owners via wireless cell at night in case of a break in and they can instantly view activity inside the store via the Web. A UPS powers the system (including illumination) in case of electrical failure. Not entertaining but very useful. And a way cool project :-)
This sounds like a perfect example of a site you would expect to be filled with dead links in about 8 months. This is espescially so as it is coming from a university and is therefore likely tied to some sort of research grant which will eventually run out leaving nobody paid to maintain the database....
Come play Moral Decay!
So here is my idea:
Could one collect the information streaming from these cameras and use it as a source for random number generation? Over a large number of Webcams the rate of information change must be huge. At any given point you could also single out darkened cams and use their CCD noise too. Doesn't sound too difficult to do (for someone else, someone with brains that is). How would this compare to typing randomly and jiggling my mouse as a source of random numbers?
If you outlaw the law, only criminals will have laws
I live in Glasgow and we have CCTV cameras throughout the city centre (and quite a bit beyond), checking on us all the time and making us think harder about behaving nicely. If I could see what the folks monitoring the systems could see, I'd be a lot happier about the surveillance.
Making all the CCTVs in a city centre webcams is the answer to "Who watches the watchers?" We do. If the naughty guard is zooming in on the booty shots or looking in folks windows we can check the time, report it directly, and get them the disciplining they need. It'd be a balance to the one-sided oppressive feeling the current systems engender. I wouldn't need any sort of control over where they were pointed, just being able to check out (whenever I felt like it) what they were watching would be good enough for me.
It'd bring folks back to the city centre here, too. When they realise how boring it is these days. And they can see the lack of anything happening from the comfort of their desk.
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