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Moscow Police Watch Pre-Recorded Scenes On Surveillance Cams
An anonymous reader writes "During several months of 2009, Moscow police looked at fake pictures displayed on their monitors instead of what was supposed to be video from the city surveillance cams. The subcontractor providing the cams was paid on the basis of 'the number of working cams,' so he delivered pre-cooked pictures stored on his servers. The camera company CEO has been arrested."
Lenny's afro and Homer's Hustle were out of place.
It took them five months to uncover this. If the contractor hadn't been greedy, it probably would have gone on a lot longer. It's no surprise though -- most camera feeds aren't encrypted/authenticated in any way. Nonetheless, the justice system and juries will rely on them as irrefutable evidence of a crime. And anyone who claims they were photoshopped into the scene will be laughed out of the courtroom.
The industrial espionage possibilities are quite lucrative.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
For those of you that can read Cyrillic, here is the company web site.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
Yes, but, did they catch any criminals on them? Who cares if they're faked, as long as they catch the bad guys...
Oh well, back to my global warming awareness seminar...
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
From TFA: "Investigators say apart from falsifying pictures the company also distributed a computer virus in order to obstruct activities of its rival in the western district of the capital."
:-)
Gotta love Moscow.
(And funny if they had the same images for months on end without the monitor watchers noticing anything odd. The article doesn't make it too clear whether the practice was occasional or continuous. Or if it was still images or video loops.)
No, this has absolutely nothing to do with Dinosaurs, but there is a scene where Nedry is on the phone with a "video feed" to the docks.
If you look closely now, you can see that the video feed is just a pre-recorded video playing in whatever video player was offered in the early Mac Versions. I wouldn't expect anything more, given the era the movie was shot in, and to the untrained eye it would appear pretty cool.
But anytime I watch that part of the movie now, I just chuckle.
What gets me is that they actually arrested the CEO over this.
If this had happened in the US, the company would have gotten a fine at most. Likely amounting to about a tenth of what they made.
And maybe a couple of low-level employees would have been fired while the CEO gets a nice bonus...
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
It doesn't matter the country - so much of "security" is simply following obeying form. A great deal of it is cargo-cult behavior. In more respectable circles, this is called "auditing", but the result is the usually (not always) same. To a great extent, the practice of security is a particularly weird form of consensus risk-spreading. A manager authorizes paying a consultancy to pay a box checker to create forms for a company to fill out, you do so. When your security fails, people review the paperwork, and if it was done well, no heads roll, insurance pays, and "lessons are learned".
The only difference in this case was that there was real accountability, but that probably only proves that Russia's capitalism is still immature.
I forget what 8 was for.
I get the impression that most of the cameras were working at some point, but failed. And this is why the company started sending fake (cached) images. I wonder how many were damaged by unhappy citizens. And I wonder what the company was thinking when they signed up to be responsible for replacing security cameras that they should have known were likely to come under attack.
Really this should almost be unsurprising. In any business, there's a huge incentive to outsource the most risky tasks just to have someone to blame when things go wrong. Personally, as a contractor, I hate working by the hour and would rather have my work judged on it's merits rather than by how long it takes. And for that reason I always have to carefully manage the amount of risk I'm willing to take for any job, and to weigh it against the fees offered.
Clearly in this case the contractor in question did not account for the amount of risk he was taking on. And clearly the Moscow police didn't have much incentive to take enough of the responsibility of securing their cameras on themselves. The result is the contractor in jail and the police acting like they had no idea there was any problem. Typical, really.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
...policemen think YOU are looking younger!
... in Soviet Russia, TV does not watch you?
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
"In Soviet Russia, cameras watch pre-recorded scenes of police"
It make sense if you think about it.
Is your /. name a reference to Bobby Abreu?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
In a Civilized country the company would be fined and the CEO would collect his severance bonus and move to a different company at a higher salary.
I grew up in a very small town in rural Georgia, not that far from where the movie Deliverance was filmed... and even I was able to watch Doctor Who on a local Georgia PBS television station as a kid, and am quite familiar with Tom Baker (and somewhat with some of the others). That's not even counting the countless pop culture references to Baker, who has largely been portrayed as the iconic Doctor.
Without Baker, I probably wouldn't have even thought to watch Eccleston and Tennant.
What? You don't think Fox fakes video?
Or it gripes you to admit it?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
They did this in Speed and Homer simpson did the same thing as well to get out of work.
... the government controls the companies!
That the amount of effort to develop software to fake all this was probably equal to the amount of actually setting up the cameras properly.
What is this, rt.com?? The same site had a story about a Ukranian guy who was building his house from stolen tombstones and another about a hairdresser who forced a would-be robber to be her sex slave ... entertaining, but not exactly a place I'd go for credible journalism.
"You never pushed a noun against a verb except to blow up something" (Spencer Tracey, 'Inherit the Wind')
Crime officially did not exist. Everything offcially worked the way it was supposed to.
Since Russia once again has a totalitarian government, and its government and culture retain many similarities with Soviet Communism, maybe the Moscow Police turned a blind eye, as it were, to the fact that the cameras weren't working. Maybe the cops put the hapless camera vendor up to pretending the cameras worked.
True.
I'm very sorry that it is this way, but it's absolutely true.
Russian police is the worst criminal organisation in the country - no exceptions since they "police" their ranks very efficiently and you do not get higher than a trainee cadet if your superiors sense some moral backbone in you.
I know this because I have a friend who has an elder brother working in Moscow police.
Sad..