Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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.)
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.
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"
Cyrillic is a script, not a language. There are several languages that use it, including Russian, which is probably the language of the article you've linked to. It is perfectly possible to be able to read a script, but not understand the language. For example, I can read Italian, because it is in the same script as English, but I can't understand it. The same would apply for those who speak a Cyrillic represented language other than Russian.
I hate printers.
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.