Ratchet Up

Trolling for Webcams

“Blogs and message forums buzzed this week with the discovery that a pair of simple Google searches permits access to well over 1,000 unprotected surveillance cameras around the world -- apparently without their owners' knowledge.

Searching on certain strings within a URL sniffs out networked cameras that have Web interfaces permitting their owners to view them remotely, and even direct the cameras' motorized pan-and-tilt mechanisms from the comfort of their own desktop.

Video surfers are using this knowledge to peek in on office and restaurant interiors, a Japanese barnyard, women doing laundry, the interior of an Internet collocation facility, and a cage full of rodents, among other things, in locales scattered around the world.” [Security Focus]

“With the proliferation of surveillance cameras in everyday life and Webcams at home computers, the ease with which unsecured cameras can be detected on the Internet has become an increasing cause of concern. Last month bloggers began reporting on the ability to tap into thousands of raw Webcam feeds with a few simple Google searches, and the Spanish police arrested a suspect on charges of developing a computer virus that can activate a Webcam without the owner's permission.

The Yankee Group, a market research firm, estimates that as many as 13 percent of American households have a Webcam attached to one of their computers, often sitting on top of a monitor in a living room or a bedroom.

Like each Web page, each camera on the Internet has an address, and unless the cameras have been concealed behind software firewalls, their addresses make them specifically searchable and identifiable.

A Google search one day last week indicated more than 10,000 such Web cameras, showing everything from bedrooms and living rooms to coin-operated laundry businesses and shoe stores to plasma reactors and mountain ranges. (Some of the cameras required passwords for access to the video.)

Other video sources are mostly security cameras that have been fed onto the Net, either deliberately to make them available to the public, like traffic or weather cams, or simply because putting the camera online was the easiest way to get the video signal into the building's security office.

If a Webcam image is deliberately displayed as a part of a public Web site, then the image is obviously intended to be seen by whoever visits that site. But a search for specific video camera signatures allows users to skip the Web site and view the camera image outside its intended context.” [NYT]

This is a Google search that reveals about 2000 webcams, courtesy of a Boing Boing reader.

Grab Bag

“Physicist Graham Flint is working on an ultra-high-resolution portrait of America — a series of gigantic, gigapixel images taken with a custom camera made from bits and pieces of decommissioned Cold War hardware. Armed with a self-designed camera he crafted from parts of spy planes and nuclear reactors, Flint is crisscrossing America, taking thousands of pictures of cities, monuments and national parks.Weighing more than 100 pounds, Flint’s camera captures images at 4 gigapixels — a resolution high enough to photograph four football fields and capture every single blade of grass. When printed at maximum resolution, the images are as big as billboards, but render the finest detail. The gigapixel camera is very large format, using 9-inch-by-18-inch plates. It’s the same format used in military spy planes like the U-2. In fact, Flint uses old spy plane film magazines. ”It was surplused out, and I bought up most of them (about a dozen),“ Flint said. Large rolls of Kodak film, used mostly for aerial photography and geological surveys, cost $1,200 each. The film is ultra-high-resolution — 4,000 pixels per inch — but on a square-inch basis, it costs less than 35mm, Flint said. He cuts the film himself and loads it onto the magazines.” [Wired]

Photographs of the Tsunami taken by Patrick Knill: from first sighting to last picture on the memory card before he and his wife were killed. [CBS News]

RevGTv “is live video and camera phone blogging worldwide. [...] RevGTv is Mobile Reality TV. It's a mobile blog taken to the next level. Camera phones are sending pics and video to RevGtv from all over the world every second and millions are watching. Get creative and go live with your own show.”

When I last checked in it was samba time in Brazil. Very hot.

There Is No Love Like Pixel Love

This is an oh so clever segue from the previous post. The cityscape above is made from pixelblocks, translucent building blocks that should sprawl across the desk of every playful cybercultist.

There are tons of kinky little creatures to be built, and space for edgy pomo referentiality. Particularly intriguing is the ability to create what they call “digital stained glass.” Their site guides you through translating one of your own photographs into a pixelblock version. It's like playing God with photography: you reach right down into the DNA of the image with your fingers and build it up from scratch.

In a world in which are are very, very few reasons to get up from the computer, this just may be one of them. Let speak that inner child.

Then, when you're addicted, consider getting one of the sets of B&W only blocks. Let the child give way to the man; let speak that inner modernist.

[Pixelblocks]

The Architecture of Density

Michael Wolf's new exhibition, The Architecture of Density, is exhibition of large scale color photographs of Hong Kong, where he has lived and worked for ten years.

“Stimulated by the region's complex urban dynamics, he makes dizzying photographs of it's architecture. One of the most densely populated metropolitan areas in the world, Hong Kong has an overall density of nearly 6,700 people per square kilometer. The majority of its citizens live in flats in high-rise buildings. In Architecture of Density, Wolf investigates these vibrant city blocks, finding a mesmerizing abstraction in the buildings' facades.

Some of the structures in the series are photographed without reference to the context of sky or ground, and many buildings are seen in a state of repair or construction: their walls covered with a grid of scaffolding or the soft colored curtains that protect the streets below from falling debris. From a distance, such elements become a part of the photograph's intricate design.

Upon closer inspection of each photograph, the anonymous public face of the city is full of rewarding detail―suddenly public space is private space, and large swatches of color give way to smaller pieces of people's lives. The trappings of the people are still visible here: their days inform the detail of these buildings. Bits of laundry and hanging plants pepper the tiny rectangles of windows―the only irregularities in this orderly design.”

[Via Eyebeam]

ArtGarden: Getting What You Want

“'ArtGarden' is a new search engine developed by British Telecom (BT) and tested by Tate Online. In ”Smart search lets art fans browse,“ BBC News reports it allows you to browse the Tate's collection depending on what you like or not. Instead of typing an artist's name, you will be shown an initial selection of pictures of paintings or sculptures. When you click on one image, the artificial intelligence component of 'ArtGarden' will choose the next set of pictures to show you. This choice will be partially based on keywords associated with each work of art, but unknown to you, partially on your previous preferences, and finally on plain luck. This technology should soon become available online. With 'ArtGarden,' it will be like jumping randomly from one aisle of the museum to another.]” [Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends]

“Behind the scenes, ArtGarden uses artificial intelligence to keep track of each viewer's preferences across a range of criteria. These 'scores' are used to bias the random selector, which then picks the next item to display. This way of browsing strikes a balance between focusing on specific personal 'likes' and introducing some serendipity - lucky finds that a more blinkered approach might miss. It's also simple to use - all you have to do is indicate your preferences using your mouse.” [BT Group]

“The technology uses a system dubbed smart serendipity, which is a combination of artificial intelligence and random selection. It 'chooses' a selection of pictures, by scoring paintings based on a selection of keywords associated with them. So, for instance a Whistler painting of a bridge may have the obvious keywords such as bridge and Whistler associated to it but will also widen the search net with terms such as aesthetic movement, 19th century and water. A variety of paintings will then be shown to the user, based partly on the keywords and partly on luck.” [BBC]

Fuzzy Face

he “good news is you can keep the camera in your cell phone. The bad news is anyone who wants to can turn it off. At least that's the way it might work if technology described by Hewlett-Packard makes it to market. A recent patent application from the computing giant describes a system in which digital cameras would be equipped with circuits that could be remotely triggered to blur the face in any images captured by the camera. [...] a system in which an image captured by a camera could be automatically modified based on commands sent by a remote device. In short, anyone who doesn't want their photo taken at a particular time could hit a clicker to ensure that any cameras or camera-equipped gadgets in range got only a fuzzy outline of their face. [...]

A system that allowed people to selectively opt out of having their photo taken would address such privacy concerns without resorting to more draconian measures such as banning cameras, as numerous authorities have done with camera-equipped mobile phones. The patent application covers technology that would have to be incorporated both into cameras and the ”image inhibitor modules“ that would signal ”No photos of me, please,“ plus a system for spontaneously registering inhibitors with cameras. The in-camera technology includes sophisticated image-analysis software to selectively identify faces so they can be obfuscated.” Something like this?

[C|Net]

D'Fusion Demo

rench company Total Immersion has a new 3D demo that is really amazing. Their site claims that it allows “incrustations in real time of 3D,” an evocative phrase that may be the result of exuberant translation. Or the fact that they retain a French media theorist as their PR flack.

Total Immersion won a first prize from European Information Society Technologies. They are hyping this technology for industrial design and demos, but the game world is salivating about the notion of, as Gear Live says, turning your “world into an immersive gaming experience, where you are IN the game...or where the game is all around you.”

Check out their demo in Windows Media.

[Via Waxy]

Taxonomic Power To The People

As the web increasingly invites individuals to contribute information―everything from posting pictures to commentary―to massive online databases like Wikipedia or photo-sharing sites like Flikr, a whole new logic of classification is emerging. Historically, formal classification procedures produced “taxonomies” developed exclusively by subject specialists, whether librarians or biologists. The slicing and dicing of a subject was the province of it's ruling class.

But now that the web invites anyone to contribute and categorize―typically by “tagging” information for retrieval―the power to classify is returning to the people, the folk. And a new discussion is emerging about the logic and custom of collaborative tagging and the resultant “folksonomies.”

Wired has recently published a good overview, but if you are interested in getting into the center of the debate a smart place to hang out is at the weblog “Many 2 Many.” Here's their defining post on folksonomy, plus one at Wikipedia with many good links.

'Shopping Out the Victim: Crime Scene Photos

Canadian police have developed a technique to remove the children from kid-porn images, leaving only the locations, which they hope people will identify through publication on the internet. Only a day after being published, one image brought several calls and a quick identification of a crime scene used over several years.

“So the officer — who began working on the case two years ago when police first saw ”horrific“ sexual images of the girl online — got as much information as he could. Just a few hours later, a second caller, this time a woman, named the same hotel and said she had stayed there a couple of years ago. ”She was quite shaken with the fact that she was even thinking about these kinds of crimes,“ McGarry said. Police will only say the hotel is in a vacation destination in the southeastern area of the United States.” [Star]

“Once police are able to identify the location where the photographs were taken, detectives will be able to check records and undertake other investigations to identify both the child and the individual responsible for the sexual abuse. The photographs being made public are the actual pictures of places where the young child was sexually abused. Using a special electronic processing technique, experts have digitally altered the photographs to remove images of the victim who had been posed in various compromising positions. Forensic examination of the photographs suggest they were taken between 2001 and 2002 and involved a girl who at the time was about nine years of age.” [Crime Stoppers]

DIY Media: The Early Years, #1

This “Recordiogram” from the 1940's was used to make your own record for a quarter. You even got an envelope to send it in the mail.

[Internet Museum of Flexi/Cardboard/Oddity Records]