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IP Crawl: Living atlas of open webcams discovered on the public internet

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Re: IP Crawl: Living atlas of open webcams discovered on the public internet

#111

Post by pibaker »

My_Name wrote: post #105
naturalmovement wrote: post #70

Everyone: For a moment forget everything you know about computers and wonder if perhaps 99% of normies are just following the directions on the package of their $19 Chinese IP camera. They have no idea what a firewall is, or what the "public internet" even means. There's also a difference between your neighbor not closing her blinds and you using a telescope to look inside her apartment, which is what sites like this…

I see it more like that there are things you can do to make sure nobody else gets into your home, like locking the door. If your door is unlocked, either through ignorance or negligence, it's still not right for someone else to just walk into your home and look through stuff you thought was private. Sure, they can do it, but just being able to easily do something doesn't make it right.

You'll be surprised by the number of people who thinks if you leave your internet door unlocked then your internet belongings are free to take. There is someone in this very thread arguing that having an internet enable camera in your home turns your home into a public place.

It is also funny, and depressing that many of the same people who think might makes right on the internet ends up lamenting how fucked up life is in their low trust societies, when their mindset is exactly what makes a high trust society — you know, the ones where people don't lock doors — impossible.

Re: IP Crawl: Living atlas of open webcams discovered on the public internet

#113

Post by fc417fc802 »

what wrote: post #75
ryandrake wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telescope is a bad analogy. This is more like the neighbor is inadvertently projecting a feed from inside their house onto a display outside by the sidewalk for any passers-by to see.

Not really? It’s just like not closing your blinds and being shocked that people on the street can see you.

Not closing the blinds on the window you can't see that looks out onto an invisible street that only exists from your perspective as some sort of abstract concept. Also your "window" isn't readily visible from a distance someone has to go stumbling around in the dark and find it by physically running into it.

In other news I'm considering developing a new app and was wondering about VC funding. It's for mapping out ladders adjacent to windows down back alleys. I think it would dovetail well with nipalert.

Re: IP Crawl: Living atlas of open webcams discovered on the public internet

#114

Post by andai »

Site won't load for me, but I remember in the late 2000s when I was a kid, I found online some string you could type into Google and it would give you unsecured webcams in the results. (Not sure why Google was indexing random people's home IPs, how does the crawler even end up there?)

I recall most of them were in Asia.. street cameras, supermarkets.. then I suddenly found myself looking into someone's bedroom.

Fortunately it was empty, but I promptly shat myself and turned off my computer.

Re: IP Crawl: Living atlas of open webcams discovered on the public internet

#115

Post by fc417fc802 »

wyager wrote: post #85
naturalmovement wrote: post #70

Everyone: For a moment forget everything you know about computers and wonder if perhaps 99% of normies are just following the directions on the package of their $19 Chinese IP camera. They have no idea what a firewall is, or what the "public internet" even means. There's also a difference between your neighbor not closing her blinds and you using a telescope to look inside her apartment, which is what sites like this…

99.9% of normies have a router NATing all their traffic It takes active effort to expose a camera publicly

Unless that camera uses UPnP and has no auth configured by default.

Re: IP Crawl: Living atlas of open webcams discovered on the public internet

#116

Post by pibaker »

naturalmovement wrote: post #70

Everyone: For a moment forget everything you know about computers and wonder if perhaps 99% of normies are just following the directions on the package of their $19 Chinese IP camera. They have no idea what a firewall is, or what the "public internet" even means. There's also a difference between your neighbor not closing her blinds and you using a telescope to look inside her apartment, which is what sites like this…

I'd also ask us tech savvy people to practice some humility.

Yes, the people setting up these cameras are not following security best practices. But are you sure that you will not make the same mistakes? Are you sure you have never exposed anything you should not have on the Internet, and never will, even as you age?

Let anyone among you who is without fumbling security be the first to throw a stone.

Re: IP Crawl: Living atlas of open webcams discovered on the public internet

#117

Post by bbor »

QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #83
naturalmovement wrote: post #70

Everyone: For a moment forget everything you know about computers and wonder if perhaps 99% of normies are just following the directions on the package of their $19 Chinese IP camera. They have no idea what a firewall is, or what the "public internet" even means. There's also a difference between your neighbor not closing her blinds and you using a telescope to look inside her apartment, which is what sites like this…

I still don’t understand how someone can end up accidentally exposing things to the public internet. With every ISP I have ever had in my country, it’s all NAT by default. Whatever I connect to my network, wired or wireless, would not be publicly accessible just like that unless I really really went out of my way to make it publicly accessible. How do so many people end up exposing these cameras to the public interne…

These are cameras sold specifically to be available over the open internet, I guess.

Re: IP Crawl: Living atlas of open webcams discovered on the public internet

#118

Post by fragmede »

naturalmovement wrote: post #97
Aurornis wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and wonder if perhaps 99% of normies are just following the directions on the package of their $19 Chinese IP camera. I doubt that the instructions for a cheap camera have enough information to walk a non-technical user through the process of setting up port forwarding on their specific router. I could believe that it’s automatic port forwarding via UPnP for some of these cameras. However a lot of them are from con…

Most CCTV contractors are not network security experts. Most network security experts would quit before ever entering a hot attic. So Cletus the CCTV guy who just spent 8 hours crawling through drop ceilings with a mask on, does a super-clean install, and sets it up as well as he knows how. Which is "good enough" — it works and he's off to the next job. The customer's happy and he gets paid. Now which one of you netw…

Sir. This is capitalism. What you do is start a company selling secure webcams and hire Cletus to install camera you buy in bulk with your firmware on it, sell the customer a cloud service, and also hire black hat Kevin with cash to expose Cletus's sloppy business practices to bring in customers who are scared into using your service. Also, get money from the government to provide footage to them for "public safety". Just be sure to underpay your techs who actually do the work, err I mean crawl around customer houses.

Cletus is free to get a bank loan and mortgage his house to give it a try as well, though he doesn't have a decade of FAANG employment money to lean on, what he does have is experience with customers and crawling around houses.

Re: IP Crawl: Living atlas of open webcams discovered on the public internet

#120

Post by ertian »

dotancohen wrote: post #58
mmooss wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is to make sharing secure, easy, and with informed consent. The answer is not to impose IP addresses, NAT routing, keys, etc. so that only technical people can give their consent.

How _does_ it work then, without imposing IP addresses, NAT routing, keys, etc?

I mean, realistically: let us run your thing, uploaded all data to our cloud, and then let us handle access control.
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