Live data from Hacker News

Exposed Webcam Viewer

cryptogasm.com

41–50 of 117 posts

Re: Exposed Webcam Viewer

#43
post #3

Neat. Raleigh, NC was on the first page and I think I remember that exact camera. We used to post webcam feeds when I was an undergrad at NC State. In fact, this one time was pretty amusing (and there's a long story associated with it): http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/120_540487511649_... http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/112_540487222229_...

It's on the first page for me too. What's the story? I live and work here in the area.

tldr: I wrote a JavaScript "virus" for our school's (unofficial) message board. I was banned for years. In a thread about that webcam, I made the above facetious apology.

Longer version: premium users of The Wolf Web were granted full html/javascript abilities. I probably never would have bothered to become premium, except every year the site hosted an Egg Hunt, which involves staying online as long as you can during a 24 hour period to claim "eggs" that are randomly assigned to you. The person who gets the most eggs wins premium status for a year. Two friends and I decided to win the competition by working in shifts and we indeed won. The fact that there were veteran users, some with over 50k posts, and we won with a new alias just added insult to injury.

While playing around with my newfound html abilities, I realized that I could write an auto-submitting form; I decided to write a virus. It was totally ugly; for technical reasons related to the payload, I wrote the entire thing on one line, used the shortest variable names possible, and it was pretty much untested. The way it worked is, when a premium user clicked on a thread with the payload, they would automatically submit a new thread with the payload included. I'm still proud of one feature: it would pull recent thread titles, so they would appear to be legitimate threads that had been bumped. I call it a virus, but it didn't do much besides spread for a few days before they disabled it. Anyway, all of my accounts were promptly banned. Somehow, I used some social engineering to convince an admin who had been away to unban me. It worked, but I never used the account.

Scheming, virus writing, social engineering. Definitely one of my finer moments. I documented some of the events here: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.511920914339.213059...

Re: Exposed Webcam Viewer

#45
post #28

This just reminds me of the start to a terrible movie. I feel like I am going to see something bad happen.

It (publically available cameras) actually is the basis of a French thriller released in 2011 called "Aux yeux de tous"... pretty good movie!

Re: Exposed Webcam Viewer

#49
This is amazing but also sad at the same time. Its amazing that people don't realize what connecting something to the internet means but sad because I've found some webcams inside peoples homes, I won't post the URLs for their own safety/privacy.
Post reply on HN