This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
iirc they weren't even the first ones to discover this because there was already someone on the blackmarket selling data collected from exposed cameras and endpoints which included PII of entire police departments.
I was living in a 10th story penthouse apartment as a new building started beside us. The contractor put a webcam high up on the structure so people could watch construction live on a website. They left the control panel fully exposed so all you had to do was find the IP address of the camera and boom, you had full control. I would point it directly at my apartment's window and wave, or my friends would do silly shit. Every morning the cam would be reset, but they never actually secured it. That's when I realized how fucked we were, 20 years ago.
I wouldn't be surprised if it got found by Shodan, which scans the entire internet, indexes it and is easily searchable.
There's actually quite a few open webcams on the internet that shouldn't be.
Is there a directory of these cameras? Or are they gonna make me do all the legwork?
These specifically or just Flock cams?
Here's a start: DeFlock Me
I meant the unlocked interfaces. I'm familiar with deflock.me and have contributed to it. But thank you.
Wholly fuck!
Honestly? Good. These cameras should either be public or dismantled. I'd like to see them dismantled, but worst case scenario is the current one where they're selectively used by law enforcement
I seem to recall an early 00s screed, perhaps by Bruce Schneier or someone of that ilk, suggesting a future in which yes we have surveillance in the public square, but since it's public, everyone has full access to all the public-place cameras at any time. So you could use it to, say, see around the corner of an alley at night.
That was David Brin in The Transparent Society. He has continued to riff on the theme periodically since then.
Benn Jordan did a recent video on his...explorations of Flock cameras. Essentially, they're easily hackable and really should be an urgent matter of national security.
Dude, he just released another one where they accessed dozens of real, currently in use cameras. They didn't even "hack" them, they just used a search engine to find publicly exposed cameras, opened their unsecured internal web panel, and could download and view any footage over the past 31 days, including from the new face tracking cameras that zoom in and pan on people's unsuspecting faces as they walk by.
Truly wild.
Reading flock their own response about their security and recording it via one of their active and installed cameras was fucking great. I mean, it was nightmare shit, but at a certain point, you have to appreciate the irony.
My own mother (pensioner) sent me the video asking "is this real?" But could only follow the first minutes of it.
I lol'd at that part and had to explain the brilliance of it. Then she lol'd, too.
It's nice to share in the shadows humor, as a family, while we feel our liberties erode.
This only serves to justify my secret low key paranoia that my like is like The Truman Show... I wish my parents were better about limiting some of the movies I was allowed to watch growing up... Arachnophobia was another lasting damage banger...
All that and they can't catch real criminals, gotta harass "illegals" and law abiding citizens for speeding a little.
And stalk women!
The idea that you're somehow not entitled to privacy based on the publicity of a space has got to be one of the most successful propaganda campaigns used to strip privacy against the will of people.
Fuck you, I want to take a walk and generally travel freely without being tracked by some fucking "Flock" or Ring camera, or uploaded unblurred to some randos Instagram where Meta and Clearview will train facial recognition and generative AI, or having my entire life story and biometric data collected at some airport.
Take me back to the thousands of years humanity existed without obscenely invasive tech.
It reminds me a little of Game of Thrones, where all the major players, the royals etc all have spy networks. This is a world where very poor peasants and servants are everywhere and many of them, including children, end up in the employ of this person or that person, watching who is coming and going and reporting back, such that one’s movements and meetings are trackable to a minute degree. The better your spy network, the more power you have.
Of course Varys, spymaster to the crown, is famed for the effectiveness of his network, which spans the continent and even across the sea to other major cities.
He himself is a master of disguise. This was left out of the show entirely but he frequently appears by surprise, whipping off the guise of an old woman and later leaving the scene dressed as a priest, etc. He grew up with actors and uses makeup and costume changes to hide his tracks. He can change his voice and gait at will and routinely shocks people by his ability to blend in and appear or disappear at will. He knows how to leave a place by a different entrance than he came in, and knows all the secrets passageways of the castle.
Basically, in a world with no privacy, the world’s foremost surveillance master is a model for all of us in these times. If you want to move freely in public but do so without a trace, be prepared to pull your hood up and when you leave a restaurant, take off the hoodie you were wearing when you went in. Practice different postures to throw off gait tracking.
You don’t have to like it, but this is the world we live in.
It's the "common sense" part of the laws.
A honest person has right to live without being tracked. You shouldn't care how they'll do it and you shouldn't care if they go out of business.
And of course you shouldn't fear to be public about it and demand answers, LOL, the most notable for me personally part about today's politics is that in English-speaking countries that fear seems to have become a thing. Well, because any protest that's more than a demonstration is becoming dangerous and costly.
While literal legalism always helps tyranny.
It's not much different from USSR in the 70s and 80s, "yeah, you can have all your rights, a defendant and all, and correspondence and you won't be tortured for submitting a complaint, and Soviet laws will be followed to the letter, but good luck, prove you're not a camel".
Since USSR and western nations no longer exist in the same time period, it's easy to discard even the thought that the latter are gradually becoming similar to the former in some regards, and might even overshoot it.
Anyway, I live in Russia, here things are for the last few months at the point where I can get jailed for writing even this, just because. LOL again.
A honest person has right to live without being tracked.
The implied corrolary here is that a dishonest person doesn't have this right? How is one determined to be dishonest?
It's more of an emotional antipode of how tracking everyone is justified - "you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide" and all such.
Whether, say, a convicted rapist (I suppose that's dishonest enough) should be tracked or not is a question in the system of values my previous comment represents.
First, whether them being a confirmed (by a proven deed) threat justifies tracking them, second, whether tracking them violates rights of those around them - their coworkers, their family members, their friends, and so on, third, whether it's possible to make tools for tracking them without introducing a technical possibility of tracking random people.
Second and third are not the same, second is about how tracking technically only them exposes those on their social graph, third is about initially illegal, but technically possible use, that would eventually become legal, because of slippery slopes.
Snip their wires, spray paint their lens, or put a hammer on the end of a tall stick. it should be easy to take these things out. Of course don't do anything or have anything on you that would identify you were in the area at the time of these actions.
There is now enough adjacent cctv coverage to follow your approach and exit from the scene of the crime. The rush is that another Flock camera is used to identify, and then make an example out of you or me.
Air rifles are pretty cheap too if you can shoot straight.
I am wondering if a super soaker with very salty water would work. It should heavily obscure the lens when dried and if someone doesn't clean it properly it will scratch it to hell.
Rain is a thing.
Cameras are typically angled down and have a little rain hood.
If the lens is getting wet, it's an awfully shitty surveillance camera.
Did you miss the part about unencrypted admin creds being widely available on the internet?
That doesn't make it a shitty camera, that makes it unsecured. Those are very different problems.
A city in the KC Metro just signed a contract with Flock for drone cameras. Fuck that Big Brother bullshit.
Benn Jordan did a great video on this: https://youtu.be/vU1-uiUlHTo
He co-released a video with 404Media on this new dystopian finding today as well.
I do not consent.
Tear em down
Or like someone in Hacker News comm suggested, use this to track a US Senator for 24 hours, make it all public, then see if they're still OK with this...
They'll just make it illegal for just them. Like the Internet privacy
Again? How insecure are these things? I am honestly wondering how easy it would be to get into one and shut down the entire system.
It's obvious that these guys are fucking amateur hour Techbros, running this shitshow as they have. I don't doubt they're underpaying and undertraining the contractors they hire to install these things.
