Drop dead

http://tilde.club/~mathowie/files/e0c99a3e95d5d907ab156fca2ba889bf-36.html

by _pius • 12 years ago

117 88 12 years ago

I actually have my laptop set up to take a snapshot every 20 minutes (unless I'm connected to work wifi - never know when it might be pointed at confidential data on a whiteboard, and it felt unfair to opt all my coworkers into it.)

It has definitely made me more mindful of situations like this.

(It actually sporadically refuses to take a photo on the new laptop right now, so http://lishin.org/pavelcam.jpg doesn't always get updated.)

akent• 12 years ago

Why do you do this to yourself?

tedks• 12 years ago

I'd probably do that. Give the link to a few friends. It's pretty harmless, sort of an automatic snapchat. It'd definitely make me more conscious of when I'm being watched by my webcam, and I'd definitely want to have an opt-out when it was about to snap a picture.

That aside, he seems to do this because it is pure nightmare fuel. This is the pic from right now: https://i.imgur.com/xuDp4Kk.jpg

bricestacey• 12 years ago

My buddy wrote up a quick git hook that took one every time you made a commit. It's kind of fun.

pavel_lishin3• 12 years ago

Because we live in a surveillance society, and it's a way of reminding myself that privacy can be compromised. Some people put a bandaid over their camera, and forget about it; I always remember.

Plus sometimes it snaps hilarious pictures.

ChuckMcM4• 12 years ago

The 'oh' moment of data dissemination.

Somethings are not good for the cloud, not only is there a picture of your buttocks in the cloud, its a lot easier to get a warrant to peek at Dropcam/Google's data than it is to get one to get a computer from your house and scan its hard drive. And if someone is fishing for a reason to get your attention, well getting snapshots inside your house is a lot easier than getting a search warrant for your house.

I was looking at the comm vaults Comcast and others put into the ground where they are doing fiber pulls and realized that it wouldn't be that hard to put one in a back yard, or in a weird kind of data center (kind of like a cemetery but selling server vaults instead of burial plots) which would at least keep your data 'off site' in the sense that your house burning down wouldn't cause it to go away.

kuyan• 12 years ago

What are comm vaults? The little that Google yields does not tell much.

RyJones• 12 years ago

A communication vault, built much like a burial vault (seriously, it's usually one company that casts both). It is made of thick concrete, buried underground, and (with a water intrusion alarm) fairly well protected from above-ground ills.

josu• 12 years ago

This could be avoided if encrypting files before uploading them to the web was the standard. Granted, the system wouldn't be as user friendly, but at least the chances of exposing your naked ass on the internet would decrease significantly.

cromulent4• 12 years ago

I want someone at HN to build a small network device which I can plug a NAS or USB drive into. Buy a pair, install one at your buddies/mothers house. They find each other over magically over the internet and any data you put on the local drive gets encrypted and put on the other remote drive.

Other drive burns down / is stolen, no problem. Your house burns down, go and pick up your photos, enter your passphrase.

I'll pay 200€ or so. The hard part is convincing another million people they want one, I guess.

klinquist• 12 years ago

I believe this is the rough idea behind https://www.spacemonkey.com/

ChuckMcM4• 12 years ago

Seriously? That's a pretty straight forward project. Buy a USB drive, buy a Rasberry Pi, rent a VPS from Amazon or whomever. Export the USB drive as an NFS volume to the local lan, Run a cron job on the Pi that connects to the VPS over SSH and does an rsync. Done. If you want it locally encrypted you'll need an encrypted file system.

Error recovery is tricky of course. You can leave a copy of your files in the 'cloud' (depending on your situation could be good or could be bad). And it depends on whether you want it active/active (you can add files on either side) or active/passive (where the passive side is pulling the active side pushing).

Should cost about $100 or 80€ in parts per unit (so double that for two units). A bit more for the internet access and a monthly fee for the VPS. If its a lot of data there may be some bandwidth charges as well.

Erwin• 12 years ago

It's not hardware, but the CrashPlan backup software (supporting Linux, too) has a nice way to "backup to a friend". You just have to "friend" each other on the backup (!) social network and you can select your friend's computer as backup destination and vice versa. While not default, there's an option to not store the encryption key with your account (otherwise there's some escrow going on in case you lose your PC).

Flenser2• 12 years ago

I think Lima might be what you want: https://meetlima.com/

If you want to be safe against hard drives and Lima failures, we recommend you to install an extra Lima on your local network or on another location which will replicate your data.

— http://support.meetlima.com/hc/en-us/articles/203013968-Does...

But you'd have to have a separate Lima for each user at the moment:

http://support.meetlima.com/hc/en-us/articles/203341487-Can-...

rakoo• 12 years ago

The software can be provided with Bittorrent Sync: launch, enter some code and you're in a shared space with whoever has the code. I'm currently writing an opensource equivalent.

The difficult part will be to come up with a packaged hardware that is simple to install, though, but you can start with friends' computers.

Nux2• 12 years ago

Of all ipcams in the world why the hell did he buy the one in 0.1% of them that uploads shit to the "cloud"?

politekc• 12 years ago

Of most IP cameras, Dropcam's form factor is enviable. The lack of local storage is not. I've been on the search for something inconspicuous and similarly-priced for a while.

voltagex_• 12 years ago

I wonder how hackable it is.

Edit: http://blog.includesecurity.com/2014/04/reverse-engineering-..., http://blog.includesecurity.com/2014/03/Reverse-Engineering-...

mahyarm• 12 years ago

The automated analysis is pretty useful. How would you know if someone is robbing you until it's after the fact? I would like it as a stand alone program too.

danielweber• 12 years ago

Having written stuff to manage cameras, it can be a relief to buy something that just uploads stuff and you don't need to manage squat besides a credit card.

Buge3• 12 years ago

I've heard stories of break ins where the crooks destroyed all the local hard drives. Cloud is the only way to avoid that, but a solution is to encrypt before uploading.

matt-attack2• 12 years ago

Wouldn't the crooks now just snip that cable that's draped across your backyard to your roof?

Nux2• 12 years ago

Even shitty ipcams will upload images to FTP (old school, right) upon motion detection, or can upload whole videos. In fact I'm syncing my ipcam's video stor on my vps. A dumb lftp script that just works.

If you buy cloud-enabled ipcamera and then complain your ass is online, you're a prick.

baddox• 12 years ago

Probably because that one is far more full-featured and easy to use than a simple IP camera.

_Adam• 12 years ago

Except that image isn't accessible to anyone except the owner, or MAYBE the NSA.

But I'm pretty sure the NSA doesn't care about looking at some random guy's ass.

In the unlikely case that they do need to investigate the ass for national security reasons, they aren't going to disseminate the picture to the world, similar to how they don't disseminate intelligence data.

Which means the ONLY way the public will see the ass-picture is if: a) The ass is of interest to national security AND b) The ass is of such concern to national security it is stored in the NSA's internal ass-database AND c) There exists some kind of ass-Snowden that leaks all the asses in the NSA arsenal.

...why does anyone care about this?

Voltage• 12 years ago

This picture will remain in the cloud for eternity.

When assial recognition software becomes more prevalent, they can use this image to match his identity to future crimes (in which he leaves an ass print behind).

vectorpush• 12 years ago

Except that image isn't accessible to anyone except the owner

Good point, it's true that cloud servers containing personal information are never hacked, this is probably because most companies take security very seriously.

But I'm pretty sure the NSA doesn't care about looking at some random guy's ass.

Exactly! It's not as if NSA employees have ever been known to abuse their power for personal or purely entertainment purposes!

they aren't going to disseminate the picture to the world, similar to how they don't disseminate intelligence data.

Agreed, rest assured that your private photos and correspondences are safe in the hands of professionals who would never be interested in leaking personal or embarrassing data about innocent law abiding citizens.

drdaeman2• 12 years ago

who would never be interested

Rephrasing Hanlon's razor, there's no need for malice where a simple fuck-up would suffice ;)

They don't need to be interested in leaking personal data, they just have to make a mistake that would allow such leak. And introducing bugs isn't not something unheard of, even for pros.

drdaeman2• 12 years ago

For example, G+ photos are accessible to anyone who knows the URL, no matter what privacy settings say.

I bet, one don't need to work for any mighty TLA to steal URL from someone's browsing history. And one may be as security-conscious as possible, but still mis-paste the URL into a wrong window. Or something like this.

Dewie2• 12 years ago

This might be my favourite dismissal of privacy concerns right after If You Are Not A Criminal You Have Nothing To Worry About.

krapp• 12 years ago

I think OP dismissed his own privacy concerns when he walked bare-assed in front of the camera he set up to email him pictures of whatever moves in front of it.

This is not an issue of privacy, it's just an absence of common sense.

Buge3• 12 years ago

Except that image isn't accessible to anyone except the owner, or MAYBE the NSA.

It is accessible to some google employees.

prawn2• 12 years ago

I almost didn't downvote because of "ass-Snowden".

Consider a variety of legal things someone might do in their home that could be useful to a government looking to discredit that person.

And there are real cases through history of government agencies trying to discredit someone, or worse.

serve_yay• 12 years ago

Funny. We're all so (justifiably) afraid of NSA and Google violating our privacy that we don't even consider the ways we do it to ourselves.

shittyanalogy3• 12 years ago

Somepeople

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PavlovsCat• 12 years ago

You can't "violate your own privacy" though. It's like wondering why someone who likes to eat a lot of strawberries might frown on being forced to eat even a single strawberry, or why someone who is perfectly fine with some permutations of the letters of the alphabet would protest others. "But I did the same thing that other guy just did, I just arranged some letters! Oh, the irony." Well no, details and context matter.

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imgabe• 12 years ago

Ultimately though, what are the negative consequences of some random stranger, or even the general public, seeing your naked ass? Pretty much nothing.

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shittyanalogy3• 12 years ago

You've taken this too literally.

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sysk• 12 years ago

What do you mean by "web accessible"? Did Google decide to publicly publish all dropcam's customer pictures?

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matt-attack2• 12 years ago

I'm sure they're accessible via a customer account. That's sort of the point of this system - you can be on vacation and peek into your home. Web accessible doesn't mean not password-protected.

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akkp• 12 years ago

To paraphrase: "The device functioned as intended so now I hate It".

The developers of this product don't deserve this blog post, especial when the feature in question is a paid extra that requires setup.

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andreasvc• 12 years ago

The blog post illustrates that applications of technology can have unforeseen, unintended consequences (even though it may appear obvious in hindsight). Regardless of whether the device works as intended, the non-technical but human question of whether it should function that way in the first place is a valid question to pose.

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devindotcom• 12 years ago

That's a pretty poor paraphrase. He has realized some troubling implications of using this type of device and wrote about it.

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raldi2• 12 years ago

1. Visit google.com

2. Search for [erase dropcam video]

3. Click first result

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duiker1012• 12 years ago

it might say "erase dropcam video" but it really means "erase indexing of dropcam video"

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raldi2• 12 years ago

Are you claiming that, when Dropcam says it erased your video, it's lying? That they're secretly keeping a copy around?

If so, come out and make that accusation explicitly. It would be quite a story, especially if you had a reference to cite.

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ubertaco• 12 years ago

The principle of the matter and all, I know, but you've got to love his response here: "now there's a web-accessible picture of me naked! Here, it's this picture: <insert web-accessible image>"

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gsg• 12 years ago

He stuck a black bar on that one (and references that in the post). Although that might seem a trivial difference, that there is an edit implies the author's knowledge of and control over the image. That makes all the difference.

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joshavant• 12 years ago

I have a Dropcam in my garage for miscellaneous reasons. I, too, have wondered the implications of providing the Google/NSA complex video evidence of my comings and goings...

It'd be nice if Dropcams were more hacker friendly, and allowed recording to personally-owned devices, instead of forcing you to use their (fairly expensive) cloud recording service.

(Not to mention the ~100ish GB/mo bandwidth savings to stream this video, which is a fairly nontrivial requirement.)

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andrewchambers• 12 years ago

It could easily be done, but that's how they make money, so it won't.

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GuiA• 12 years ago

And that's a great sum up of the state of technology in 2014.

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Vendan• 12 years ago

Foscam has a bunch of models that do just this

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kybernetyk2• 12 years ago

It’s at this point you ask yourself if having a net-connected camera for monitoring your house was a good idea after all.

It's a good idea but you probably shouldn't buy the fancy "cloud" version. Just set up your own FTP server ...

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ggchappell• 12 years ago

I'm missing something here.

If you don't want naked pictures of yourself taken, then you don't undress in front of a running video camera, right? Seems kinda obvious.

This fellow put together a setup that automatically takes pix of whatever happens and uploads them to a company's server and ... he's shocked when it does what it's supposed to?

I don't get it.

--------

EDIT. Been pondering this. Perhaps he began with a misconception akin to that of a politician who wants a backdoor for the good guys to use, but who doesn't understand that if the good guys can use it, then so can the bad guys. Then the e-mail and his resulting thoughts showed him that he wasn't thinking about the world properly; thus his feeling of shock.

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jonnathanson• 12 years ago

You make a good point, but perhaps you're being slightly unfair to the author. My take on his piece wasn't that he was "shocked" when the camera did what it's supposed to do. Rather, he realized -- upon seeing a very jarring stimulus -- that he has no idea who else can see what he sees, or what they do with that information.

A general consumer assumption with devices like these is that only the end user sees the footage. That's a naive assumption. But psychologically, it's understandable. We believe that the walls of our homes are "privacy shields" -- Faraday cages, of a sort, that somehow prevent anyone outside from seeing in, or anything inside from leaking out. At the same time, we bring connected devices (including cameras) into those homes. Few of us consciously put two and two together.

Seeing himself naked was sort of a wake-up call for the author. He'd always known the camera was connected to the cloud. But then he became cognizant of who's on the other end of that cloud. I think it's fair to recoil upon coming to that realization, regardless of who the company might be (Google or otherwise). Consumers are embracing the "cloud," but they really have no idea what the "cloud" is, or what it can mean. Again: naive, certainly. But still an interesting thing to consider.

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mdonahoe• 12 years ago

This happened to me, and "wake-up call" is exactly right. I set up the camera to check my cats when I was away, and found myself realizing I walk around naked a lot.

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hellbanner2• 12 years ago

The blog's subtitle is "doing it wrong". Naked in front of a camera and pondering implications of Internet of Things backed by private corporations?

Yes, you are doing it wrong.

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kentdev• 12 years ago

I may have to spend the weekend messing with my raspberry pi to make a local dropcam. Just found a link to a guide:

http://www.sonsoftone.com/?page_id=287

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tlrobinson• 12 years ago

Assuming you do want off-site backups of your security footage, but only accessible to you (i.e. strongly encrypted), what are your options?

What if you want a remote live stream?

Linux or OS X, please.

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dllthomas3• 12 years ago

Well, in principle you could toss your public key on that camera. In practice, I don't know if anyone does this as anything remotely approaching off-the-shelf.

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lotsofmangos• 12 years ago

Sounds like a good project for a raspberry pi.

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knodi123• 12 years ago

On the one hand, "If you don't want naked pictures of yourself in the cloud, don't take naked pictures of yourself and put them in the cloud."

But this is like saying "If you don't want to get scammed, then don't respond to scammy emails." That is, it's perfectly good advice, which is fine for people who visit Hacker News, but maybe not sufficient for the vast majority of people who aren't aware of the ins and outs of our rapidly advancing technology.

There are whole communities of people devoted to the practice of finding women who accidentally configured their phones to upload all pictures to a publicly accessible cloud storage server. The women whose nudes are distributed this way may not realize their pics are being mirrored- or they may assume it's to a private site (because why the hell isn't that the default?!?)- or they may have shared these pics with a dude who made the same mistakes.

But regardless, the point remains- any individual is easily capable of being immune to this problem. But there's a whole population of vulnerable victims who don't even know they're being victimized. And that is a real problem.

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shittyanalogy3• 12 years ago

I think you guys are missing the point a little on this one. It's not that there is a picture of this dudes bare ass somewhere online and he's upset about it, it's that no matter what he did or tried he could be guaranteed in absolutely no way that the data was removed or under his control. Once it's in the pipes, it may or may not be there, there's no way to know. Anything you put online, in all sorts of incidental ways be it from giving your TV voice commands, sending your location to google maps, or your net connected security devices, becomes someones property other than just yours. Not that it's legal, or that people are spying on everything you do, but that you have no way of knowing about or controlling the data once it's there.

This isn't supposed to be scary, just a reminder that you can lose control easily.

This is a complex issue and if you think it goes away by saying things like "well then don't stand in front of the camera naked." then you are missing the point.

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joshkpeterson• 12 years ago

This dude is Matt Haughey, founder of Metafilter.

He wrote another piece about accidentally spying on his house-sitter that I think is more interesting.

https://medium.com/@mathowie/every-data-point-is-sacred-e0bd...

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anigbrowl• 12 years ago

Much as I care about privacy and the exploitation of people's data for commercial gain, I find this a bit histrionic. If you put the automated camera inside your house and you are the sort of person who sometimes wanders around naked, then the two are eventually bound to collide (which is why I don't have automated cameras inside the house).

On the plus side, everybody has an ass and this one is so far into the background of the picture that the only conclusions I can reach about the subject are 'Mathowie is quite pale' and 'he has an ass like every other member of the human race.' In other words, this isn't really awkward enough to serve as a cautionary tale to anyone else. Now if he had been dressed up as a lobster that would be quite a different kettle of fish.

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jaxbot• 12 years ago

I have a device similar to a Dropcam but by D-Link, and have it configured to transmit data to my NAS, rather than the cloud. I can then SSH in to view the images on it.

If you want a camera monitoring your home, but don't want it stored on someone elses' system, it's pretty easy to roll your own with a variety of configurations.

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thrillgore• 12 years ago

This certainly gives me pause about buying a Dropcam, even if the only place its going to observe is near my front door.

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rwallace• 12 years ago

What would bother me about this is that picture is far too small and blurry to identify a criminal. Is that the best this product can do? If so, are there any competing products that do better?

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