Hacker News Reader

Comment by astine | Hacker News Reader

There's not a lot of explanation as to what''s going on here. Are these security cameras which are exposed to the Internet for some reason or other? If so, I'm glad none are watching me. It might be fun to figure where some of them are.

View on HN

One of them was pointed at a crib with a child moving around in it. The rest were the empty insides of houses for me. One of them looked like it was on a shelf behind some glass figurines (hidden camera?).

I don't think that these a 'security cameras' as in corporation/government-owned.

Edit:

* The URLs all follow the same format: "http://IP/anony/mjpg.cgi "

* 'mjpg' is a video format[1]

* More discussion on these URLs. I assume that the users are getting it from the same source.[2]

* And... the source is here[3]

* It's possibly NSFW[4]:

   I randomly clicked this one first and
   immediately saw a little naked girl
   around 7 or 8 years old walking  
   around.. :sick:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_JPEG

[2] http://hypebeast.com/forums/off-topic/164209/?topic_page=2

[3] http://pastebin.com/CZHTGtXA

[4] http://www.tribalwar.com/forums/archive/t-645837-p-3.html

    One of them looked like it was on a shelf behind
    some glass figurines (hidden camera?)

Sounds like a nanny cam.

"I don't think that these a 'security cameras' as in corporation/government-owned."

At least some of them are. I saw a few which were watching storefronts and barber shops. They looked like CCTV footage.

There was a blogpost [1] a month or so ago showing a backdoor to some webcams. The urls on the map look to be using this method in conjunction with some sort of ip-location lookup.

[1] http://console-cowboys.blogspot.com/2012/01/trendnet-cameras...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com