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Ugolog Creates Surveillance Website To Watch Anyone, Anywhere

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by Keith Kleiner on April 28th, 2009

big_brother

What if people all over the world randomly decided to setup motion detection webcams and then send feeds from these webcams to a single website that would centralize the video data for anyone to search, view, and manipulate?  Hot off of the heels of our story yesterday about the implications of cameras recording everything in our lives comes a website called Ugolog that does exactly this.  The concept is both spooky and captivating all at once.  The privacy implications are just out of control, opening the door to all sorts of immoral and illegal invasions of people’s privacy.  On the other hand, the power and usefulness of such a network is extremely compelling.

When you go to the Ugolog website you are immediately impressed with the simplicity of the site (I sure hope they keep it this way!).  No advertisements, no stupid gimmicks, no complicated interface.  The site offers a bare bones, yet elegant design that allows you to do one thing quickly and easily: setup a motion detecting webcam and send the feed to Ugolog.  No software is required, only a web browser and a properly configured camera.  Don’t know how to setup the camera?  No problem!  The site has tutorials that tell you everything you need to know.  Once Ugolog has a feed from one or more of your cameras, the data will be available for you and anyone else in the world to view along with all of the other feeds on the site.

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Video 2.0: Tiny Cameras Watching (Over) You

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by Drew Halley on April 27th, 2009

Are you being filmed right now? Are you sure?

Or, more importantly: does that thought make you nervous? You might want to get used to it. As camera technology gets better and better, it’s also getting smaller and cheaper. Digital cameras – a novelty item as little as a decade ago – now surround us wherever we go. They’re built into our phones and our laptops. They watch over our homes and businesses, our ATM withdrawals, and every major intersection of our cities. That red light you blew last week? The ticket is in the mail.

fig1

The Mini DV

Take the Mini DV, the self-proclaimed “world’s smallest video camera” rolled out in Hong Kong this month. About the size of your thumb, it captures up to 8 gigs of video feed and boasts an impressive 2-megapixel resolution. It has a two-hour battery life, and uploads your adventures via USB 2.0. It even clips to your clothing so you can show your friends exactly how “dope” your skydiving trip was.

But the ubiquity of digital cameras isn’t just changing how we document Spring Break. It’s changing how news breaks. The first on-site images of the Mumbai terror attacks last year didn’t come from the BBC or Associated Press; they came from Flickr, with front line coverage by amateur photographers. When Oscar Grant was killed by a police officer on New Years Day, digital video in the hands of Oakland subway passengers captured the tragedy first-hand – and made CNN.

The implications get complicated, and fast.

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Eyeborg – Video Enabled Prosthetic Eye Fuels Privacy Debate

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by Keith Kleiner on March 6th, 2009

When he was a child Rob Spence lost one of his eyes in a shotgun accident.  Now as an adult, Rob is a filmmaker working on a documentary called Eyeborg: a thrilling effort to replace his missing eye with a prosthetic eye equipped with a video camera that can wirelessly record everything he sees.  The project is an exciting journey for the imagination, tempting us with an approaching era where prosthetic components surpass the capabilities of natural human body parts.  More importantly the project joins a series of recent examples that challenge us to contemplate a world where 24/7 surveillance of everything around us is not only possible, but common.

eyeborg_prosthetic_eye_parts eyeborg_prosthetic_eye_closeup

The prosthetic eye features a tiny CMOS camera – 1.5mm square to be exact.  The video signal transmits wirelessly, picked up by an external RF Transmitter smaller than the tip of a pencil eraser. The entire “bionic” package feeds off lithium polymer battery technology, and the data could be sent and recorded to a backback enabled storage device.

To be clear, the eyeborg project is not trying to give sight back to the blind (see the Argus II project for that).  Rather, the objective is simply to create a video recording device that will be implanted into the eye for 24/7 life streaming.  Of course several other projects, notably Justin.tv, already offer this capability.  The Eyeborg project is unique, however, in performing surveillance truly from an individual’s line of sight and also because it explores the implications of a future where our body parts can be augmented to exceed their natural capabilities.

Interestingly it is the privacy implications, not the technology, that may be of most interest to people who encounter the Eyeborg project.  Even though several countries such as Canada and the UK have installed tens of thousands of cameras to monitor their citizens, people categorize surveillance from an individual differently…and they should.

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