More Fun With Google

In a blog entry dated January 5th, 2005, I showed you a neat little trick you can play - using Google to log in to unsecured security cameras. Every so often I'll get bored with surfing the same old websites and will go back to this little trick to see what's up with the world.

If you have voyeuristic tendencies, you'll love this trick! Check it out (click any picture to enlarge):

Dude hard at work at a coffee shop in Cambridge, MA

Two girls hard at work at an office somewhere in Japan

People hardly working at a golf shop somewhere in Japan

Inside an IT closet in the Czech Republic

The construction parking lot at the Boca Raton Condos in Las Vegas

Zooming in on the Mini's license plate

Some geek in a computer lab in Wisconsin

A nice fish tank in Japan

A yacht club in Rotterdam, Netherlands

Some Japanese folks get in an early-morning game of tennis

I watched this creepy old lady for 20 minutes, and she never moved!

A camera for bird watchers at Derby College in the UK

The Adatara ski resort in Japan

One of my personal favorites is a woman I've nicknamed "Connie". "Connie" works for an IT company in the Carolinas. I tracked down the company's website, fully intending to call "Connie" and tell her that anyone with an Internet connection could watch her work. Unfortunately, I just giggled uncontrollably and hung up when she answered. And yes, the pictures of her answering the phone are from when I called!

Sometimes you need to be a detective to figure out what you're looking at. The picture on the left (below) looked as if it was from a reception area at a hotel or low-end country club. After panning the camera around several times, I noticed the logo on the floor mat just inside the door. I zoomed in as best I could (see picture on right). After flipping the image around, I was able to figure out that the logo says "Harbor View Marina". 10 seconds with Google later, I was at their web site, which informs me that "Harbor View Marina is a full service marina on Lake Michigan... [in] Ludington, Michigan."

Admittedly, this isn't much of a "hack". In fact, just about anyone can get started hacking into cams in just a few minutes. Here's how:

1. Start Internet Explorer (yes, you must use Internet Explorer; the webcams require an ActiveX control, and ActiveX is IE-only).

2. Go to Google and search for inurl:"ViewerFrame?Mode="

3. Click on any link, paying attention to the address you're clicking on (many cams are located or pointed outside; since it might be nighttime at the camera you click on, so you might get a "blank" (black) screen).

4. If prompted to install an ActiveX control, do so; it's written by Matsushita (Panasonic), so it's safe to load it.

5. Once the page has finished loading (it might take a few seconds, especially when you first install the ActiveX control), you'll be presented with a screen that looks like this:

The controls are pretty self-explanatory, but here's a brief rundown just in case:

• Directional Pad - this moves the camera up, down, left or right. Note that the people that set up the camera might have chosen to "lock" it in place. If this is the case, you'll see LOCKED in red letters above the "Pan\Tilt" controls at the top of the screen.

• Pan\Tilt - this control moves the camera in a left\right or up\down arc with a single click.

• Zoom - Zooms the camera in or out. The button with one tree zooms in, the one with three trees zooms out.

• Focus - Focuses the camera. I generally leave this alone.

• Presets - Allows the owners to pick specific locations that they can view with a single click. It's rarely used on the cameras I've seen.

• Brightness - Controls how bright the picture is; use the + or - buttons to increase or decrease the brightness and use STD to return it to default.

• Resolution - Controls the size of the camera window. In the picture above, it's at 640x480. The thumbnails above are 320x240. I don't know why they even have a 160x120 setting, as it's too small to see anything.

• Image Quality - "Favor motion" means that the overall picture quality will suffer, but the images will look good when the camera moves. "Favor clarity" means that the images will be clear overall but blurry when the camera moves. "Standard" is a compromise between the two, and is best for overall usage.

• Image Size - Unlike the "resolution" option, "image size" simply resizes the image at 1.0 or 1.5 times its normal size. Since it's not using the CCD of the camera (simply resizing), the quality declines when set to 1.5.

• Buffered Image - Not very exciting, this option captures still images every x seconds. Click on "Viewer" to view said images.

• Multi Camera - If the site has more than one camera, they can choose to allow users to interact with all of them via one "website".

• Top Page - The main page. It allows you to look at one camera in "motion mode", "refresh mode" (still images updated every x seconds), and access the camera's "help" (and possibly the "setup" pages). I've never been able to hack in to a camera's setup mode, but from the look of the help files, it doesn't look very interesting - or at least not as exciting as you might think.

One other tip: since the cameras seem to be more popular overseas than they are here in the US, the interfaces are often in Japanese or Dutch or German. This isn't much of a problem once you're used to the interface, but you might need some help your first couple of times. If you come across a camera that's NOT in English, you can change the language by simply substituting the number 0 or 4 in the "language" part of the URL and reloading the page. For example, the following address would display the camera's interface in Japanese:

http://123.123.123.123:8629/ViewerFrame?Mode=Motion&Language=1

Just change the "Language=1" to "Language=0" part:

http://123.123.123.123:8629/ViewerFrame?Mode=Motion&Language=0

and reload the page. Also, if the camera is NOT in English and doesn't have a "&Language=" part in the URL, you can simply add it yourself. For instance, change this:

http://123.123.123.123:8629/ViewerFrame?Mode=Motion

to this:

http://123.123.123.123:8629/ViewerFrame?Mode=Motion&Language=0

Have fun and HAPPY HACKING! Let me know if you come across any interesting cameras!