This is dedicated to all the hackers and the crackers, to the hackers and the crackers.
I see in binary, I speak source code, step on my toes, I'll post a million jpegs of you
and a fag pwned, in your digital stance getting firewalled ho, cause I'm riding the net in
my six-fold, I was a dick with my 56, now with my cable I'm able to get that stable,
on the out, my name is Ace and I'm a Leo, on the digital highway, my name is Neo and
I'm a hero, in a flash, I'll screw you on burning dreamcast, you need some ISO, let me through
my hard drive rifle, our exchange you could never stifle, in a digital hug, you just caught
the love bug, I bootlegged your CD, I caused a fight between Un and Jay-Z, your CG, it's
all gonna be free, whether we take it by force or we take it nicely, you feel that rattling
your phones, when I tell you we just hacked out Jones, and NASDAQ leaves you flat on your
back, cause I am he who loves to hack and crack, cause I am he who loves to hack and crack.
This is dedicated to the hackers and the crackers, serial codes, source codes, ISOs, RANs, SIFs,
SIFs, this is dedicated to the hackers and the crack.
Hello everybody and welcome to the live edition, okay no it's not a live edition, it is another
recorded edition, episode, whatever we call it these days, of Binary Revolution Radio, episode
number 196, to be exact, to be precise if you will, because we're so precise on this show,
and I'm so precise I'm even gonna tell you that today's date is July 3rd, 2007, Tuesday, July 3rd,
the original air date, of course you could be listening to this in 3517, for all I know,
as if MP3s will still exist then, or the Earth will still exist then for that matter, but that's
a whole other topic, and maybe weighing in on that topic will be our new first time co-host,
at least on this show, Enigma, welcome to the show my friend.
Hey everybody.
Are we gonna have an Earth in the year 3517?
I don't know about that.
Will we be destroyed by an alien race, or will we destroy ourselves by then?
Probably, destroy ourselves.
Well, if you're listening to this in 3517, well I guess there's nothing really to say,
because we're long dead by then, so yeah, I guess we should move on, that was pretty much
a pointless discussion.
I love starting off the show, I'm all over the place.
Well, this is an all Florida episode of Binary Revolution Radio, because my co-host Enigma
there from the BR813 meeting, and me of course from the BR407 meeting, we got a central Florida
thing going on, and in housekeeping, I think we should probably talk about the fact that we
have a little meeting swap going on, if you will, or at least, I don't know, we're attending
each other's meetings, it's not really a swap per se.
Yeah, and I always love when you come over and talk, talk about I'm, I don't have to.
Yeah, hopefully my laptop battery won't die in the middle of a presentation this time.
Yeah.
So when exactly, what are we doing here?
We're going to, you're going to come over to my meeting first, for July, right?
Yeah, I guess I'm coming over on July 21st, I believe, it's Saturday, and I'll be attending
your meeting, and then you're coming over to mine the next Saturday, which is the 28th,
and I guess my meeting is going to be at a different location this time.
I didn't tell you yet, though.
So it's on the Panera Breads, it's on the same rail that we usually have it on, everybody
can check out their website, I'll have the new location up sometime this week, hopefully.
Yeah, I'll have to put that into the GPS device there and find my way.
Yeah.
So yeah, normally, yeah, normally we have these on the third Friday of the month, but due to
some visitors we were having, we decided to push them back to Saturday to make it convenient
for both of us, so I'll go ahead and take the third Saturday, which is the 21st, so you
can come on over, and anybody who wants to come to the BR-407 for the first time might
be a good time to come meet up with Enigma, our good friend and fellow DDP member there,
by the way, congratulations.
Yeah.
And we will have, I know I'll have at least one presentation, one that I had put together
for kind of a last minute DEFCON submission, it's probably not going to get picked up, so
I'll probably be giving it at that meeting, and even if it is picked up, I'll be giving
it maybe a timed last minute run through, and if you can't make it to the BR-407, to
the BR-813 on the 28th, and I'm trying to bring...
I should have a presentation as well, that I don't know what I'm going to be giving yet,
but we'll see how it goes.
Well, I've definitely got, I gave a presentation last month at my BR-407 that I will bring with
me, so I'll at least have that one, as well as possibly my DEFCON, if anyone's interested.
I'm going to try to bring some of the BR-407 crew with me, and make a little road trip out
of it, so I don't know if you can get anybody to make it all the way over here on the 21st,
but we'll probably have two good-sized meetings, I think, around those times, so that will
be pretty cool, and speaking of DEFCON, there's been some discussion in the forums about whether
we'd be getting together at DEFCON, and who's going, et cetera, et cetera, and I've kind
of been purposely laying off of that a little bit, because I wanted to see how the schedule
comes out, to see what the speaking schedule looks like, which is supposed to be up any
day now, if it's not up by the time you're listening to this, so it's supposed to come out
on July 1st, and it's not there yet, so we will, I guess, basically, the easiest thing
to say is to watch the BINREF forums, the top of General Hacking, there's some pinned threads,
and I will pin something up there, once we figure out when and where we are going to meet,
and once again, we will have presentations, I will have at least two, and Enigma, hopefully,
will bring his, as well, and we will probably meet, like we did last time, there is a,
oh, I forget the name of it now, I'm on the spot, it's some kind of mall right near, or
kind of near, anyway, the Riviera, where DEFCON is held, there's a mall right there on the
strip, lots of chairs, lots of places for people to sit, grab some food, we'll sit around,
hang out, we had probably, gosh, we must have had 30 to 40 people there last time, 20 to
30 people, something like that, so that was really cool.
It's my first time at DEFCON, so.
Well, you're in for a treat.
Oh, yeah.
For whatever that means.
I'm scared now.
It may not be the talks this year, but we'll wait and see, I'm not going to go saying and
stirring up any trouble yet.
Just saying, you know, I like when a hacker conference has hackers, and not a bunch of
security professionals, you know, everybody I see on the speakers list is a real name from
a real company, you know, we're the hackers, but I digress, I'll, I'm probably already going
to get hate mail for that comment, so we'll see.
Yeah, you're going to get hate mail for that one.
I know, you know what, fuck them, I don't care.
If it's not abundantly clear at this stage of the game that I just don't give a fuck,
then I just don't know what else to do.
By the way, this is not safe for work, in case anybody didn't know that either.
Oh, we should add that to this.
Yeah, if you really want to get not safe for work, go back 20 episodes of radio, and you'll
get the idea.
You know, I tried for a little while to bite my tongue, and be, you know what, it's just
not me, it's not, not in this, you know, like if I were in person, in front of people,
like when I give presentations, I never, ever, ever use this kind of language, but you know
what, this show is my outlet to just say it like it is, and sometimes it just helps get
the point across better, so, fuck them.
Anyway, we should put a standard disclaimer at the top of the show, though, by the way,
that's what I should probably have been doing all this time, warning new listeners, but,
hey, life goes on.
I don't think, now wait a minute, correct me if I'm wrong, Enigma, I'm not sure, but I
don't think I used any foul language, I did an episode of Twatech Radio, today with a
techie, Twatech, Twatechradio.org?
Yeah, something like that.
I did a radio, did a radio show, or did an episode of that show, at least one so far,
while I was not doing this show, on its, how long has it been, a month, probably, since
we did an episode of BinRev, and I think I kept it together on that one, I'm not sure.
I think you did a pretty good job on it, it was considerably wrong.
Well, you know, that's the cool thing about that show, is that there is no set, like with
us, we have a set limit, truth be told, I mean, this show could easily be three, four
hours every week, the way I just ramble on, I mean, we haven't even gotten to the email
yet, and we're already almost ten minutes into the show, I mean, I can talk, it's not
good talk, or smart, intelligent, funny, probably pretty awful, but it doesn't stop me from doing
it either way, so, I don't know, that show's cool because you can do any length, it can be
a five, ten minute episode, is there a minimum, or is there a maximum, is there either one of
those things on the show?
We try to do a five minute minimum, but I've had shows like four, thirty, up to, what was
yours, an hour and nine minutes, you have the longest running.
Is mine really the longest one?
Gosh.
Yep, yep, and I didn't even add closing music on that one, I figured it was long enough.
Yeah, right.
And I'm lazy, and I didn't really want to encode it, so.
There you go, there you go.
Well, I did another one out there that should be coming up, I don't know, sometime, whenever
you need it.
I got some other ideas in mind, so we'll be putting some more together, I think, over time.
It's also cool because it's not all on my shoulders.
Like this show, every week, it's, you know, I had Ratchet doing it for a long time, which
was great.
Right now, the reason it's kind of stuttered is because it's all on my shoulders, and if I
just don't have time, which I knew was going to happen this year, I had a lot of other
engagements, so I knew it was going to be a burden, and I just wasn't able to make it.
So the show has stumbled because of that reason, no other, so it's good that you don't have
the commitment with that show of one person having to be every single week, or twice a
day, or whatever.
You can kind of have a rotating cast of people.
Each person does a small part, does their share, and it ends up working out better on
the whole that way.
It's not so much stress on one person.
And that's what we try to do.
We try to spread out the workload.
You know, I've been taking, like, two shows a month, and some of the others have been taking
two shows a month, but mostly it's one show per month, you know.
But we do it every day, so, or try to, at least.
Right.
Well, and you know, that's the other thing, too, is we're trying to keep a regularly scheduled
show going here, and if we miss one, you know, I used to feel bad about it.
At this point, there's nothing I can do, but with you guys, you know, you miss one
day, two days even.
You're doing 20 to 30 shows a month, for crying out loud.
I mean, I don't think it's such a big deal if you miss one here and there.
Yeah, we're up to, like, 258, I want to say.
Something like that.
Yeah, and we're only on 196 of VINREV, so.
Yeah, yeah.
And we've been running a little better than a year and a half.
So, I've been doing it almost a year as the admin, so.
Hmm.
Oh, and actually, while we're, before we jump into the email here, one other little housekeeping
thing, I guess, that just popped into my head is, I guess this is early shouts.
Shouts over to the guys at the Lenox Link Tech Show.
They are up to episode 198, possibly 199 by the time this is released.
I don't remember exactly what the day is, but anyway, they are coming up on their 200th
episode, so congratulations to them.
Definitely go check them out.
That's a lot of damn episodes.
Yeah, lenoxlink.net, and of course, streaming on ddphackradio.org, so go check them out,
listen to that show.
They do good stuff.
And, um, I think, you got anything else for housekeeping?
No, that's about it.
Yeah, we've already dragged that out as long as humanly possible, so let's do some email.
Alright, so, our first email this week.
How'd you like that little radio thing I did?
Alright.
That's the closest.
Yeah, it was just dandy.
That was the closest I get to, like, a normal radio voice.
Alright.
Our first email this week comes from Dr. Claw.
I can't do it.
I can't do a radio voice.
I'm.
You can't do the presence right deal?
No, no, it just sounds so unnatural.
Of course, I guess I probably sound unnatural anyway, but that's another topic.
Alright, our first email this week comes from Dr. Claw.
Dr. Claw says,
I think the hacker, I think the hacker one of the hosts was talking about doing all the
LexisNexis searches in episode 193 was probably Adrian Lamo.
I'm kind of surprised no one got that.
Sorry, I know this is really old.
Sounds like the episode was from around Easter.
I don't listen to the show much anymore, because sadly, there hasn't seemed to be much reason to.
I like the new hosts, though, or, well, I assume they're new.
Maybe they just did this episode.
Nothing against Ratchet.
I just don't like listening to his voice.
I have a horrible voice, too, but then again, I don't do a podcast.
Well, I guess I shouldn't drink an email, but I'm going to pretend to be a drunk driver
and deny myself the ability to retrospectively decide not to click send
and just go ahead and crash into a pedestrian.
Adrian Hugs and Kisses DRC, Dr. Claw.
So, on behalf of Enigma, I will accept those hugs and kisses and wait for more.
Oh, thanks.
And after I just made a comment about my voice, I don't know, Ratchet's voice is probably better than mine,
so I don't know how, I think having Ratchet do the show was a huge step up.
Now, this particular episode, we got another email of someone saying, confirming Adrian Lamo, too,
and I didn't understand that email because I don't remember mentioning the topic,
and then I realized that it was from episode 193 that was done by Faceman, Drake Anubis, Zal91.
Who else was on that episode?
Do you remember?
I think that was it.
I don't want to slight anybody.
It was the girl at the beginning.
Yeah, and I don't remember the name.
I don't remember her name.
Yeah, I don't want to slight her, but yeah, they picked up and did that show.
That was really nice of them to pick up the slack.
When we did miss that one or two shows there, of course, that just got worse,
but, you know, at least they stepped up to do an episode,
so they did that one that you heard around that time, so thanks again to them.
As far as Ratchet, again, he's, I think he's probably got, him and Strom anyway,
especially, both have, I thought, good radio voices,
and, you know, Ratchet's just been a great host over the years.
I mean, he did all of season three and a good bit of season four.
It probably has been a long time since you listened, though,
because Ratchet took over for season three,
but then I took it back over for season four for, like, the first half of the season,
and then Ratchet and some of the others took turns hosting here and there,
but, I don't know, I think you might have been,
you might have stopped listening for quite a while.
You might want to go check the archive page
and pull out some episodes here and there and see what you can find.
Ratchet had some really great guests on there.
They had Mark Spencer on the show.
They had, actually, just go to the archives.
They had a lot of great co-hosts on the show with them,
so, I don't know, I'd say you're missing out
if you didn't listen to the shows or some of the episodes that Ratchet did,
so I'm going to stand out and say Ratchet did a pretty damn good job.
Yeah, and I agree with you.
He did a really good job.
Anything after, like, episode 100 was pretty much him up to, like, 150-ish,
something like that.
That sounds about right.
I have to do on the show notes.
I have an intimate view of those.
Exactly.
And, you know, and I always said that I liked, you know,
truth be told, I was kind of done after season two.
I just needed, I had some life things going on,
and I think I blogged about them at the time
and had to kind of unplug for a little bit.
So, the show would have been done then if it wasn't for Ratchet.
So, you know, you guys definitely got to appreciate
how much work and time it goes into doing this,
and Ratchet really came through.
So, I think he did a great job.
And not only that, but it also made me realize
that it's actually a good thing, at least in my opinion,
to mix the show up and have it, you know,
have different hosts and different guests,
different topics, different viewpoints and opinions,
because Ratchet and I agree on a lot of stuff,
but we also disagree on a lot of stuff.
So, it's good to hear an opposing viewpoint.
There's nothing wrong with people disagreeing
and saying something from a different point of view,
and especially when kind of through season four here
as we were swapping episodes back and forth,
we'd sometimes follow up on dangling plots or comments
from the other people who did the show.
So, we'd have email feedback,
and we'd kind of go back and forth on topics,
which I thought kept it fresh and different.
So, I kind of liked the fact that we had
some different people hosting the show along the way.
Which is why, again, Twatek, today with a techie.
And actually, didn't that go through,
didn't that go through a few iterations of names, too?
That was before my time.
That was more in Droops and Mr. Petrillo's time.
Yeah, see, that was originally a playoff of...
I believe it went through at least a couple.
Yeah, that was a playoff of Twit Radio,
which was This Week in Tech, I think is what that stood for.
Yeah, I believe so, yeah.
So, I think Twat was...
And today with a techie.
I think it originally, I think...
Maybe I'm wrong.
I thought it was Talk with a Techie Radio
or something like that,
and then became Today when it was a more regular daily show,
although it's been pretty regular from the get-go.
Yeah.
But anyway, there, see, two pimps in this episode for that.
And wait a minute, actually, you know what?
Let's digress for a moment here.
Weren't you guys in the magazine recently?
Didn't you guys get some good notoriety or some good publicity?
Was it Linux?
Yeah, the Linux magazine.
Linux magazine did a little segment, didn't they?
Yep.
I wonder what kind of hits or if that increased the listenership.
Is that a word, listenership?
The listenership of the show.
From that.
That was really cool.
I was really proud to see that.
But that was pretty good stuff.
All right.
Anyway, back to email.
So we make sure we have time for our main topic tonight.
Second email comes from Systems Glitch.
Systems Glitch says,
Stank Dog and or co-host.
I'm not sure...
Okay, playing the role of co-host tonight will be Enigma.
Enigma, are you up for the job?
I suppose so.
Okay.
Systems Glitch says,
I'm not sure this is the right place for this message,
but I didn't want to create...
I didn't want to just create a forum topic about it.
It seems like a lot of the forum members would be interested in a bin rev hardware swap section of the forums.
Would setting this up be possible?
If no one else is willing to run it, I can handle it at least until school starts back.
I'd imagined it as a section of forums open only to people approved for it,
sort of like the Agents of the Revolution section mentioned in the radio show,
but less restricted as to allow forum members access to it.
Perhaps base admission on length of time as a forum member, post count, etc.
Naturally, it would be disagreeable to have just anyone posting in a section for swapping hardware.
I'm not sure if there's too much liability issue for this sort of thing.
Anyway, just an idea I've been thinking about for a while.
Keep up the great job with the radio show.
All right.
Thank you, Systems Glitch.
Yes.
We have discussed this on multiple occasions.
A few years ago, we even tried it.
Discussed hits.
See, I don't spell check the show notes.
Discussed this a few years ago.
We discussed hits a few years ago.
And we did try it, and it did not get a lot of traffic.
One of the things about running the forum is there's a very fine line between too many forums and not enough forums.
So we don't mind trying them here and there, and people are always requesting,
well, can somebody create this new forum or that new forum or whatever?
You know, every time somebody suggests that we do stop and think about it, discuss it,
we analyze is there really enough topic, is there going to be enough traffic to justify adding another forum to the forums.
Is that the proper terminology, I guess?
There's another section to the forums for that.
I don't want to have to scroll down 20 pages to see all.
That's one thing.
You ever see a lot of people that will start forums, and they'll have so freaking many different sections?
They'll have a Windows section, a Mac section, and then they'll have a Linux section with 40 different subsections for each distro they can think of.
And, I mean, it's just like, it's really hard to balance how much is too much.
So what we ended up doing was joining topics like you're proposing, anything about selling, trading, stuff like that, into the links section.
And the links is where you can post links to just any kind of cool random thing that you found, links to YouTube videos, links to blog posts that you've read, presentations.
Well, anything.
I mean, I can't even sit here and list them all, but any kind of link.
But it also doubles, and you can read the description on it.
You can also, it's one safe place in the forums when you can kind of sort of post spam, insofar as any items that you may have for sale or trade or whatnot.
Not spamming sites, not coming in, no referral links.
That's still against the rules, even in this forum.
So don't get too happy.
I'm not saying that that's a free, anything goes.
You can post wares or spam outright in there.
But if you do have something for sale as a reasonable person in your eBay, Craigslist, stuff like that, you are welcome to do it there.
The reason that we kind of have always gone against a more organized way of doing it is because from my standpoint as the owner of the site and having to be the one who's responsible for all of it is it does create some liability issues for me.
I can't vouch for all of the members, all the forums.
And legally, I can't vouch for any of them.
And some of them, like Enigma, I wouldn't vouch for because they're just not, no, I'm just kidding.
I'll vouch for Enigma.
But nobody else.
Nobody else.
And the first time that one of these deals fell through, somebody ran off with their money, everything turned sour, and the shit hits the fan, as they say.
Okay, then we got people that are mad at us saying that we should have done something about it or demand, give me this person's IP address and email and his information, and I'm just not going to do that.
I respect privacy.
I've never given up anything from the forums, any of that kind of stuff.
We work very hard to protect even email addresses.
No one can get email addresses.
The spiders can't come in and harvest your email address.
The only thing that you could be giving up voluntarily is if you decide to put in your AIM account number or something like that or Yahoo Messenger or something like that.
But we don't give that kind of stuff up unless it's something very, very serious that we feel it's the right thing to do.
And I don't want to be put in a situation where somebody says, okay, this guy ripped me off for $200, $2,000, whatever, and then never gave me the item or whatever it is.
And it has already happened on the forums.
There have been people that have worked out deals and then didn't get what they were expecting or didn't get anything.
Somebody just disappeared.
So I don't want to put myself in the middle of that, and it's just not safe.
So we can't really make a section because then we're endorsing it, and we become legally liable for the stuff that happens there.
And not to mention, I don't even want to think about would there be tax implications for us as the middleman or any kind of weirdness.
There might be laws.
And plus, would you really want the administrative headache of all of it, adding another forum and adding all the users' complaints and so on and so forth, like you were saying?
And he volunteered to try to run some of it.
But, yeah, it's appreciated.
But, no, the best thing is, and I still think what we came up with, is you can use the links section.
You're free to post in that forum about what items you might have for trade or sale on eBay, Craigslist, or if you're just trading on your own blog.
Or you can use the links section to say, you know, here, I have the following items, and I'm looking to trade them or give them away.
I think there's one down and off topic right now that could easily be moved up into the links section.
But, you know, whatever, that is safe to post in the links section.
It's probably the best place to put it.
But, yeah, I think that's best because just like anywhere else on the interweb, people can rip you off.
I can't tell you, everybody in the forum, I don't know.
We have 7,000 or something registered members.
Is that right?
6,000?
I don't know.
Yeah, I think it's higher than that.
I thought it was 10,000.
Is it really?
Oh, my gosh.
Yeah, I think I saw 10,000 posts or 10,000 registered users.
I know a lot of them.
I know a lot of people, but I don't know 10,000.
Anyway, I mean, do you think we can justify adding another forum?
I mean, what do you think?
No, I think it's too much of a headache.
And the legal issues just make it very unusable.
Just use eBay or some other type of service like that Craigslist.
And then link it, you know, you're welcome to link it here because people would be interested in that stuff, obviously.
So, like one of my favorite threads that comes up once in a while is usually it's in the freaking section.
They'll do an eBay roundup or somebody will post a bunch of the links of things that are on sale on eBay that might be of interest to people in the forums.
I think that's a great thread.
I love seeing that.
I think that's very interesting.
I wish somebody did that with hacking type things maybe every Monday or something like that.
If somebody wants to volunteer for that, step on up.
Email us.
Yeah, knock yourself out.
There you go.
There was 7,700 registered members.
Oh, yeah, that's a lot.
With 10,000 posts was what I saw.
Yeah, there's probably more attempted registrations in the system of people who never finished filling out their submission,
didn't verify their email address, et cetera, et cetera.
So, actually, that's a common question that I get asked is why don't the member numbers that are assigned match the total number of members at the bottom?
And it's because there's a lot of gaps that get stuck in there where people never register, never finish registering.
There's a lot of gaps in there.
A lot of them are spam bots.
A lot of them are people who just don't bother coming back.
They just become registering and they never confirm it.
So, probably 10,000 is what the numbering is up to in the database, but 7,700 on the forums and counting.
All right, let's see.
Yeah, let's hurry up.
Boy, this, as usual, I go rambling on and on and on.
Email number three this week comes from Swooz.
That's kind of a fun word to say.
Swooz.
Swooz says,
Dear hosts, I live in a secure, gated community and the entrance gate is constantly broken.
Either it is wide open or our clicker will not open it at all, nor will the access code.
I would like to see possibly even a partial episode on this subject.
I know some of you guys are from Florida, perhaps in the same, but perhaps in the same episode we could discuss SunPass.
I don't see a show, I didn't see a show this week and just wondering if you guys might have been scrounging for topics.
Keep up the good work.
Thank you, Swooz.
Nope, not scrounging for topics at all.
I mean, again, I can talk for freaking ever.
I've always got topics and content.
It's not that.
It's the time, unfortunately, that's caused us to miss a few episodes of the show or a few weeks of the show, I should say.
However, we are still working our way towards episode 200, so be looking out for a special episode 200.
I've got some outtakes.
I've got some ideas and plans in mind for that, so make sure you come back for that episode.
As far as the ideas, those two topics, I think those are great.
I think those are great ideas.
Again, enigmas here in Florida, I know we've seen a lot of gated communities.
I lived down in South Florida until a few years ago, so down there it was enormously common.
I lived in a gated community down there for many, many years, so I know a lot about the systems that we had and some others.
So I'm going to ask around.
I have some friends down there that may be able to give us some information and co-host a show that know a little bit more about those topics.
And actually, Right Coast and I have done some discussion at our BR407 meetings about the SunPass system,
which, for those who don't know, is the little RFID or the little radio sensor you put in your car for the toll road system.
So you might have to ask around and see what we can come up with for that.
Yeah, the SunPass is very, I'll say, interesting, some of the implications of that RFID.
Yeah, I don't know if it's – yeah, I probably shouldn't say RFID.
I don't know if it – is it RFID?
It's not RFID.
It's actually just an old-fashioned radio frequency.
I think it's actually – I think it actually runs on a satellite band, if I'm not mistaken.
But we'll do the research and check that out as I take a sip of my iced tea.
There you go.
I got my iced tea.
You know what?
I should totally sell out and, like, pimp some brand of iced tea and get free iced tea for the rest of my life.
I'm sure you could.
Yeah, probably not.
Nobody wants to be associated with a hacking show.
Well, all right.
Let's wrap up the mailbag for this week, and that leaves us anywhere from 30 more to, say, 50 more minutes to talk about our main topic tonight, which is closed-circuit television, which I think a couple of people have asked about doing an episode on this.
So Enigma has stepped up this episode to do some research.
And, actually, you already had some experience in this topic anyway.
So let's start this off.
Now, I am pretty ignorant about this topic.
So let me – let's start off with a little, like, baseline.
Let's get everybody understanding what CCTV or closed-circuit television is, first of all.
There's – you know, when we think television, the obvious thing is broadcast television.
That's the antenna that you have on your house, which antennas aren't around much these days anymore.
But you used to have antennas on your house that are picking up signals being broadcast by a big tower somewhere in your area, your local channels and whatnot, that are coming over the air.
It's all FCC-controlled.
These are the NBCs, the CBS, the et cetera, et cetera, Fox, whatever, they're out there these days, that are being sent out for everybody in their homes with the proper equipment to pick these up and display them on their television.
Cable is hardwired.
A cable company intercepting or picking up their signals, usually through satellites and whatever methods they're using, and then distributing those to your cable box out to the homes.
They've run fiber out to all the homes.
You've got the coax running in, delivering your signal.
You've got satellite, which is another similar thing, blasting the satellite, and then you buy the DISH network or DirecTV is the other one, and pulling down the signals and displaying them on your television that way.
These are all being broadcast in some form or other.
But closed-circuit television is something different than all of that.
Is that a correct statement?
Yes.
The CCTV system is completely enclosed, as in it only sends the signals to specific monitors, specific recording equipment.
It's not broadcast for everybody to see and or hear.
You can broadcast audio, video, you know, whatever you need.
So, the difference between those other ones that we talked about is it's not sent out with the intent of many people watching it.
It's sent to one location.
Correct.
Most of the time it's sent to a recorder, either a time-flop VCR or a DVR, and recorded, and also displayed on monitors.
You see those monitors that are in split channels that have multiple cameras that you can view in, like, you know, grocery stores, department stores.
I used to work in a correctional facility that we had, you know, like 52 cameras on four monitors.
So, yeah.
Did you work in Oz?
No, I didn't work in Oz.
You sure?
I could have sworn I saw you on there one time.
No, no, no.
All right.
Just checking.
Well, what else is different about closed circuit, then?
I mean, how, what?
It basically is for the intent of the business or the entity that actually set it up.
It is not meant for any type of broadcast.
So, like, I'm sorry.
So, I was just going to say, like, many, in case it's not, I think most of our listeners have seen these.
If we're not being clear, these are like, you go into, like, a gas station, for example, or a grocery store, I think you said a minute ago.
Any of those places where you see the little, and usually the cheaper systems, the lower, they're just little black and white, gray scale, where you'll see one or two different things.
Somebody will look up on a monitor to see, oh, there's somebody at pump number four, or there's somebody down this aisle of the grocery store, or just any number of businesses, where they've got cameras that are sending a constant signal that somebody's monitoring.
Whether it's somebody in the back room doing security, or whether it's, you know, just someone monitoring in a gas station to see when a new customer drives up that they might not see.
Right.
Most people have seen these.
And, like, fast food restaurants as well.
Yeah.
They have a camera out on the drive-in to catch the customers coming in that they can see.
Yeah, I forgot.
That's a good one.
I see those all the time.
And, basically, you can get as complex as, like we had at the correctional facility, where we had 52 cameras, all color monitors, and color cameras, and we had, like, 170-degree field-of-view cameras that, you know, were a couple hundred dollars a piece, viewing, like, dorms.
So...
Right, yeah, and these...
It all depends on how much money you want to spend.
Yeah, and, actually, another example that pops in the head is in a lot of department stores, you see those little domed cameras in the ceilings that are the same thing.
Now, some of those also could be dummies.
Right.
A lot of places will put up dummy of those little domes, so you don't know where the camera is.
And most of them are black, so you can't see where the camera's actually pointed.
And I have heard from ReliableSource that they actually will move the dummies around and swap them with real ones occasionally, so that people don't always know where the dummies are if they were to find out.
So, that's...
We used to do that at the place I used to work at, so they could never tell where we were actually recording.
Very good, very good.
All right, well, you know, we talked about some business uses of them, but maybe we should back up, actually, and maybe talk about personal uses, because they're not only for business.
The prices on these things have come down tremendously in the past few years.
You can go into Best Lie and Circuit Shitty and any number of stores.
I don't know, even Walmart probably is carrying stuff like this now.
Yeah, they do.
They carry a full camera unit with a monitor.
What are people doing with these at their home?
Obviously, you can use it for your own personal security, but there are other valid uses.
Yeah, you can use them to monitor pets, check for packages and mail on the outside of your door, like if somebody comes up and swipes a package.
You can use them to monitor your garage.
You can monitor your house on vacation.
A lot of the units now, some of the higher-end DVRs have web interfaces that you can actually dial into from an outside line and basically sit and watch your house.
And again, it can be set up with alarms, so you can get a text message on your pinger if something were to go wrong.
Mainly, I've seen a lot of archived video surveillance.
Basically, same principle.
It will archive on the DVR and it will be purged every once in a while when your hard drive fills up.
Or, of course, you can take that hard drive and roll it out and archive it with a date stamp and put in a new one.
Yeah, some of the higher-ends actually have a backup feature on the DVR unit itself that can be pumped out to a computer with a bigger hard drive if you wanted, or pump the DVD or whatever.
Yeah, I like the idea of having one at the front door, not only for the security aspect, but yeah, that would be great if I'm at work and expecting a package delivery or something at the house.
I can look and see if I've got a computer sitting on my front porch that's been delivered, like I recently had a NAS device that was sitting on my front porch waiting for me until I got home.
Safe neighborhood and everything is usually pretty good, but if I saw that there at lunch, I could check my house, see that it's sitting there, and zip home for lunch to make sure I take it inside or something like that.
So that's pretty handy for somebody like me who gets a lot of packages.
Or we could just live across the street from work like I do and walk home for lunch.
But that's, I digress.
Yeah, that would be, that's really nice.
That's really convenient, but, and obviously you mentioned monitoring pets, babies, stuff like that.
Maybe babies and pets at the same time, but whatever.
Whatever.
I don't have to worry about that one, as far as I know.
And let's see, and you talked about, yeah, a lot of them are offering internet access now where you can go to a web GUI remotely.
Probably could go into another tangent about how to make that externally accessible and firewalls and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And actually there's also something really cool feature is, you know, obviously this takes up disk space.
It's constantly recording, but there are actually features, there's a way you can set these up so that they only activate or start recording when it detects motion.
Yeah, we had that actually set up at the facility I worked at.
We would only record motion.
Right.
And a lot of times you'll get changes in light that will kick off the motion sensor, which is kind of, it's good and bad.
I mean, you set it so, how do you say, so tight that it will kick off the motion sensor.
But if you back it off enough, it will, you know, allow some motion, and that's not really good when you're monitoring kids.
Oh, for sure.
And the kid walks in a room and just stays up against the wall, and he barely moves.
Yeah, it's definitely, yeah, it definitely depends on what your application is.
If you're monitoring your baby, you want to have it running all the time and reliable.
But, like, again, if you're on vacation and you've got it washing, watching your kitchen or your, I think, washing machine example you used of making sure something's not flooding your house.
You know, you can have it watching, and nothing's ever going to change there.
I mean, some light might come in from outside, but if it actually detects motion, such as water flowing out of your washing machine onto the floor, then that's something that would be nice to know.
Even if there were some false positives of light sensitivity that triggered once in a while, it's still better than having it running constantly, looking at, waiting for an event to happen that may never happen.
So it definitely depends on what your application is or what your intent for the use of this is.
Yeah, again, it all depends on the application.
In a household environment, you don't really care much.
You can set it to the lowest setting, and you should be fine on the motion sensor.
But in a more practical environment or, you know, the example I said of the kids in a correctional facility, you might want to turn it up a bit, just a bit.
Yeah, and some of the high-end models of these, I've seen some before that will text message your cell phone or even call your cell phone.
And even, I think there was one that even had a cell phone application you could put on, like, your Windows mobile phone or your Palm phone or something, Palm OS, that you could put on there that would just, you could, if you had the internet access through the phone, you could pop on and check it through the phone with a specialized interface.
But that's usually on the higher-end home models.
And you're really now getting up into the business models, which really have even more features and are more powerful.
So what kind of business...
Most of them can do all those features on the higher-end, but on the basic models, you don't even most of the time get a web interface.
It's just kind of sitting there as a brick on the DVRs.
But they're getting there.
I think I saw one that was a four-channel with a web interface for, like, a couple hundred hours.
Well, businesses we talked about earlier that are using these things, what are some of the reasons that a business would want something like this?
We talked about the home ones, but businesses, probably the main thing, and correct me if I'm wrong here, would be for security.
Oh, yeah.
Security is the number one concern.
And a lot of times, you will have them in, like, a bank or a casino or an airport, monitoring pretty much everything.
I mean, the casino I was in, like, last week when I went to Vegas, you'd be surprised at how many cameras there actually are.
Although I did see, in the hotel itself, I was surprised I didn't see a camera actually in the hallway, which I was shocked.
Just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it wasn't there.
Oh, that's true.
I mean, but I was shocked not to see a dome somewhere in that hallway.
Yeah, Vegas is famous.
The casinos are famous for having just the highest-end systems.
And you can imagine how much data storage they need and the systems they have to maintain and store that stuff for years and years upon end.
They need to be able to watch people over long periods of time and trends and patterns.
And, yeah, they're storing tremendous amounts of data in casinos.
I mean, Vegas, you can pretty much assume you're on camera 24-7 in that city.
Oh, yeah.
And it must be insane storage space, terabytes upon terabytes.
It's, I know what we used at the correctional facility, and we were using 500 gig easy a month.
So, that would do it insane quick.
It's got to add up.
Well, and another cool use, and one of the good uses, it's not only because we probably will touch on this a little bit later about some of the privacy aspects.
People don't like the cameras in certain places.
But one of the great applications of it is that there are some places where you can't or shouldn't, we'll say, have a human being.
It's a dangerous environment.
It's a dangerous place for somebody to be.
And instead of putting a human being in that dangerous area, why not put a camera out there that can do the job just as well?
Mm-hmm.
I can't think of, like, a CERT-specific example, but I'm thinking, I don't know, cleaning out toxic waste or checking dangerous electrical areas or something like that.
If you can just have a camera there that checks to make sure that nothing's leaking radioactive material, it's a little bit better to have a camera there than a human.
And a lot of times, the little robots or the little crawlers will have a camera on the front of them, and that's a cool little application for that.
And that's still considered closed-circuit television.
Just because it's mobile or moving or on a robot doesn't mean it's any different.
It's still closed-circuit television technology for whatever you want to call it.
Whatever you want to call it.
It's your show.
You can call it whatever you want.
That doesn't mean that it's going to be right, but I'll call it what I want.
Well, where do you want to go from here?
What else do you want to talk about here on this topic?
I think we've got everybody understanding exactly what we're referring to.
Most people probably have seen them or maybe have some of their own.
Where do you want to drive this here?
Where do you want to take this?
Well, let's talk about the application of it in a business.
We'll break it down by steps.
Basically, you would have the – I want to briefly go over how it's built, how the TV system is installed and maintained.
And you obviously have cameras.
Depending on your application, you'll have a time-lapse VCR in an older system or a new DVR.
You'd have a specialized monitor that can do multiple channels and multiple inputs.
Sometimes you'll have audio, which is a really cool application because on some of the DVRs, you'll have audio inputs that you can record, audio as well as video.
I always think that's cool.
I don't know why I'm lame.
Well, then you get into sensitivity of microphones and a lot of configuring and setting up for that as well, but definitely something very cool.
Yeah, we opted not to do the audio part where I used to work.
It's very difficult in a noisy dorm to distinguish any audio whatsoever.
So it's kind of a moot point, plus we were short on storage space.
So, I mean, in some applications it would be good, but in most you're not going to find audio.
Well, even in Vegas we were talking about, even the casinos, I would be surprised, even though it's high-end and everything they've got,
I'd be surprised if they were doing audio because there's just too much background noise going on with all the bells and whistles and chings and slot machines and everything that's going on.
I don't know if they'd be able to isolate any useful sound anyway.
Maybe there's certain areas, but out in the main casino, I think it'd be hard to isolate anybody's voice or anything useful.
So why bother using the bandwidth or the storage space?
Yeah. I can't see any application off the top of my head that would use audio.
I'm trying to think of something.
Well, if there was like, there's been, I've heard, or seen, I should say, videos where people would meet in a dark alleyway and make a drug deal
and they have the audio on camera so that they have the stuff they need to prosecute, or inside of an elevator they'll be able to pick up the audio.
People have a tendency to think they're private in an elevator with one other person.
They can quietly whisper to each other or whatever, and that's been picked up with audio.
So anything that's going to be an enclosed room where there's not a lot of background noise, then it's, you know, it may be, even if it's not intentionally there to trap something,
it's not, there's no reason not to have it running when it's definitely a silent environment like that.
Again, other than storage space and bandwidth.
Usually I think that happens when the police or some, one of the three-letter agencies is doing an operation where they know and expect something to happen
and they set up so they get high quality video, audio, everything that they need.
So, you know, just, we're kind of been thinking about this from a standpoint of ongoing monitoring,
putting them in a business where they're constantly always there, always running,
but they could certainly be thrown up in a pinch for a sting operation of some kind, things like that.
They can be thrown up there in a short time and check for, you know, monitor for high quality video and audio for a short period of time
and not really have to worry so much about storage space as long as they get what they need.
And I thought of another application of CCTV police cams on the patrol cars.
Oh, yeah.
That would be another application.
Yep, yep.
You get some great videos from those.
Yeah, yeah.
Core TV.
Gotta love it.
Gotta love that.
Alright, well, so, you know, constantly monitored, you know, they're constantly being watched by somebody.
True or false?
False.
If you listen to or if you actually read, what dinner of magazine was Dual Parallel's article that I was talking about?
Oh, you're going to put me on the spot.
I'm going to look.
Yes, I am.
While you continue talking, I'm going to look that up on the interweb real quick and tell you that exact answer.
Well, anyway, that specific article that I was referring to was a primer on physical security.
And it basically laid out the ground rules for detection and response.
And CCTVs are notoriously used in bad situations.
In other words, you can't have response without detection and delay.
And detection, you actually have to have somebody behind the camera or some type of alarm that will trigger the camera.
And have you found it yet?
Because I'm rambling.
It is in issue 1.2, the second of our three issues of the magazine.
And it is a physical security primer for the community by my good friend, Mr. Dual Parallel.
Yeah, it's a really good article.
You should read it.
But you mentioned those three points.
And I always go back to them when I'm installing a closed-circuit TV system for someone.
If you don't have, you know, the response, you can't really have any detection or delay.
Right.
Well, you can't have a response if no one's detected anything.
Correct.
And that's the whole problem.
They think that a CCTV system by itself is detection, which it's not.
Well, and that goes...
There has to be some type...
I'm sorry, go ahead.
There has to be some type of human behind the scenes or some type of alarm.
Right.
And I was going to say that refers back to earlier I was saying that you can set these up in such a way.
And, you know, reliability, of course, is a factor.
But such a way that, yes, if you have it motion-sense and if it detects someone has entered your home or whatever, you can have it, you know, big deal.
If you're not there to watch it and you're not monitoring it, then it does you no good.
They broke in.
They may be on camera, but you're still robbed of blind and they're gone before you can do anything about it.
You get home from vacation and find that your whole house is missing or everything in your house is missing.
If your whole house is missing, they really pulled something off.
But if you have that feature, if you have it set up so that if it gets motion-activated and it sends you a text message or mails a cell phone or some of the, I think, the more complex, some of the higher-end ones will tie in with your home security system.
So if you have one of those monitored systems, it could even contact them if something goes off, an alarm goes off, and they can send somebody out for a response.
So you still get that response.
You may not get any delay in there, which would be nice, but you get to detect in the response, which are the two most important, in my opinion.
Well, you have to have some type of delay because those systems are pretty good.
The ones that at least are around here, that we have one at work that I work at right now.
I can't remember the name of the company, but they're pretty good.
If they notice something on the camera and it goes off, at least someone is dialing into it to see who's there, especially on off hours.
So that's good.
Yeah, we also pay a lot of money for that.
Yeah, exactly.
That is not cheap.
You're right.
So closed-circuit TV can provide safety for lots of different things.
Something like that.
Well, I think you had a thing here in your notes about how new vehicles have rear-view camera systems in there.
Is that really a form of closed-circuit TV?
I mean, it is, by the definition, that it's only intended to go to one receiver, and that is the rear-view camera pointing to the little LCD screen in your car.
Yeah, that would be an application of it.
See, that's something that's hard for me to kind of think.
When I think closed-circuit TV, I'm thinking those domes.
I'm thinking the cameras in the drive-thrus and in the stores.
But really, by the definition of it, that certainly is a closed-circuit television system.
Yeah, it's closed-circuit within the car.
Yeah, very closed-circuit.
Well, you know.
But, yeah, they're putting them on school buses.
They're putting them in amusement parks, subways.
You know, they've got them everywhere.
It's a beautiful world, I guess.
There's been a lot of talk about them being in the subway systems in New York and other places.
Some of the greatest interweb videos, though, on YouTube and stuff have been from school buses of kids getting in a fight on the school buses,
principals, or not principals, excuse me, well, possibly principals, but the bus drivers getting into fights and arguing with the kids
and worse things with the kids, which we won't go there.
I don't want to even go there.
But I think there was even some wrecks where the bus tipped over and stuff like that, and it was all caught on video.
So there's a lot of interesting stuff that's caught by these closed-circuit cameras.
And they usually do have audio on school buses.
Yes, you're right.
They usually do.
I just didn't even think about that.
So, now there's another more recent phenomenon, if you will, and I don't want to drive you or anything like this in any direction,
but what about this closed-circuit photography?
Is there digital photography?
Is there a term for that?
Is there a special term?
No, it's closed-circuit digital photography is what I call it anyway.
It basically is a snapshot of what's going on in the camera system.
And it saves that to a hard drive or whatever you want it to save to.
The bad things, well, let me go over the good things first.
It's low maintenance.
You've got a low overhead.
You're not taking as many frames a second.
It's a lower storage capacity.
In other words, you're only getting maybe a meg or two, depending on the resolution of what you're capturing.
It's a snapshot in time.
So, that's good and bad.
You can actually capture a specific incident that would happen for evidence purposes.
And it also gives clear pictures.
The bad things are it's not real time, obviously.
It's a picture.
It doesn't capture motion well.
So, it gives you just a brief smit of the video.
And it's subject to lighting conditions, which most cameras are, unfortunately.
Yeah, now let's see if I'm thinking of this correctly here.
Now, this is when, well, especially recently, like a lot of digital cameras have the ability to record video.
It's based on a different technology, of course.
So, it's a little bit better quality video.
But it's still not intended originally to do that.
So, these closed-circuit digital photography-style cameras, they can take higher quality still frame pictures.
And they can take them quickly, as quickly as possible, based on motion or motion sensing or whatever.
But it's basically a sequence of still photos.
And is that where you see on TV sometimes a video closed-circuit in a gas station or whatever being held up,
where you see it jumping from frame to, like you can see, instead of it recording constant video,
it's recording a picture every half second or one second or two seconds.
And everybody looks like they're jittery and jumping.
And you see the guy run in the door with the gun.
There's one frame with him with the gun over the cash register.
And then the next frame is him running out the door?
No, that's usually just bad frame rate.
So, that's just low frame rate on a, that's just a low-quality camera, closed-circuit camera.
Well, it's not the camera as well.
It's whatever recording device you're actually watching it off with.
The camera has nothing, the camera has nothing to do with your frame rate.
Could it be not, that the hardware that it's recording to is not fast enough to write it or, and it's losing frames or totally?
Most likely it's either, can't record at a specific frame rate.
Like, for example, I have, or I did control a 52 camera system that we had 16 cameras on each recorder.
And your total frame rate is divided among those 16 cameras.
So, if you're recording at, let's say, 25 frames a second, you're getting less than a frame a second per camera.
I see.
So, those digital shots, or those pseudo-digital shots that you were referring to, are basically the camera recording one frame per second among the 16.
So, that's probably overloaded the equipment.
They'd be best to step up to another, to a higher-end equipment if they really want to increase the quality.
Yes, yes.
We also had a unit that we just got in when I left.
It recorded 125 frames a second, which considerably improved our quality of video.
So, it could record, I think, like 16, 16 to 20 frames a second per camera, which was the quality that we were getting total in the other ones.
So, you know, it all depends on your needs.
Most gas stations are going to have a really crappy frame rate, and it depends on how many cameras they're split up over.
So, usually, I've seen gas stations have up to four to eight cameras.
Hmm.
So.
So, then, now, I guess I didn't understand this digital photography one.
Basically, it's very simple.
Instead of having a video camera in there, you've got a digital camera taking photos in there.
Well, yes and that.
I mean, obviously, not a consumer, not a consumer level one, but it's some sort of, it's not taking streaming video.
It's taking individual pictures and sacrificing speed and video capabilities for higher quality images.
Right.
And what it's doing is it's capturing them over time.
Like, you can set it up where the motion sensor will kick off, and then it will take, like, 16 still pictures over the next 10 seconds.
Right.
Or whatever you set it to.
Sure, it's just time-lapse photography.
Correct.
Hmm.
And that's probably a better definition.
I just put digital photography.
No, I think that is actually an industry term or a standard.
It is called CCDP, but I just never really thought about what it was.
I thought it was just, I thought there was just cameras that had the capabilities.
They just weren't very good at it.
So, it turns out it is, well, again, I'm sure I'm oversimplifying, but it's a digital camera up there
trying to do flash, trying to do photography, taking pictures, thinking that it's better to have a higher quality picture than it is to have low quality video.
So, and I guess there's probably arguments on both sides of that coin.
Right.
And it all depends on your needs and the basic camera setup.
I mean, you're looking at the resolution of the camera versus the quality of the recording unit.
Hmm.
Well, and I guess probably the ideal would be to have both, you know, have one of each.
So, that way if your store gets...
Yeah, we're talking money.
Yeah, and, you know, obviously it depends on if you can afford it and what, you know, what's going to meet your needs.
But, you know, a lot of times they'll have video of somebody coming in and robbing a gas station or whatever,
which is the cliched thing you see all the time on TV that these are used for,
but you can't make out their face, you can't tell what they look like.
So, on the other hand, you can have this digital photography version, this digital photography camera,
that'll get you a better quality one.
But, boy, if it happens really fast and you blink, you might not get the photo on film to have the high quality picture.
So, it's dangerous.
Right.
I mean, yeah, it's going to be nice to have both if you can afford them.
And in that instance, I'd personally rather have the video.
Yeah, yeah, me too, I think.
Especially if you do get higher end video, the quality is going to be better, video quality,
and the resolution is going to be better anyway.
So, well, listen, we're a little over an hour here, so let's jump ahead since we kind of talked about,
we've kind of touched on it several times, that these things take a lot of storage.
And we've mentioned it briefly, but let's focus on that for a second.
What are some of the storage problems here?
And actually, you were giving me a good comparison before we started recording.
About that.
And I was giving you a comparison, Al, of the...
Where is my memory?
You were explaining to me about consumer-level DVRs and how they relate to these higher-end systems
and the differences between them and the limitations of it.
Well, just kind of compare and explain the differences there.
Well, a consumer DVR or something that you would get from like Bright House or...
Comcast, Adelphia, whatever.
And insert your favorite TV host here.
Basically, it basically records two channels.
Like, you can't watch a third channel.
You can record one and watch one, or you can record two, but you can't do three.
Right.
That's because it only has two inputs.
The CCTVs, DVRs, can go up to 16 channels.
Actually, I think they can go higher than that.
I've only had experience up to the 16 channel.
So, again, it requires the unit to support that and also the cameras to be wired specifically for that.
And most of the time, it's BNC, unless it's a wireless camera, which I've never had at my facility.
I never really dealt with the wireless side of it.
Most of our cameras were straight BNC, coax cable.
So, for...
Go ahead.
I was just going to say, so the DVR that most of us are familiar with, the TiVos and stuff like that of the world,
we've only got two inputs coming in from the cable company.
There are certainly low-end, when we go back to, we were talking about consumer models earlier,
there are low-end consumer models, closed-circuit TV kits that may only have two or four inputs.
I think most of the ones I see are four.
That seems to be the most common ones that I see that they can monitor for at one time.
And they usually only have very small hard drives, maybe 100 gig, something like that.
And that's the other thing we're going to kind of segue here, is that the big issue with these is storage.
And on many different levels, not only how much you need and how much is used and how you set it up,
but also data retention policies.
At home, it may be a little bit more lax, but at businesses, you know, how long do you keep that data?
How do you rotate it?
Do you have a storage network?
And that's big with the data retention in, like, correctional facilities and stuff.
We have to retain 30 days at least.
So it's, you know, 500 gig in 30 days or whatever it is, and we have to retain that for the next month.
So we have 500 gigs we can't touch.
So that's a big problem.
Our newer units came in, like, with terabytes and terabytes of storage, so we were fine.
But you've got to let it sit there, and 500 gigs isn't anything to sneeze at.
So most, like, most bigger companies have, like, a NAS sitting out there that you can, you know,
copy the data over to or something to that effect.
And, you know, again, that's going to vary from place to place.
I bet you Vegas keeps that stuff for maybe even a year.
I mean, they've got to keep, yeah, and they've got so many of them.
You can just imagine.
It's got to boggle the mind how much storage they have.
I mean, it's got to be just insane because they keep that stuff for the longest amount of time so they can go back and look for people.
They've got other technologies in there, like that face recognition and stuff, which I don't know if we're going to have time to go into some of those.
But, yeah, it's going to – that's a very, very big factor in the business environment for sure.
In the home systems and the consumer-level systems, it's pretty easy, I think, to set these up so that basically it'll just rotate when it runs out of space
or when it gets to the end of its allotted space.
It'll go back and start writing over at the beginning and keep a moving window going.
Is that normal setup?
Normally, you'll have a purge log, which means you would get so much of a percent full of the drive,
and then it will send you an error message saying, I don't know what to do right now.
And then you can go back and delete, like, dates, specific dates if you want.
Or you can just tell it to overwrite, and whenever it gets full, it overwrites.
There you go.
Very dangerous.
Wouldn't recommend it.
Well, on the other hand, isn't it just as dangerous to not pay attention to the thing?
You know how people tend to not monitor and maintain that stuff properly,
and it runs out of drive space and doesn't record anything new.
Good point.
You have your downsides either way.
I would much rather get the email and go in there and delete dates myself.
Right.
But that's just me because I don't trust the automation.
Right.
I got burned on the automation way too many times.
Uh-huh.
Not reliable, huh?
Well, having drives fail and then only writing to a specific drive or set of drives or subset of that drive,
it gets a little interesting sometimes.
You need a nice...
Especially the older units, they were very bad at that writing to a specific drive,
like just writing to the slave drive and ignoring the master completely.
So you need a nice RAID 5 NAS device like mine.
Yeah, yeah.
That would be nice, jackass.
Ha, ha, ha, ha.
All right.
Well, listen.
I want to talk about some vulnerabilities to these before we close up the show.
We've probably got another 10 or 15 minutes left.
Let's talk about some vulnerabilities to these systems and maybe even some myths,
some vulnerability myths if we have time.
Okay.
Like, because some of the things that you brought up here, I didn't even cross my mind,
that are very interesting.
And they deal, again, this is physical security, so some of these are physical attacks, if you will.
Yeah, I do love the spray paint one.
It's just so classic.
Yeah, I mean, it's just common sense that you've got to realize that, okay, you've got a camera pointing at you.
How do you stop it?
Well, gee, something as simple as spray paint would do the job pretty well.
Well, the guys that we used to deal with all the time, they would, you know, shove stuff up against the camera.
And what tissue paper was the thing, either, you know, toilet paper or, like, towels and stuff,
they'd shove up against the cameras and block them.
That's nasty.
Yeah, that's nasty.
Well, and, yeah, actually anything.
You could throw a blanket over it.
You could throw an envelope over it, some tape over it.
I mean, anything that's going to obstruct the view of the camera.
Pretty straightforward, common sense attack.
Now, obviously, if it's a dome camera in the ceiling, that makes it a little bit tougher.
Yeah, or if you have the drop-down ceilings, just pop out the tile and block it.
Or, and, well, actually, I guess we'll probably move on to some of the other ones.
Actually, no, I guess it would fit in to, say, here, if this is a wired system, you can cut the wires.
Cut the wires, cut the power.
Cut the power, cut the wires.
We'll have, where the power goes, coincides with the cable.
So you'll have the power cable either right next to it or it will go over the coax.
I've seen systems like that, too.
So, kind of, not exactly spray paint, but, again, a physical thing that you can do.
And, obviously, that's not something that's probably easily done in a larger, in a business environment or something like that.
But, certainly, worthy of discussion.
I mean, theoretically, cutting the power to something would work.
Or, I've seen where those dome cameras have little slits in them where the actual lens comes out.
And, in the older domes, they can only see in that specific slit.
So, all you have to do is turn the dome around.
Get a little, you know, get a screwdriver, go up there, and turn the dome around.
Of course, they see you climbing up there with a screwdriver.
Of course.
Yeah.
That's what stocking capsules are.
If you intend on doing something illegal afterward, it might be beneficial to turn the camera.
Yeah.
Of course, not that we're...
Or jump over the drop-down ceiling into another office or something.
Yeah.
We're not condoning any of those activities, of course.
We're not going to plant any ideas there.
Wasn't planning.
That's just my experience on those things.
We're letting the listeners know what to watch out for.
Of course.
Make sure that people don't do these things to the systems that you set up.
All right.
So, what else do you have?
If there is something in the ceiling or you don't have a scan of spray paint, what else can you do?
Beans of light are always fun, either infrared or just a beam of light.
It can obstruct the view of the camera.
Infrared.
Have you ever went into a department store and pointed a TV remote at one of the display cameras?
I have not.
Try it sometimes.
I can imagine what happens.
The camera goes white.
Yeah, anybody that's ever pointed a camera towards the sun or an overly bright light, if you have a bright light source behind somebody when you're taking a picture, you know, of course, that that overloads the camera lens, can't handle all that bright light coming in and kind of chokes.
And that's true of infrared especially, very, very bright lights.
Yep.
What else?
That's, I think that's it.
Let's see.
Right.
You know, infrared and just a regular beam of light, like one of those laser pointers will do the job, too.
Right.
Depending on how sensitive the camera is, you might get some, you might be able to make out some of it, but it should do the job.
And...
Again, not condoning anything.
Right, right.
I think, actually, yeah, we did mention cutting off the power.
Yeah.
Sometimes they can have a UPS device that might, or a backup power source of some kind.
Not if you cut both wires to the camera.
Well, I guess, yeah, if you cut both of them, then it doesn't matter, does it?
Most of the time, the UPS is on the other end, on wherever the camera's plugged into.
Well, and...
I've never seen a camera that had a built-in UPS in the unit itself.
Yeah, I would imagine they probably exist on some high-end, maybe, I don't know.
Yeah, but why not just snip the, if you've got a wired camera there, and you have...
Wireless.
A cable coming into it, and a power coming into it, snip both of them, and you're good.
Well, if it's wireless, though.
If it's wireless, okay.
All right, all right, I'll buy that.
Yeah, if it's wireless.
And actually, there's some vulnerabilities, obviously, to wireless as well.
Yeah, it runs on 802.11g, I believe, most of them.
Most of your consumers level, anyway.
So, therefore...
That would be relatively easy to block.
Or, so you can jam those...
Or intercept them.
Or intercept them, obviously.
Now, theoretically, since it is just like any other thing going over, you could theoretically...
Should theoretically encrypt those.
Should.
Yeah.
Do that.
Probably not.
Just like, just like whether they rotate the logs, and clean up the hard drives, and have
the settings configured.
It's one of those things where people just don't maintain them, or pay attention.
They just get it up and running, and then forget about it.
And don't pay attention.
Or change the admin password on the DVR unit, maybe?
Yeah, there.
That might do it.
So, all right.
So, here, let's talk about some myths and questions here, because we're kind of running
low.
Like, all right, true or false?
In the movies, sometimes, you will see where the spy taps into the video feed and replaces
it with a looped footage of something they've taken earlier.
That's possible?
True or false?
Yeah, it could theoretically be doubtful, though.
So, that's a movie thing, but theoretically, it's possible.
Theoretically.
Because your feed is coming from a live camera.
Again, theoretically, it's coming in from a live camera.
So, if you're sitting there watching it, and I think we do see this in a lot of movies,
you cut the wire real quickly, or you unplug the wire from the camera and plug it quickly
into a, I don't know, a VCR, these days, maybe an iPod or something with a video feed that's
looping, and somebody might not notice the difference if they're not paying close attention.
Yeah, but they'd have to be real dumb or not watching it at all.
Well, they're dumb people in the world, we'll just say that.
Yeah, because your camera is just a raw feed, so technically, you could, so.
Yeah.
All right, so.
Again, not requiring anything illegal from anybody.
Well, and on the topic of myths, like, spend maybe one or two minutes here.
There's been a lot of mention of these cameras, a lot of application of these cameras in toll
booths, on turnpikes, on pay roads, toll roads, or at stoplights and things like that.
And privacy implications aside, there's been a lot of discussion on this, and there's been
a lot of actual inventions and stuff that have come up.
Now, we've already talked about how these worked, and some of the vulnerabilities we
talked about, like the beam of light is the one that I see most commonly people try to
use to trick this.
So, you go burning through a toll booth or whatever, and you don't want to pay the toll,
you go zipping through the sun pass or the speed lane or whatever, and they have closed
circuit cameras in every lane that is supposed to be able to catch your license plate and hopefully
your face through your windshield as you go through there.
So, if you go through and don't pay, it'll snap that really fast.
So, there's been a lot of inventions claiming that they can prevent this.
And I have done some experimentation, and so have a lot of other people.
So have a lot of other people, and everybody's come to the same conclusion.
But, like, one of the things you'll see, and I've even seen spam emails about this, is
there's this clear spray paint coating stuff, this clear coat that you can spray over your
license plate.
And it's supposed to cause, like, a shimmering mirror, it's supposed to coat it with this
very shiny material, dries, causes it very, very shiny, so that it goes back to the light,
the beam of light we were talking about earlier.
When you try to use the flash on the camera, on the digital CCDP, or the sun on a video,
if the sun reflects off of this and make it really shiny, when the camera tries to pick
that up, it's going to get that bright light either flash mirrored back to it or the sunlight
bounced back to it and, therefore, ruin the image like we talked about earlier.
Another thing is you can buy these plastic covers that's the exact size of your license
plate.
You just unscrew your license plate, screw this plastic cover on top of it, and screw
it back down.
It's an attempt to do the same thing as before.
It's thinking that it's going to, A, either reflect some of the light back off of the plate,
or some of these are even curved with little grooves in it that attempt to distort the image.
Like, I don't even know how to describe that.
You know what I'm talking about, though, don't you?
Mm-hmm.
It's like a, I don't even know how to describe it.
When you look through a translucent object, you're not seeing through it perfectly clear.
You're looking at it like a bunch of prisms that are supposed to break it up, and when
the camera's further away, then it's not going to be able to accurately read your license plate.
Well, I think the one universal thing that I have seen from this is that none of them work,
unless you've heard otherwise.
No, they shouldn't work.
None of them should really affect the camera, taking the picture, and the actual quality.
If you're going to go that far, I just say, why don't you replace your license plate?
Yeah, then when you do get pulled over legitimately and they find out it's wrong, then you're in
really deep trouble.
Well, and I should also...
If you take it that illegal to begin with, you might as well in a few steps.
Ah, never mind.
Yeah, you're crossing a whole other line.
And actually, just to put it out there, putting any kind of coating or plastic cover of your
license plate, technically even lights around your license plate, which could possibly cause
the same thing if they're bright lights.
Technically, in the state of Florida, anyway, those are all illegal.
I think, like the Sun Pass, you know, if you go through one of them and you say you don't
have enough money to go through the toll, they'll let you go through the toll anyway.
Yeah, they'll just...
It could be a little slip that says insufficient funds or something.
Right, and they'll just either bill it to your credit card on file if you have it, or next
time you load it up with funds, it'll already be deducted.
It basically has a little, what do they call it for a checking account, like an overdraft
protection type thing?
So they give you a little bit of leeway.
Yeah.
So I don't think we're going to have enough time and probably, you know what, let's keep
the show technical.
I mean, we could talk about the privacy problems and we were going to at least mention them,
but having cameras out all the time, I mean, if you're running a private business and you
have cameras out protecting your business and your company and making things safer for
people that are coming to shop at your company or whatever, to me is one thing.
I don't really have too much of a problem with that personally.
I mean, other people may feel differently, but putting cameras out in the public becomes
a grayer area, if you will.
And I agree.
I don't know.
To a certain extent, I'm okay with some of that, to be honest.
It might surprise some people.
Some of that I'm okay with, like the lights in the intersections to tell if you're running
red lights or speeding or something like that.
But I got to honestly say, and if somebody can email me and prove me a reason why I shouldn't
feel this way, I don't really have too much of a problem with those.
It's an intersection.
It's using technology in a way to help make police officers' job easier to catch people
going through there.
So I don't really have too much of a problem with that.
You're speeding, you're breaking the law, and you get caught doing it.
That doesn't bother me so much.
But having them out on street corners and intersections and in-city streets, to me, I feel like you
should have a little bit more privacy there.
But in this world these days, I kind of don't feel like I have any privacy anywhere, truthfully.
Yeah, that's true.
The privacy is somewhat lacking nowadays.
Yeah, this could turn into a whole episode by itself talking about the privacy implications
of cameras and monitoring and a whole George Orwell 1984 Big Brothers watching tangent.
But we don't have time for it on this episode, so we're going to have to wrap it up.
Before we do, though, is there anything else that we skipped that you wanted to mention
before we close it up?
No, I think that's about it.
I think we covered a lot.
The only thing I have trouble with with the whole privacy issues, I don't particularly
like the face recognition ones.
I think that's just crossing a line that you really shouldn't.
I agree completely.
I do not like those at all.
Yeah, that's...
Because...
Yeah.
We could go into it, but I'll just say I agree, and we'll close the show with that,
I guess.
I just thought I'd mention it to egg you on a little bit.
I'm biting my tongue.
I'm holding back.
I don't want to...
We don't have any time left.
So, what kind of shout?
You got some shouts this week?
I'll shout to you.
I'll cheat a little bit.
Oh, yeah.
All the DP members.
And I'm sure you're with me on my shout this week is, you know, I do my corny shout outs
once in a while, and being that this is coming out July 3rd, of course, one day before July
4th.
If you're listening on the podcast, you might not be listening this until July 4th, but,
you know, the 4th of July celebrating our freedom in this country, the United States, and I have
to give my shouts, of course, to all the veterans and the men and women that are fighting overseas
right now, veterans and soldiers overseas right now that are, have given so much and are giving
so much, that are going out there and earning this freedom that I have to do this show yet
another year.
We're coming up on the end of season four, done another year of the show, and it's been
on the backs of these people.
So, you know, it may be corny, and it may be all kind of weird and all, but, you know,
I got to be honest and say that I totally, totally respect what these people have done
for us, and you have to understand that, you know, go out July 4th, celebrate the freedoms
that we do still have left in this country.
Yes, they're diminishing.
Yes, there's problems, but you know what?
It's still a great country.
We've still got more freedom than most people enjoy, and don't take those freedoms for granted.
When people are trying to take these away, when these privacy things do come up, stand
up and be heard.
Don't let them disappear, you know?
We have a lot of freedom.
It's great.
It can be better.
Appreciate what we have and try to keep what we have.
So, my shouts go out to them.
Happy 4th of July, everyone.
Hosting for Binary Revolution Radio is provided by caro.net.
They've been doing great for us for several months now, so if you need hosting by them,
and they have shared hosting plans I saw they just added recently, so if you want to go find
some shared hosting, they offer that now, virtual hosting.
Check them out, caro.net.
Our site of the week this week is Animusic, A-N-I-M-U-S-I-C.
That's animated music.
It's computer CGI graphics of some pretty cool music with all kinds of different very creative
animations to go with them.
You can buy that on DVD.
You can go check the site out and download some of them.
They're very cool.
Email us any feedback at all.
Love us, hate us, want us to disappear.
If you're actually in the future in the year 3517, the email address might not work, so bear
with us on that.
But that is going to do it for the show this week.
Closing music.
Oh, let's see.
Last minute, I am going to close with Bad Spella featuring MC Frontalot, Rhyme of the
Nibelung.
I might have used this before, but you know what?
I'm going to use it again, and that's going to do it.
Enigma, anything else before we close out the show here, buddy?
No, that's about it.
All right.
Thank you for being on the show, my friend, and to everybody out there listening in interweb
world, we will see you, well, sometime in the future.
But it will be the same hack time.
Same hack channel.
When the hubby comes out, he looks a little menacing, says he's going to eat you like
a little piece of venison.
When it's a morning, I guess I'm confused.
Does the wife know the hero?
There seems to be clues.
There's a sword in the tree.
Why is a tree in the house?
Did she slip a man to make it?
How come Siggy don't get out?
How come neither of them make it up the hills right now?
As for brothers, love, and sisters, isn't this disallowed?
Isn't this kind of how bad fates come about?
I'm going to need an intermission just to figure it out.
Now here come Papa, he's the one I jacked.
Rune Hilda is the daughter with the armor on the rack.
Does he lack indiscretion?
He backs up quick.
Daddy Bo don't ever seem to step to my brick.
She got him by the fix of the beard, she's insistent.
But the subtitles look good and I missed it.
Odin don't get to get his son killing dragons.
Still sounds like a job for the elder baggins.
Ain't even alright to get his daughter to fix fights.
It's about to go to sleep in my seat, alright.
Because the music's hella stupid, it don't got no beats.
And that's the 22nd time I heard the leitmotif.
And I cite no grief, but opera ain't for me.
It's for the kind of people, yo, who listen to the CBC and sip on tea.
And read up on the paper, another intermission coming.
I'ma be the great escaper.
Sneaking out the lobby, got ushered by an usher.
Showed me to my role and reminded me to hush up.
I'm settled in, waiting for the boredom to commence.
Definitely unprepared for what comes next.
When the strings set in, and the horns come chasing.
It's kinda like, I got rewarded for my patience.
This is more like it, this I could keep.
Ladies in helmets, you ride 18.
Moving down in my seat, I'm rocking and squirming.
Even the mobs got over the fact that they're talking German.
I'm learning, I might even have to come back.
Wonder if they sell a ticket for just the third act.
Dashed on the way out, did I follow?
I say sort of.
And I got to say, I'm glad that we're with the rings that there's an order.
I saw a lot of similarities, but I'm pretty sure that this was an adaptation of Star Wars.
I mean, you know, the twins and everything.
I'll probably go look it up on the internet.
You know, just to be sure.