Going a little more live
We’ve started to add some more dynamic elements to the site. Specifically, the boxes with Recently Viewed cams are now updating in real time, whenever somebody watches a cam. The number of visitors is also updating in real time.
This is the beginning of some more live features, making it easier to be on track with what is going on right this moment.
September 9, 2013 at 11:12 pm | Site News | No comment
The War on Privacy is a War with Ourselves
We just noticed this article at Huffington Post that mentioned us. Nothing really earth shattering there, but it is always nice to be mentioned. An excerpt:
Opentopia, a website like many others, works by pulling unprotected, effectively public, live feeds from various sources around the internet. These can (and do) include an office full of square-jawed women in Moscow, an empty car park in Brazil and a university cafeteria in Maryland. With the constant expansion of video surveillance and video networks many, as a result of poor regulation, are as accessible as your mothers battery-operated Friday night special. Just open the draw, root around and there it is.
They lump our kind of webcams in with the recent discussions about Google Glass, the wearable always-on built-into-your-glasses camera that might take pictures of people at any point, without them having explicitly consented to it. The point of the article seems to be more or less that it is unavoidable that our lives get more and more transparent, but that it is mostly rather boring. And that we’re not really going to have privacy unless we stop being interested in snooping on other people’s lives. Well, maybe.
September 8, 2013 at 11:49 pm | Mentions | No comment