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China to have 626M surveillance cameras within 3 years
- infinity0 9y agoFollowing suit, UK unveiled plans to have 625M surveillance cameras.
- ashleysmithgpu 9y ago10 for each person in the UK? ... I wouldn't put it past this government
- gaius 9y agoIt started during the Bliar years (not that that excuses this government from continuing with it). Remember the national biometric database?
- oliwarner 9y agoErr, no. It started in the 1960s. There were massive city-wide programmes up and running well before Blair. The IRA (or their reactionary counterparts) are who you should blame for the amount of CCTV in London, but it all comes from the same place. If it wasn't them, it would have been something else.
- escapologybb 9y ago^This My first memory of surveillance in any kind of large-scale was in the early 1990s, well before Tony Blair. It was when the Met police put up the "Ring of Steel" around the centre of London to stop the volunteers blowing things up. Anyway, too much surveillance bad. Unless they use it to find your phone, in which case too much surveillance good. One might think it's somewhat of a nuanced issue!
- kalleboo 9y agoI just tried to search for how many surveillance cameras there already are in the UK, and by the time I got to "number of surveillance cameras", Safari popped up a Siri suggestion for the London Wikipedia article... http://mayoyo.tokyo/jK7.jpg http://mayoyo.tokyo/jK7.jpg If anyone is curious "The British Security Industry Association (BSIA) estimates there are between 4-5.9 million cameras"
- infinity0 9y agoA quick google search suggests that China currently has about 20 million cameras, so the UK is actually not far behind. Given the population, there are actually more cameras per UK citizen than there are per Chinese citizen.
- buro9 9y agoAnd yet, when I was the victim of a hit and run incident in central London we were unable to locate a single working camera that could provide any usable evidence. The vast majority either do not work, or are privately owned and when enquired about (difficult in itself as there are so many parties to contact once the owner is identified, and they likely do not have direct access and need to speak to someone else) have extremely useless retention periods that meant no footage survived enough time to request it.
- agumonkey 9y agoGonna start my surveillance free luxury city and enjoy my new rich-itude.
- azurezyq 9y agoWell, you may call it surveillance cams but it may not be a bad thing. But as a Chinese, I never feel stressful under these cams in China, but feel unsafe all the time walking down the street in SF in the night after moving to US. Purpose matters.
- icantdrive55 9y agoThere's kinda of an art to walking at night in San Francisco. Walk with purpose. Don't look like an easy target. Don't park way out of the way to save a few dollars in parking. Don't just expect Cops are paid to protect you--in all reality, they do the bare minimum. Yea--it's not fair.
- dogma1138 9y agoIs SF really that bad?
- kalleboo 9y agoParts of it are
- miller_joe 9y agoNo
- jononor 9y agoWhat is the difference?
- tbronchain 9y agoIs it really camera that made the difference? I had a motorbike stolen in Beijing. Police's answer? "Sorry, the camera didn't work". A friend forget his phone in a taxi (who run away, then turned it off when he tried to call it). He left the taxi at a precise crossing with cameras. He went to the police station a very soon after. Police answer? "We couldn't identify the taxi". I have a few more stories like this (like wallet and phones stolen at the ATM). Yes all in China. And I'm not talking about the multiple scams that are very specific to china. Maybe public surveillance camera help preventing armed attacks (but it's never really been a thing in China anyway, and in serious decline in the world in general) and I doubt they can do much more. As you say, purpose matters. I don't believe crime stops with surveillance, it changes. Edit: one thing I forgot to mention, I feel the Chinese state media are doing a very good job at not talking too much about the different crime/problems happening. Western media are doing pretty much the opposite. I think on that precise point, if other method than censorship were used, it's actually a pretty good thing and do make people feel safer.
- thisisit 9y agoThe interesting thing part is this: "Hikvision has been expanding in the Americas where it now has 8.5% of the market, putting it in the No.2 position. The Chinese government owns a 42% stake of Hikvision, according to a piece by the Wall Street Journal earlier this month on the security concerns of Chinese-made cameras being used in the US." Article here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/surveillance-cameras-made-by-china-are-hanging-all-over-the-u-s-1510513949 https://www.wsj.com/articles/surveillance-cameras-made-by-ch...
- knowsnothing 9y agoThey provide a large portion of cameras around the world
- draugadrotten 9y agoSurely their cameras and hence their operations are a prime target for the world´s intelligence services and organized crime. What is known about how the company deals with developing sensitive products in this very hostile environment?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- freeflight 9y agoMost of these cheap Chinese cams suffer from the usual IoT issues: Security is an afterthought/hardcoded admin credentials [0] if the user even bothered to properly set them up in the first place. Shodan.io has plenty unsecured cams, from baby cams to security cams in shops [1]. Interesting way to kill a couple of hours, if you disregard the creep factor. As such I doubt worlds intelligence services, or organized crime, need to target any of these cheap webcam companies specifically. [0] https://www.ispyconnect.com/userguide-default-passwords.aspx https://www.ispyconnect.com/userguide-default-passwords.aspx [1] https://www.shodan.io/explore/tag/webcam https://www.shodan.io/explore/tag/webcam
- rtx 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- kosma 9y agoCorrected title: "China to have 626M surveillance camera botnet within 3 years".
- vivaforever 9y agoChina and surveillance, these two words form a piece of a news, if you change it to other countries, then it's not news. Western media is very objective.
- breitling 9y agoI'm interested in how they plan to monitor all these cameras. Obviously, it can't be any number of people looking at all 625M cameras. Will some AI monitor all the feeds and flag suspicious activities to the local authorities?
- adventured 9y agoIt'll be combined with recent substantial efforts toward facial and voice recognition systems in China. When a hit occurs, it'll be recorded for time and place etc.
- oliwarner 9y agoWell if they're using the same 2013-compiled firmware as the millions of IP cameras China dumps on Amazon, eBay, etc, I imagine it'll be hackers monitoring them.
- rsynnott 9y agoLooks like it's mostly private cameras? Those probably won't be monitored at all, in practice; most private security cameras aren't. Back when they used tapes, a surprising number weren't even actually hooked up to record.
- shsu7 9y agoThey will usually take 3 years to figure out they can't and then it's time to junk the 625 million cams and upgrade to the next dumb solution. Your basic tech industry employment guarantee scheme.
- wqnt 9y agoChinese government utilize some pretty good machine learning to analyze and monitor those cameras. Techniques include: - Vehicle plates recognition. They are automatically captured and mapped. Chinese police can get the complete historical routes of any car around major cities in real time just buy entering the number. - Activity detection. If something interesting is happening in front of a camera (e.g. two people running in front of a camera middle of the night), AI detects that and pops the view up in front of humans for further action. Because less than 1% of cameras contain any useful info at any moment, they don't need that many humans to watch those cameras live. - Face recognition. For many cameras, Face capture and recognition is running live and report any criminals or targeted personnel to police. - Footage markup. If police need to go through the camera footage manually, the recording playback can skip the uninteresting parts to save time. Combining these with unrestricted real-time integration of other data sources, such as real time GPS from mobile apps, cell tower call history from telecoms, network traffic inspection and remote spying capabilities, Chinese police forces can pretty much find anybody very quickly. They are also known to have state of the art big data platforms developed in house. One anecdote I read: Somebody killed a person in a small city middle of the night, removed battery of his phone, ran to his car parked on street, drove a couple of hundred miles to another middle sized city, only to be caught in a motel next morning. How? Complete camera footage covering his walking path, vehicle plate tracking all the way to his destination, and motel check-in system that is also integrated with police.
- post_break 9y agoSomewhat related, be very careful buying IP cameras. A lot have been shown to have backdoors to different countries. Trying to find a good PTZ outdoor IP camera has been a mine field since I'll find one and then a reviewer will look at the traffic it's sending and see very very sketchy stuff. My friend bought a hidden camera for his house only to see it was sending video traffic to china.
- jhulla 9y agoThis is why I keep a bunch of equipment by default on an isolated subnet where the router drops all packets to the outside world. Doesn't matter what the device is trying to do. Connecting to these devices requires one level of indirect - where I connect first to an internal machine that can send packets to/from the hidden subnet.
- post_break 9y agoYeah that's a good plan. I've read reviews where some cameras just stop working after a while when this is done too. It's a shit show.
- taksintikk 9y agoCell phones are surveillance cameras so that number is extremely understated.