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Voyeur's Dreams: Tools for Spying
Snooping has never been so easy. It is not known whether voyeurism should be considered something bad, but the fact that store shelves are full of all sorts of devices for this activity is an indisputable fact. Maybe this is a worldwide conspiracy?

Well, first of all, a wide-angle lens. You seem to be filming one shot, but in reality you are watching others.

In lens advertising Omax It doesn’t even hide what they are actually needed for.

For lovers of the female form, of course.
Secondly, an old and proven observation device is binoculars. And again we are told in plain text where to look for the best views.


The Bynolyt binoculars advertisement is, of course, made with a sense of humor. But I wouldn’t like to think that every owner of “far-sighted” optics looks at their naked neighbors.
Another class of devices designed for voyeurism are video recorders. They appeared with a specific purpose - to help drivers defend their rights on the road. To divert attention, they even came up with models that can protect the owner’s wallet from fines. Thus, the Highscreen Black Box Radar Plus recorder not only shoots video in Full HD resolution, but is also capable of capturing signals from speed cameras and traffic police radars.

The built-in radar detector “sees” even the thunderstorm of all reckless drivers - the latest complex for recording offenses "Strelka-ST" - from a distance of 500-700 meters. What can we say about ordinary radars and traffic police cameras?
Then the compact Highscreen Black Box Outdoor with a removable display appeared. This thing has an almost limitless scope of application: you can hang it in a car (to divert eyes), attach it to a motorcycle or bicycle (to photograph female athletes), or even dive with it.

Black Box Outdoor is almost an extreme camera; with it you can swim at a depth of up to 5 meters (hello, girls in bikinis!).
But the DVR really came into its own as a spy camera with the release of the Highscreen Black Box Connect model. This little box takes video and transmits it over Wi-Fi directly to your smartphone (OS supported Android and iOS ) or uploads to a “cloud” server on the Internet. By leaving the recorder somewhere in the Wi-Fi reception area, you can monitor what is happening from any device connected to the Internet, even from a thousand kilometers away.

This is very cool. Especially for those who like to peek unnoticed.


But of course, one should not consider everything written as an exposure of a worldwide conspiracy of voyeurs. It’s just that there really is a lot of tracking technology, but as they say, it all depends on the purpose for which it is used.

An unknown hacker has been organizing an Internet show for several days in a row, spying on people using web cameras. This is not the first time that users have been spied on through their own computers and smartphones - many criminals and Western intelligence agencies have done this. Lenta.ru found out whether it is possible to protect a webcam from hacking.

Amateur peep

On Tuesday, April 26, an anonymous member of the “Dvach” imageboard created a forum thread where he announced an unusual Internet show. He promised that he would broadcast on YouTube within a couple of hours and follow random netizens live. Moreover, they can unexpectedly launch various applications on victims’ computers, turn on porn, and post their data online.

To keep viewers from getting bored, the self-proclaimed showman announced “full interactivity” - viewers will be able to send him their requests in the chat, which he will immediately fulfill. After some time, a link to the Synchtube service appeared in the recording, where, in addition to the built-in video broadcast from YouTube, a chat was organized and a donation collection was organized. To guarantee the fulfillment of their requests, users were asked to send the hacker a symbolic sum of two or three rubles for “project development.”

At the very beginning of the broadcast, it became clear that the attacker was operating through the LuminosityLink system. It is typically used by network administrators to manage computer networks remotely. However, there are many pirated versions of the program on the Internet that can be configured to spy on users, infect them with viruses and organize DDoS attacks. The corresponding instructions can be easily found on YouTube.

In more than two hours of broadcast, the hacker managed to connect to several dozen computers. Usually he watched for a couple of minutes what the victim was doing, and then suddenly displayed various videos or photographs on the person’s screen. Thus, a young couple from Russia was forced to watch gay porn, and a Ukrainian policeman was forced to watch a bloody mixed martial arts fight.

The next day, the hacker mastered another form of entertainment: playing music on VKontakte. I managed to wake up one of the users with it. The attacker tried in every possible way to anger people, because this is what the viewers of the show expected. Usually the victims immediately began scanning their computer for viruses, but the showman simply added antiviruses to the list of prohibited programs.

Viewers reacted especially violently to several users who turned off the Internet out of fear, and to a young man who decided to call the police. They also laughed at the person who entered into correspondence with the hacker, thinking that he was conducting a dialogue with the support service of the Internet provider. Before this, the author of the broadcast displayed information about skin diseases on his screen for ten minutes.

The most curious thing is that the attacker is extremely difficult to identify. Dvach has long been famous for its guaranteed anonymity for all users, and the hacker himself probably uses VPN and other services to mask his IP address. The network, however, suggested that the broadcasts were organized by the famous YouTube observer of various hacker programs, Dmitry Shalashov, since the voice was similar.

Website for cameras

The Dvacha hacker is far from the only attacker spying on people through web cameras. In 2014, the BBC reported on a Russian site that made it possible to monitor webcam broadcasts around the world. More than two and a half thousand channels from the USA, two thousand from France and one and a half thousand from the Netherlands were available on the resource.

The webcams of Russian users also appeared on this portal. Threat Post discovered about 70 working cameras from Moscow, Korolev, Krasnodar and other cities.

BBC journalists then contacted the owner of the resource. He stated that he had nothing to do with Russia and refused to admit that he was a hacker. According to him, he gained access to all broadcasts after entering a simple password to the cameras, which the users themselves did not change from the standard one. At the same time, the Networkworld website calculated that about 73 thousand webcams in 256 countries were protected by default password.

There really was no hacking going on. Users who did not change factory settings and passwords essentially gave attackers access to their webcams.

It was only a matter of time before an aggregator of unsecured webcams appeared. The portal's creators did not have to look for software vulnerabilities or launch a phishing site to steal passwords. Unsecured cameras were discovered using a simple search query.

After widespread publicity, the site was taken down. Wireless camera maker Foscam said at the time that it had changed its software following the incident, and its cameras now force users to set complex passwords, preventing them from working with standard factory security settings.

Snowden's truth

Former US National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden also spoke about the use of webcams for surveillance. In his revealing materials, he said that American and British intelligence services are tapping phones, monitoring correspondence on social networks and instant messengers, monetary transactions and ticket purchases. In addition, the NSA has access to millions of webcams and can monitor users through them. It became clear that absolutely unhackable technologies do not exist.

Snowden presented details of how intelligence agencies monitored video chats in February 2014. According to published materials, a special program called Optic Nerve, capable of recognizing human faces, was used for this purpose. It was originally created to fight crime, and with its help it was planned to search for terrorists, but in the end it turned into a tool for mass surveillance.

Optic Nerve was developed by British intelligence. According to Snowden, every five seconds the program automatically took screenshots from randomly selected video chats and stored them in a special database. Among these images there were often shots of an erotic nature. Optic Nerve launched in 2008, and within six months the intelligence agency had captured images of 1.8 million network users.

For surveillance, British intelligence used only video chats from Yahoo! Inc, and shared the data exclusively with their American colleagues. In Yahoo! Inc. they knew nothing about it.

To each according to his work

However, hackers are not always able to evade responsibility. For example, in 2013, a case was opened in the United States against 19-year-old Jared James Abrahams. The young man gained illegal access to girls’ computers and took explicit pictures of them using web cameras. He then threatened his victims to publish these materials if they did not send him more erotic photos.

Abrahams also tried his former classmate Cassidy Wolf, winner of the 2013 Miss Teen USA title. The girl refused to comply with Abrahams' demands. He made good on his threat and posted pictures taken from his webcam online. As a result, he

Igor Magazinnik, one of the creators of Viber, technical director of the company. Born in Nizhny Novgorod, at the age of 16 he emigrated to Israel. In the early 2000s, together with his army friend Talmon, Marko created a service for exchanging music files iMesh, the Israeli analogue of Napster. In 2010, with the money that iMesh brought in, as well as with the money of friends and relatives, Igor Magazinnik and Talmon Marko launched the Viber application for iPhone, designed primarily for free calls over the Internet. It immediately became a popular alternative to Skype. Reasons: fast and intuitive mobile application, simple registration, for which a phone number is enough. According to the creators, three days after the international launch, a million people downloaded the Viber app store. At first, the press saw it mainly as a VoIP service, a program for making calls, although very soon most users used it primarily for messaging. Now, according to Igor Magazinnik, “this is a platform for communication on phones and desktops, covering all the user’s communication needs. Text chats, voice and video calls, calls to regular phones at low prices, games, stickers and more.” The application is one of the five most popular mobile instant messengers: 250 million active users in the world (20 million in Russia), according to the company’s data for May. By comparison, WhatsApp had 800 million active users this spring, and Facebook Messenger had 600 million. Viber has the most users in Brazil, the UK, India, and the countries of the Asia-Pacific region. A year ago, Viber was bought by Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten for $900 million. Legally, Viber is a Luxembourg company. Development centers are located in Bnei Brak (part of greater Tel Aviv), Minsk, Brest and Amsterdam.

• I, like many people, have several messengers. And it seems that only Viber chats are filled with so many hearts, roses, some dancing cats and other stickers.

• The first time I realized how powerful this thing is was when I met an employee of Rakuten (a Japanese company that bought Viber a year ago for $900 million. - Ed.), a European married to a Japanese woman. He either boasted or complained that his wife spoke to him exclusively in stickers, and for a long time he was not very sure whether he understood her correctly. Maybe this is the influence of hieroglyphs, or maybe just universal human compensation for facial expressions and gestures that are absent in text chat. In general, we saw the idea of ​​stickers in Asia, in messengers like Line and KakaoTalk. They realized that they were becoming popular in the West, and simply responded to the demand. Now stickers are selling well from us, including in Russia, and in total revenue they are second only to paid calls via Viber Out.

• Did Rakuten buy you because of the stickers?

• No, of course, for them this is a story for the future. Initially, Rakuten is the most successful Japanese company in the field of online trading, such a local Amazon. Over time, they started branching out into other industries, and now Rakuten does a billion different things. Starting with e-books and Kobo readers, ending with some golf courses. They have their own bank, telephone company, travel agency. They strive to create an international company and therefore buy a lot abroad, hoping that new assets will help this their mission. They need Viber as a global platform to distribute their services. I can’t say yet what it will look like on a planetary scale. Although in Japan itself, Viber is already integrated with Rakuten: there, for example, you can link your Viber account to a local loyalty program and receive some points for it.

• How does this even happen - such billion-dollar deals?

• We were looking for investments to afford all sorts of expensive things, in the field of marketing, for example. Quite by accident we came across the Rakuten investment fund. The founder of the company, Hiroshi Mikitani, came to us in Israel. And all this almost instantly and completely unexpectedly moved from a conversation about investment to a conversation about buying. Of course, we sat in restaurants a lot, drank a lot, ate a lot. They are open and cheerful, it is very easy to be with them. These are not those silent Japanese who bow to each other and work for 40 years in one place. I would call Rakuten the most un-Japanese of the Japanese companies. They even have an internal language in English, everyone in the company speaks it, all documentation is in it. This englishization, as they call it, is one of the ways to become global.

Photo: Natalia Kogan / DVISION STUDIO

• Is Rakuten interfering with your work? How did they influence you?

• Most likely not at all. They do not interfere with the work. Me and Talmon (Talmon Marko is the second founder of Viber. - Ed.) remain at the helm, although a little later we may move away from the direct management of Viber: we are now launching a new project, but this is a completely different story, not related to social media , which I can’t talk about yet. The Viber team retains complete freedom within the framework of the development strategy that was in place before the deal, while we now have more money. Our strategy is simple - to cover all the communication needs of the user. People want something new - we find out about it and do it for them.

• For example? What do people want from instant messengers now?

• Well, take encryption. I personally don’t have any problems with this, I have nothing to hide. But what to do, Snowden started this hysteria. Now it is customary to protect your data, this is a normal desire of the user, and we cannot ignore this. Some instant messengers like Telegram actually use this fear of users as a marketing driver. We have never tried to position encryption as an important aspect of our messenger, although we have always had it, and now we are making our messenger even more secure. In one of the next versions, Viber will switch to end-to-end encryption of all its services: text messages, calls, and video conferencing. This means that even we at the company will not have access to these messages and broadcasts; they will be decrypted directly on the user’s device.

Photo: Natalia Kogan / DVISION STUDIO

• Okay, that’s why I started talking about stickers at the beginning. The WhatsApp messenger does not have any stickers, and it generally looks more compact, and it is the most popular messenger in the world.

• We are not in the same position as WhatsApp, which is usually in no hurry to expand functionality. That is, they promised voice communication God knows when, but added it only a month ago. WhatsApp can afford it because it is a world leader, and it is a leader because they launched earlier. A year earlier than Viber - this is a big advantage. After this, it’s impossible to make another minimalistic product. Therefore, we have to compete by offering new functionality to users as quickly as possible.

• What can you say about popular forecasts about the death of social networks and the fact that we will soon even read news in instant messengers?

• Social networks are certainly evolving. Some of their functions, mainly communication ones, will most likely transfer to instant messengers. And a significant part of people too. This is already happening all over the world. In America, as you know, the average young person not only stops using Facebook, he doesn’t use WhatsApp either, preferring some strange things like Snapchat. But the Facebook feed will be the main source of news for many for a long time. A separate question is whether this average young person will need news in the form we are used to. Messengers can provide media formats that we cannot yet imagine.

Photo: Natalia Kogan / DVISION STUDIO

• You seem to have tried to invent such a new format - I mean Viber publics. But, I’m afraid, not everyone understands how to approach these public pages, or how they can even be read. Tell us about them.

• Our publics are the result of the evolution of chat groups. A person or several are discussing something, and the rest are following them and quietly liking them. When we came up with all this, we asked ourselves whether it would be interesting for people to follow the correspondence of artists, football players and other famous people on their phones. That is, this is a thing where you can spy on others through the keyhole. With their consent, of course. It turned out that this is interesting: many public sites have millions of subscribers. In Russia alone, public pages are read by three million people - chats about fashion, weight loss and humor are mostly popular. I follow a few myself a little. In Russia they read the channel “2 x 2” and “Vesti.net”. And in Israel, before the recent elections, there was a public page where members of the Knesset staged, excuse me, wild fights live. The most interesting thing is that these were not their PR people. The messenger is such a simple and direct thing that politicians began to write there themselves. Now we are conducting an experiment: for the first time in Israel, we have given everyone the opportunity to start their own public page. Where this will lead - God knows.

• Each messenger has its own unique things, but the aggregator will not have them. For the sake of standardization, you will have to sacrifice calls, video communications, stickers and other joys of the platform. The aggregator means a return to the era of text messages. Obviously, it is important for the creators of instant messengers that the services they have been working on and struggling with for years are available to users in their entirety. So no, alas, the aggregator will never appear.

Results of a survey conducted by the head of the Sibiriks studio

The head of the Sibiriks studio, Vladimir Zavertailov, interviewed his colleagues and collected a number of resources where designers can find ideas and inspiration for creating their own products.

Every artist (including web designers) is a bit of a thief: he stole an idea in one place, a plot in another, digested it with his creative pot and got a masterpiece.

If you are brazenly circling the sites of the day from Awwwards, inspired by the quote “Good artists copy, great artists steal” - be careful not to cut yourself on the shards of broken illusions. Because no one said that, guys. This is the same dubious creation of the Internet as Statham’s quotes.

The original said that mediocrities steal, and creative guys only copy and improve. Therefore, stop being lazy, it’s time to make original layouts.

We shocked the Sibiriks designers and found out where they look for ideas and generally get inspired (legally). We found links that were completely worn out (Awwwards - who would doubt it), and something more original. Scattered by target:

• Collect ideas for the website.
• Find a specific element.
• Grab some visual inspiration.
• See everything in one place.
• Tighten up the hardware.

It turned out to be a good warehouse of inspiration. It’s enough to put together a mood board, come up with a project feature, and even find a couple of pieces of code to make the layout designer’s life easier.

Collect ideas for the site

On these resources you can see what good websites generally look like - in case the customer’s references have completely erased your ideas about bad and good design. We study, absorb, tune in to the right wave.

• Awwwards. Not a button accordion, but a classic. Although “Collections” on Awwwards is a relatively new feature.
• The FWA, CSS Design Awards, Website Design Award. A bunch of site competitions where the works are sometimes repeated. But the original nominees also make it through.
• Designer News. A resource where you can find cool examples and read the opinions of colleagues from all over the world. Usually all designs that are posted on Awwwards appear here first.
• Site Inspiration. Nice sites that rarely overlap with Awwwards and Co. Not always competitive, but still original and interesting.
• Cargo Collaborative. A selection of minimalist sites with some hidden zest.

• The Best Designs. Here the sites are simpler - the creative slider is turned up no more than 20%.
• The Perfect Grid. A selection of sites with a non-standard grid is a trend in 2017, by the way.
• Sibirix"s Pinterest. When our designers are not drawing something useful, they add sites they like here.
• Minimal gallery. Gallery of radical minimalism. Inserts beautifully. What is this exhibit worth, where on the main page there is only text and a cursor in the shape of a banana.
• Hover States. A selection of unusual sites with a convenient filter by tags.
• Siiimple. Here, one good minimalist site is added in portions once a day.
• One Page Love. Collection of one-page sites. Funny, and sometimes not very decent. Faint of heart and sissies, walk carefully.

Find a specific element

Resources for when the general concept has been settled, and all that remains is to come up with catchy little things: fonts, icons, interactions.

• Dribbble. A rightfully well-worn resource - there are gigabytes of ideas for icons and micro-interactions. The hardest thing is to find something useful among them.
• Motion UI. A subjective summary from Dribbble - for those who don’t want to rummage through its rubble themselves.
• Codepen Codrops. Resources where ready-made work elements are stored: insert them onto the site right now. Find something cool, play with it in your design and bring the required piece of code to the layout designer - profit.
• Web Design Freebies. A selection of icons, fonts, and sometimes mockups - a goldmine for a moodboard. It is no longer updated, so use it before it goes bad.
• Color Supplyyy App. A simple and pleasant application for selecting colors.
• Google Fonts. Fonts that Google approves.
• Uimovement. A collection of cute micro-interactions.

Get visual inspiration

Just a selection of pictures that help our designers catch inspiration.

• Design Collector. Photos, videos, pictures and other tinsel that helps you find the vector in which you need to create.
• Ffffound. A slightly more hipster image warehouse: more glitch and acidic GIFs.
• Designspiration. A hodgepodge of design works and photographs from Instagram.

See everything in one place

If you need to see layouts, icons, and fonts at once, but you value your work in progress too much to switch between sites, check out the resources below. Everything is there, just specify your search query.

Since Orwell wrote his immortal work “1984,” the expression “Big Brother” has become a commonplace, a label that is being thrown around left and right. Total surveillance seemed something disgusting and unacceptable in polite society. It seemed...

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, fears about “state surveillance” subsided as authorities succeeded in instilling in people the idea that surveillance was carried out for the benefit of the citizens themselves.

And at the same time, both in the United States and in many other countries, a strange, at first glance, trend is observed: ordinary citizens are increasingly spying on each other.

“Next time you go outside, don’t forget to smile for the camera,” begins the article published in USA Today.

In the United States, there is an increased wariness of everyone and everything, and in addition, the cost of surveillance and surveillance technologies is falling day by day. So now it’s not just banks and groceries that can boast of ubiquitous security cameras.

People were afraid of "Big Brother", and yet "Little Brother" turns out to be no less ubiquitous.

Smile, please! Your neighbor is filming you, or rather, his automatic camera. The favorite slogan “Keep Smiling”, which has acquired almost legal force in commercial companies in the West, has acquired a new “support” in the form of the ubiquitous “electronic eyes”.

On a huge number of sites there were or are still hanging animated banners advertising webcams for monitoring one’s property, animal or woman. Some banners are characterized by ambiguity, which, however, is natural (this will be discussed below)...

The ubiquitous cameras are no longer Big, but, as technology expert Howard Rheingold calls them, “Little Brother.” “It was believed that only the state had sufficient capacity and technology to carry out (total) surveillance. But now everything has been democratized. Your neighbors and your relatives can do this,” USA Today quotes Reingold as saying.

One of the popup banners from X10 Wireless Technologies promoting a surveillance camera...

Remember in the movie “Mission: Impossible” when the characters were waving glasses with a built-in camera? This is no longer fantasy. This, according to USA Today, is a reality purchased via the Internet for modest money - around $100. This tiny camera can be hidden anywhere, including sunglasses, cell phones or pens.

Generally speaking, in the United States, cell phones with cameras are still somewhat of an innovation. In Australia and Hong Kong, it is already expressly prohibited to carry such devices with you into swimming pools and, in particular, locker rooms. The reasons for the bans, it seems, are unnecessary to explain.

Meanwhile, individual stories about how cameras of the lower price class saved someone, or helped arrest robbers, are appearing more and more often, convincing “civil citizens” of the need to purchase these devices.

Consider, for example, the news that the San Jose police have distributed photographs of a certain guy who kidnapped a 9-year-old girl right from her house and fled in a car. It’s not a fact that the pervert will be caught with the help of these particular pictures, but it turned out to be an excellent advertisement for surveillance cameras for parents living in the neighborhood.

Few people seem to care that the camera itself cannot protect a child from persecution by a pedophile.

A fake camera is a scarecrow for bandits.

It is typical, by the way, that fake surveillance cameras are actively sold via the Internet. These are not cameras at all, but plastic models - a kind of scarecrow. The developers claim that with the help of these “toys” they can ward off robbers.

And although experts on public security and personal information were more worried about surveillance of citizens by intelligence services, total surveillance of everyone over everyone is, alas, already a given. And it’s not so much a matter of trying to protect yourself from the outside world.

The point is the irresistible attraction that spying on their neighbors conceals for many people. Especially if their own life seems monotonous and empty to them, and this is not uncommon in our time.

Yes, in polite society this is - for now - considered indecent. Psychology considers this a kind of deviation, and even a kind of sexual perversion. There is even the term “voyeurism” (from the French word “voyeur” - peeping, spying).

Screenshot from the game Phantasmagoria 2. The camera spies on the act of seduction. Is voyeurism a characteristic feature of our time?

However, nowadays an incredible number of people suffer from voyeurism. The moral barrier has disappeared, perhaps also because, thanks to the Internet and high technology, the availability of “pornography” has increased dramatically.

“Pornography” refers not only to the open demonstration of nudity and people copulating, but also the very possibility of secret surveillance of other people - without their knowledge. Sometimes, however, with their consent.

For example, in September 2002, the Spanish newspaper El Pais published an article entitled “Total Pornography” (translation on InoSMI.ru). The author of the article makes some pretty bold statements, but it’s hard to argue with them. For example:

“The desire for openness is becoming one of the most passionate desires of our time. In economics, politics, morality, food, sex, any event becomes modern if it meets the conditions of transparency.

Beef tested by the French Meat Industry Information Center (Centre dInformation des Viandes - CIV) is 100% guaranteed to be meat cut from muscle tissue with a sharp knife. And all thanks to the Openness Agreement.

But in relation to other flesh - human and sexual - the apogee of pornography (both on the Internet and off) is certainly associated with an interest in voyeurism, voyeurism, observation of others. Starting from “Big Brother” (the Spanish analogue of the project “Behind the Glass” and other similar reality shows) and ending with the Chilean “Glass House”, from the aerial buildings of Norman Foster in London, to the UEFA pavilion in Nyon, Switzerland, built according to project by Patrick Berger - everything strives for openness.

Pornography is a symbol of our era, both in the moral and ideological sense of the word, having to do with human flesh and what it can be bought for...

The world itself puts its naked body on display for anyone to see, and democracy is perceived as a state bathed in light. So should we be amazed at the avalanche of pornography - traditional and non-traditional?

On the Internet, thanks to webcams, anyone can film their yawns in front of the monitor screen and send their images to midnight denizens of the Internet just like them.

The webcam shows the most intimate, which is exchanged for the hidden, webcam others. Sharing intimacy online is one of the most engaging ways for users to communicate."

Then why, one might ask, be surprised? What was predicted in O. Huxley’s novel “Brave New World” (Aldous Huxley. Brave New World, 1932) - glass floors and ceilings, “the right to know everything about everyone” - became a reality. This has not made the world any happier, nor any safer – these are just illusions.

But, as you know, “the darkness of low truths is dearer to us than the deception that elevates us.” The ability to spy on someone without their knowledge creates the illusion of power over them.

The ability to observe the surroundings of your home and its interior creates the illusion of security.

Skilled robbers, however, will disappear before the police appear, and the camera, at best, will help identify them. But she is unable to stop anyone.

But this is precisely an illusion, because skilled thieves will steal everything they need from the house and get away before the police arrive, alerted by the owner of the house, accidentally who noticed robbers on their computer monitor.

However, how many people understand this? Apparently not. According to a company actively involved in the distribution of surveillance web cameras, X10 Wireless Technologies, whose “ambiguous” banners have covered the entire Internet, claims that more than a million of its cameras are currently in use. And this is only one manufacturer.

According to calculations by Paul Saffo, an employee of the Californian Institute for the Future, there are 30-40 surveillance cameras per ten miles in any large city. And this is not counting those cameras that are installed in houses or that passers-by carry with them.

“They spy on us all the time,” Saffo says. “We not only spy on each other, but also on ourselves.” And we will all one day discover that we have become uninteresting “stars” of our own boring reality shows.”