Eyecam Is Watching You In Between Blinks

We will be the first to admit that it’s often hard to be productive while working from home, especially if no one’s ever really looking over your shoulder. Well, here is one creepy way to feel as though someone is keeping an eye on you, if that’s what gets you to straighten up and fly right. The Eyecam research project by [Marc Teyssier] et. al. is a realistic, motorized eyeball that includes a camera and hangs out on top of your computer monitor. It aims to spark conversation about the sensors that are all around us already in various cold and clinical forms. It’s an open source project with a paper and a repo and a how-to video in the works.

The eyebrow-raising design pulls no punches in the uncanny department: the eye behaves as you’d expect (if you could have expected this) — it blinks, looks around, and can even waggle its brow. The eyeball, brow, and eyelids are actuated by a total of six servos that are controlled by an Arduino Nano.

Inside the eyeball is a Raspberry Pi camera connected to a Raspi Zero for the web cam portion of this intriguing horror show. Keep an eye out after the break for the Eyecam infomercial.

Creepy or fascinating, it succeeds in making people think about the vast amount of sensors around us now, and what the future of them could look like. Would mimicking eye contact be an improvement over the standard black and gray oblong eye? Perhaps a pair of eyes would be less unsettling, we’re not really sure. But we are left to wonder what’s next, a microphone that looks like an ear? Probably. Will it have hair sprouting from it? Perhaps.

Yeah, it’s true; two eyes are more on the mesmerizing side, but still creepy, especially when they follow you around the room and can shoot frickin’ laser beams.

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Insecure Surveillance Cameras Provide Dystopian Peep Show

It probably doesn’t surprise you to hear there are tens of thousands of web-connected cameras all over the world that are set to take the default credentials. Actually, there are probably more than that out there, but we can assure you that at least 70,000 or so are only a click away. With this project, [carolinebuttet] proves that it’s quite possible to make art from our rickety, ridiculous surveillance state — and it begins with a peephole perspective.

The peephole in your own front door grants you the inalienable right to police your porch, stoop, or patch of carpet in the apartment building’s hallway while going mostly undetected. In Virtual Peephole, the peephole becomes a voyeuristic virtual view of various corners of the world.

Slide aside the cover, and an LDR connected to an Arduino Micro detects the change in light level. This change makes the Micro send a key press to a Raspberry Pi, which fetches a new camera at random and displays it on a screen inside the box. You can peep a brief demo after the break, followed by a couple of short build/walk-through videos.

If you’re a peephole people watcher, put a camera in there and watch from anywhere.

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Another Day, Another Air Gap Breached

What high-tech, ultra-secure data center would be complete without dozens of video cameras directed both inward and outward? After all, the best informatic security means nothing without physical security. But those eyes in the sky can actually serve as a vector for attack, if this air-gap bridging exploit using networked security cameras is any indication.

It seems like the Cyber Security Lab at Ben-Gurion University is the place where air gaps go to die. They’ve knocked off an impressive array of air gap bridging hacks, like modulating power supply fans and hard drive activity indicators. The current work centers on the IR LED arrays commonly seen encircling the lenses of security cameras for night vision illumination. When a networked camera is compromised with their “aIR-Jumper” malware package, data can be exfiltrated from an otherwise secure facility. Using the camera’s API, aIR-Jumper modulates the IR array for low bit-rate data transfer. The receiver can be as simple as a smartphone, which can see the IR light that remains invisible to the naked eye. A compromised camera can even be used to infiltrate data into an air-gapped network, using cameras to watch for modulated signals. They also demonstrated how arrays of cameras can be federated to provide higher data rates and multiple covert channels with ranges of up to several kilometers.

True, the exploit requires physical access to the cameras to install the malware, but given the abysmal state of web camera security, a little social engineering may be the only thing standing between a secure system and a compromised one.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Remote Control By Head Gestures

Some people may think they’re having a bad day when they can’t find the TV remote. Yet there are some people who can’t even hold a remote, let alone root around in the couch cushions where the remote inevitably winds up. This entry in the Assistive Technologies phase of the 2017 Hackaday Prize seeks to help such folks, with a universal remote triggered by head gestures.

Mobility impairments can range from fine motor control issues to quadriplegia, and people who suffer from them are often cut off from technology by the inability to operate devices. [Cassio Batista] concentrated on controlling a TV for his project, but it’s easy to see how his method could interface with other IR remotes to achieve control over everything from alarm systems to windows and drapes. His open-source project uses a web cam to watch a user’s head gestures, and OpenCV running on a CHIP SBC looks for motion in the pitch, yaw, and roll axes to control volume, channel, and power. An Arduino takes care the IR commands to the TV. The prototype works well in the video below; with the power of OpenCV we can imagine mouth gestures and even eye blinks adding to the controller’s repertoire.

The Assistive Tech phase wraps up tomorrow, so be sure to get your entries in. You’ll have some stiff competition, like this robotic exoskeleton. But don’t let that discourage you.

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Heat Duct Rover Explores Stink, Rescues Flashlight

It all started with a bad smell coming from the heat register. [CuddleBurrito] recalled a time when something stinky ended up in the ductwork of his folks’ house which ended up costing them big bucks to explore. The hacker mindset shies away from those expenditures and toward literally rolling your own solution to investigating the funk. In the process [CuddleBurrito] takes us on a journey into the bowels of his house.

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D-touch Tangible Drum Interface

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmGP3eCOF5A]

yes, drums are tangible. We know. What this is, however, is a tangible interface that is a drum machine. The software is freely available for download, after registration. For hardware, all you need is a webcam, a computer, and a way to print out the pieces. D-Touch is cross platform which is very nice. Please note that the software will not run until you activate it by putting in your user account from their site. If you like this project, you might also get a kick out of the Go Sequencer.

Face Tracking In Opera

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ioV2Dj56iw]

Inspired by this year’s april fools day joke from Opera, [Jason] has made facial gesture recognition actually work. While this may seem like a silly project, it could seriously help some people out. This could be a great accessibility tool for people with motor control limitations.He states that it has some problems right now, most notably a performance issue with extended use, so he’s hoping to get some input from some bright minds.

[thanks, Jordan]