Y-Cam Bullet IP camera

I got sent the Y-Cam Bullet last year and then when I moved home it found itself into a box, only to be re-discovered last week.

Cables, adapters, wall/ceiling mount, power lead, optional sun visor etc, all  come in the box.

What's in the box

I had already purchased a Y-cam S in black over 2 years ago (the older model without the micro sd card slot). I used it as a night vision baby monitor and at the time I remember it wasn’t the easiest device to set up as the Mac software from Y-Cam was pretty shoddy.

The new setup application for mac seems to have fixed this and I had the Bullet unpacked set up and operational in a little over 5 minutes.

Having used the smaller Y-cam S in the past I was expecting decent build quality but was a little surprised at the size. It was bigger than I expected and when unscrewing the front to insert the micro SD card I could see the size was not just a result of it’s sturdy IP66 weather proof external case, but this also had to house the chunky Infra Red diodes that give it is night vision capabilities.

So, what can it do..?
It does all the things you would expect from an IP camera. You can view and listen into what ever it is pointing at in real time, from anywhere in the world, through a computer on the web, or a smart phone. There is also a nifty little iPhone app that also works on the iPad.

It has motion detection that you can set up to trigger recording from movement in various regions of it’s sight. When motion is detected, the camera can email you a photo of what’s going on, or record the video to an internal micro sd card that you can view when logged on to the camera’s web page. You can also grab snapshots and record video whilst viewing through the browser.

Screengrab taken through the browser in total dark

It’s IR-cut filter enables true/day night operation so daytime colours are pretty good, it also has power over ethernet (PoE) and as yet un-explored by me (as it is still PC only), 2-way audio. I’d love to be able to talk through the camera from my Mac as this would open up all kinds of possible uses.

Snapshot taken with the iPhone app & reduced to 500px wide

I had a play with the app and whilst viewing you can grab snapshots with a click of the button (see image above). The snapshots drop into your iphone photos gallery. It’s a pretty simple app at the moment and I’d love an update that would enable remote recording and push notifications instead of email. I get a ton of emails a day and would not necessarily see an email notification that the camera had been triggered. I am thinking some kind of ftp push to app hack could be done but not needed if the guys at Y-Cam just update the app. I’m sure more sales would be generated as the great reviews for a fully functioning app rolled in.

(This test clip was recorded through the camera, downloaded remotly through the browser, looked fine on the computer, but seemed to have the audio scraped on upload to youtube.)

The Y-cam records video at a maximum frame rate of 30fps at 640 x 480 with the frame rate automatically adjusting with your internet connection. Stills are taken at the same resolution although I have reduced them to 500px to fit this blog column.

Although I have only used the ethernet connection during set up and then wifi from then on, the camera also has a Digital I/O and 2-way audio connector should you have a more complex monitoring system you want to plug it into.

I like the fact that adding an internal microSD card to the slot enables a local back up option should you not be continually recording the footage to an external hard drive. This also means you can use the camera on it’s own in a remote location and later view the footage via a mobile device with a MiFi, or plug the camera into a PC. This way it is effectively a self contained detection and recording device. As long as it’s powered of course.

As far as I remember there was only PC support originally but now things seem to work much better on a Mac with the video viewed using Quicktime and the motion detection settings adjusted in the browser. This does have to be adjusted using a flash enabled device though so using the iPad for fine tuning the camera is not an option. Once again perhaps a future app update will open up this functionality.

Should you want to get imaginative and use the camera for video conferencing, the Bullet supports up to 16 simultaneous remote users with password protection.

At time of writing the Y-Cam YCBL03 Bullet IP Camera is £270 on Amazon and looking at other options with similar specs, this appears to be the best value for money.

Apart from all the fun to be had just playing with tech like this and of course the usual security uses, I have a couple of other uses in mind. One would be front door monitoring when I’m locked away in my garden office and expecting visitors or post. The other is for the camera to be a kind of digital babysitter for my semi-independent Grandmother who suffers from Alzheimer’s

I’d like to monitor the times when she uses the kitchen and taylor her care accordingly. The carers at the moment visit three times day but my Gran never seems to be hungry when they are there. They told me that if they knew exactly the time she wanted food and assistance (as She can’t remember) then they can adjust their visit times. With the camera setup temporarily in her kitchen, it can be programmed to record all motion and this would log what my Gran is doing and when. No need for an internet connection as the footage could be stored internally on the microSD card. The footage could be used to see exactly what my Grandmothers needs where and when.

Ideally if a long term solution was needed, via an internet connection my Gran could talk to me through the video camera and me back to her from anywhere in the world. This would need Y-cam to sort out the two way audio feature for the Mac user. If you have any questions on this or the latest developments, perhaps connect on twitter with @YcamSolutions who seem very pleased to answer any questions and who have helped me out immensely with any queries I’ve had.

In Conclusion:

It’s a serious camera worth the money with lots of browser based functionality capable of dealing with all kinds of projects.

I’d happily recommend any camera tech from Y-Cam but take a look at the whole range to ensure you are not buying something over spec’d for your needs. For some of my planned projects the £100 cheaper Y-Cam YCB003 would probably suffice. That said, the Y-Cam Bullet is a solidly built professional IP surveillance camera that works well both indoors and out, night and day, in all weather. It’s great value for money with more features than I’d personally use. I love access via the iPhone app, but it is simple and I’d like to see more app development to cater for the increasing number of Mac users and those working from mobile devices.

Y-Cam Bullet

Without anyone really noticing it we are becoming a police state. We’re not quite there yet – it’s a long way down to the real depths of secret police, social control, monitored movements – but we’re blindly sleepwalking that path.

George Orwell’s 1984 portrays a country plunged into totalitarianism. The state is locked in an endless war that, although somehow affecting no one directly, functions as a perfect mechanism for inducing fear and justifying the destruction of basic liberties.

Crucially there is mass surveillance. This is the key: an essential element for a true police state is that everyone should be monitored, at all times. Or they must at least believe this is happening. In 1984 everyone is watched, intrusively. Privacy has all but evaporated, the word itself ceasing to have meaning. Everywhere, fear.

Without getting hysterical, without too much hyperbole, there are clear parallels to modern day Britain.

Since September 11 we have been at war with an enemy – “terror” – that by many of our actions we are empowering. The stage is now set for a generations long conflict that can never be, in any real sense, won. In order to fight this war, basic liberties are eroded: long imprisonment without trial, without charge becomes legal. Evidence gained from torture is suddenly admissible in a court of law. Foreign intelligence services carry out extraordinary renditions through British airspace and soil, with the connivance of the government.

And, there is mass surveillance.

CCTV camera and tracking technologies have proliferated. Not so many years ago such cameras – let’s call them spy cameras; that is after all what they are doing – were limited to spaces like garage forecourts. They were ineffective things, recoding largely useless, indistinct time-lapse photos onto VHS tapes. Endless hours of drivers filling-up their cars and walking in to pay. Perhaps the occasional robbery, caught on film, to show on ‘CrimeWatch’ because the police cannot catch the suspect.

Cut to the present day: cameras are, almost literally, everywhere. They are in shops, they’re in bars and clubs, they are high on gantries over the roads, at traffic lights they are watching the high street. They are watching and recording you as you go about the most banal tasks.

The technology is still in relative infancy but has already developed far beyond those scratchy VHS tapes. Face recognition software and high-resolution optics mean your movements can be traced, your facial expressions logged: Your speed and trajectories measured: Your number plate inscribed onto a computer database. You went shopping this afternoon, parked in the Main Street carpark, brought some underwear on a credit card and then went home? Yes ma’am, we know all that. It’s all there, on our hard drive. You met a woman who is not your wife for the fifth time in two weeks, she always wearing a long black skirt, you a gray suit? We know that sir, it was picked up by our cameras and noted by the computer engineer when he ran some tests on a face recognition software.

This monitoring started out as a deterrent against crime and, as such, how could any of us object? Don’t you want to be safe?
Local councils across the country approved more and more projects that promised to smash yob culture. They secured some central government funds, raised cash from local businesses. Sinister words like surveillance, like police state were never mentioned, potential human rights implications pushed aside: The cameras would make us safer by allowing the police to catch criminals, to safeguard the elderly. Don’t you want the elderly to be safe?

And then we are at war with terror and we’re more afraid than ever. It’s not that a teenager is going to snatch your purse outside the bank; that’s a quaint fear from happier times. Now it’s suicide bombers on the bus.

More cameras, better monitoring will help save us. How can we object?

The technology was put in place, the network established and it does have benefits. It can, perhaps, add to our security. It can help police build a case against homicidal fanatics. Perhaps it will even help reduce a crime rate that has, thus far, shown no signs of actually being reduced.

Yet there is a price to pay. We have, unwittingly, put in place the building blocks of a police state; the ability to know where citizens are and, with some high degree of accuracy, what they are doing. When privacy ceases to exist, so in a real sense does freedom. To stop the criminals we are now all monitored as if we are potential criminals. The bag-snatcher is in the database of images as he runs from his victim.. So are you, as you carry the weekly shop to your car.

*

In the late 18th Century a British philosopher designed the perfect prison. The man was Jeremy Bentham, the prison known as a Panopticon. It was a study in architecture, a building to be constructed in such a way that an observer could watch prisoners without them knowing if they were, at any moment, actually being watched. Perhaps the observer is writing down their every action. Or perhaps the observer is asleep.

The prisoner would never know and so, the prisoner would have to assume they were being watched at all times. Bentham envisioned it as a way of creating an omniescent observer: a God in command of all the prisoners, a permanent presence. Big Brother.

In his words, the Panoptican would be: “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”

The emaciated prisoner would internalise this gaze, and learn to behave in the way he was expected to behave by the observing power. He would become his own prison guard, his own re-educator. His own Big Brother.

Bentham was a liberal, a reformer. He designed the prison for peoples own good.It was not driven by impure motives but a desire to save the dregs of society. But his project was to be confined in space: it was a physical building outside of which the gaze of the observer failed. It had clear limits.

In modern, CCTV Britain, a Panoptican is being created and it has fewer boundaries. It has been established in our public spaces. In certain towns, certain cities it is more complete than you perhaps imagine. The observer could be watching you almost everywhere. We are becoming a perfect prison.

*

It is just about possible to argue that none of this matters, if we trust absolutely that the authorities controlling it all never, ever abuse their incredible powers. If the government, security apparatus and judiciary stick absolutely to the rule of law, if they uphold the rights of the individual with just zeal. If they ensure there are no illiberal erosions to these basic, sacred rights.

And that’s the problem. Authorities rarely, if ever behave that way for long. They certainly do not behave that way automatically but by continued debate, argument, contest.

Especially in times of war, the instinct of authority is to retreat, to shut down and to restrict. This is already happening: traditional laws are suspended – on the grounds of a vague, nefarious threat to the nation – and along with them are suspended our collective moral decency. Our preciously, democratically elected government starts to behave more and more like a Stalinist dictatorship. They all have national emergencies too; that’s why the reformers disappear, that’s why the military tribunals meet in p
rivate to hand out sentences that cannot be appealed.

We take another step down that ladder, another step into the darkness.

With the CCTV and surveillance technology now already out and on the streets, the mechanism is there for the state to take further control of our lives. It may start with monitoring terrorist suspects but where does it end? Can we trust our leaders, our parliaments – those that have failed us so dramatically over simple, vital matters of war and peace – to ensure this all goes so far but no further? Will we so easily abdicate our best interests to them?

We are not a police state yet. The databases tracking your movements are not linked together, they are not complete. The face recognition software is experimental, not universal. The national ID card scheme that will concrete in another layer of monitoring has yet to be rolled out. We are, however, treading the path and we are further down it today than we were yesterday. Will we keep on walking?

We had a drink, munched on some food and made some media.

Last years post can be found at www.SocialMediaPicnic.com We hope to do the same thing next year so please put it in your diary and come along. There’s always some passers by who are also making a pilgrimage. This year it was some German folk, a lady on a bike and @Hedgewytch.

Throughout the year if you come across any relevant links or content around surveillance or civil liberties, please tag it with the #1984 hash tag.

Yup, that’s all it seems to take now-a-days to raise the suspicions of some underpaid private security guard. Just be out and about minding your own photographic business, perhaps dangerously close to the threshold of some crappy shopping centre and as quick as it takes for a CCTV camera to rotate.. There they are, trying to enforce some imaginary law.

Normally I flash my press pass and tell them I know my rights. Sometimes I am feeling a little more confrontational and ask exactly what law it is they think they are enforcing? On one occasion a confused security guard told me it was one of the prevention of terrorism laws. The conversation then swung round to me asking.. “Do I look like a terrorist??

(Don’t answer that.)

I am not sure when all this started.. Perhaps it was just after 9/11 when everyones hightened level of paranoia needed to be justified by inventing some extra imaginary threats.

Most of the time, the least that happens is I’m looked at in a “I am watching you” kind of way. This is with a Mediterranean complexion, who knows what would happen if i wanted to go out with a camera and I was slightly darker skinned!

You may well have seen them yourselves, but once in a while I pass by a shop window and catch sight of those scarily Orwellian anti-terrorism posters asking YOU to be vigilant and to keep an eye out for people who use more than one mobile phone, or people who travel alot.. or who take photographs in a public place.

This kind of fear-mongering really pisses me off and in the past I have gone into the shop and asked if I could have the poster. Part of me could not believe the ridiculousness of it all and seemed to be wanting to gather these posters as evidence of crimes against common sense. Are the general public really so small minded as to report one another for doing normal everyday things?

Probably.

Anyway it seems like I needn’t have bothered collecting these posters as most seem to be available.

online to download.

I was slightly comforted today to read this article in the Guardian Newspaper. Bruce Schneier states that the Police’s ‘War On Photography’ is daft as.. in his words.. “..real terrorists, and even wannabe terrorists, don’t seem to photograph anything.”

With that reassurance in mind, read the article to learn that perhaps ‘movie plot‘ threats are being concocted to have some kind of psychological grip on our already fear laden minds. We really must make a point of fighting for our photographic rights..

If you are out and about with your camera, be it video or stills, stick a printout of your rights in your bag and make a stand, just in case.

UK Photographic Rights

US Photographers Rights

Aus Photographers Rights

This topic and others relating to our rights and what denotes a public space in todays day and age will be discussed at the social media picnic on the 25th of June.

This year (2011) it’s a Saturday!!

Let’s discuss civil liberties, CCTV, privacy and surveillance in the company of Orwell!

[written 2008] Whilst on Twitter I mentioned in passing that I was thinking about holding a social media picnic at the site of George Orwell‘s grave and the response was pretty good. Mostly people wanted to say that they were sorry they lived so far away and that it was a good idea. (It’s easy to get to)

Why do we not have more social media meet ups outdoors? Especially in places relevant to a theme? For this very reason I have been thinking also about a social media music festival (If i say social media one more time in this post i think i may shoot myself) and/or getting some geeks out ‘Bushcrafting‘ too. (Follow @Bushtech for more on this).

Granted, at the moment as I write this it is raining outside, but on the whole the Summer is a time to be outdoors, even in the UK.

We tend to be much more chilled and relaxed when outside (i.e. no suits) and I feel the unconventional nature of an open air meet may draw out a flavour of thought we would not normally see with ties constricting blood flow to the brain.

I wish Google’s Campfire One and the Picnic Network were more like a hippy geek meet up round an actual camp fire deep in the woods. Once everyone’s arms were tired from waving their phones above their heads for a signal, who knows what the suits could spawn.

So why not just do away with most of the facilities and arrange to meet a select few people in a field somewhere..? We organise who brings the potato salad and who brings the wine and that’s all we need really.

I am up for it and I think Orwell’s Grave is a good start. It has a pub nearby, so in an emergency, the toilet can be used and I am sure when picnic supplies run low, a steady flow of good local ale would safely ensure the ideas also keep flowing.

I have bought the domain SocialMediaPicnic.com and at the moment linked it here. I’d be happy link it to a site listing other open air events going on in the world.. Anyone want to build a wiki/blog or hub site?

Let me know in a comment below if you are up for the first picnic at Orwell’s grave, I have preempted the local Vicar and she is happy to have people sat around on the grass on the afternoon of the 25th of June (Orwell’s birthday), providing no one needs burying that day.

Never-the-less.. Me and Eric will be there with bread wine and cheese, no doubt tweeting, possibly streaming, certainly drinking and eating. Well maybe not Eric. But i’ll bring enough for him too.. just in case..

Here is the postcode: OX14 4AE

Update:

People who have attended in the past

Me – Documentally

Dr John Perivolaris – @JohnPerivolaris

Brian Jones – @iambrianJones

Hedgewytch – @Hedgewytch

Phil Campbell @PhilCampbell

..and various locals and passers by.

A mention in the Guardian

NOTE: Although the event is burial dependent.. There is always the pub, which I have already tested.