I'm at a traffic intersection in Times Square, looking up at a giant Coke billboard. If I look left, I바카라™m sure I바카라™ll see the vaudeville visages of the cinemas that line the road down to Greenwich Village. But in my situation, looking left is not a simple act. To look left, I need to play the numbers. I바카라™m looking through an array of cameras that pan constantly across Times Square, taking snapshots every 30 seconds. To look down the road, I바카라™ve to be seeing through the right lens at the right time. It바카라™s as chancy as looking for Elvis.
The view I바카라™m seeing is pretty small, about a third the size of a snapshot, and sometimes I have to wait long for a fresh picture to load. But these pictures are coming to my screen over the Net from a tiny web camera the size of a golf ball halfway around the world. That they reach me at all is pretty magical. On the screen, New Yorkers go about their lives, completely oblivious to my remote surveillance. Schoolchildren climb into a yellow bus. Nuns raise funds, rattling cans of coins. Severely dressed secretaries stroll by, ruminating over hot dogs (hey, it바카라™s NYC!). And in the midst of all this, the camera catches a tiny packet changing hands between two young men바카라”who are looking elaborately casual. This is definitely NYC.
In the popular imagination, webcams are all about surveillance and its low-life cousin, voyeurism. Indeed, the world seems full of 바카라˜sorotity houses바카라™바카라”a cam in every room, people paying to peek. There바카라™s a vast number of private cams out there besides. Decent people train them on the front door when out of town, hoping to catch burglars in the act. Freaks put them in the guest bathroom, hoping to catch decent people in the act.