 Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Think Tech Hawaii Studio for another exciting episode of Security Matters. We are with Jason Wright today, and he is with OpenPath. But you may also know him from the security fail stuff that he tracks for all of us around the industry online. I definitely want him to give you his history, and I want to talk a little bit about some of the great stuff that OpenPath is doing. And I definitely want to get into some of the reasons behind these images that he posts, which I think, you know, let all of us reflect on some of the things we've done right and some of the things that we've done wrong as an industry. So Jason, I really appreciate you joining us today. Thank you so much for being here. I know James drives a hardship over there, so I'm glad he gave you some time off to join us on Security Matters. So if you wouldn't mind, I know we don't give it all away on secure on social media these days, but maybe kind of take those folks who aren't familiar with you through your history and in the industry and how you got to OpenPath. Awesome. Thanks, Andrew, and thanks for inviting me to join you here on Security Matters. This is a great forum to discuss some of the things I've been doing on LinkedIn as well. And build about myself, kind of, if I'm not done. See, I've been in the security industry for quite a while, and probably one of the few rare people who have now worked all four verticals. You know, I've been the end user. I've been the integrator. I've been an integrator to a couple of the Fortune 5 companies here in the San Francisco area. And then I've been a security consultant. And now I'm working with the hardware manufacturer into the program. So I think it puts me in a unique view perspective of the industry. But before I was in security, I was actually in quality control and electronics manufacturing. And so I'm an ISO auditor, life safety, and that's as Matt did it all. So kind of come into the world in a different point of view and solving new problems in different ways. And you write the CCTV fails and all the other security fails, IT fails, sign fails, door fails. I kind of all just initiated over the evolved over time. But the way they all really came about is just working with new green people in the industry. And they're like, I saw some of the senior guys would be showing pictures of bad installs and they'd be all laughing about it. What more people need to see this? Because we don't live long enough to make all these mistakes ourselves. And, you know, learning from other people's mistakes and the green guy is going, Oh, wait, if I do it that way, I'm gonna get ridiculed. So it really makes them understand that there's a quality level of this industry. And, you know, if, you know, from a mice plus I looking at electronics quality or a consultant side, it's if it looks this bad on the outside of the building, what does it look like in the walls or the parts I can't see. So it's all about raising that level of performance. And we all make a clean, beautiful work and we get proud of it and we'll show it off too. So I do both. I do the goods and the bads, but the goods don't get shown off as much as they probably should, but some of them do get shown off. That's awesome. Go ahead. Go ahead now. It's important that we do have those learning lessons. And like you said, the good and the bad. I've often talked about how the, like the AV industry, for example, you know, when they leave a project, you know, there's a great sound, huge screams, everybody's all happy and excited. And when the security guys leave, they're likely the cameras work. Okay, great. Thank you. You know, so nobody really sees the work, especially if you're a lay person, you know, until your point, you've been the end user before as well. So if you don't know, you know, what it ought to look like, sometimes you walk away thinking everything's fine, and you've not really been delivered something good. So the QC team comes behind the installer and goes, hey, I know the customer is happy, but I'm not happy with what we've done here and here's why. So I love that, that sort of that credibility for the industry, that little checkpoint that we can bring. You said you did some auditing, some ISO stuff in the manufacturing realm as well. So did that peak your eye for looking for these things that you've got further along in the security industry? Oh, yes. I think that really helped because I used to go in and audit multiple, I'm, I saw a lot of orders, multiple certification levels, but yeah, you're right, you're learned about what should be good. And like, this doesn't match documentation or, you know, you and me or anybody, when you looked at a camera on the outside of, I don't know, the fast speed place you're gonna go get dinner from later this week. And you just see that above the drive through that camera that's hanging by the wire, you're like, who installed that? So you're, it's just that you see them everywhere. I think we're gonna post some of my pictures in the very first one I ever posted, I think is the first picture. So. Oh, wow. Well, with that, let's go, let's, let's see an image. What do you got for us? What's first? So he was one of the first ones I ever was, I think it was the very first one I ever posted. And I started the hashtag CCTV fail with those on LinkedIn. That one probably didn't get as many views as they are the ones today, but the ones today get a lot of comments to them. And I must say the pictures I post, they tell a story in their self. I don't need to post like a story. I'll make sure that, you know, there's, I don't say who the customers are, I don't show who the owners are, where they're located. They should be able to be standalone on themselves. Yeah. Yeah. So when I see this, I think, first of all, the facility manager is not paying attention or it's, it's a system that's been abandoned and not properly decommissioned. Right. There's a, there's a few reasons. Well, there's not many reasons why that should still be there. Unless they got decommissioned this morning and just no one's done it. No one's done the takedown shit. Yeah, that one's in San Francisco on the side of the street. So I'm not going to say where it is, but yeah. Oh, wow. I just walked off the train and looked up and like, oh, there we go. Oh, wow. Yeah. But yeah, you're right. Security person, if they were receiving that video feed, what were they looking at before? And they're currently not seeing what they were originally targeting. So there's, there's lots of people that are upset about this in the chain. I'm sure. Yeah. I've visited with teams that have guards sitting around all night and I'm like, well, why don't you let them go check the views of the cameras to make sure nothing's changed. You know, you've got your, your image standard that should be there for day and night shot. And in Hawaii, you know, the sun moves around a lot, right? So those shots can get changed. Those guards are sitting there. Why don't you let them go check the reference images against the cameras all night? They're not, what else are they doing when nothing's happening? Right. So it's been, this one should have shown up for somebody, you know, if they're checking the video at all. Well, I've even found cameras behind, you know, the tree had grown up in front of them. You're like, how was last time you viewed it? Because there's a tree now in front of the camera. So yeah, yeah. And you're like, you know, does anybody going to call and have that thing trimmed like in the last five years or whatever? It's crazy. All right, let's look at the next one. What else we got? Yeah, this one and then the next image where, yeah, I found those in a bookstore. I'm not going to say where it is, but yeah, that a whole bunch of these was a dome camera, but they had them on pedestal arms. Like they took the pedestal, the bullet camera off and put it, the dome on top of the original mount. Wow. Wow. And what do you think it's, do you think it's actually focused downwards at something just looking just way bent over there? I just hard to say. It's hard to see what they're trying to even view, but it defeats the whole purpose of putting a dome when you mount it to their old bullet mount. And then the sound below it level up, right? Like as if point the camera, that's interesting. See, was that a chalkboard or something? That's so funny. Oh, wow. Let's move on to the next one. These are interesting. Oh, wow. Yeah, I took this one in, I think in Oakland. Actually, Chad posted this one as well too. He saw the same one in the wild. And it's hard to tell, but it has a mini dome mounted underneath the old housing. And then they put the old camera and pointed it up and then put a dome underneath it. So instead of a mount to the camera to an old camera. But from a distance, it looks like it's pointing up at the sky. They just want to use the old cable. Is that an old EMI housing? Oh my gosh. Yeah, it looks like it. Wow. And so this is industry standards tell us we can't or that we shouldn't do these type of things, obviously. This is someone who's tried to say, oh, just make it work, right? Somebody got some marching orders, just figured out. No, we don't have any money, so make it work. So they probably extended the little cable from inside the old camera to just to that little one there and the power. And there you go. They drove a whole mount to the camera, to the existing camera. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, maybe this, and we see this when we let, when like the owner has done the work themselves or whatever, they got their, their maintenance. DIY coming up. There's a DIY coming up. Yeah. Okay, let's have a look. Smile. So I found this one. It had a really nice sign. This was in San Jose and it has a nice sign all the way around the building. It had these dome cameras. Now the dome has gone gray from the sun. So I'm like, what do you mean they can see them? They can't see me with this. Yeah, you stand there and smile away. Even nothing ever happened. There was four cameras all around this building and all of them looked like this. It was. Wow. That, that maybe, maybe a manuscript, maybe the polycarbonate went bad, you think? The, the manuscript. Yeah, it was in the first sign. Maybe it wasn't UV ray as an indoor, maybe, I don't know. But yeah, all of them had gone like brown. There's no way the camera could view out. Then you talked about you reviewing your camera feeds to see if they're still seeing what they're originally viewing. Yeah. And this guy just thinks his cameras went bad and really just his little dome enclosure went bad. Wow. That's um, and that, that, you know, that indoor camera outdoors, you do see that a lot. Unfortunately, usually they're flooded, you know, by the time you see them there'll be water in the dome. Somebody's trying to save money or they are the, it got specified with the wrong part number and then no one actually paid attention. The installer should catch that minimally, but they don't until they just mount them, you know, they get orders just do just hang it now. We'll fix it later and then it never gets fixed or whatever. That indoor dome outdoors is a real problem for people. So pay attention to that one. Pay the money for the outdoor enclosure, folks. Yes, it's full of water. It's not going to work. I actually have found two or three of them in the wild that still had the wrapper on the outside of the dome. They never took the wrapper. So I'm like, well, how did you focus it? It's still got the wrapper plastic on it. Wow. Yeah. So they didn't, right? You know, it's like, oh, that's just how it looks. You know, they get that excuse. Which shows me that someone, no one ever, the installer never viewed the feed and verified it's focusing. The field of view has been adjusted. It still has that, you know, packaging protective film over the wrapper mounted and stuck. They walked away and left it up. Yeah. Yeah. And the end user obviously never looked or never had any idea what sort of quality they should be getting or something. I can't even imagine what the view looked like. This makes no sense sometimes these things we see. And again, could be an end user did the installation thinks he's got it right, you know, and then that's as good as he gets, you know, all we said. What do we got next, gang? I think we got a couple coming up here and they'll have. Oh, wow, I love the mic. Yeah, we got sound on this one. Dan Rothrock is rolling over in his grave right now. Yeah, I posted this one a few months ago and it had hundreds of comments to it. I mean, I must say that the comments to my posts are worth a read. Yeah. That I had people call me in the last couple of weeks laughing and stitches saying I haven't had a good laugh with a cry in a long time. So the comments alone are pretty good and worth the read. That is so awesome. Yeah, they're probably better, more comedians than I am. It's good when when you know, when people get that gut reaction to things and they just come off the top of their head with what it looks like or they're off of you a nice metaphor, you know, it's always good to see the comments. And that's that. That looks like a big camera mounted on a on a pan tilt of some type or I don't know that doesn't look familiar to me. Yeah, it's like a pan tilt mount with an old camera with a microphone attached to it for sound. Wow. Well, I wonder if the mic still works. Someone's got to tell people that there's cameras out there with microphones built in on now. Yeah, we had Cameron Jeff Donnie on here to talk about audio for these types of scenes, you know, where you need that command and control and you need that audio. This next one's got a good stack on it. Okay, well, let's, I tell you what, let's see. I remember seeing that before. But before we talk about that one, let's take a quick break. We'll pay some bills and we'll be back in about one minute. Stick around gang. I'm Mitch Ewan, host of Hawaii, the state of clean energy on think tech Hawaii. Hawaii, the state of clean energy is about following the many clean energy initiatives in Hawaii. Hawaii, the state of clean energy appears weekly on think tech Hawaii at 4pm on Wednesdays. Thank you so much for watching our show. We'll see you then. Aloha. Hey, hello everybody. And welcome back to security matters. We're talking with Jason Wright and we're looking at security fails. We were talking about some camera fail. This next one is a sort of a, I can't tell if it's all the guy had in his truck. I don't know, but let's take a look at this one. It's an interesting one. Yeah, there you go. You got the conduit there. You had a box, you know, you're supposed to mount to doesn't look like the right right mount anyway. But I guess it wasn't the right height or he needed to get down below something. So, you know, it's just a whole gang of that's taken gang box to the extreme, right? Six game boxes on that one. Yeah, it probably cost more than a mount if they were to just put it in. I'm wondering, yeah, because you would normally have a bit of a pedestal there with, you know, the correct pedestal enclosure. That's an interesting idea. Maybe just get it done. You know, I am we're in Hawaii, right? And so our installation sites typically aren't that far away. Sometimes we have to fly to the outer island. So you you got to make do sometimes. But I do have, you know, I know installers on the mainland sometimes will drop four hours, you know, to do an install. And then you get there, you don't have what you need and you got to make it work. But wouldn't you come back and fix this one? The next time you're out in that area for a service call or something. If you need a game box, you know, you get some. Yeah, you know, you know where to go to them from your last site, maybe he was just leaving them in a stash there. That's pretty good one. What do we got next coming up? Oh, wow. And why don't people take the old equipment out? I just what they weren't paid for removal. I mean, what a mess. Well, I guess it already gets them to where they want to be or yeah, this one, they put a four game box and then mounted the camera to it because it didn't fit to the old mount. It's replacing an old bullet camera. My brain doesn't work that way. Unfortunately, if you come to the Honolulu and you go to the Honolulu airport, you're going to see a bunch of this kind of mess here. I don't know if the state wouldn't contract with those folks to do the removals. It's a sad site over there for the security-minded folks that show up in our airport here. And they look around and see things not too dissimilar from this. They have to be. I found posts in airports before as well. There was one with a nice camera next to the network port. And the camera was just plugged into the network port. And I'm 6'4". I could reach up and reach it. It wasn't over eight feet high. And I can just reach over and unplug the camera. Wow. Yeah, in the airport, right? Yeah, it's interesting how many how many systems end up in, you know, there's, you know, THS, TSA, and DHS and then the local authority. So there's so many different systems. And I don't like to criticize, but you should, if you're an end user or if you're a municipality, pay to get the work done properly. You know, fund the work so that it gets removed neatly, it gets reinstalled cleanly. There's a workman-like way to do this stuff, which is why Jason's gone to the effort that he's gone to to display this stuff for people. It's informative, of course, at all levels. Well, we paid millions of dollars for these beautiful buildings and architecture and fittings. And security needs to blend in and work within these architectures to the same quality level they use for the glass, the windows and the trims and the carpets. And we need to be just for the same quality as them. Yeah, and it makes me wonder what do they think about the security industry when they see our stuff installed like that, right? Like, even if someone who doesn't know what it ought to look like can look at that last picture and go, wow, what were they doing or who did that? I don't want that in my lobby. Yeah. Oh, wow. What do we got next? Let's take a look. This is one that's about a mile from my house. They had a bracket on a piece of fence board with a camera mounted on it. And this place had like five or six of them around it. Wow. So that's your DIY. Probably they did it themselves, probably. Wow. Do you think will it hold up? Is it upside down? It's mounted on a bracket and they put a board sticking out. Instead of mounting it directly to the building, they mounted it to a board. What were they thinking? I don't know. Wow. But it's been up there for over a year or two. Now, if you're that homeowner, is that a commercial property? It's a commercial property. It has to look terrible, you know, to the eye. That's the entryway. That's the entryway to this commercial place. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Well, maybe they, is that one of the ones you think where they got what they paid for or something? Or they had somebody on their team who said that they know what they're doing. We'll put a little shelf there and mount the camera to it. It'll be fine. There's three or four of them like that. Wow. That seems like a little bit of extra work maybe or maybe they were trying to tuck it up under that ledge or something. I don't know. Interesting stuff. It's amazing. This is in Northern California, by the way. So I'm not feeling so bad about some of the stuff I've seen around Hawaii now that I'm seeing some of this. Yeah, you walk around and, you know, another thing these security things do is raises your situational awareness. Look at other people do and learn from other people's mistakes and use them for training for your own teams too. And these are great training exercises for your people. And if you're having like your technicians or whatever your class before they start, put up one of these cameras because the new green guys will be going, wait, I don't want to be the one of ridicule. So they learned to do better quality work too by sharing these images with each other. Yeah. And teach them to ask questions. We talk about that. Technicians, historically, I'll just use that word, have a pride, a sort of a pride about their work and a pride about understanding how to do what they do. And oftentimes some of them aren't as good about sharing the what and the why and all of that that went into that, you know, 15 or 20 years of experience that they have and sharing that with the new guy. They think it's funnier to just let him do it wrong and then let him be the guy everyone's ridiculing with the pictures in the meeting at the beginning of the week. So I'm really big on ask questions. You know, if you don't know, if you haven't provided the installation manual, it isn't like the information is not available. So if you, you know, for if you're new to our industry out there and you want to do something or have something done and you're not sure how just ask someone at take a look at the manual, if nothing else, that'll show you what it ought to look like and how it should be done. That's amazing. Go ahead. Honestly, and if you don't know how it's done, ask someone because you hear you and I are, you know, laughing at these images, but at the same time we're going, why didn't take the old mount down, you know, and someone wasn't told that when didn't ask those questions and making sure that, you know, that you don't know how it's to be done or should be done, then those things to ask and ways to get it done. Right. Yeah. They show up out there with that scope of work that says install, right? So they're looking at like, okay, I've got to install it doesn't say remove anywhere. So that's that literal interpretation, right of some, some project manager watching out for scope creep or something. You never know, right? That's an extra five minutes of work. Yeah, which you should always donate, I think. Oh, wow, what do we got next? Oh, I remember seeing this one. So yeah, I do bad signs as well. This one I posted just recently. You know, there's a thing called a Normandor. And the Normandor is if a sign needs a sign to tell you to push or pull, it was probably designed wrong. So Don Norman, he was one of the initial people, one of the initial founders of like the way Apple products work. And so it should be intuitively native. If it's got a handle, you pull, it's got a flat plate, you push. And if it's got, I don't know, I don't know what they're trying to say with this sign. I think you have been better without the sign. You still had a 50-50 chance with this sign. I think it goes down less. Yeah, or the sign could just say figure it out, you know, or something. I don't even know. If you can pull and one of them will work, that would have been easier. Yeah, a bit of a mockery there. That's crazy. Oh, wow. So we're moving into, it looks like some door problems. What else we got? Oh, that IT installs. Oh, gosh, this one, it goes around the corner. The cans on its side. They cut new holes. You got exposed wiring going around the corner. Yeah, I don't know what they're thinking. How does that work? I mean, if you accepted that job, you can see that everything should be in an enclosure. And then here we branch from enclosure to enclosure. So I know someone extended or added, or they did something to assist them there. Exactly. Shouldn't that be in pipes maybe? We have facilitation for table management, right? Oh my gosh. Interesting. That's a pretty good one. That's a good lesson for anybody that's, you know, looking at an installation. At least this guy here used gutters. What happened? What? Oh, to have all this. But he used gutters. That is interesting. Somebody said, I just don't want to see the wire. Put gutters up, but he forgot his saw. I don't know. Oh my gosh. That is terrible. I mean, truly terrible. Next. Oh, yeah. This is how valuable the data. Yeah, that's how valuable the data closet was, right? Yeah. And then there's another one coming up, which I just posted recently on LinkedIn, this one. Oh yeah. Yeah, that one's got a lot of issues with that. You know, they started with a backboard at the initial construction phase. They didn't put the fireproof paint on. You have to do that here, but you know, at least they started well, but it expanded pretty badly, pretty rapidly. And, you know, you have to spend a little time in that room periodically, you would think, so you might look at, think about cleaning some of that up. Well, if you need to flush the cash, it's really easy to do. How many comments do you get on that one? Do you recall? Probably a thousand. There was over 600 comments on that post, and it had over 70,000 views. Nice. Were they, were most of them clean, or were there any takedowns? You know, that one, that one could invite some of those off-color comments, might say. Actually, I only had to remove two ads on that post, because people try to post advertisements to it. Oh, I see. Right on. Right on. Great stuff. Well, we are winding down here. Jason, what, in your experience, you know, I haven't been out there, haven't seen this kind of stuff, and trying to expose it. What can you share with the audience? You know, what's the sort of the takeaway that they should think about this? And especially if you could, you know, from the sort of fore perspective, you know, from the manufacturing side, the installation side, the end user side, you know, what should they be learning when they take a look and ponder the comments? Well, it's about, you know, we're all in the industry to be the best we can. And I think if we just raise the quality of the work, view things from the end customer's perspective, you know, if this was your site, would you be proud with it when you walk away? And would you be willing to invite your customers to see your other customers to come see your work? And, you know, you'd be proud to what you leave behind, because this is your legacy and what you do. Yeah. And then I also like to learn from other people's mistakes and see what you can find, because they're everywhere and you're going to go around and look up and find something bad soon, I'm sure. And I'm happy to share them with me or others. We like to collect these kind of images. And it's a fun, interesting side hobby, but it drives a good interesting topic in the industry. And hopefully it makes the whole security industry more accepting. And hopefully we can help remove a lot of these people. We've know some of them are DIY and we don't have much control over. Yeah. And our industry needs that. We should always be striving to become better all the time and learning from what we've done wrong and then learning from what we've done right and then learning how to get better. Continuous improvement is kind of one of those buzzwords of, you know, the supply chain risk management world and cybersecurity world. But the security industry itself should be consistently striving and the leave behind, you know, the things that we see, the work that is there, that is our deliverable. And that's how we get measured. Very few people get to see the actual functionality, right? The software side, the client side of that work. So we'll many, many, many more see the hardware side and the install side. So clean it up, use these lessons. Jason, it's great stuff that you're doing. Appreciate your dedication to the industry trying to make us all better. And together we can all get better. I'm a big fan of that. So thank you so much. Appreciate your time today. Everybody out there, have a great, safe Tuesday, and we'll see you again next week. Aloha.