Since its founding in 2007, the Mumbai-based collaborative studio CAMP has used surveillance, TV networks, and digital archives to examine how we move through and record the world. In addition to their film and video projects, the wildly prolific studio runs a rooftop cinema in Mumbai and maintains several online video archives, including the largest digital archive of Indian film.
Technology
What can a 100-pixel video teach us about storytelling around the world?
CAMP’s first major US museum exhibition is on view now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through July 20th and includes three video projects spanning two decades of work. The exhibit’s three films repurposed private television sets into interactive neighborhood portrayals, collected cellphone footage recorded by sailors navigating the Indian Ocean, and reimagined how a CCTV camera could be utilized for exploration rather than control. In one film, CAMP collected cellphone videos that sailors shared at ports via bluetooth; in another, passersby on street level control a surveillance camera 35 stories above.
I chatted with two of CAMP’s founders, Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran, about the importance of maintaining an open digital archive, the slippery definition of piracy, and how footage that never makes it into a finished film is often the most illuminating.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Your film, From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, offers a portrait of sailors navigating the Indian Ocean, using cellphone videos to document their journeys and daily lives. Can you talk about how that project came to be and how this partnership with the sailors began?
Ashok Sukumaran: Around the global financial crisis, in 2009, we were walking around the city of Sharjah in the UAE. Sharjah is a creek city, like Dubai. Before oil was discovered, the creeks were the main city center focus. And these boats were these kind of weird, out-of-time wooden ships, and many of them were going to Somali ports. So, we asked them, “How come there were no issues with pirates?” Because everything we were hearing about Somalia at that time was about piracy. They said, “No, no, there’s a difference between going to the Somali town carrying everything they need and driving past it with a ton of oil.”
Shaina Anand: Almost all of these giant wooden boats were built in these twin towns in the Gulf of Kutch, in Gujarat, and they were massive. They were 800–2,000-ton giant wooden crafts.
AS: There’s a kind of language of the port. The Iranians, the UAE folks, the Somali, and of course, Indians and Pakistanis speak a kind of common language, which is close to a Hindustani mix of Farsi and Urdu. So, we were able to talk to everyone, to some extent, and we discovered a kind of music video genre that was really inspiring. This was the 2000s, with early Nokia phones, and sailors would shoot video and add music to it. Then their memory cards would run out [and they’d get deleted]. Some of the videos were 100 by 200 pixels.
SA: It was really important to us to try to trace the genealogy of the cellphone video, and it obviously was changing so fast. [The videos were] 10 frames a second, or 13 frames a second, in odd, square formats. It was rapidly changing.
For us, what was striking was that this image emerged in the middle of nowhere, out at sea, when a brethren boat or a comrade boat was filming on a phone. When our film had its festival run at the National Theatre in London, one of the film programmers came and told me, “It gives us such joy to see those images on the best screen in London.” And it gave us the same joy, too. That there is an equality, then.
Many people misread this “low-res image” and [call it] “a poor image,” and we’re like, that is not what it is at all.
How were the videos originally transferred and shared among sailors?
SA: It was a very physical process because these were not found on the internet. We were physically sitting down with people and saying, “What’s on your phone? Can I have a look at it? What did you film?” These [videos] were exchanged over Bluetooth, so they were not uploaded to YouTube, but they were literally transferred by putting the phones together.
AS: [When the boats] anchor for a bit at these smaller islands along the Gulf of Aden or Gulf of Persia, they’re still always in pairs or threes. They travel together for safety. That’s also the time for leisure and piping in those songs.
There’s something sweet about this moment of being bored at sea and using that space to create something.
SA: In a lot of our work, you see this idea that the subject of the film is usually behind the camera. They’re usually running the thing, and they are looking out at whatever interests them. At sea, you have a lot of time, even though it’s busy when it’s loading and unloading. But at sea, a lot of people are basically hanging out and taking pictures of the things that they can see. Then the music adds the emotional tenor. All the music in the film was found with the video; we didn’t add any music ourselves.
AS: And then if your phone has 2GB memory, that’s the ephemera bit. The video gets deleted, but it’s found on another boat on someone else’s phone.
SA: And within these communities, the videos are quite traceable because the boats are known. There are a thousand boats, but people would instantly recognize, “That’s so and so.” Even by looking at the shape of the boat in a 100-pixel video, they would know which boat it was.
You talked a little bit about how these videos were really ephemeral; they got erased very quickly. So much of your work seems to be about a commitment to maintaining an archive.
AS: We set up CAMP in 2007, with our collaborators who were lawyers and coders and cinephiles, and then, all of us together, good friends. We set up Pad.ma, our first online archive, and the lawyers were working around copyright law and trying to challenge them legally, pushing fair use. We didn’t want to valorize piracy, but we realized how, for countries in Asia, piracy was vital.
You didn’t even think of [buying software from] Microsoft. You bought the parts of a computer with help from the person selling them, saying, “Okay, so much RAM, this motherboard,” and so on, and then loaded what you wanted.
SA: The whole Indian tech sector was built on piracy, or what’s called piracy. People were not able to pay the fees. With Pad.ma, we basically initiated this idea of a footage archive or a collection of material that was not films, but things that were shot by people during film projects that never made it into the cut. For political reasons, for economic reasons, for the reasons that the films were only 30 or 60 minutes long and they had filmed for years, all those kinds of things. The idea was that Pad.ma was a footage archive that allowed you to deeply access that material.
So it’s an archive of scraps — the things around the edges that maybe weren’t shown elsewhere.
SA: Yeah, but here, the scraps are 20 times the size of the finished thing.
AS: I think that’s the important thing. You had 100 hours of footage for a 60-minute film. That was really the reason for building a non-state archive, and we’re the custodians and collaborators who think the 99 hours may be more important. It’s not those old remnant scraps.
It’s the other way around.
AS: It’s the other way around. I mean, you have a one-hour interview, and two minutes might make it into a film.
SA: You had all these examples of European avant-garde filmmakers coming to India making films and then doing these edits of what they thought they were seeing. But the footage is saying much more than their particular edit at the time. It can be very revealing of what was actually going on and how they filmed.
So the archives contain a huge amount of data.
SA: I mean, we have committed to that. We raised money from various sources for the projects. Indiancine.ma, which is a sister project, that’s like the whole of Indian cinema as a metadata archive. AS: There were magical things in 2008 on the platform. One was that the timeline had cut detection. So, you can actually go to a cut just by using your left and right arrow keys. And you don’t have that even in [Adobe] Premiere. You could also densely annotate. So you have researchers working, you have activists, you have film scholars, and they may take from the archive. But in that process, they’ve given back their expertise or their views of the archive.
Can you talk more about your work with participatory filmmaking?
AS: On one level, what had been occupying my head space was this critique of how documentary images are taken, or why this relationship between subject, author, and technology is so dumb.
I would keep saying, “look at the image,” and we can say a white guy filmed it, or we can know this really important Indian filmmaker filmed it, or you can say a top feminist filmmaker filmed it, or a queer person filmed it or a person from that community. But something’s a bit off in that form as well. Not just [in terms of] who’s speaking for who and all of that.
Another of your projects in the exhibit, Khirkeeyaan, which created video portals between neighbors and community centers using CCTV, seems like a place where the subject has a lot of authority over their image.
AS: Between 2005 and 2006, CCTV cameras started to proliferate all over. And they were cheap. So, the electronic market where we’d go to buy computer stuff now had become a CCTV market.
It was $10 for those static cameras. You could get that quad box, like a four-channel mixer. They were everywhere really fast: the grocery store, the dive bar, the beauty salon, the abortion clinic. Wherever I went, I was seeing these tiny things.
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
SA: When you put the camera on top of the TV and you allow the two systems to meet, you can just look into the television, and then that’s part of the cable television network. By default, these systems are kind of oppositional. One is a broadcast system, or one is a sucking and one is a closed thing, and if you join them together, they start to talk to each other or—
Download and upload simultaneously.
AS: Exactly, which was the key property of video. That there was feedback. It was immediate.
SA: It was live, and unlike film, you don’t have to process it. They were ambient. They would go on for 24 hours. You were able to say that your household TV is now a portal.
AS: The key thing was that this wasn’t the internet. The cables were all 100 meters each. For a long time, until it got replaced by dish antennas, coaxial cable just used to snake across our cities. The cable would come to your house from the window sill, where the coax would be wrapped around, and there’d be a little booster. It would go from neighborhood to neighborhood, building to building, terrace to terrace. [With Khirkeeyaan], the network was neighborly, but these neighbors were meeting each other for the first time.
Was there anything that kind of surprised you about the way that this network was used?
AS: What always surprises me, and continues to, is that when you set up your own kind of collaboration with the subjects, and then you exit, you’re not asking those leading questions of, “Tell me about your life,” or “Which village do you come from?” And poetry happens. I think, what was very affirmative for me, was just the confidence with which people sat and looked at their TV sets. You sit and look at your TV set all the time, but the TV set now had a hole in it, and it was looking back at you.
Another of your videos in the show, Bombay Tilts Down, uses a CCTV camera. Can you talk more about your work utilizing surveillance?
SA: CCTV, in a way, changes how we behave. It sort of infects, depending on who is watching us and how.
In Bombay Tilts Down, it was the simple idea that this gaze of the camera is already there. In the city, there are 5,000 of exactly the same kind of camera, and probably many more.
They’re all at least 4K, and now they’re 8K, but they are robotic controllable cameras that are designed to do facial recognition at a distance. Instead of being a guard, waiting for something to happen, we used it to film the city. And the range is incredible; it goes way beyond the property line of the thing it’s trying to protect. You can see 15 kilometers away with it, from the 35th floor.
So you installed the camera yourself.
SA: This one, yes. The people you see in Bombay Tilts Down are looking up at the camera because people could see the stream downstairs, and some of them were moving the camera around, calling the shots.
I love instant cameras because of how they help me slow down and be creative without the distractions of a phone. Holding a real print also feels grounding in a screen-dominated age, which is why I think a lot of people these days are drawn to them — and why models with old-school vibes like the Polaroid Flip make such great gifts. It’s usually pricey, but today you can buy the Flip for $184.99 ($35 off) directly from Polaroid, which is its best price to date. Amazon is also selling the camera with two packs of film for $212.49 ($37 off), which marks a new low too.
Polaroid cameras offer the most charming, old-fashioned instant-film experience of any I’ve tested, and the Flip is no exception. It sports a classic, retro-inspired design with a flip-up lid and prints vintage-style square I-Type photos with Polaroid’s iconic white frame. Yet at the same time it’s got the perfect amount of subtle modern conveniences baked in, like Bluetooth, USB-C charging, and a beginner-friendly companion app that lets you adjust saturation and exposure.
But what makes it really stand out is its picture quality, which outshines other Polaroid models in this price range. The Flip has the most powerful flash of any Polaroid camera, and paired with its unique sonar autofocus and four-lens hyperfocal system, it produces sharper, more consistently in-focus images than any model Polaroid offers at this price. You can manually tweak exposure, too, and the camera even sends warnings you when a shot is likely to be over- or underexposed. These are all features that go a long way toward reducing the number of wasted shots, which is helpful given I-Type film costs a whopping $18.99 for just eight prints.
That said, the instant camera’s not for everyone. Fujifilm’s cheaper Instax Mini 12 develops prints much faster and looks more true-to-life while struggling less in low light. Still, the Flip’s dreamy, vintage aesthetic has its own appeal, especially if you prefer a more artistic, old-fashioned look.
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Cybercriminals keep finding new angles to get your attention, and email remains one of their favorite tools. Over the years, you have probably seen everything from fake courier notices to AI-generated scams that feel surprisingly polished. Filters have improved, but attackers have learned to adapt. The latest technique takes aim at something you rarely think about: the subject line itself. Researchers have found a method that hides tiny, invisible characters inside the subject so automated systems fail to flag the message. It sounds subtle, but it is quickly becoming a serious problem.
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NEW SCAM SENDS FAKE MICROSOFT 365 LOGIN PAGES
Cybercriminals are using invisible Unicode characters to disguise phishing email subject lines, allowing dangerous scams to slip past filters. (Photo by Donato Fasano/Getty Images)
How the new trick works
Researchers recently uncovered phishing campaigns that embed soft hyphens between every letter of an email subject. These are invisible Unicode characters that normally help with text formatting. They do not show up in your inbox, but they completely throw off keyword-based filters. Attackers use MIME encoded-word formatting to slip these characters into the subject. By encoding it in UTF-8 and Base64, they can weave these hidden characters through the entire phrase.
One analyzed email decoded to “Your Password is About to Expire” with a soft hyphen tucked between every character. To you, it looks normal. To a security filter, it looks scrambled, with no clear keyword to match. The attackers then use the same trick in the body of the email, so both layers slide through detection. The link leads to a fake login page sitting on a compromised domain, designed to harvest your credentials.
If you have ever tried spotting a phishing email, this one still follows the usual script. It builds urgency, claims something is about to expire and points you to a login page. The difference is in how neatly it dodges the filters you trust.
Why this phishing technique is super dangerous
Most phishing filters rely on pattern recognition. They look for suspicious words, common phrases and structure. They also scan for known malicious domains. By splitting every character with invisible symbols, attackers break up these patterns. The text becomes readable for you but unreadable for automated systems. This creates a quiet loophole where old phishing templates suddenly become effective again.
The worrying part is how easy this method is to copy. The tools needed to encode these messages are widely available. Attackers can automate the process and churn out bulk campaigns with little extra effort. Since the characters are invisible in most email clients, even tech-savvy users do not notice anything odd at first glance.
Security researchers point out that this method has appeared in email bodies for years, but using it in the subject line is less common. That makes it harder for existing filters to catch. Subject lines also play a key role in shaping your first impression. If the subject looks familiar and urgent, you are more likely to open the email, which gives the attacker a head start.
How to spot a phishing email before you click
Phishing emails often look legitimate, but the links inside them tell a different story. Scammers hide dangerous URLs behind familiar-looking text, hoping you will click without checking. One safe way to preview a link is by using a private email service that shows the real destination before your browser loads it.
Our top-rated private email provider recommendation includes malicious link protection that reveals full URLs before opening them. This gives you a clear view of where a link leads before anything can harm your device. It also offers strong privacy features like no ads, no tracking, encrypted messages and unlimited disposable aliases.
For recommendations on private and secure email providers, visit Cyberguy.com
PAYROLL SCAM HITS US UNIVERSITIES AS PHISHING WAVE TRICKS STAFF
A new phishing method hides soft hyphens inside subject lines, scrambling keyword detection while appearing normal to users. (Photo by Silas Stein/picture alliance via Getty Images)
9 steps you can take to protect yourself from this phishing scam
You do not need to become a security expert to stay safe. A few habits, paired with the right tools, can shut down most phishing attempts before they have a chance to work.
1) Use a password manager
A password manager helps you create strong, unique passwords for every account. Even if a phishing email fools you, the attacker cannot use your password elsewhere because each one is different. Most password managers also warn you when a site looks suspicious.
Next, see if your email has been exposed in past breaches. Our #1 password manager (see Cyberguy.com) pick includes a built-in breach scanner that checks whether your email address or passwords have appeared in known leaks. If you discover a match, immediately change any reused passwords and secure those accounts with new, unique credentials.
Check out the best expert-reviewed password managers of 2025 at Cyberguy.com.
2) Enable two-factor authentication
Turning on 2FA adds a second step to your login process. Even if someone steals your password, they still need the verification code on your phone. This stops most phishing attempts from going any further.
3) Install a reliable antivirus software
Strong antivirus software does more than scan for malware. Many can flag unsafe pages, block suspicious redirects and warn you before you enter your details on a fake login page. It is a simple layer of protection that helps a lot when an email slips past filters.
The best way to safeguard yourself from malicious links that install malware, potentially accessing your private information, is to have strong antivirus software installed on all your devices. This protection can also alert you to phishing emails and ransomware scams, keeping your personal information and digital assets safe.
Get my picks for the best 2025 antivirus protection winners for your Windows, Mac, Android & iOS devices at Cyberguy.com.
4) Limit your personal data online
Attackers often tailor phishing messages using information they find about you. Reducing your digital footprint makes it harder for them to craft emails that feel convincing. You can use personal data removal services to clean up exposed details and old database leaks.
While no service can guarantee the complete removal of your data from the internet, a data removal service is really a smart choice. They aren’t cheap, and neither is your privacy. These services do all the work for you by actively monitoring and systematically erasing your personal information from hundreds of websites. It’s what gives me peace of mind and has proven to be the most effective way to erase your personal data from the internet. By limiting the information available, you reduce the risk of scammers cross-referencing data from breaches with information they might find on the dark web, making it harder for them to target you.
AI FLAW LEAKED GMAIL DATA BEFORE OPENAI PATCH
Researchers warn that attackers are bypassing email defenses by manipulating encoded subject lines with unseen characters. (Photo by Lisa Forster/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Check out my top picks for data removal services and get a free scan to find out if your personal information is already out on the web by visiting Cyberguy.com.
Get a free scan to find out if your personal information is already out on the web: Cyberguy.com
5) Check sender details carefully
Do not rely on the display name. Always check the full email address. Attackers often tweak domain names by a single letter or symbol. If something feels off, open the site manually instead of clicking any link inside the email.
6) Never reset passwords through email links
If you get an email claiming your password will expire, do not click the link. Go to the website directly and check your account settings. Phishing emails rely on urgency. Slowing down and confirming the issue yourself removes that pressure.
7) Keep your software and browser updated
Updates often include security fixes that help block malicious scripts and unsafe redirects. Attackers take advantage of older systems because they are easier to trick. Staying updated keeps you ahead of known weaknesses.
8) Turn on advanced spam filtering or “strict” filtering
Many email providers (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo) allow you to tighten spam filtering settings. This won’t catch every soft-hyphen scam, but it improves your odds and reduces risky emails overall.
9) Use a browser with anti-phishing protection
Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Brave, and Edge all include anti-phishing checks. This adds another safety net if you accidentally click a bad link.
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Kurt’s key takeaway
Phishing attacks are changing fast, and tricks like invisible characters show how creative attackers are getting. It’s safe to say filters and scanners are also improving, but they cannot catch everything, especially when the text they see is not the same as what you see. Staying safe comes down to a mix of good habits, the right tools, and a little skepticism whenever an email pushes you to act quickly. If you slow down, double-check the details, and follow the steps that strengthen your accounts, you make it much harder for anyone to fool you.
Do you trust your email filters, or do you double-check suspicious messages yourself? Let us know by writing to us at Cyberguy.com.
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Raspberry Pi is increasing the price of several single-board computers in an attempt to offset soaring memory costs. The updates are being applied immediately and affect Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5, with prices increasing by $5 to $25 depending on the model and amount of RAM. The 16GB memory variants of the Compute Module 5 are also being raised by $20, now starting at $140.
“The current pressure on memory prices, driven by competition from the AI infrastructure roll-out, is painful but ultimately temporary,” Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton said in the announcement. “We remain committed to driving down the cost of computing and look forward to unwinding these price increases once it abates.”
An affordable new 1GB variant of Raspberry Pi’s flagship 5 model is also being introduced for $45, which includes a quad-core 2.4GHz Arm Cortex-A76 processor, dual-band Wi-Fi, and a PCI Express port.
Raspberry Pi isn’t the only computing hardware provider feeling the pinch, with CyberPowerPC and Maingear having also addressed how the skyrocketing price of RAM is impacting their business, with price increases either already in place or expected in the future. The limited supply and high demand for RAM has led to some stores selling it at market prices, just as the out-of-control GPU prices from earlier this year had finally started to settle down.
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