Building Omegle for Exposed Webcams | Alec ArmbrusterAlec wrote, on May 28, 2026:<br>Building Omegle for Exposed Webcams

Introduction<br>I&rsquo;ve always loved Omegle and Chat Roulette. Clicking a button and getting dropped into a random situation somewhere on the planet felt like instant chaos in the best way.<br>For a long time, I&rsquo;ve wanted to build a one-way version of Omegle for exposed IoT devices. You click a button, and boom: you&rsquo;re connected to a proxied stream from some random device on the internet.<br>Try it out at StumbleTV!<br>How It Works<br>The whole app is built with Nuxt 4, with Nitro on the backend. It&rsquo;s hosted on Cloudflare Workers/Pages on the $5/month plan.<br>Every 12 hours, the backend pulls a list of exposed devices from the paid Shodan API and stores them in a database. That includes a base64-encoded version of the original crawled stream screenshot.<br>When a user visits the frontend, the backend randomly selects a device from the database and returns the base64-encoded screenshot. If possible, it also crawls the origin IP and tries to procure a live stream via fuzzy path matching.<br>If no live stream is available, the backend will return the last persisted screenshot.<br>There&rsquo;s a bunch more to it, mostly WAF-related stuff to stop you degenerates from speedrunning my cloud bill, but that&rsquo;s the gist.<br>Random Interesting Things<br>I really love the minimap, which shows you where in the world the stream is coming from (via Shodan&rsquo;s lot/landmark/etc. data).<br>Another interesting thing: a small but noticeable number of these streams are honeypots looping pre-recorded video and almost certainly logging the backend&rsquo;s IP address.<br>Japan is the king of exposed webcams.<br>Last thing&mldr; Sony themselves exposed one of their own webcams, leaking Sony employees working on Sony projects. Of course, it&rsquo;s live-stream enabled so you can watch them work in real-time. They&rsquo;re incredibly productive. At the time of writing this post, they&rsquo;re sleeping.<br>What&rsquo;s Next For StumbleTV<br>First, I merged Omegle and Shodan. Next, I&rsquo;m merging StumbleTV and GeoGuessr and turning this into a game where you guess where the stream is coming from on a map.<br>Discuss this post on HackerNews here and here.