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Smart streetlights are casting a long shadow

failedarchitecture.com

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Re: Smart streetlights are casting a long shadow

#31

Post by rendaw »

A couple posts seem to be suggesting these are just normal street lights, or motion activated streetlights. It appears they aren't - they seem to be streetlights with cameras that upload the feed into the cloud.

> “This is not a surveillance system—nobody is watching it 24 hours a day,”

Surveillance doesn't mean being watched by a human 24 hours a day, nor has it ever. Not only that, but this is misdirection - they're surely storing the data so that if police (or politicians, or advertisers, or criminals) want to they can look it up and watch you 24h a day retroactively.

Re: Smart streetlights are casting a long shadow

#32

Post by sieabahlpark »

homonculus1 wrote: post #25
ip26 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t you surveil the road as you drive at night?

No. That's an abuse of language. Surveillance is persistent monitoring of an area, person, etc. with a strong implication of record retention and intent to escalate situations which may arise. Looking upon your way as you travel is not surveillance. Putting a light on a night is not surveillance. We are talking about a particular thing, notwithstanding irrelevantly broad archaic or foreign usage.

No post body was provided.

Re: Smart streetlights are casting a long shadow

#33

Post by wakaru44 »

CosmicShadow wrote: post #18

Meanwhile this morning I was wondering if I could drop a remote control LED light next to the solar sensor on the street light across the street with a drone and fool it at night into turning off so I can use my telescope without being blinded in my front yard.

when I was young, kids in my neighbourhood used those 1 pound laser pointers to shut off the street's lights for fun.

Re: Smart streetlights are casting a long shadow

#34

Post by SKILNER »

jdlshore wrote: post #3
QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #2

Look. I'm the target audience- a bleeding heart liberal with a long history of wokeness to the point of annoying others on this site, and a deep mistrust of surveilance. Even _I_ an exhausted with arguments like "Citizens of Ancient Rome started to install an oil lamp in front of every villa to prevent tripping or thefts, and an enslaved person would be designated to watch the lamp—lighting was already paired with th…

No kidding. I got to the same paragraph and closed the tab. The author seriously buried the lede. What exactly is a “smart streetlight” and why is it of concern? I have no idea.

Haha, me too, I read that sentence and closed the tab.

Re: Smart streetlights are casting a long shadow

#36

Post by exabrial »

jacobolus wrote: post #29
joecool1029 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add more to this, the LEDs rely on phosphors to get white or amber light off. It's one company that had defective phosphors and sold them all around the country. I spotted some of them failing around Scranton, PA. Here's a link on it: https://nightskysantafe.org/blog/nationwide-failure-of-ael-s...

Even the properly functioning "warm white" LED streetlamps are a fucking disaster. They are way too blue, way too bright, spaced too far apart, placed too high up in the air, and not diffused adequately. Orange sodium lamps are so, so, so much better in every way.

I hate the be the old guy that's yelling at kids on the lawn... but I agree about sodium lamps
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