Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

404media.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 507 posts

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#51

Post by estimator7292 »

eddyg wrote: post #47

Yes, they should be secured so they can only be accessed by law enforcement. But if your spouse/SO/sister/mother/girlfriend/whatever was assaulted while jogging in a park that had Flock cameras, and it allowed law enforcement to quickly identify, track, apprehend and charge the criminal, you'd absolutely be grateful for the technology. There's nothing worse than being told "we don't have any leads" when someone you c…

What about when ICE uses this data to abduct and deport your spouse and family members? Will you be grateful then?

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#52

Post by jandrese »

embedding-shape wrote: post #36
jandrese wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably makes close to no difference in development or production, but it does significantly cut down on the number of tech support calls from people who can't figure out how to set the password, or immediately forget the password they set. If it has no password then you can just plug it in an have it work. Sure it's totally insecure, but its also trivial to install.

Generating a password that is unique to the device and print it with a sticky label on the underside of the device isn't exactly rocket-science, and ISPs somehow figured this out at least two decades ago, which was the first time I came across that myself. Surely whoever developed this IP-camera has an engineering department who've also seen something like this in the wild before?

Yep, but if you do that you need to staff a help line with people who can say "turn the box over and look at the sticker, no the sticker with the numbers on it, it's white with black letters and says PASSWORD in a big font, no the password isn't literally PASSWORD, it's the line below that with the strange letters, yes, to type that one you need to hold the shift key and press 3..."

Remember that ISPs often have people who come to your home to hook stuff up.

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#55

Post by akerl_ »

jkestner wrote: post #50
tptacek wrote: post #33

I would love to watch a shorter version of this video that just discussed the deltas between the status quo and Flock, rather than breathlessly reporting the implications of cameras as if they were distinctive to Flock. He'll spend 30 seconds talking about how you can see every activity and every person on the camera --- yeah, that's how cameras work. There are thousands of public IP cameras on the Internet, aimed at…

In my experience, people respond much more strongly to naming a specific company or person. Clearer plan of action than a resigned “This tech is old news.”

If your takeaway from that comment is that ‘tptacek thinks Flock’s tech is old news and he’s resigned about it, I think you’re going to be in for a treat.

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#56

Post by tptacek »

jkestner wrote: post #50
tptacek wrote: post #33

I would love to watch a shorter version of this video that just discussed the deltas between the status quo and Flock, rather than breathlessly reporting the implications of cameras as if they were distinctive to Flock. He'll spend 30 seconds talking about how you can see every activity and every person on the camera --- yeah, that's how cameras work. There are thousands of public IP cameras on the Internet, aimed at…

In my experience, people respond much more strongly to naming a specific company or person. Clearer plan of action than a resigned “This tech is old news.”

Is the plan of action "eliminate all public IP cameras"? That's coherent, I'd get it, but that doesn't seem to be what he's saying at all. He used a Google search to find exposed Flock admin consoles (interesting! say more about that!) but he could just as easily have just searched "open IP cameras"; there's sites that do nothing but index those.

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#58

Post by kklisura »

kklisura wrote: post #46

For more context here Flock Safety is a YC-backed company [1][2] [1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety [2] https://x.com/garrytan/status/1856016868580151615

And let me share this reply by Garry Tan, CEO of YC, after someone made a comment that Flock might be _pretty dystopian_ [1][2]:

> You're thinking Chinese surveillance

> US-based surveillance helps victims and prevents more victims

[1] https://x.com/neurajordan/status/1963303084609966288

[2] https://x.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#59

Post by embedding-shape »

jandrese wrote: post #52
embedding-shape wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generating a password that is unique to the device and print it with a sticky label on the underside of the device isn't exactly rocket-science, and ISPs somehow figured this out at least two decades ago, which was the first time I came across that myself. Surely whoever developed this IP-camera has an engineering department who've also seen something like this in the wild before?

Yep, but if you do that you need to staff a help line with people who can say "turn the box over and look at the sticker, no the sticker with the numbers on it, it's white with black letters and says PASSWORD in a big font, no the password isn't literally PASSWORD, it's the line below that with the strange letters, yes, to type that one you need to hold the shift key and press 3..." Remember that ISPs often have peop…

Yes, which costs money, which is exactly my original point. It's not because "Oh I'm so hassled because customers are dumb", it's "No, hiring people to do support would cost us money, which we don't want".

> Remember that ISPs often have people who come to your home to hook stuff up.

I can't recall a single time a technician wasn't required to come to my flat/house to install a new router. I'm based in Spain, maybe it's different elsewhere, but I think it's pretty much a requirement, you can't setup the WAN endpoint or ISP router yourself.

Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

#60

Post by kernal »

estimator7292 wrote: post #51
eddyg wrote: post #47

Yes, they should be secured so they can only be accessed by law enforcement. But if your spouse/SO/sister/mother/girlfriend/whatever was assaulted while jogging in a park that had Flock cameras, and it allowed law enforcement to quickly identify, track, apprehend and charge the criminal, you'd absolutely be grateful for the technology. There's nothing worse than being told "we don't have any leads" when someone you c…

What about when ICE uses this data to abduct and deport your spouse and family members? Will you be grateful then?

[flagged]
Post reply on HN