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Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera

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211–220 of 268 posts

Re: Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera

#211
post #196
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

K. And cops also have guns, tear gas, the right to pull people over, arrest them, etc. etc. If they cannot be trusted with a licence plate database, then they can't really be trusted with those either. Are you advocating to just abolish police so that whoever is willing to use the most force can be in charge of everything? Like Mexico, but with less policing! Or to just remove all their weapons and legal powers so th…

"And cops also have guns, tear gas, the right to pull people over, arrest them, etc. etc. If they cannot be trusted with a licence plate database, then they can't really be trusted with those either." now you're getting it. "cops are the only reason we don't all have delicious cartel boots (or their bullets) in our mouths already" citation needed. And since you're looking for some solutions to these problems, here ar…

> tax the ever loving fuck out of anyone worth more than a million, dump those taxes into public services like education and healthcare

Have you met California? That's literally the exact thing we do here. Yet our crime is terrible. And if you think throwing money at schools will translate automatically into better outcomes, it really isn't that simple. Schools with 50% more money hire more administrators and consultants and build way nicer facilities, but they don't just automatically turn out kids who are 50% more moral.

Healthcare is a similar joke. We spend more on healthcare than any nation! Yet we're not the most healthy. Why should we run up the score even more on how much tax money we spend on that when we've already proven it to be inefficient?

> people aren't forced into deviance

With respect, I do not believe that anyone is forced into deviance. People will always come from a diversity of levels of privilege (unless we convert to an economy like North Korea where the leader and their friends live well and everyone else is in poverty). Those who start out with the least will always have a choice to try to get ahead through crime or by honest means, just like everyone else does.

Wouldn't you say the rich aren't any more likely to actually follow the law as the poor? Why do they have agency, but poor criminals were predestined for crime?

[Edited to add the following: I believe that denying people's agency and treating them as helpless victims drawn irresistibly to crime, does a disservice to the disadvantaged. It tells those who are tempted, or those who have made mistakes, that they may as well do crime, since society expects them to anyway and says they are 'forced to.' And it erases/ignores those from poor backgrounds who did make something of themselves.]

> licensure and insurance

This doesn't seem like a serious idea to me. Licensure is no magic wand. The effect of malpractice insurance in medicine has arguably brought most of society very little benefit (other than attorneys).

A nationwide standard on censuring officers proportionally (up to and including suspension or ban from serving as a peace officer anywhere) for offenses of misuse of power makes sense and could be good policy. Most of the rest of this just sounds like unserious wishing that will never go anywhere.

Re: Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera

#212
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They won’t have that sort of moment of self reflection until someone does something like use Flock infrastructure to stalk and assassinate the CEO of another YC company and then it will only be brief and fleeting before they double down on supporting this kind of egregious behaviour. Some people are just wired that way.

I say these people should not be in charge of choosing who gets insane amounts of money and networking opportunities

They should not be in charge of anything, but being a sociopath gets you obscene amounts of money and puts you in charge of all sorts of things.

Re: Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is, why should they care at all? Will this hurt their business?

Is there any recent example of a company getting breached and its data exfiltrated, where the business was actually hurt? I predict we'll get a standard boilerplate "We take security very seriously" press release, a narrative that blames the evil hackers entirely and not the company's negligence, and then that will be that.

Would the DNC in the last US national election count?

Re: Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera

#214
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hate how Product Managers somehow get to take the reins of engineering teams instead of having to sell them product ideas. It's madness, they often lack the technical skills and "optimise away" requirements surfaced by eng teams they don't comprehend or just don't like having to deal with.

Because software engineering is not professional engineering. Now, this doesn't always stops management, but when you have to have an engineering signoff it does make things a bit more difficult.

Do you feel like an inadiquate imposter or something? I'm assuming you work in software.

Watch some engineers in other disciplines and you soon recognise that many of them have about the same responsibility as a software engineer. Design is design.

Or read about engineering failures like flight QF32 (mostly a success story):

  A paperwork review showed that the required signatures were missing from 131 out of 138 retrospective concessions issued between 2009 and 2011
https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-matter-of-millimeters-...

Australian Quantas, with a UK Rolls Royce engine on an Airbus, with engines maintained in Aussie.

Safety is now often made up of interlocking: regulations, standards, quality systems, safety management systems, insurance, international legal contracts. Certified engineers and signatures are usually only a very small part of those systems.

Certification matters less than you might think across international borders.

Perhaps I'm a cynic, but beliefs in certification seem so irrational to me. What is it? Jealous desires for status? Desire to have guilds/gatekeepers? Complete misunderstanding of how safety occurs in "real" engineering?

Re: Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera

#216
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3.18.71-perf-gaf770dc is a Qualcomm Android vendor kernel from roughly late 2017. The 3.18 branch went fully EOL in 2019, so nothing after that was ever backported to it.

Security through obsolescence!

That's how we got Chinese APT in our phone systems that we are apparently going to do nothing about. Seriously, can be fixed, AT&T et all just won't

Re: Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera

#218
Move fast and break things*

* Privacy, civic trust, society if you get a chance!

This is the end product of tech leadership taking fat rips of disruption cocaine for the last 15 years. Flock Safety got VC money so that they could build a panopticon. There is nothing surprising about the fact that they did a hack job with terrible security; the fact that their service names are various types of alcohol is beyond parody.

Oh well, at least Flock Safety's IPO will be a critical cash infusion in the pursuit of building the torture nexus so that's cool.

Re: Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera

#220

This is SOP for IOT devices. I am beginning to think we need to regulate this stuff, because it is ubiquitous. The device manufacturers do not have a culture of security.

There are much better ways of device enrollment; at a minimum they could require device activation that doesn't blindly use a token with no further checks.
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