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Flock and Cyble Inc. weaponize “cybercrime” takedowns to silence critics

haveibeenflocked.com

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Re: Flock and Cyble Inc. weaponize “cybercrime” takedowns to silence critics

#121

Post by mapontosevenths »

tptacek wrote: post #120
mapontosevenths wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But now the wrong ox is getting gored, and people are uncomfortable with it. I'm not mad the ox was gored, just that nobody replaced it after they were done sacrificing it. Bad science deserves to die, but in my mind it should always be replaced with better science. Not just left as an empty gap. > Again: there is active science being done at some of the largest research universities in the world on the questions y…

Sasha Gusev and Alex Strudwick Young are two good follows on opposing ends of the spectrum of research beliefs here, both link constantly to new studies. From a more psychometric and behavioral perspective, Eric Turkheimer is a good starting point. On the other end of the spectrum from Turkheimer is Richard Haier. These are, like, high-profile names, but of course there are many dozens more people actually doing work…

Thank you!

Re: Flock and Cyble Inc. weaponize “cybercrime” takedowns to silence critics

#122

Post by croes »

VladVladikoff wrote: post #100
croes wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have indexed publicly available data. The privacy was long gone before you even entered a license plate number. Or do you think other actors didn’t have the same data but without a frontend to show it to you?

Entering your licence plate into this site gives the operator your geodata/ip address tied back to your licence plate.

Unless you use a VPN to access the site. Flock has your real location on camera.

Re: Flock and Cyble Inc. weaponize “cybercrime” takedowns to silence critics

#123

Post by wahnfrieden »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #4

This is a Y Combinator company? https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety dang/tomhow, does Y Combinator have a code of ethics that comes into play when one of your funding recipients does something unethical and/or illegal like this?

[flagged]

Re: Flock and Cyble Inc. weaponize “cybercrime” takedowns to silence critics

#124

Post by VladVladikoff »

hibf wrote: post #42
VladVladikoff wrote: post #37

> The site’s only input fields accept license plate numbers (which are hashed client-side before transmission and cannot be harvested) License plates are trivially short, hashing them accomplishes no additional level of privacy if the hashes could be bruted in seconds on an antique GPU.

Technically true. Flock could present an unfounded argument that I might be brute-forcing my own security and privacy measures. I think it'd sound pretty dumb.

What about doing it all client side? Or perhaps let the user type one or two characters then fetch that from the server for all matches and do the remaining matching client side. There are ways you could truly isolate yourself from the PII.

Re: Flock and Cyble Inc. weaponize “cybercrime” takedowns to silence critics

#125

Post by creatonez »

VladVladikoff wrote: post #37

> The site’s only input fields accept license plate numbers (which are hashed client-side before transmission and cannot be harvested) License plates are trivially short, hashing them accomplishes no additional level of privacy if the hashes could be bruted in seconds on an antique GPU.

This might be referring to k-anonymity where you truncate the hash so that it matches about 1000 hashes, then the client matches against that list. Which makes it so the operator can't really narrow down what exact license plates correspond to which searches.

Re: Flock and Cyble Inc. weaponize “cybercrime” takedowns to silence critics

#127

Post by TimorousBestie »

duckmysick wrote: post #101
TimorousBestie wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One long-standing code is that they moderate YC companies less on HN, allowing criticisms like yours to stand: Well, that’s what dang says he does. There’s no transparency and no publicly available data that would demonstrate adherence to the rule. > To HN's credit I haven't seen this rule violated. I don’t think you’d observe anything different if it were violated.

> no publicly available data that would demonstrate adherence to the rule. What kind of data would satisfy you? I imagine any data coming directly from YC would be untrustworthy and third-party data would be incomplete (say, it wouldn't catch content removed before it's published). Is there a similar data set for other private platforms?

A public moderation log would satisfy me just fine, and is common practice on other forums.

Re: Flock and Cyble Inc. weaponize “cybercrime” takedowns to silence critics

#128

Post by nerdponx »

therobots927 wrote: post #16
ares623 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they/we absolutely love the distraction

Because our educational system has been dismantled

Which is precisely part of the strategy to keep everyone distracted and confused.

Re: Flock and Cyble Inc. weaponize “cybercrime” takedowns to silence critics

#129

Post by mdnahas »

thayne wrote: post #69
CalChris wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if Flock + Cyble can be sued for fraud. There are 5 elements in a fraud: Misrepresentation of Fact Knowledge of Falsity Intent to Induce Reliance Justifiable Reliance Resulting Damages

The "resulting damages" is pretty small though, they just had to move off of cloudflare. I'm not sure it would be worth it, especially if the other side doesn't end up paying their legal costs.

They’ve done it twice now.

I’d argue in court that this is a pattern, not a one-off event and the damages need to be large enough to prevent this repeating.

Also, service providers are not identical. They chose Cloudflare because it was the “best” service. So damages include being moved to a worse service.

Re: Flock and Cyble Inc. weaponize “cybercrime” takedowns to silence critics

#130

Post by LoganDark »

VladVladikoff wrote: post #37

> The site’s only input fields accept license plate numbers (which are hashed client-side before transmission and cannot be harvested) License plates are trivially short, hashing them accomplishes no additional level of privacy if the hashes could be bruted in seconds on an antique GPU.

Some hashing algorithms are tunable into being very expensive and difficult to brute-force even for very short inputs, but I virtually guarantee that whoever designed this system most likely would not even be aware those existed.
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