Really hoping some good guy hacker manages to take them all down somehow
Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera
181–190 of 270 posts
Re: Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
The question is, why should they care at all? Will this hurt their business?
Feels like their purpose is to test the boundaries, take the hits, and eventually sell off
They want the good, bad and ugly to flock to them as it were and vaporize them so Axon and Motorola Solutions can just pick up right where they left off. And people will just ignore or forget it because it's not the same company.
Re: Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera
#183Earlier 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.
2017 was also the year Flock was funded and founded and went through the YConbinator cohort. But you would have thought that by 2021 when Andreessen Horowitz funded them or at least by 2025 [1] when both further funded them, someone would have actually done some minor due diligence. Coincidentally too, 2025 was when the flock surveillance matrix went up all over the country almost immediately. We constantly hear that…
Interesting that they are a YC Company. Does yC do any ethics vetting of saying "No, let's stop fascism before it spreads?"
Re: Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Allegedly you can buy credentials on the darkweb to perform national searches. Might explain why some of the logged reasons for recent searches were “LMAO”
The normal explanation is plenty, unless you’ve never met, read about, or heard anyone talk about, law enforcement officers (who are human beings - for better and for worse).
How many of us have had coworkers who put something like that into a commit message? And that's a message that's at least notionally supposed to be helpful to you or your coworkers, rather than existing purely for the purposes of oversight you don't want in the first place.
Re: Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not like this stuff wasn’t known to be a problem 10 years ago. We were already in Trump’s first term, it’s not like it was part of the early post 9/11 “secure everything” push. It was WAY after that. 10 years ago is no excuse.
It’s not an excuse, but gives some luxury of distance. We have a lot more hindsight now on how rotten things can become, so with that hindsight it’s easy to say that companies like Flock shouldn’t exist, or shouldn’t be invested in. Ten years ago required some more leaps in foresight that some people were making, I was, but even I didn’t think it would get as evil as it has.
IDK. We’d already had plenty of spying by companies, the government, police abuse, etc.
It was all quite plain then. And the very heavy rhetoric made it very obvious which direction things would go.
Re: Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t worry, your elected representatives won’t be bothered by trivialities such as facts either way.
They can be recalled and/or replaced, as many have who voted for data centers. They fought against datacenters. Now they are running for local offices - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/15/datacenters-... - September 15th, 2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49375000 (citations)
Don't know why you're getting downvoted, but hackernews is very anti-democratic in nature. One thing politicians quickly realize, especially local ones, is that you do have to be accountable to voters at the end of the day. One or two bad stories is enough to sink a local race too, or at minimum require a massive spend to overcome the negativity.
Local politics is where you understand how effective a handful of people can truly be.
Happy to read people are understanding the true power they have collectively instead of as individuals.
Re: Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
They can be recalled and/or replaced, as many have who voted for data centers. They fought against datacenters. Now they are running for local offices - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/15/datacenters-... - September 15th, 2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49375000 (citations)
Don't know why you're getting downvoted, but hackernews is very anti-democratic in nature. One thing politicians quickly realize, especially local ones, is that you do have to be accountable to voters at the end of the day. One or two bad stories is enough to sink a local race too, or at minimum require a massive spend to overcome the negativity. Local politics is where you understand how effective a handful of peopl…
Oh yeah, totally agree, the HN zeitgeist is what it is.
Re: Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are levels to defending against physical attacks, and Flock half-assed theirs by leaving the encryption key right on the file system, according to the reporting. Those more serious about security — like Apple — store keys in an "enclave" chip so it can't be easily extracted by an attacker doing the bare minimum
Apple did that… eventually. Early iPhones weren’t very secure. Apple only got serious after they dominated the market and reducing the theft value of iPhones became a priority.
Even the cheapest commodity encryption chips have had this capability for well over a decade now, Unlike Apple, Flock are not a hardware pioneer, not by a long shot.
The Android documentation has an example of how to use hardware keys, and a Chinese OEM (IIRC) was found using the example key provided by Android sample code - and yet that was more effort than Flock applied, since their ARM SoC support it.
Re: Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
so is my all-passwords.txt file on my desktop
My passwords are in an encrypted block in a text file that can be unencrypted inline in an Emacs session with a keystroke sequence that looks like a cat just chased a mouse across the keyboard, and that's before entering the decryption password. To access it, an attacker would first have to learn Emacs. Pretty sure that's a post-quantum level of security.
Nefarious
I like it
Re: Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
That same NH law perhaps more importantly limits ALPR use to law enforcement officers.
[flagged]
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 that they can just ask people to 'please stop doing crime'?
Or just that we should only allow high-IQ college graduates to be cops? It sure doesn't seem like there are enough of those interested in that line of work. As it is, it already pays well, and yet I can hardly think of anyone I know who has even considered being a cop.
I'm not trying to be obtuse here, but just asserting "police bad" doesn't seem like it even comes close to trying to solve any problems.
(Before you ask me why i'm such a bootlicker, I'd just like to point out that the cops are the only reason we don't all have delicious cartel boots (or their bullets) in our mouths already.)