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Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

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Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#231

Post by Spooky23 »

IAmBroom wrote: post #148
throwway120385 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The guys we blew up with a drone were definitely jihadists."

Not any better, nor different, than a missile from a piloted plane, or a guided missile. Yes, the current administration is morally capable of destroying random ships to claim victories over "bad guys". But they always had that ability.

No, it’s not. Whataboutism is collaborating. Don’t be that guy.

The difference with this administration is that they aren’t even pretending to follow the nominal controls or rules to wield that force.

There was a legal concept around the drone/missile/commando/aerial strikes to assassinate targeted individuals in the Middle East. The morality of that action was dubious at best, but what’s happening in the Caribbean doesn’t even meet that very low moral, ethical, or legal bar.

This administration, with their craven collaborators on the Supreme Court, is solely focused on asserting virtually unlimited executive power to a fairly obvious end.

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#232

Post by PaulHoule »

IAmBroom wrote: post #169
throwway120385 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I completely agree that the police need things like health care and mental health and training on dealing with crises and all of this stuff we expect. But the idea that they need better weapons to do their job or that everyone they encounter should be treated like Afghani insurgents using the cameras they've installed in their own homes is beyond dystopian. Getting shot or stabbed, in my understanding is way less…

This I can agree with. I have experience with the local PD in handling "no good answer" domestic violence situations with a neighbor's mentally ill kid; they clearly had training to guide them. I'm grateful for that, although they still couldn't resolve much (the mental health system is still dysfunctional in the US).

Partly it's dysfunctional but the options for treating severe mental illness (schizophrenia spectrum, bipolar, major depression) aren't that great.

When you seem some guy screaming on the street corner a monthly depot injection of an antipsychotic drug would probably calm them down but overall the drugs are unpleasant [1] and have serious side effects, particularly sedation, weight gain, and high blood sugar [2] A "functional" system would probably be one that can get people like that a diagnosis and get them treatment against their will.

Kanye West is a good example. He has a bipolar diagnosis but now thinks he is fashionably autistic so he quit taking his meds and now he is shooting music videos of black people in blackface giving the Hitler salute after a whiney autotuned complaint that they won't let him see his kids after he posted something on Twitter [3]. For him responsibility is not "don't cosplay as a Nazi" but "face up to your condition and take your meds" and he won't want to cosplay as a Nazi and they might let him see his kids.

I've known quite a few people who are schizophrenia spectrum without a diagnosis: one of them lived at our house for a year and a half until she threatened my wife with a knife and she took her own life a year later, another one called us up five times in one day last week with a scrambled story about how she got bit by a dog, I sat down and listened to her for about 20 minutes in which she got lucid just a few times and I was able to piece together the place where it happened, that she's talked to the security guard and the EMT but not the police, that she did see a doctor and get a Tetanus shot though she wasn't sure if it was a Rottweiler or a Pit-bull.

The good news is that new drugs are here and more are under development:

https://www.cobenfy.com/

[1] no diversion risk!

[2] last year my condition got worse and my doc put me on the minimum dose of seroquel before going to sleep which is 1/10 the dose they'd give to someone who is really psychotic. It was effective at getting me quality sleep and avoiding "paranoia against objects" in the morning but I gained 15 lbs and my A1C was borderline in my last bloodwork and my doc thinks I should get off it. Even the smallest dose is so sedating I can't believe anyone could take it during the day, my guess is that if I cut the pills in half the sleep promoting effect will still be strong enough.

[3] oddly not "X"

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#233

Post by scjon »

morshu9001 wrote: post #192
red-iron-pine wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

plenty of good use cases for it, and the popularity of the devices speak for themselves. just don't get ones owned by evil megacorps who have openly said they'll sell access to ICE

What is an equivalently capable alternative that puts the user more in control? The reason Ring is popular isn't just marketing or network effect, it's that it works. Before Ring and clones, security camera / DVR combos were really hard to make effective, I tried. Maybe you'd have a totally reliable system with good video, but it'd fail to notify you when you need it to, or notify way too often. Battery power was inf…

Unifi is as good or better and doesn't require a subscription

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#234

Post by grafmax »

endymion-light wrote: post #82
shrubble wrote: post #43

When you take this info and combine it with the ability of Wifi7 routers to "see" where people are in their house, you realize that the recent demo of Anduril's helmet that gives an information display that the soldier/cop wearing it can use to "see who is in the house" or "see around corners" etc. is not sci-fi but instead, something they can do today.

In reality - I think this will be far worse than that. Why send in an expensive soldiers or a cop when you could just filter in a drone

Yikes. Talk about imperial boomerang.

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#236

Post by account_1234 »

I worked in a Ring back in 2017. In the Ukraine office. All the things you read about their privacy were right. All private things, like access for employees to people's data, are right. This is an absolutely evil company. I don't understand why people in the first place in the USA are buying it.

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#237

Post by addicted »

noja wrote: post #203
Aurornis wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you take this info and combine it with the ability of Wifi7 routers to "see" where people are in their house, WiFi routers can’t tell you where people are in the house. The routers don’t even know their own location within the house. All of those papers you see on the topic have extensive additional information being put into their models. The routers don’t magically know the layout of your house. At most, a W…

So combine it with a plan made from a social media posting.

Or a Roomba... One of the first things they want to do is make a plan of the house.

But also, don't builders have to submit plans of homes to the local government when building them for approval?

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#238

Post by pyth0 »

bpt3 wrote: post #220
hitarpetar wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just to make this explicit, protecting civilians has never been the purpose of modern police forces. they were developed to put down rebellions/catch slaves/protect rich people's property

Just to make this explicit, you are incorrect. There are plenty of instances where you would be correct, such as the origin of police forces in the American South (which were initially slave patrols), but that doesn't mean you are correct in all instances. I'm not sure what joy you derive from spreading misinformation, but you should probably reconsider it.

You didn't refute anything in the comment, other than saying one part of it was correct. This comment would be more useful if you actually made an argument.

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#239

Post by foobarian »

prayerie wrote: post #219

Having tried to do this already to no avail, does anyone know if as an owner of one of these Ring devices if it's possible to take it offline and handle everything locally? I'm usually against these types of "smart" devices, but only bought it because my house got burgled as a student (whilst I was asleep!), so I got pretty shaken up and got the cheapest thing I could find. Currently, I do have it connected to a loca…

Unfortunately MAC addresses are hard to mask. With a DIY camera you could customize the MAC address, but it would still be visible. To truly hide it I suppose you'd need to use a wired interface. Ubiquiti used to make 700MHz WiFi adapters but I don't think those are a thing any longer

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#240

Post by addicted »

Aurornis wrote: post #188
Almondsetat wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The police has access to the planimetry of your home. Secondly, if they get close enough they can measure the distance between the agent and the router, and then deduce all the relative distances from the router to the people inside.

This is sci-fi fantasy mixed with paranoia. The floor plan of every home is not on file, especially older homes. Police aren’t accessing your floor plan and then accessing your router and combining these into a perfect model that maps people’s locations. Where in this supposed plan are the police deducing the location of your WiFi router in the house and constructing a model of all materials and objects in the house…

Yeah, your local friendly police officer isn't gonna do that.

They're gonna pay Anduril, Palantir, and a whole host of other business or consulting firms a ton of your money to do that.

The criticism that "it's technically too challenging for the police department therefore its sci-fi" is extremely silly given that the current article literally is about private companies that are building surveillance networks that they will then sell to the police.

Which makes the entire situation a lot worse.

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