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

331–340 of 507 posts

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

#331

Post by YY34798347329 »

kklisura wrote: post #58
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

This isn't a surprising sentiment when you consider America is a country that protects billionaire pedophiles who partied on Epstein Island while China puts corrupt billionaires in the slammer, or even executes them. America is a country that exists to keep him rich at the expense of the poor while China does the reverse - its the greatest threat to his continued class dominance over the proles.

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

#332

Post by haimez »

tejtm wrote: post #299
SamInTheShell wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing will be done until one of the investors of the tech end up embarrassed from weaponization of the tech against themselves. These people have no clue how creepy some of their technologic betters can be. I once witnessed a coworker surveilling his own network to ensure his girlfriend wasn't cheating on him (this was a time before massive SSL adoption). The guy just got a role doing networking at my company and t…

flock is a YC startup We have met the enemy and he is us -Pogo

Are we the baddies?

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

#333

Post by kjkjadksj »

Flock cameras would be so easy to disable by motivated people. Dress in nondescript clothing, mask, sunglasses, and just spraypaint over the lenses. This is completely asymmetric warfare because it is trivial how long it would take for you to do this. You could hit dozens of cameras across an area overnight. Meanwhile, flock or the city, whoever maintains this stuff, needs to identify the vandalized cameras, flag them for repair, pay a technician to go out and presumably repair the unit outright. You pay cents and they are paying potentially thousands in labor and hardware costs.

And this would absolutely work at scale too. Streetlights are already being vandalized for their copper and most cities cannot afford to hire more technicians to even keep up with streetlight repair. I believe I’ve seen the backlog for streetlight repair in LA is over 10x what the current street services crew is capable of repairing in a year of constant work and growing by the day.

Municipalities and these technology companies cannot keep up against a motivated crew and can’t afford to scale either. Totally asymmetric.

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

#334

Post by tptacek »

phyzome wrote: post #330
tptacek wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! I know it's a big ask, but can you give me pointers (rough timestamps, whatever). A friend told me to watch this video for the distinctive Flock badness, and the time I spent on that was not rewarded.

Sure, around 33:00 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY The other video is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ but I don't recall which one goes more into it. It's also possible I'm just remembering Flock-specific stuff from other sources, and the things he shows in these videos are more general issues with security camera companies (using Flock as the example). It would be great if this stuff wa…

Thanks! I looked, but that's a segment about someone at Flock accusing anti-Flock people of being "antifa" or terrorists. I'm about as anti-Flock as I think it's possible to be (having been instrumental in killing it my Chicagoland suburb) and I'm not not sure what to do with "someone at Flock said something dumb".

In case it helps: my thing here is, the video we were commenting on thread seems to be about all public cameras, not just AI-assisted smart cameras or even security cameras more broadly. That was my complaint.

It's not that I don't think there's a video to do about 60 open Flock admin consoles; I'm sure there is. I'm just not sure what the implications are, because that video spent all its time talking about stuff that is trivially true of all public cameras, many of which are indexed on Google already, not through Google-dork searches for open console but instead with searches like "open IP camera live streams".

(I was struck by this in part because I vividly remember when Russia invaded Ukraine flipping between dozens of different live camera streams in places like Mariupol; that's obviously not the US, but you can do very similar stuff in the US, and on a lot more than 60 random misconfigured Flock cameras).

I think there may be something to the PTZ on the new Flock cameras that makes this worse? I just think he should make a better, sharper video case against them.

Thank you for giving me a link!

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

#335

Post by goda90 »

gruez wrote: post #279
goda90 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This Whataboutism[0] is quite silly, because the vaccine mandates "melted away" due to the checks and balances of the government operating to make them go away. Meanwhile we're seeing checks and balances themselves melting away. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

>This Whataboutism[0] Not every counterexample you don't like is "Whataboutism". >because the vaccine mandates "melted away" due to the checks and balances of the government operating to make them go away. No, it would be "checks and balances" if there was actually some conflict between the branches of government. If like in most jurisdictions, the restrictions were imposed by the executive, and then lifted by the ex…

The Supreme Court ruled against the vaccine mandate.

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

#336

Post by kjkjadksj »

edot wrote: post #6

Flock or their defenders will lock in on the excuse that “oh these are misconfigured” or “yeah hacking is illegal, only cops should have this data”. The issue is neither of the above. The issue is the collection and collation of this footage in the first place! I don’t want hackers watching me all the time, sure, but I DEFINITELY don’t trust the state or megacorps to watch me all the time. Hackers concern me less, ac…

I know right. It is like we all forgot that cops were literally sharing pictures of Kobe Bryant’s mutilated body in bars for a laugh. A lot of people in law enforcement are totally screwed up in the head.

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

#337

Post by torben-friis »

superultra wrote: post #306
jjwiseman wrote: post #160

The CEO of Flock, Garrett Langley, called Deflock a terrorist group. It's unhinged. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-kZGrDz7PU

I live in an Atlanta neighborhood where one of the founders lived. A prototype for Flock Camera was designed by three Georgia Tech grads because someone kept breaking into their car (not uncommon in our neighborhood tbh). The trick is that the camera was pointed towards a middle school. Which means they were constantly recording kids without adult consent. Now, years later, Atlanta is the most surveilled city in Nort…

>There are 124 cameras for every 1,000 people

How does that make any kind of economic sense? Morals aside, that’s a ridiculous amount of devices, data collected and transmitted, and so on.

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

#338

Post by marcus_holmes »

quitit wrote: post #317
dvtkrlbs wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and the biggest problem with this kind of ALPRs are they bypass the due process. Most of the time police can just pull up data without any warrant and there has been instances where this was abused (I think some cops used this for stalking their exes [1]) and also the most worrying Flock seems to really okay with giving ICE unlimited access to this data [2] [3] (which I speculate for loose regulations). [1]: http…

I keep an unofficial record of instances where police and similar authorities have abused their access to these types of systems. The list is long. It's almost exclusively men stalking ex-partners or attractive women they don't know, but have seen in public. What's frightening is it's not rare, it actually happens constantly, and this is just within the systems which have a high level of internal logging/user-trackin…

No idea why you're being downvoted, this is all true.

Same was found in Australia when they looked into police access of data [0] [1] [2]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jun/...

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-15/victoria-police-leap-...

[2] https://www.ccc.qld.gov.au/sites/default/files/Docs/Public-H...

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

#339

Post by kjkjadksj »

CPLX wrote: post #327
FireBeyond wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He has said his goal is for a "world with no crime. Thanks to Flock." and his goal is not aspirational, visionary, but quite literal. He sees false negatives as more problematic than false positives. He has admitted being inspired by Minority Report (to me it's always very telling when someone takes a cautionary tale like this and finds it "inspirational"). It is right to be amazingly concerned.

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus

Show HN: Torment nexus. Built in Rust (YC W25).

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

#340

Post by autoexec »

fusslo wrote: post #131

I wonder what our founders would think about tools like Flock. From what I understand these systems are legal because there is no expectation of privacy in public. Therefore any time you go in public you cannot expect NOT to be tracked, photographed, and entered into a database (which may now outlive us). I think the argument comes from the 1st amendment. Weaponizing the Bill of Rights (BoR) for the government agains…

> I wonder what our founders would think about tools like Flock.

I suspect they'd make a distinction between private individuals engaging in first amendment protected activity like public photography and corporations or the state doing the same in order to violate people's 4th amendment rights. We certainly don't have to allow for both cases.

Post reply on HN