Earlier quoted context omitted.
Congratulations on not participating in the legal or political systems of the US, I guess?
Or even visiting the US, to say nothing of living here
Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves
431–440 of 507 posts
Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves
#432What I don’t understand is how you can work at a company like Flock and look yourself in the mirror. Seriously. You must be aware of the inherent evil, of the privacy invasive nature of your product, of how it’s being actively abused. How do you rationalize this for yourself?
Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
If that was the case then you should wonder what Descartes would think. What Derrida or Baudrillard would think. We both know it’s not about that though.
Wondering what the people who created the government think of the current government is massively different than wondering what either of two French philosophers who never participated in statecraft born 150 years later thinks. It is perfectly normal to wonder what the architect of a system thinks of the current system, and entirely separate from wondering what a pair of unrelated Frenchman think of that system. Even…
Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves
#434I would love to watch a shorter version of this video that just discussed the deltas between the status quo and Flock, rather than breathlessly reporting the implications of cameras as if they were distinctive to Flock. He'll spend 30 seconds talking about how you can see every activity and every person on the camera --- yeah, that's how cameras work. There are thousands of public IP cameras on the Internet, aimed at…
Have you ever gone fishing? Did you catch all the fish? Often it is more impactful to address one major/tangible player in a particular space than it would be to "boil the ocean" and ensure that we are capturing every possible player/transgressor. I agree that some of the video was overly breathless, but if that's what wakes people up to the dangers of unsecured cameras/devices then so be it.
Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves
#435Interesting, but nothing new. Shodan users have known about clueless IP camera owners that leave their cameras on the public internet for years. This is a little more interesting because it's from a well-funded startup rather than independently owned Chinese IP cameras.
The old PIPS ALPR devices aren't online anymore but they had horrible security as well. Just sending a newline to their UDP port would cause them to send you all images as they were being collected in real-time - no authentication needed. And the images had the license plate information encoded in the JPG metadata. I did a talk about it at some point (https://imgur.com/HHcpJOr) and worked with EFF to take them offline
Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves
#436Was fortunate to talk to a security lead who built the data-driven policing network for a major American city that was an early adopter. ALPR vendors like Flock either heavily augment and/or anchor the tech setups. What was notable to me is the following, and it’s why I think a career spent on either security researching, or going to law school and suing, these vendors into the ground over 20 years would be the ultim…
As someone who has thought about, planned, and implemented a lot of RBAC... I would never trust the security of a system with RBAC at that level. And to elaborate on that -- for RBAC to have properly defined roles for the right people and ensure that there's no unauthorized access to anything someone shouldn't have access to, you need to know exactly which user has which access. And I mean all of them. Full stop. I d…
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/she-got-abortion-so-te...
Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
jesus fuck the gloves really came off in the past few years. noone even cares to hide it anymore. i could almost admire the transparency of these people, the way they're apparently okay accepting collateral damage of their schemes, up to the complete destruction of the fabric of society... as long as there's money to be made.
Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves
#438Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves
#439I 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…
Re: Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves
#440Was fortunate to talk to a security lead who built the data-driven policing network for a major American city that was an early adopter. ALPR vendors like Flock either heavily augment and/or anchor the tech setups. What was notable to me is the following, and it’s why I think a career spent on either security researching, or going to law school and suing, these vendors into the ground over 20 years would be the ultim…