Live data from Hacker News

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

404media.co

431–440 of 507 posts

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

#431

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

I’ve done both those things! Your obsession with what some half dead geezers from 300 years ago is a huge part of what makes the country a horrible place to live and a horrible influence on the world

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

#432
post #410

What 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?

There's this book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt that explores the topic.

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

#433

Earlier 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…

These guys made a constitution that says all men are free, except for slaves and women because they’re obviously not men. This led to a civil war just a couple decades later. I think it’s pretty clear that they didn’t really know what they were doing. In fact, that’s why they gave you the tools to change the laws of the country.

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

#434
post #33

I 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.

Many hands make light work

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

#435

Interesting, 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.

Searching for ALPR was also one of the popular early queries: https://github.com/jakejarvis/awesome-shodan-queries?tab=rea...

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

#436

Was 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…

>Was your Texas cop tracking an abortion a real example? Because that would be bad. So so bad.

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

#437

Earlier 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.

The gloves were always off, it's the masks that came down. Now they are ready to punch.

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

#438
The most terrifying part here is the synergy between the AI feature and the security hole. An open stream from a static camera is one thing, but it's entirely different when you have an open-access AI agent that autonomously finds "interesting" targets, zooms in on faces, and tracks people between cameras. This transforms a passive data leak into an active, real-time stalking tool

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

#439
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…

Your founding fathers would become feasible perpetual energy sources as they roll in their graves seeing what your country has turned into. Not that you guys are alone - a lot of countries would benefit from such energy sources too.

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

#440

Was 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…

The problem goes even deeper than messy RBAC in a database. This story showed that the system's brains are pushed to the edge, and if you gain access to the device, you don't even need the central police database. You get a local, highly intelligent agent working autonomously. This breaks the traditional threat model where we worry about "someone leaking the database"; here, the camera itself becomes an active reconnaissance tool. It turns out that instead of hacking a complex, (hopefully) secured cloud, you just need to find a smart eye like this with default settings, and you already have a personal spy at an intersection, bypassing any police access protocols
Post reply on HN