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Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

techcrunch.com

441–450 of 531 posts

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then remember you live in America and you get shot for walking on someone's property. Joking, a little, but seriously: the culture in the US has rotted to such an insane degree. Not only are we not friends with our neighbors, I'm actually scared to talk to them!

I participate in Nextdoor.com because of a community group I work with. The fear in people’s hearts is insane. One memorable one was a Little boy who decided to sell candy bars. I knew the kid from my son’s school. Some psycho followed him for a few hours, tracked down to his home and called the sales tax authorities and the city clerk as he didn’t have a peddler permit. She documented her “investigation”, complete w…

Can you share more? Why was this person upset with kids selling candies?

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#442

I _hate_ walking down the block and hearing their dumb "Hi! You are being recorded!" jingle. Ffs if you're going to record me at least do it quiely

Me too, but these people probably aren't having their cars pilfered in the middle of the night.

My solution to that is to just not keep anything valuable in the car and leave it unlocked. After getting my car window smashed in twice for the thieves to not find anything other than trash I decided this was a better system and haven't had a problem since. For all I know people have rummaged around my car but I don't have to deal with damages anymore.

My ideal anti-theft device would be a mode where the car is unlocked but the alarm goes off if you try to open the door.

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#446
post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your point? Obviously we wouldn't allow something like this to be deployed in our community. But what does that have to do with Flock providing an interface to police departments for collecting Ring camera footage? I don't think that's a good thing --- I think PDs should continue to manually canvass for footage and specifically ask residents for footage when they need it, I think that's actually the right publ…

Also the thing not being mentioned anywhere in this thread that is in other reporting is that the Flock partnership is an interface for police to ask the Ring owner to share their footage with police. A thing that police can already do under the current system. It seems to just be a "single pane of glass" for both systems.

Right; it bugs me that TechCrunch is doing this "AI is racist" thing here. Like: I think a lot of naive AI is in fact racist. But AI has nothing --- that I can tell --- to do with this story. Do they know what they're talking about or not? I have an issue with this "jazz hands" stuff.

I feel the same way about this Flock stuff as I did about all the NSA stuff back in the Snowden days: like, directionally, I get it, I'm on the same page, but I know just enough to know when Glenn Greenwald is just making shit up, and I can't let that slide.

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#447
post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a Unifi Protect system and am generally pretty happy with it. The biggest problem I have is similar in spirit to the Ring problem: remote access is required to get push alerts from the mobile app. Unifi had an issue at the end of 2023 where users could access consoles they didn't own through remote access: https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/15/ubiquiti_camera_priva... If I (or more specifically my spouse) cou…

I have the same UI protect system w 7 cameras. After that incident, I made it local only. I like Unifi gear, but I became super paranoid after that incident. After some digging around, I found homebridge [0] (with the homebridge-unifi-protect plugin by hjdhjd [1]) which fixed that for me by tying the UI Protect system into Apple's HomeKit ecosystem (which also leverages the homekit secure video that keeps alerts/moti…

I haven't seen any in depth performance comparisons, but I had also started to dig into this and I was leaning towards using Scrypted instead of the HomeBridge plugin. Just wanted to name-drop them for others also interested in all this

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're investors, not bosses Being an investor is not an excuse. It makes you amoral, too. "I didn't build the bomb, I just funded the company that built it."

That's the beauty of capitalism, its very foundation allows you to act immorally or amorally, and pretend that it's ok because of "the market", "invisible hands", "revealed preferences", etc. If it's immoral but done in pursuit of maximizing shareholder value, it's magically allowed.

> done in pursuit of maximizing shareholder value, it's magically allowed.

Not even allowed, sometimes legally required ("fiduciary duty").

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#450
post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, the Reolink Doorbell cameras for anyone who doesn't want to be on the Unifi/Ubiquiti platform. Also I believe all these cameras provide a generic RTSP feed which can be consumed by any computer running Frigate[0], an open-source NVR/AI platform. 0: https://frigate.video (Reolink, Unifi/Ubiquiti, and Frigate are all good solutions for anyone who is not interested in supporting the proliferation of a pol…

If it matters to you, Reolink is a Chinese owned company. Not passing judgement one way or another, but if avoiding Unifi over the remote incident matters, I could see this factoring in as well.

> If it matters to you, Reolink is a Chinese owned company.

It does matter to me. Because I am an American, my greatest risks (actual and theoretical) are from American entities.

Conversely, China has little actual power to negatively impact my life. I am most comfortable (and arguably safer) with Chinese gear.

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