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Cleveland Voted to Kill Its Flock Camera Network. They Have REMAINED ON, With Police Still Using Them (www.gadgetreview.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 176 points 4 months ago (9 children)

Since they are operating illegally, does that mean we can just take them? They have RAM.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    I don't think they're operating illegally. It's just the city is no longer paying them.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    And who did Flock pay for the land usage to install the cameras?

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    No one, and the city has not asked them too. When someone puts up a sign by the road that says "Slow Children" they don't pay the city for it, and most people do NOT own the land between the sidewalk and the road, they just mow/maintain it out of moral obligation.

    The city decided not to renew the contract, they need to make another action to ensure their removal, or construct a law about them for them to actually be "illegal".

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    • [–] 114 points 4 months ago (6 children)

    You thought the world was gonna just go back to laws being obeyed?

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  • [–] 34 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (5 children)

    Liberal Democracy has always been like this. You can vote for what business wants to prove it's popular. But a vote against is "mob rule", so it gets ignored

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  • [–] 19 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    I guess the only solution is to kill the cops. 🤷‍♂️

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    I will not shoot a cop. However, I won’t call for help as he’s mauled by the neighborhood methhead either. Out of fairness of course.

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    • [–] 89 points 4 months ago (23 children)

    It's the year of our lord 2026. Rule of Law is dead. The other Golden Rule is now supreme: He who has the gold, makes the rules.

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  • [–] 13 points 4 months ago (20 children)

    2026 is not the year of the lord, but of the devil make no mistake.

    Gangsters are in control, which is not cool even though you might think it is. It's not. Gangsters are parasites, making things more expensive.

    Kill the gangsters.

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  • [–] 29 points 4 months ago (19 children)

    This feels a lot like the collapse of the USSR. Like, yeah, shit wasn't necessarily great before, but what comes after is worse.

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  • [–] 17 points 4 months ago (18 children)

    There was a hypothesis proposed a number of years ago that a mono-polar world is inherently unstable. A second great power keeps the other "honest" to a degree and limits the scope of corruption. It doesn't stop it entirely mind you, but it has to at least maintain the appearance of integrity or expose its vulnerability. Any world where only one great power exists, must eventually collapse under the weight of internal corruption.

    Looks like the hypothesis had some merit.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    It probably helped that one was at least nominally socialist, so the promise of worker liberation was always on the wind, keeping the capitalists a bit nervous like are they serious? what if it actually happens?

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  • [–] -2 points 4 months ago (15 children)

    If you crack open a history book you'll find that a multi-polar world has a lot more war. Napoleonic wars, World Wars, etc. Even in the Cold War when nuclear weapons made it too insane for super powers to fight each other directly, they found ways to have massive proxy wars, like the Korean War and Vietnam War. These wars left over a million people dead each. Then there were all of the various civil wars that the superpowers were involved like the Angolan civil war, that one was about a half million people dead. These conflicts were happening all over the world.

    People today shit themselves over Gaza, but that's less than a tenth of casualties compared to the wars that happened in the Cold War and less than 0.2% of WW2. Would you consider wars happening in multiple parts of the world with 10 to 500 times the casualties we've seen in Gaza to be a "stable world"?

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (10 children)

    The Spanish flu killed more people than all the human wars in the last thousand years. How many genocides still occured under "Pax Americana." Taking the whole world into account, 90% of humanity would be under just as much threat of violence if the US vanished tomorrow. There hasn't been an era of broad peace among most of the globe in 6000 years. You act like it's been sunshine and roses under the monopolar system. Ask the people of Libya, Syria, and Iraq how they feel about that? Ask the Cubans, and the Guatemalans and the Haitians if they feel protected.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (9 children)

    You're acting like a million deaths is the same as 100,000 deaths. I'm not saying a mono-polar world is sunshine and roses. I'm saying a multi-polar world is worse. I'm giving you numbers to back that up.

    It's not like either of us is going to change the course of the world. It will likely go in the direction of a multi-polar world because the US is on the decline. You shouldn't be so naive as to think that you should be preparing to celebrate world peace breaking out when there's a multi-polar world. You should be prepared for world war.

    Some the things you listed are just the start of that. Syria was not exactly aligned with the West. It was aligned with Russia and Iran which are pushing for this multi-polar world you seem to think will be better. Half a million people were killed in the Syrian civil war. You should expect more of that in a multi-polar world. Ukraine is another example of Russia trying to become a Great Power in a multi-polar world. It's at least a million dead and counting in that one.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (8 children)

    If you think I expect world peace you didn't read what 8 wrote. But I will die proudly for justice. For mercy. For the truth, and I will not mourn a hegemony that enforces "peace" at the cost of thos values.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (7 children)

    There's a difference between justice and revenge. There is no such thing as revenge against a country. Germany still exists today even after the horrible crimes committed by that country in the past.

    You're being told by Iranian propaganda that you're supposed to hate a country. But hatred doesn't make you strong, it only makes you stupid and gullible. Willing to die just to serve the interests of some psychopath.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (6 children)

    You mean the Lego things? That's the only Iranian anything I've ever seen, but nice try. Catchy tune but didn't change my position on anything.i don't believe in "mowing the Israeli lawn" if that's what you're afraid of. I do however believe in letting Israel suffer the natural consequences of its own decisions, and not protecting them out of some misguided sense of guilt.

    By justice I meant the billionaire parasites and the Epstein class.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (5 children)

    Are you so naive as to think the Lego videos were the only thing they've produced? Iran is behind only China and Russia in terms of internet propaganda operations. It's fairly trivial to count the number of accounts on social media that are active every day, but coincidentally not active at times when the power's out in Iran. They operate troll farms same as China and Russia does.

    How do you think the Lego videos came out of nowhere and got picked up by the algorithms? Upvoted by the troll farms.

    I've seen some strange activity on Lemmy like the exact same content being posted from multiple accounts. Always pro-Iran and anti-Israel.

    You're being incredibly naive if you think they just put out some cute little Lego videos and nothing else. You're the target of an information warfare campaign, and it seems to be working. You need to think a little more about what content you'd expect troll farms in China, Russia, and Iran would be producing.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (4 children)

    You really have no reading comprehension. I said they're the only ones I've seen. Not that that's all that exist. I'm a millenial. I was raised to spot and discard propaganda by all the American corporate advertising that's been jammed down my throat since I was born.

    The only thing that I find offensive about the Iran conflict is that western lives and resources are being wasted fighting people we have no reason to hate. I don't give a damn what happens to Israel. They're not my problem.

    And you can spare me the blood libel of equating Judaism with the crimes of Israel. Watching Jews being abandoned and attacked by their own community for not trying dismiss and ior God forbid justify the crimes of Israel is the most antisemitic thing I've ever seen.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (3 children)

    How cute, you're a millennial and so you think that makes you special. You've been exposed to imagery of a war on the other side of the world and so you think it entitles you to be an asshole to people where you live.

    It may be hard for you to accept, but you're not all that much different from the boomers. Just mindlessly consuming things on the internet that make you angry. Not giving any thought about who is making you angry and for what purpose. Boomers tend to gravitate towards the Russian propaganda, while you gravitate towards Chinese and Iranian propaganda.

    The only thing that I find offensive about the Iran conflict is that western lives and resources are being wasted fighting people we have no reason to hate.

    The Iranian regime is making you hateful. It's easier to convince people of lies than it is to convince people they've been lied to.

    My conversations with younger generations are basically identical to my conversations with boomers. Same tendency towards conspiracy theories, same distrust of any media source that's not conforming to their feelings. Your generation doesn't make you anything special.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    I haven't been exposed to shit. Have you not been listening? I don't feel any particular sympathy for China, in fact I firmly oppose those trying to lean my country towards them. I don't have many sympathies for Iran either, though I do have some sympathy for those who opposed the regime. It's unfortunate they're likely entirely dead now thanks to the dipshit in the White House. I don't appreciate anyone trying to push propaganda on me, whether it's Russia, China, Iran, The US, Google, Microsoft, Open AI or Nvidia, or Israel. I had to learn to breathe underwater in the sea of propaganda and lies from every direction.

    For example, I can see you trying to twist a comment on American corporate bullshit, and the world being a better place when America finally falls apart, because a sick and dying whale thrashing around is more trouble than all the chaos of a multi-polar world, and trying to turn it into a debate on the middle east because you only care about Israel. You're irrelevant and I will forget you tomorrow, just like all the propagandists that came before you.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    I haven’t been exposed to shit. Have you not been listening?

    I don't think you're listening.

    You're on the internet, you've been exposed to foreign propaganda. If you're conscious of it, you'll be able to better spot it.

    If you insist on being so naive and pretend everything that makes you outraged on the internet must be real, you're open to manipulation.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    But that's just it, I am conscious of it. That's why I can safely discard it. That's why ads don't work on me anymore. That's why this conversation doesn't matter in the slightest. Now, I'd appreciate you letting it go because this digression is an obvious attempt to create a tempest in a teapot.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    The Concert of Europe kept the continent relatively peaceful for a century, mainly by ensuring that one nation didn't become another Napoleonic France.

    Post World War II was also relatively peaceful compared to the interwar years, mainly because of the two interventionist powers trying to compete with each other. There was a lot of genocide after World War I.

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    • [–] 32 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Create a division of local government for supervising the police using flock and suddenly the cameras are full of bullet holes.

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    • [–] 53 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    So the only thing that changed is that the area lost their own access to them at the termination date, but the camera companies still collect that data.

    Sounds like the thing to do is take the cameras down

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  • [–] 17 points 4 months ago (6 children)

    Other cities are just covering them in trash bags.

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  • [–] 14 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    I started to write about covering, but I don't know the full sensor suite and I assume they can still collect a bunch of data. That sounds good as a first step, though.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    You know, you could fuck with those too. Those sensors are passive devices. They don’t directly engage with what they are observing. Which means they cannot authenticate anything. There’s no challenge-response.

    So I wonder how hard it would be to flood the blinded cameras with gibberish data.

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    • [+] 49 points 4 months ago (5 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 13 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    Correct. Just competitive authoritarianism at this point.

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  • [+] 13 points 4 months ago (4 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (3 children)

    Did you vote for an oligarch?

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    • [–] 23 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Who cares about democratic decisions or the law in the US, anyway?

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago*

    I mean if we are being real they voted to not pay to renew the contract, and people checked to see if they were still there when the the contract ended.

    No where was it mentioned the date the cameras were required to be removed by, nor what would happen with them.

    A good comparative we have seen in the U.S. would be direct tv. If you cancel the service and the contract ended on June 29th, Direct Tv doesn't come out and remove the dish from your roof that day, they leave it there and it's your problem.

    Cleveland likely needs to start a lawsuit against the company for leaving their products on their property and if they aren't removed by a set "reasonable" date schedule someone from the city to remove them.

    Really I'm sure flock is just hoping to get them to pass a separate contract so they don't have to move them to another city

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    • [–] 42 points 4 months ago (20 children)

    Paintball markers.

    Make Tippmann proud.

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  • [–] 10 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    I once contacted their support cause I sent my "marker" in for warranty, they're like oh yeah unfortunately your chunk of metal is um (probably in their museum) but nothing we can do for you except ship you our top of the line brand new model... Dang you guy's really screwed me.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago

    They were definitely great when I sent them a used ProAm I had bought. Supposed to convert it over to a ProLight version, but I think they sent me a pretty much new marker, didn't recognize any "old" parts on it. Haven't played in years, but still have it stored away.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago*

    Tippmann really are the GOATs of just like... the 'I like to go paintballing everyonce in a while' demographic.

    Yeah, yeah, other people make fancier pantsier shit... T98 is the goddamn AK47 of markers.

    Maybe one of the actual last examples of American manufacturing one could actually be proud of.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (16 children)

    Lasers. You can get rather beefy ones that wreck havoc on any optical sensor.

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  • [–] 13 points 4 months ago (8 children)

    Anyone who needs to be reminded of the damage lasers can cause shouldn't be fucking around with lasers imo. Way too easy to hurt someone.

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  • [–] -1 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    Idk, considering this is America and most peoples alternative would be a gun, lasers seem rather benign.

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  • [–] -5 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    Considering this is America and most people don't actually own guns, your comment seems rather online

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    uh. i live in the bluest of states with the most centrist of liberal friends... and we all own guns. like. alot of them.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    Your anecdote is meaningless when 2/3 of the country doesn't own a gun. Turns out you can't extrapolate a data point like that

    the most centrist of liberal friends

    Personally not something I would be bragging about but you do you I guess

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  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    So your argument is that unless a majority of Americans own guns, you're not even allowed to correlate America with guns at all? What a dumb argument.

    Nobody ever said that the majority of Americans own guns, they said that guns seemed like a more American solution than 1W+ lasers that could easily fry a camera from a distance.

    Unless you have the numbers to suggest that more people have those kinds of lasers than the 100M+ people who have guns, then your point is meaningless.

    At the end of the day this was an unserious suggestion to fire guns at utility poles made in jest towards a country with constitutionally enshrined gun rights and an unhealthy gun culture. Why be this uselessly pedantic about gun ownership statistics that nobody even mentioned or challenged?

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  • [–] -2 points 4 months ago

    You think in duality. You think in labels. Therefore you think ingroup/outgroup, and therefore you do not have developed the empathy skills to fully simulate "outgroup." You can't fully comprehend a person fundamentally different than you because of the möbiation of entanglement - which the Buddhists call defilement - ultimately creates dualistic dichotomy within the topological matrix of your mind, and therefore you will not notice the cognitive dissonance produced by that möbiation.

    uh

    Like, you can't comprehend that there's a person out there that doesn't think like you at all, in both good and bad ways. It's bizarre someone would even suggest these things to you. You scoffed at them, for you did not understand them with your underdeveloped empathy skill. Now go ahead and misinterpret what I just said so I can teach you further.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    I'd be careful with that. Not sure how likely it is that the beam reflects and messes up ur eyes.

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  • [–] -2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    So there is a country with more guns than inhabitants, and they are afraid of a f-ing laser?

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago*

    I mean yes, true, but:

    More dangerous

    More expensive

    Easier to track who purchased/likely owns one

    More complex to use.

    ... if you get caught marking up a camera with paintballs... or frying it with a laser...

    Which person do you think is looking at more potential fines and jail time?

    Whats less expensive and easier to dismantle and throw away or otherwise dispose of?

    A fairly decently powered laser?

    Or a Tippmann 98?

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    • [–] 19 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    LOL! Freedom!!! Right? I visited Cleveland once and only once.

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  • [–] 16 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    That's not totally fair to Cleveland. They terminated the contract, Flock just kept right on recording. The same thing happened in many other cities. When maintenance crews service the lights, they should remove the cameras. Keep them in storage until Flock comes to get them.

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    • [–] 19 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Then people need to start cutting them down

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    • [–] 18 points 4 months ago (9 children)

    I have to wonder if it’s possible to fuck these up with a QR code bumper sticker. They are notoriously poorly designed.

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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    Highly unlikely that any amount of significant processing is happening on-device. Wouldn't be cost effective

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  • [–] 16 points 4 months ago* (6 children)

    You could piss off the company running them though, don't these cameras use AI? Get some QR codes that lead to nepenthies traps full of their own AI generated images of nonsense license plates. Waste their money and poison their training data.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    I have no idea what you're talking about, but I approve. Do...whatever you just said.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    Image element recognition doesn't magically make actions happen, such as following a QR code link. The on-board AI would be more along the lines of pattern recognition such as reading text, license plates, people counts, etc. You could poison it by putting up the license plates but unless someone is actively looking for those plates it'll just be a small bit of metadata attached to the time code. The fact that they're stationary means it'll probably be ignored as well

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