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Imagine all the false positives from children screaming during play.
Also, fuck this dystopian bullshit.
Anyone else like to watch horror movies with the windows open and the volume turned up?
Totally unrelated of course but people should try it, apparently it can create quite an immersive spectacle.
Flock’s Gunshot Detection Microphones Will Start Listening for
Human Voices
Spanish
Flock "Safety" read Orwell's 1984 and decided to be the infrastructure supplier for Big Brother
I wonder what the resonant frequency of those mics could be? Wonder how loud it would have to be to ruin a mic?
I can think of another company with microphones all over the place, mostly in living rooms and attached to front doors.
This will exclusively have the effect of deploying police to the location of mentally I'll homeless people, making things worse.
Allegedly, the physical construction of the gunshot mics don't make them particularly suitable to listening to conversations on the street. Like a lot of flock marketing and products, it is over promising but it can still be useful for detecting "unrest". So think less "it will hear you say 'fuck trump"" and more "it will hear a crowd of people in a starbucks realizing how fucked everything is" or "it will hear someone yell out a warning that ICE is in the area".
What is inevitable and will actually cover the individual will be the drone detection mics. The actual act of hearing a Terrorist Drone is REALLY easy from a technical standpoint and is a very similar concept to the gun shot detectors but have MUCH more sensitive mics.
Drones have a very specific sound that isn't similar to anything else, so I'd imagine picking up a drone would be much simpler than someone in distress.
Yeah. It is a shockingly easy problem to solve. The point is more what the hardware is designed to listen for.
Drones? A quadrotor big enough to handle a... paint balloon is not that big. That is why so many dumbass russians don't hear it until it is too late in Ukraine. So you need a fairly sensitive mic and the hardware to filter through all the background noise.
Gunshots? You COULD rig something up to do similar so you can hear a gunshot from a mile away but there really isn't a point since that wouldn't be actionable data for the real customers (cowardly cops who want to run the other way). And you want to sell a LOT of these because triangulation obviously means square mile because said customers don't understand trigonometry. So you want to focus on loud noises and be able to distinguish a gunshot from a car backfiring from fireworks. So relatively low sensitivity mics and hardware more geared towards that.
Which, when you are re-purposing them for surveillance, are very different tools.
So what ways could these devices be disabled with the minimum amount of risk? I suspect a strong enough laser could damage the image sensor. But what about the microphones?
Because I highly doubt we can count on the law to protect us from this.
Should be fun flooding these with false positives and adversarial noise.
They are already well known for false positives on gunshots.
My city just ended their contract with our shot spotter company because it hasn't made anyone safer but has resulted in a ton of mistaken dispatches. People know they can fire a gun and simply walk away, it'll be 10, 20 minutes before police roll by. Who cares?
- Get an old MP3 player. And speakers.
- Grab the audio from horror, action, gangster, etc movies.
- Make audio files with long periods (hours) of silence punctuated with about 2 minutes of screams and gunshots here and there.
- Go to the location of a Flock microphone with the MP3 player loaded with audio files, speakers, and a trowel.
- Bury the whole thing shallow and hit play.
- Flock starts using Content ID match to filter out false positives from all known recorded media
Then use your own voice and gun to make sure Content ID doesn't work.
Then Flock goes deaf any time someone drives up with moderately loud music playing on their car stereo.
Play a game with complex audio simulation and go wild for a bit. May not be 100 percent but it may be variable enough to cause it. If you can't find a game with such a thing, look at the Fallout NV and 4 Nexus modders are batshit.
"Keep the change, ya filthy animal!"
(Old timey Thompson pew pew pew sounds)
Great, we're gonna go from idiots blasting heavy bass, to idiots blasting anime porn sound tracks around the neighborhood.
Flock Safety, the police technology company most notable for their extensive network of automated license plate readers spread throughout the United States, is rolling out a new and troubling product that may create headaches for the cities that adopt it: detection of “human distress” via audio. As part of their suite of technologies, Flock has been pushing Raven, their version of acoustic gunshot detection. These devices capture sounds in public places and use machine learning to try to identify gunshots and then alert police—but EFF has long warned that they are also high powered microphones parked above densely-populated city streets. Cities now have one more reason to follow the lead of many other municipalities and cancel their Flock contracts, before this new feature causes civil liberties harms to residents and headaches for cities.
What do these devices look like? I'm happy to just put really loud white noise machines right next to them.
Personal white noise generators?
You misspelled flamethrowers.
oh look, the thing they told us would never happen when this shit was installed
the creep is real.
thought for the day: is thin wedge always a fallacy when it's always fucking coming true?
Cities now have one more reason to follow the lead of many other municipalities and cancel their Flock contracts
If it's legal to install that stuff at all, it's unlikely to stay left up to the cities. You have to expect that if someone (e.g. federal govt) wants it deployed, it will go in everywhere whether the cities want it or not.
Cancelling contracts at the local level is useless in the long run. The stuff has to be banned by legislation.
That’s just incorrect, the majority of these are run by local governments.
has to be banned by legislation
The list of things that the legislature needs to do is a mile high, but things will only get worse and not better as long as fascists are running the show.
Here’s a fun trick: If you have N microphones on an area you can filter the audio to N -1 voices using just linear algebra, no AI.
It’s a very cool trick.
Now imagine what happens when you add AI and blanket an area.
Wait, how? Got a link pls?
I had to do a bit of research to remind myself. We did this in university as an exercise, so it was a while ago.
Basically with N signals (speakers) and M mixes (microphones). When M > N then you can create an MxN matrix and solve it numerically, and we were able to do that pretty easily. We also did the case where M=N as a demo and we used ICA for that with either projection pursuit or SVD, I can't remember.
You can read more about this on Wikipedia:
- Blind Source Separation
- Independent Component Analysis
- The exercise we did was a lot like this tutorial https://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.2986
With modern models this would be even easier with fewer microphones, and there's been a lot of time and money between when these methods were devised and now.
Does this mean the people playing their crappy music at full blast on speakers as they walk are now providing a public service?
It's to detect ICE agents sobs when their feelings get hurt, so military can be deployed in the area



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