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[–] 133 points 8 months ago (5 children)

There's nothing more American than destroying a Flock camera

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  • [–] 17 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    I was almost gonna say something about killing nazis, but..

    nah, not as american

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  • [–] 18 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

    Killing Nazis is a Soviet thing. In the US, we hire them for important government jobs and fold them into our culture.

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  • [–] 8 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Soviets were allied with nazi Germany untill they turned on them.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    This is such awful history; of course it works because it serves the US, but it does blow me away that otherwise well-meaning people continue to parrot it. You don’t have to be a “tankie” to stop spouting this nonsense.

    You’re referring to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. That was a non-aggression treaty, not an “alliance.” The soviets would be pretty foolish to make an alliance with a country whose fascist genocidal leader, hitler, made clear the inescapable need to invade the soviet union in mein kampf.

    You know who else had already made non-aggression pacts with the Nazis before that? The UK, France, Italy, Poland, Denmark, Estonia, and Latvia. You think they were “allied” with the Nazis?

    Hell the Spanish civil war was a proxy war that the soviets had to pull out of to get ready for invasion (much to the ire of western anarchists forever).

    No, man. The soviet position was pretty damned clear: they needed time to mobilize. You think they were mobilizing to deal with…what, Poland? Everyone knew what was happening between the Nazis and the soviets. They still weren’t ready, and got slaughtered.

    Dislike the Soviet Union for other reasons. There are plenty of good ones. This is nonsense.

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  • [–] 249 points 8 months ago (20 children)

    Who'd have thought that warrant-less mass surveillance that treats every citizen like a potential criminal would eventually hit a tipping point where people began to fight back against it?

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  • [–] 83 points 8 months ago (11 children)

    Along with it incorrectly labeling people as a criminal so cops harass innocent families

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  • [–] 90 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (8 children)

    That's a feature, not a bug.

    The whole point of warrantless mass surveillance where you collect a person's entire life history from birth to death is to be able to go back through that history at any point they become an inconvenient person, whether because they are protesting or are a whistleblower or anything else that endangers the existing power structures. They can and will use your history to fabricate a "reasonable" narrative to turn you into whatever type of criminal they claim you are.

    This is exactly why they're pushing the "antifa is an organized terrorist organization" so hard.

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  • [–] 19 points 8 months ago (7 children)

    And they wonder why people have anxiety disorders

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

    "You'd have anxiety too if you knew that entire government organizations were dedicated to watching your every move while everyone told you that you were crazy."

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  • [–] 25 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    I watched a video last night. Some guy was banned from a casino. All they had was a blurry surveillance camera photo of him.

    The AI tagged some other guy as him. Cops came and arrested him. Said the man's ID must be fake, or he used a fake ID last time because there's no way their high-fallutin AI could be wrong! It was >99% certain!

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  • [–] 46 points 8 months ago (6 children)

    What’s funny is someone at flock is likely seeing this as a business opportunity. “With flock+ we will detect downed cameras and send a technician out to replace them instantly. Subscribe now!”

    Meanwhile, municipalities are less than thrilled about defending throwing money at something literally no taxpayer wants.

    This problem might solve itself really. Let the buisness majors sell the hangman their own nooses.

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  • [–] 24 points 8 months ago (5 children)

    Sadly some people do want flock cameras because they think it's worth it to have a better chance of catching criminals even if our personal liberties get taken away. It's the age old freedom vs safety discussion.

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  • [–] 13 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Maybe a year or so ago, but now those same people are starting to understand the definition of criminal is flexible.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago*

    I agree that the more popular opinion is changing to more freedom, but most of the older millennials and above that I talk to care more about catching criminals because they are more likely to be influenced by Facebook/Nextdoor posts and the mainstream media.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    The thing is though you could have both, at least to a degree. You could have much more transparent policing, the cameras could do processing purely locally and based on publicly accessible lists with listed reasons for why the given plates are captured, you could make it so that the only ones who do get the data are actually thr police and not thr company selling the cameras, etc.

    But that's not in the interest of Flock, or even really the powers that be. The surveillance machine needs feeding, doesn't matter for what cost.

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  • [+] 24 points 8 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 child)
  • [–] 17 points 8 months ago*

    That's because they want to be the ones doing the surveilling. There's loads of disgusting threads you can find online about them discussing ways to disable or hide that their devices are recording so they can surreptitiously record others while claiming they're not. Most often filming vulnerable women.

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    [–] 72 points 8 months ago

    Stealing them is felony grand theft.

    Vandalizing them is a misdemeanor (typically, check your local laws and also don't do crimes).

    If they were all stolen, it's an easy PR 'woe is us, think of the children' win for Flock.

    If there's a bunch of social media posts that are showing chopped down flock cameras just laying on the side of the road then it has better optics from the point of view of 'We don't want country-wide surveillance networks'.

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  • [–] 61 points 8 months ago
    [–] 47 points 8 months ago (23 children)

    Couple dead pixels from a particularly bright light might well make them unable to do their plate reading job efficiently. Might make for an interesting study.

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  • [–] 24 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Lasers tend not to be good for camera sensors, I've heard.

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  • [–] 8 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    I think you'd need pretty high powered lasers to do sufficient damage. I think a class 3 wouldn't be enough, or so I've heard.

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  • [–] 16 points 8 months ago (14 children)

    That might actually work, but it's probably easier and safer to just use a can of spray paint

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  • [–] 15 points 8 months ago (12 children)

    Paint seems easier to detect and remove.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (9 children)

    I doubt the lenses are glass, which means the solvents in spray paint will be, effectively, impossible to clean off without damaging the lens in the process. I doubt they have a maintenance team with such finesse as opposed to one that just replaces the device, just every other US support service.

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  • [–] 19 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    I've suggested paint before, and several people replied that there things have coatings on the lens that resist paint and other chemical attacks.

    It's almost like flock anticipated that people would be pissed off at them...

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago

    Its not unreasonable for an anti-crime camera manufacturer to expect criminals to paint cameras. It's a movie trope. But anyway, sure would be nice to see some compilation of attack attempts to see what sticks

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  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    These things are usually pretty high up. The camera in my neighborhood are about 15ft / 4.5m up. When one goes down, they have to queue up for a truck to be sent out.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    If you can climb a rope, the poles that Flock use are narrow enough to be climbed the same way

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago* (1 child)

    My closest examples are banded to existing street light poles with some ~12ga stainless hose clamps, maybe 10ft up. Private parking lot security. I'm guessing your example (like the thumbnail?) is the choice for a town police dept or housing dev that can't attach to street lights

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  • [–] 8 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    What shall we do with an angle grinder (3x) early in the morning?

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  • [–] 83 points 8 months ago* (7 children)

    Any RAM or storage in those things? That solar panel looks useful.

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  • [–] 42 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    I am tempted to snatch the solar cell for meshtastic nodes. They do look like they are high quality.

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  • [–] 11 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Could you replace the insides with a node?

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  • [–] 15 points 8 months ago

    Get a high vis jacket over a black polo shirt with an iron-on logo, a face mask, and sunglasses. Park out of sight or bike or walk up. You could probably swap most public hardware things with mesh node guts in broad daylight. Just sayin’. This is not advice.

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  • [–] 35 points 8 months ago

    If we won’t defend our 4th Amendment rights the sold out politicians sure as hell won’t

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  • [–] 31 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Ive thought about getting a stick with a cardboard sign that says fuck flock and putting it right in front of all the cameras around me that i know of

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  • [–] 24 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    I could've sworn 2 weeks ago there was an article about people breaking into them to steal the wires and components.

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  • [–] 19 points 8 months ago* (2 children)

    ANYTHING cloud-connected - your doorbell, your security system, even all f**king post-2006 vehicles, regardless of manufacturer - are suspect.

    And are highly likely to be actually spying on you.

    I’ve been working with computers since 1982, on the Internet since 1988, on the Web since 1992, and in the IT industry since 1997. The proportion of average people who don’t realize how much of their stuff is exposing them, and by how much, is frankly astounding. It’s almost 100% of normies who are woefully ignorant. Even IT people who have no clue is in the majority.

    And the security on this stuff that tracks you tends to be - except in rare circumstances - absolute dogshite. Sometimes it comes without any security at all, such as all devices sold having admin creds baked in, or all remote-access credentials being identical and non-user-editable.

    This is why almost all of my stuff is hardlined, I have no IoT devices at all, and the wifi for my family’s devices is physically separate from everything else.

    Don’t get me wrong, as IT for almost three decades I love all the new shinies. But I’m not blind, and I’m not stupid.

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago

    Much later into the career than you but honestly in the same boat. I don't fucking let any of that shit into my house, I don't use any of the big tech companies software, FOSS on everything I own and I honestly have become so disillusioned with mainline consumer tech because it's honestly mostly trash imo. The older I get the more I realize I just want a fucking laptop with a decent keyboard, decent screen and good battery life.

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  • [+] 34 points 8 months ago* (3 children)
  • [–] 8 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    You definitely said non-exhaustive, but yes- this is nowhere near accurate for my local area- thinks there are 5 in my town but there are dozens, at least.

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  • [–] 15 points 8 months ago
    [–] 10 points 8 months ago

    It's every American's duty as an American to do so.

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  • [–] 10 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    But but but...the internet told me that Americans welcome this with open arms! /s

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  • [–] 8 points 8 months ago

    Tech crunch indeed.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    How did Ring avoid controversy?

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Didn't some use a 5000MW laser to fry some of them?

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  • Nooooo! Not property damage noooooooooo!!!!!

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  • [–] 8 points 8 months ago
    [–] 8 points 8 months ago

    hell yeah they are 🤘

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago
    [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    im glad people are fighting back. i hate these things.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago
    [–] 0 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    What is this and why did they put them up in the first place

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