- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
I am standing on the corner of Harris Road and Young Street outside of the Crossroads Business Park in Bakersfield, California, looking up at a Flock surveillance camera bolted high above a traffic signal. On my phone, I am watching myself in real time as the camera records and livestreams me—without any password or login—to the open internet. I wander into the intersection, stare at the camera and wave. On the livestream, I can see myself clearly. Hundreds of miles away, my colleagues are remotely watching me too through the exposed feed.
Flock left livestreams and administrator control panels for at least 60 of its AI-enabled Condor cameras around the country exposed to the open internet, where anyone could watch them, download 30 days worth of video archive, and change settings, see log files, and run diagnostics.
Archive: http://archive.today/IWMKe
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Tear em down
Or like someone in Hacker News comm suggested, use this to track a US Senator for 24 hours, make it all public, then see if they’re still OK with this…
Hacker News Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355548
Without the ycombinator
That’s the first I’ve seen a HN web client. Why does it exist, and what’s the reason against linking directly to Y Combinator?
YCombinator is a VC fund trying to pretend like they’re hacker(tinkering) friendly community, when their business model is boosting their own companies/startups. And companies aren’t hitting those profits with people tinkering.
https://soatok.blog/2025/12/17/the-revolution-will-not-make-the-hacker-news-front-page/
In all, that doesn’t align with the hacker ethos. They’re just capitalizing on what it stands for with a lot of techbro hubris.
The first step of limiting their influence is using a different opensource frontend.
Peter Thiel invested in Flock through Y Combinator
Ycombinator is the Thiel funded Altman led cancer VC that originated the surveillance capitalism
neonazitechbro situation we have today. It spearheaded the death of US democracy.Fuck “Hacker News”, the people that hang around there are in major ways responsible for the shitty state the internet -and the world- is in now.
Might as well use it to track ICE
Or point a very powerful laser at them
I do not consent.
Again? How insecure are these things? I am honestly wondering how easy it would be to get into one and shut down the entire system.
Install a hardware-frying virus on it
I studied coding for a while (and it has been a while since I punched in code), but I never coded a virus. I am hesitant to ask an LLM to do it since I have no idea if it’ll work, and I also need to test it to see if it works first. Not sure if I have any sacrificial electronics to do that.
Overclock them and overheat their guts?
It’s obvious that these guys are fucking amateur hour Techbros, running this shitshow as they have. I don’t doubt they’re underpaying and undertraining the contractors they hire to install these things.
Benn Jordan did a great video on this: https://youtu.be/vU1-uiUlHTo
He co-released a video with 404Media on this new dystopian finding today as well.
A city in the KC Metro just signed a contract with Flock for drone cameras. Fuck that Big Brother bullshit.
I seem to recall an early 00s screed, perhaps by Bruce Schneier or someone of that ilk, suggesting a future in which yes we have surveillance in the public square, but since it’s public, everyone has full access to all the public-place cameras at any time. So you could use it to, say, see around the corner of an alley at night.
That was David Brin in The Transparent Society. He has continued to riff on the theme periodically since then.
Snip their wires, spray paint their lens, or put a hammer on the end of a tall stick. it should be easy to take these things out. Of course don’t do anything or have anything on you that would identify you were in the area at the time of these actions.
Air rifles are pretty cheap too if you can shoot straight.
Honestly? Good. These cameras should either be public or dismantled. I’d like to see them dismantled, but worst case scenario is the current one where they’re selectively used by law enforcement
iirc they weren’t even the first ones to discover this because there was already someone on the blackmarket selling data collected from exposed cameras and endpoints which included PII of entire police departments.
Is there a directory of these cameras? Or are they gonna make me do all the legwork?
Wholly fuck!
deleted by creator
This is ai-tracking is equivalent to having a government agent following you 24/7
You’re not doing anything wrong, so why are you worried the police is trailing your every move? amirite?
It is kinda insane. I mean if someone was standing outside their window with a notepad writing down everything they see and hear people would be creeped the fuck out. But put a camera there and the same asshole is sitting on a computer desk in a different city they are ok with?
My legs get tired
This gotta be bait
For your detractors, I’d like to point out that nothing stated here in untrue.
The problem is feeding 10’s of thousands of video streams, from a single entity, to the police and government. And now they’re using AI to sort the data, which is a powerful use case for AI.
Were we to magically feed all the webcams and doorbells and security cameras to a single source, it would still be a technological mess to sort out. Flock’s system is purpose built to track us.
It’s not a privacy problem.
It is a stalking problem.We’re using the wrong words.
If we end up getting privacy in public, the police will then use it to stop people from filming them in public. That is the long-term goal of setting this in motion.
