Since they are operating illegally, does that mean we can just take them? They have RAM.
And, I believe, those models have TPUs.
And huge amounts of copper.
I don’t think they’re operating illegally. It’s just the city is no longer paying them.
And who did Flock pay for the land usage to install the cameras?
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”.
I bet if I went out and did it they would find a way to make it illegal really quick.
They don’t pay, the customer pays them.
Honestly probably more than my system has now.
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.
Don’t forget about might makes right. What, you didn’t want to live in a world where big burly dudes with guns protecting wealthy pedophiles tell you what to do?
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.
This feels a lot like the collapse of the USSR. Like, yeah, shit wasn’t necessarily great before, but what comes after is worse.
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.
I don’t much like hypotheses that require certain size groups of people.
But I guess that’s just the instability of the dictator applied to the entire world.
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”?
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.
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.
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.
You are equating the genocide of Palestinians, something that has been going on for decades, to proxy wars between super powers.
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.
So if it’s only millions of non-white people dying that means the world is “stable”?
I use stable as a relative term, but it isn’t like the number of non-white people dying goes down during periods of instability.
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?
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
Other cities are just covering them in trash bags.
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.
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.
People should start snipping wires. Bags only stop visual surveillance
That city, Dayton, also being in Ohio strangely.
Preferably after applying an angle grinder.
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Correct. Just competitive authoritarianism at this point.
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Did you vote for an oligarch?
No, we just vote for which person the oligarchs buy and own.
So it’s more of an electoral puppet show?
The electoral college did.
Create a division of local government for supervising the police using flock and suddenly the cameras are full of bullet holes.
I like the way you think pardner
Yeah id say he’s onto something except police would just get the footage deleted then say its all good - they all investigated themselves.
Typical. I grew up in Cleveland (not born there, I didn’t come from that shallow, murky gene pool), and it truly sucks, and one of the very worst things are the cops. They are literally the worst cops in the nation.
This is the city where three teen girls went missing for a decade. Turned out they were kept hostage in a house directly NEXT DOOR to one of the girls’ homes. They had interviewed EVERYBODY in the neighborhood, EXCEPT the weird single guy who lived right next door. After a decade of being raped regularly, one of the girls escaped and they all got free, no thanks to the cops.
It’s also where a psychopathic serial killer operated openly in a neighborhood, killing women and burying some of them in his backyard. Others just decomposed in his house. The neighbors complained about the stench for years, and also the blood-curdling screams, and the fact that he would try to grab women off the sidewalk in front and drag them into his house. Finally, a naked bloody woman burst out of the house screaming, and the cops FINALLY checked the guy out and found bodies everywhere.
Cleveland cops (and ALL the surrounding suburbs) are as bad as cops get in this country, and it was one of the primary reasons I left, along with the fact that Clevelanders tend to be pretty dumb, since all the smart ones leave.
And the weather really sucks, too.
Not to mention the Cuyahoga river that sometimes just happens to catch on fucking fire from pollution. I seriously think that pollution fucks with everyone’s brains over there but here I am on the east coast where the East River, Charles River and the run off systems from Maine all empty into the areas some ¼ mile to a mile away from drinking water treatment facilities so… What the fuck right.
We’re all getting retarded drinking the water and then we can’t escape microplastics or cadmium, lead, mercury and chlorine forever.
To be fair the Cuyahoga river burned once since 1969 and that was in 2020 when a tanker car got derailed so spilled fuel into the river (more info: https://all-geo.org/highlyallochthonous/2020/08/the-cuyahoga-river-burned-today-for-the-first-time-in-51-years-heres-what-we-can-learn-from-it/)
Honestly the 1969 fire spurred the creation of the EPA and a lot of new regulations on pollution (thankfully, except now our current admin wants to roll stuff back and not enforce the law so … I guess that sucks…)
The 2020 incident was just a freak accident thing and before 1969 it has caught fire like 10 times already, it’s crazy what people are willing to put up with. At the end of the day though, the river has recovered some and there are a number of fish and wildlife that live in it - it goes to show we can do better but we often choose not to.
And by we I mean large corporations, the government, and the billionaires.
Great clarification. I had moved by 2020, so I wasn’t there for that one, but as you outlined, that was a unique incident, not caused by the river being so polluted that it could actually BURN!. And most people don’t know that that last big burn was only the latest in a long series of river fires.
I remember driving past the area of The Flats where the factories were, and EVERYTHING was black, the buildings, the equipment, the very ground. There was nothing green at all. It looked like another planet.
The Cuyahoga River hasn’t caught fire in over 50 years. That was because of all the factories along the river that dumped their pollution in it for decades.
But that ended years ago, when all those factories went out of business, and Cleveland became the economically and culturally stagnant shithole that I grew up in.
Yeah the middle of America got so fucked over… Now they want to start nuclear power plants all over the country.
Tldr - nuclear power is awesome and USA electric grid is fucked and so are we if someone wants to attack it.
Nuclear power plants are actually awesome though, they’re one of the most efficient and safest forms of electricity generation especially when built and managed properly.
We’ve learned a lot since five mile island.
I think we should be pushing for more nuclear as a way to expand the power grid capacity and reliability. Of course other renewable energy systems as well, like wind and (especially) solar should be proceeding to be built up too while we decrease reliance on coal/oil/natural gas for electricity production.
It’s wild how backwards the Trump admin is on all of that. It’s also getting to the point where even non subsidized it just makes more sense to use wind or solar because it’s as cheap or cheaper than traditional fossil fuels now.
Personally, I’m of the opinion that if we can spend gobs of money killing children halfway around the world we have the money to fix our infrastructure at home. Like, regardless of what I said above, our electrical grid is so vulnerable to even amateur hour attacks never mind a sophisticated state actor like China or Iran. You could blow up idk … 20 or less substations and probably knock most of our grid out for weeks and that’s if you’re not using the backdoor software that was installed coupled with poor network security to just remotely fuck our shit up.
We’ll learn a real hard lesson about all that sooner or later at this rate. You can’t just keep destroying the soft power and goodwill your nation has built up over 100 years and piss off a bunch of powerful countries and expect there to not be consequences.
I am also for nuclear. It’s just a giant steam power plant with radio active rods. I’m thinking about the Ohio River being polluted with radioactivity as a worst case scenario.
Yes we’d certainly need proper oversight and responsible disposal of radioactive materials. It’s true, that can be problematic but I think the problems from that are smaller and easier to solve than the problems from fracking/oil well drilling/coal mining etc destructive practices for fuel.
I’m sure there’s been a lot of debate about it over the years.
But yeah nuclear power is pretty cool tech.
I think the problems from that are smaller and easier to solve than the problems from fracking/oil well drilling/coal mining etc destructive practices for fuel.
No. Way more destructive. Fracking for oil and drilling can make a site uninhabitable for like 5 years and it can be cleaned effectively in a minimum of like a month.
Nuclear Damage can last from 112 years to up to 20,000 years. You can decontaminate an area effectively on 2 to 7 years but the waste water of dumped wouldn’t be good for anything.
Some colleges have micro nuclear power plants so it’s not like they’re not used.
Its a gamble that needs a lot of competence to make it future proof.
But… But I have it on good authority that Cleveland rocks!
I’ve quite enjoyed my time in Cleveland, but it was more recently
That’s because you could leave.
It is a good music town, I’ll give it that. GREAT art museum, too, and the Metroparks is a secret treasure. It’s a good sports town, too, but I don’t care about sports at all.
Politically, though, all of Ohio is a hellhole.
Who cares about democratic decisions or the law in the US, anyway?
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
I have to wonder if it’s possible to fuck these up with a QR code bumper sticker. They are notoriously poorly designed.
Highly unlikely that any amount of significant processing is happening on-device. Wouldn’t be cost effective
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.
I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I approve. Do…whatever you just said.
Nepenthies is a type of webpage that generates an endless chain of links and pages to bait in content scrapers and feed them garbage that poisons their training data.
Nice, do lots of that.
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
Image recognition AI has been found to be vulnerable to prompt injection via text present in the image.
For LLMs, sure, but there’s no way they’re running LLMs on-device. Just classic AI models at the most
LOL! Freedom!!! Right? I visited Cleveland once and only once.
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.
They could run an add in the newspaper. “Free cameras, first come, first serve”. They would be down in 20 minutes.
Excellent. That would probably be impressively effective
Then people need to start cutting them down
Most people dont know the cameras contain about $80 worth of copper and gold.
This is America, the people serve the government.
The government wants its cameras on to monitor the inmates, who’s going to stop them?
Again, deflock shows where they are. Just start mobbing them and fucking them up, sledge hammers go a long way.
Cordless angle grinders work better. The UK has been fighting back for ages
RIP. THEM. OUT.
the police have no recourse other then braking the law themselves arresting you if you do.
and also those police are braking the law by useing those devices.
people have been taking down the cameras itself.
It’s not vandalism to put a nice opaque piece of cardboard on a solar panel. And no one seems to know how the camera got like that between the time the batteries died and when the technicians found it.
You know, I like to go fishing. I bring my long fishing pole, and some black plastic bags to contain any trash I happen to see along the way. I like to carry the trash bag fed through the eyelet at the top of my fishing pole. Now, if that bag happens to fall over the top of a flock camera while I’m walking past, enveloping it and drawing the drawstring tight around it, there’s a fair chance I won’t notice.
If course, I dress for chilly weather with a flappy hat to cover my ears, sunglasses to protect from sun glare, and a covid mask, just to be safe. Of course I never bring my mobile phone when I go fishing. I never seem to catch anything anyway.
A law should be passed, where people who blind a Palantir cannot be prosecuted.
