6 ms·

Smart streetlights are casting a long shadow

44 points by amanuensis 4y ago

QuadmasterXLII 4y ago
Look. I'm the target audience- a bleeding heart liberal with a long history of wokeness to the point of annoying others on this site, and a deep mistrust of surveilance. Even _I_ an exhausted with arguments like "Citizens of Ancient Rome started to install an oil lamp in front of every villa to prevent tripping or thefts, and an enslaved person would be designated to watch the lamp—lighting was already paired with the notion of control through slavery. "
- jdlshore 4y ago
  No kidding. I got to the same paragraph and closed the tab. The author seriously buried the lede. What exactly is a “smart streetlight” and why is it of concern? I have no idea.
  - mechanical_bear 4y ago
    The same paragraph resulted in immediate closing of the article for me as well. lol I figured if the author was going to be reaching that hard, nothing of value was lost by not reading it.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - SKILNER 4y ago
    Haha, me too, I read that sentence and closed the tab.
- 8bitsrule 4y ago
  The wikipedia article has no references for that Greek/Roman thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_light#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_light#History OTOH 'Link boys' make sense; article explains "In thieves' cant, a linkboy was known as a "Glym Jack" ("glym" meant "light")" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link-boy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link-boy
- username223 4y ago
  The use of "enslaved person" here is pretty laughable given the origin of "slave" as "Slav," because people liked to capture and sell Slavs hundreds of years ago (https://www.etymonline.com/word/slave https://www.etymonline.com/word/slave). Also interesting that the Slavic word for "slave" is the origin of the word "robot."
  - dullcrisp 4y ago
    Huh?
- totetsu 4y ago
  So no discussion about the substance of the article.. just a bunch of people who don't read the conclusions first and scroll backwards up a text like a sensible person .. .. and is it so distasteful or irrelevant when talking about contemporary problems of power and society, to compare to other moments in history?.. isn't this kind of comments a text book example of derailing the online conversation with some tangential point
- everyone 4y ago
  Same for me, this article is just poorly written, and also author's argument is poorly constructed: instead of making one point clearly and tersely, author is attempting to make many bombastic ones. It's unbalanced and hyperbolic and I can't take it seriously. Also, this unnecessarily long and hyperbolic style of writing is exactly what undergrads have been trained to produce in college in the humanities for many years imo.
dec0dedab0de 4y ago
the tldr seems to be that these streetlights are being presented as automated maintenance systems, but are being used by the police for surveillance. This is worrying, I would definitely support a law that said all government owned audio/video/3d/biometric/etc recording devices must be clearly marked as such. I might also be in favor of the same law for privately owned devices that are recording public areas. I didn't really read the whole thing though, it was painful, I wouldn't have made it past the first line but I saw that this thread seemed to be bumped by mods. so I assumed it must be for a reason.
- sulam 4y ago
  What was your signal that it was bumped by mods?
  - Jtsummers 4y ago
    It came out of the second chance pool (go to the bottom, Lists -> Pool). Originally posted yesterday.
  - dec0dedab0de 4y ago
    The original few comments had different timestamps if you clicked on them. That seems to have been updated since, but if you look in the commenters history it still has the old time stamp. It could just be an unrelated glitch, but my guess is that the story was submitted yesterday, never made it past new, and one of the mods thought it was important enough to deserve a boost and reposted it. Or maybe there was a natural dupe unrelated to mods. but then the two threads merged and the previous comments had their timestamps updated. Maybe there was a validation error and it was done manually to have the timestamps on the comments be larger than the timestamp on the story, or maybe its a bug in the merging process. really it was just a guess at hn internals.
    - Jtsummers 4y ago
      It's not a glitch or an error, it's how the second chance pool works. They give them a new time when they get a fresh start. Their timestamp is temporarily updated, and any existing comments get that same timestamp. I think (but have never seen this confirmed) that this is a way to game the existing voting system (posts are ranked by a combination of votes, age, and comment activity). By giving them an artificially "young" age they move up in the ranking to hit the front page, giving them a chance for more votes (to remain on the front page) and comments. After a few hours the original timestamp gets restored. Revisit this tomorrow (certainly) or in a few hours and the times will change.
zoom6628 4y ago
Is here interesting after the first 4 paragraphs. Written by an architect not a tech so that maybe the bias of giving history first. The conclusion is the ability for passive surveillance using multiple vectors and ability of public sector to combine with other data is open to abuse.
rubatuga 4y ago
Definitely feels like Toronto made the right choice by not making themselves into a Google-ified IOT city.
ballenf 4y ago
"The streetlight was originally designed as a surveillance device and has been refined to that end ever since then." I'm sorry, but I don't think any normal definition of "surveillance" would include a lamp that simply allows those in the area to see their surroundings better. Distributed observation by unconnected individuals without record keeping just doesn't seem to come close to a normal idea of "surveillance". And usually there's an element of surreptitiousness to the activity that's implied.
- ip26 4y ago
  Don’t you surveil the road as you drive at night?
  - homonculus1 4y ago
    No. That's an abuse of language. Surveillance is persistent monitoring of an area, person, etc. with a strong implication of record retention and intent to escalate situations which may arise. Looking upon your way as you travel is not surveillance. Putting a light on a night is not surveillance. We are talking about a particular thing, notwithstanding irrelevantly broad archaic or foreign usage.
    - sieabahlpark 4y ago
petermcneeley 4y ago
"Why not? A Sentinel for every man, woman, and child in Zion. That sounds exactly like the thinking of a machine to me." - Morpheus
CosmicShadow 4y ago
Meanwhile this morning I was wondering if I could drop a remote control LED light next to the solar sensor on the street light across the street with a drone and fool it at night into turning off so I can use my telescope without being blinded in my front yard.
- gnarbarian 4y ago
  use a pellet gun
- wakaru44 4y ago
  when I was young, kids in my neighbourhood used those 1 pound laser pointers to shut off the street's lights for fun.
exabrial 4y ago
All right I have a question, why are there all these purple and blue street lights? You can barely see anything with them and they produce a ton of glare
- thepasswordis 4y ago
  They're failing LED lamps. They aren't supposed to be that color.
  - joecool1029 4y ago
    To add more to this, the LEDs rely on phosphors to get white or amber light off. It's one company that had defective phosphors and sold them all around the country. I spotted some of them failing around Scranton, PA. Here's a link on it: https://nightskysantafe.org/blog/nationwide-failure-of-ael-streetlights/ https://nightskysantafe.org/blog/nationwide-failure-of-ael-s...
    - jacobolus 4y ago
      Even the properly functioning "warm white" LED streetlamps are a fucking disaster. They are way too blue, way too bright, spaced too far apart, placed too high up in the air, and not diffused adequately. Orange sodium lamps are so, so, so much better in every way.
      - exabrial 4y ago
        I hate the be the old guy that's yelling at kids on the lawn... but I agree about sodium lamps
Animats 4y ago
Oh, I was thinking that smart streetlights would switch to motion detector mode during slow periods, so they were usually off.
rendaw 4y ago
A couple posts seem to be suggesting these are just normal street lights, or motion activated streetlights. It appears they aren't - they seem to be streetlights with cameras that upload the feed into the cloud. > “This is not a surveillance system—nobody is watching it 24 hours a day,” Surveillance doesn't mean being watched by a human 24 hours a day, nor has it ever. Not only that, but this is misdirection - they're surely storing the data so that if police (or politicians, or advertisers, or criminals) want to they can look it up and watch you 24h a day retroactively.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

44 points by amanuensis 4y ago

Look. I'm the target audience- a bleeding heart liberal with a long history of wokeness to the point of annoying others on this site, and a deep mistrust of surveilance. Even _I_ an exhausted with arguments like "Citizens of Ancient Rome started to install an oil lamp in front of every villa to prevent tripping or thefts, and an enslaved person would be designated to watch the lamp—lighting was already paired with the notion of control through slavery. "

jdlshore 4y ago
No kidding. I got to the same paragraph and closed the tab. The author seriously buried the lede. What exactly is a “smart streetlight” and why is it of concern? I have no idea.
- mechanical_bear 4y ago
  The same paragraph resulted in immediate closing of the article for me as well. lol I figured if the author was going to be reaching that hard, nothing of value was lost by not reading it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- SKILNER 4y ago
  Haha, me too, I read that sentence and closed the tab.
8bitsrule 4y ago
The wikipedia article has no references for that Greek/Roman thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_light#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_light#History OTOH 'Link boys' make sense; article explains "In thieves' cant, a linkboy was known as a "Glym Jack" ("glym" meant "light")" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link-boy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link-boy
username223 4y ago
The use of "enslaved person" here is pretty laughable given the origin of "slave" as "Slav," because people liked to capture and sell Slavs hundreds of years ago (https://www.etymonline.com/word/slave https://www.etymonline.com/word/slave). Also interesting that the Slavic word for "slave" is the origin of the word "robot."
- dullcrisp 4y ago
  Huh?
totetsu 4y ago
So no discussion about the substance of the article.. just a bunch of people who don't read the conclusions first and scroll backwards up a text like a sensible person .. .. and is it so distasteful or irrelevant when talking about contemporary problems of power and society, to compare to other moments in history?.. isn't this kind of comments a text book example of derailing the online conversation with some tangential point
everyone 4y ago
Same for me, this article is just poorly written, and also author's argument is poorly constructed: instead of making one point clearly and tersely, author is attempting to make many bombastic ones. It's unbalanced and hyperbolic and I can't take it seriously. Also, this unnecessarily long and hyperbolic style of writing is exactly what undergrads have been trained to produce in college in the humanities for many years imo.

dec0dedab0de 4y ago

the tldr seems to be that these streetlights are being presented as automated maintenance systems, but are being used by the police for surveillance. This is worrying, I would definitely support a law that said all government owned audio/video/3d/biometric/etc recording devices must be clearly marked as such. I might also be in favor of the same law for privately owned devices that are recording public areas. I didn't really read the whole thing though, it was painful, I wouldn't have made it past the first line but I saw that this thread seemed to be bumped by mods. so I assumed it must be for a reason.

sulam 4y ago
What was your signal that it was bumped by mods?
- Jtsummers 4y ago
  It came out of the second chance pool (go to the bottom, Lists -> Pool). Originally posted yesterday.
- dec0dedab0de 4y ago
  The original few comments had different timestamps if you clicked on them. That seems to have been updated since, but if you look in the commenters history it still has the old time stamp. It could just be an unrelated glitch, but my guess is that the story was submitted yesterday, never made it past new, and one of the mods thought it was important enough to deserve a boost and reposted it. Or maybe there was a natural dupe unrelated to mods. but then the two threads merged and the previous comments had their timestamps updated. Maybe there was a validation error and it was done manually to have the timestamps on the comments be larger than the timestamp on the story, or maybe its a bug in the merging process. really it was just a guess at hn internals.
  - Jtsummers 4y ago
    It's not a glitch or an error, it's how the second chance pool works. They give them a new time when they get a fresh start. Their timestamp is temporarily updated, and any existing comments get that same timestamp. I think (but have never seen this confirmed) that this is a way to game the existing voting system (posts are ranked by a combination of votes, age, and comment activity). By giving them an artificially "young" age they move up in the ranking to hit the front page, giving them a chance for more votes (to remain on the front page) and comments. After a few hours the original timestamp gets restored. Revisit this tomorrow (certainly) or in a few hours and the times will change.

zoom6628 4y ago

Is here interesting after the first 4 paragraphs. Written by an architect not a tech so that maybe the bias of giving history first. The conclusion is the ability for passive surveillance using multiple vectors and ability of public sector to combine with other data is open to abuse.

rubatuga 4y ago

Definitely feels like Toronto made the right choice by not making themselves into a Google-ified IOT city.

ballenf 4y ago

"The streetlight was originally designed as a surveillance device and has been refined to that end ever since then." I'm sorry, but I don't think any normal definition of "surveillance" would include a lamp that simply allows those in the area to see their surroundings better. Distributed observation by unconnected individuals without record keeping just doesn't seem to come close to a normal idea of "surveillance". And usually there's an element of surreptitiousness to the activity that's implied.

ip26 4y ago
Don’t you surveil the road as you drive at night?
- homonculus1 4y ago
  No. That's an abuse of language. Surveillance is persistent monitoring of an area, person, etc. with a strong implication of record retention and intent to escalate situations which may arise. Looking upon your way as you travel is not surveillance. Putting a light on a night is not surveillance. We are talking about a particular thing, notwithstanding irrelevantly broad archaic or foreign usage.
  - sieabahlpark 4y ago

petermcneeley 4y ago

"Why not? A Sentinel for every man, woman, and child in Zion. That sounds exactly like the thinking of a machine to me." - Morpheus

CosmicShadow 4y ago

Meanwhile this morning I was wondering if I could drop a remote control LED light next to the solar sensor on the street light across the street with a drone and fool it at night into turning off so I can use my telescope without being blinded in my front yard.

gnarbarian 4y ago
use a pellet gun
wakaru44 4y ago
when I was young, kids in my neighbourhood used those 1 pound laser pointers to shut off the street's lights for fun.

exabrial 4y ago

All right I have a question, why are there all these purple and blue street lights? You can barely see anything with them and they produce a ton of glare

thepasswordis 4y ago
They're failing LED lamps. They aren't supposed to be that color.
- joecool1029 4y ago
  To add more to this, the LEDs rely on phosphors to get white or amber light off. It's one company that had defective phosphors and sold them all around the country. I spotted some of them failing around Scranton, PA. Here's a link on it: https://nightskysantafe.org/blog/nationwide-failure-of-ael-streetlights/ https://nightskysantafe.org/blog/nationwide-failure-of-ael-s...
  - jacobolus 4y ago
    Even the properly functioning "warm white" LED streetlamps are a fucking disaster. They are way too blue, way too bright, spaced too far apart, placed too high up in the air, and not diffused adequately. Orange sodium lamps are so, so, so much better in every way.
    - exabrial 4y ago
      I hate the be the old guy that's yelling at kids on the lawn... but I agree about sodium lamps

Animats 4y ago

Oh, I was thinking that smart streetlights would switch to motion detector mode during slow periods, so they were usually off.

rendaw 4y ago

A couple posts seem to be suggesting these are just normal street lights, or motion activated streetlights. It appears they aren't - they seem to be streetlights with cameras that upload the feed into the cloud. > “This is not a surveillance system—nobody is watching it 24 hours a day,” Surveillance doesn't mean being watched by a human 24 hours a day, nor has it ever. Not only that, but this is misdirection - they're surely storing the data so that if police (or politicians, or advertisers, or criminals) want to they can look it up and watch you 24h a day retroactively.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]