7 ms·
Flock and Cyble Inc. weaponize “cybercrime” takedowns to silence critics
- _a9 10mo agoPart 2: Flock and Cyble Inc. Continue to File False Notices https://haveibeenflocked.com/news/cyble-part2 https://haveibeenflocked.com/news/cyble-part2
- therobots927 10mo agoAbsolutely unacceptable behavior. Wild that Americans are so distracted by pointless social issues that they haven’t even realized the ruling elite are treating them like cattle. Absolutely pathetic.
- westmeal 10mo agoThe pointless social issues are manufactured specifically in order to distract Americans from the fact they are being treated like cattle.
- ares623 10mo agoAnd they/we absolutely love the distraction
- therobots927 10mo agoBecause our educational system has been dismantled
- throwaway0xT 10mo agoCloudflare outage on Dec. 5 on remote servers were /user/ parsing errors in HTTP. Flock does this well in terms of bios spinlock releases, whereas a secure measure is stress-testing network traffic.
- nerdponx 9mo agoWhich is precisely part of the strategy to keep everyone distracted and confused.
- anjel 10mo agoCattle is as Cattle does
- Psillisp 10mo agoMoooo
- chii 10mo ago> are manufactured specifically the fact that these majority do accept the distraction points to lack of intelligence and discipline in critical thinking and future planning. The populous has half the blame - not just those who do these manufacturing of distractions.
- themafia 10mo agoThat's an easy trap to fall in. This industry costs trillions every year to operate for a reason. The people never really stood a chance. It's not as if school educated them to live in the world we actually inhabit.
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago> Wild that Americans are so distracted There is a tonne of civic action against Flock, specifically, in the works, in many cases with successful results.
- voidfunc 10mo agoAmerica is huge and there's a lot of exceptionally stupid people especially in the South and Midwest. Not much I can do about that over here in the coastal Northeast.
- hermannj314 10mo agoI was offended and then I defined "exceptionally stupid" a few ways and all the statistics support this claim. I'm still offended though. Fucking a lot of smart people in Mass., Vermont, Conn., New York, Maryland, DC.
- matthewfcarlson 10mo agoI’m pretty sure anywhere there’s a lot of people (the northeast of the US for example) you’re going to find a lot of smart people.
- hermannj314 10mo agoPeople with advanced degrees accumulate in those specific states, despite not significantly different rates of HS graduation from other states. Smart people, as measured by educational attainment, live in the NE coastal states and exceptionally stupid people (by the same metric) live in the South and Midwest. As a guy from Iowa, I was offended, but humbled by the reality of the numbers.
- faidit 10mo agoAll things considered, I don't think advanced degrees necessarily correlate with intelligence. It's often just a marker of socioeconomic privilege. A Carnegie Mellon study found that people with PhDs were more likely than any other educational attainment level to be against the Covid-19 vaccine: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.20.21260795v1.full.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.20.21260795v... (page 17) Gallup polls during the Vietnam War found that higher-educated Americans were more likely to be pro-war while the most anti-war group were those with only a grade school education: https://afterthewarproject.org/files/original/3e5e5a47a152039640da9e900d5e8f296fb5b18d.pdf https://afterthewarproject.org/files/original/3e5e5a47a15203... (page 19 of the PDF, page 38 of the document)
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 10mo agoLike what?
- kotaKat 10mo agoFlock's CEO basically went to the public and said "you all have phones" like the Blizzard people. “If (people are) worried about privacy, a license plate reader is the dumbest way to do surveillance. You have a cell phone. A cell phone knows your exact location at all times,” he said. “If you don’t trust law enforcement to do their job, that’s actually what you’re concerned about, and I’m not going to help people get over that.” Just means I have to have a Faraday bag alongside my polesaw and high-powered laser. I can compete with your shitty outdated Android SoM and a shitty Raspberry Pi webcam in an enclosure.
- ProllyInfamous 10mo agoI'm an American blue collar that does NOT carry a cell phone. Datapoint: one.
- jjulius 10mo agoAnd yet... many communities are in the process of ending their contracts and lawsuits are being filed against them?
- CamperBob2 10mo agoThis is a Y Combinator company? https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety dang/tomhow, does Y Combinator have a code of ethics that comes into play when one of your funding recipients does something unethical and/or illegal like this?
- edm0nd 10mo agoyeah their code of ethics is to laugh all the way to the bank and be untouchable. nothing will happen to them from YC.
- avaer 10mo agoOne long-standing code is that they moderate YC companies less on HN, allowing criticisms like yours to stand: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320816 To HN's credit I haven't seen this rule violated. For example I wouldn't have known it was a YC company if not for your comment.
- TimorousBestie 10mo ago> One long-standing code is that they moderate YC companies less on HN, allowing criticisms like yours to stand: Well, that’s what dang says he does. There’s no transparency and no publicly available data that would demonstrate adherence to the rule. > To HN's credit I haven't seen this rule violated. I don’t think you’d observe anything different if it were violated.
- squigz 10mo ago> I don’t think you’d observe anything different if it were violated. If the mods were in the practice of moderating like this, yes, it would almost certainly be noticed by someone whose post/comment got deleted. HN, like every other community on the Internet, relies on trust between the users and mods. If you don't trust them, you can always leave.
- 10mo ago
- defrost 10mo agoRelated: Flock Said It Does Not Use Dark Web Data. Code Analysis Tells a Different Story - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46341674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46341674
- latentpot 10mo agoCyble, with a large team of dark Web researchers based out of India cover that while giving flock plausible deniability
- tamimio 10mo agoRemember when Zuck called his fellow students at harvard who used facebook “Dumb fucks”? The US is accelerating into techno-authoritarianism, and all of these tech companies adopted “companies over countries” motto since the start, it’s not a surprise now.
- sneak 10mo agoit’s important to contextualize that quote: he called them dumbfucks specifically because they trusted him with their data.
- Aeglaecia 10mo agoit is fairly evident that contextualisation is paramount in objectively assessing a situation ... in the context of having god like power over billions , it seems entirely moot to debate the merits of why such a god like individual would label his subjects as idiots ...
- tamimio 10mo agoThe context is given, it’s all about users’ data. facebook, google, plantir, flock, you name it, the end goal is to harvest data as much as possible to sell it, profile the individuals, manipulate the public opinion (facebook did a mood-manipulation “experiment” back in 2012, you can only imagine now in the era of social media dependency and AI), invade people’s privacy, among many other things. Now add to that mix a mandatory digital ID, and let’s hear what these CEOs will call the public behind closed doors, I’m sure it’s worse than “dumb fucks”. Fun fact: Zuck early days business card printed with “I’M THE CEO, BITCH.”
- anal_reactor 10mo agoIf you operate in a world where your goal is to scam others then anyone displaying any amount of trust is obviously a dumb fuck.
- bongodongobob 10mo agoIn the sense that the US has been anti-intellectualist for decades, I'm kind of ok with it. All the kids who fucked around in school and picked on the nerds for just existing are kind of getting their comeuppance. It's definitely cut off your nose to spite your face type shit, but does give me a little bit of joy. "You stuffed me in a locker and destroyed my social life because I read a book at lunch. I'm going to automate your job away and help billionaires make sure you'll never rise out of poverty."
- greyface- 10mo agoIf Flock truly believed that the domain name infringes on their trademark, they would file an ICANN UDRP complaint instead of Cloudflare and Hetzner abuse reports. But they don't, because the former would require them to perjure themselves, and the latter just requires them to lie to a hosting company.
- CalChris 10mo agoI wonder if Flock + Cyble can be sued for fraud. There are 5 elements in a fraud: Misrepresentation of Fact Knowledge of Falsity Intent to Induce Reliance Justifiable Reliance Resulting Damages
- themafia 10mo agoCloudflare would have to bring that suit since they were the ones defrauded. The site owners probably can't sue Cloudflare because of their contract. So the site owners probably have to go basic "tortious interference" and be ready to show actual damages.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- CalChris 10mo agoNo, if the site owners have been harmed by Flock + Cyble knowingly filing a false takedown notice then they can sue Flock + Cyble. If Cloudflare's reputation has also been harmed then they could sue Flock + Cyble as well.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- RobotToaster 10mo ago> Cloudflare would have to bring that suit At first that seems pretty unlikely, but I could see them wanting to nip this in the bud so it doesn't become more common.
- citizenkeen 10mo agoIs this not libel?
- dawnerd 10mo agoProblem is they have way more money to fight and that’s basically their whole playbook. I was caught up in a fraudulent libel claim that had to settle* back in the Twitter days. When those companies want to come after you, it’s really hard to fight back. * no money was exchanged just some guarantees to not disclose their client and remove tweets.
- hibf 10mo agoThey don't actually allege anything. They add in the keywords without going so far as to say "this website is doing X." It's enough to trip the keyword filters at Cloudflare and other hosting providers and reverse the burden of proof.
- cosmicgadget 10mo ago> With the new Divinity game in the works, I decided to do a run as Gale in BG3. I don't support this decision but I respect it. Curious what the Cloudflare HNers have to say about this debacle.
- hibf 10mo agoCan't be less than what support has had to say up until now.
- seanhunter 10mo agoEveryone knows that it all hinges on why they’re being Gale. If they’re doing it so they can romance Shadowheart then it’s permissable.
- badgersnake 10mo agoYou can romance Shadowheart as Laezel if you want and they hate each other at the start of the game. Don’t need Gale for that. You can “win” in act 1 with Gale though.
- softwaredoug 10mo agoMy city just ended our pilot Flock program. I hope others do the same. But I think the real issue with Flock will be private security. Random Home Depot parking lots, etc. https://www.29news.com/2025/12/17/charlottesville-ends-flock-camera-pilot-program-over-privacy-concerns/?outputType=amp https://www.29news.com/2025/12/17/charlottesville-ends-flock...
- rrix2 10mo agoThe local credit union in Eugene had installed Flock cams at the entrances to all their branches. They took em down after only a few of our community members began protests out front a few branches and emailing with the CU's leadership before our city terminated our contract and removed the cams
- overfeed 10mo ago> My city just ended our pilot Flock program. I hope others do the same. If someone would like to engage in grassroots activism on this, may I suggest the perfect domain: getTheFlockOutOfMyCity.com
- LostMyLogin 10mo agoMy town in Colorado just did the same. Pretty happy with the result.
- Kim_Bruning 10mo agoIf these folks get in trouble, they might try hosting with Freedom.nl . It's +/- the old xs4all crew, and they might be in for some more fun in the 21st century.
- VladVladikoff 10mo ago> The site’s only input fields accept license plate numbers (which are hashed client-side before transmission and cannot be harvested) License plates are trivially short, hashing them accomplishes no additional level of privacy if the hashes could be bruted in seconds on an antique GPU.
- hibf 10mo agoTechnically true. Flock could present an unfounded argument that I might be brute-forcing my own security and privacy measures. I think it'd sound pretty dumb.
- whatshisface 10mo agoIf the security depends on the person it's supposed to be secure against not trying to break it...
- VladVladikoff 9mo agoWhat about doing it all client side? Or perhaps let the user type one or two characters then fetch that from the server for all matches and do the remaining matching client side. There are ways you could truly isolate yourself from the PII.
- TheDong 10mo agoBeing able to say "Our server never sees user-input license plate numbers", even though from a technical perspective the hash is just as identifiable, does have value. Even though it offers no additional privacy, it does let non-technically-minded users and so on feel safer, and that's valuable.
- 63stack 10mo agoThe value is being able to mislead your users
- EdwardDiego 10mo ago
- manbart 10mo agoFlock is trying their best to usher in dystopia
- Rakshath_1 10mo ago[dead]