thaumaturgy

5 ms·

1.
by thaumaturgy 28d ago
I'm not centrist, but I think I can give a reasonably fair account. I was among the first to organize against Flock (YC S17). Flock was accepted into YCombinator's Spring 2017 batch. Prior to YC, Flock CEO Garrett Langley had had
2.
by thaumaturgy 1mo ago
Indeed. Around that era I had a fun little "crashmybrowser.com" toy site that had a few different JS tricks you could click that would absolutely wedge your browser (any browser, at the time). This had come after years of my being
3.
by thaumaturgy 1mo ago
PG&E diverted safety money for profit, bonuses: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/PG-E-diverted-safety-... After choosing profits over maintenance, California utility giant forces blackouts on customers:
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Chairman Hawley Investigates AI-Powered Flock Cameras Amidst Privacy Concerns(hawley.senate.gov)
4 points by thaumaturgy 1mo ago|1 comments
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by thaumaturgy 1mo ago
The letter: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28581149-hawley-floc...
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Wildfires Are Turning Forests in the American West into Shrubland(nytimes.com)
16 points by thaumaturgy 1mo ago|1 comments
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by thaumaturgy 1mo ago
https://archive.ph/9wiv4
8.
by thaumaturgy 2mo ago
This issue is a lot more nuanced than Flock's standard contract with municipalities. You're right that Flock explicitly -- and repeatedly -- states that agencies "own" the data. They make those statements not just in the
9.
by thaumaturgy 2mo ago
I've been daily-driving desktop Linux for close to 15 years, hadn't touched Windows in about 10 years, and then got a job a few months back that requires Microsoft-everything. "Primitive" is the word that comes to mind e
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by thaumaturgy 2mo ago
Those are small potatoes. The obvious big customer is the federal government. Founders Fund was an early investor, Flock's enormous volume of data would be a great fit for Palantir, and as early as 2020, Flock was facilitating direct a
11.
by thaumaturgy 2mo ago
It isn't at all the current status quo. There may be some kind of departmental guideline in some cases, but it's neither required by the software, nor mentioned in the Lexipol Media Group policy template that commonly gets purchas
12.
by thaumaturgy 2mo ago
There is another middle option that I would have liked to see the author discuss: requiring either a case number or a CAD ID, instead of a "search reason". In my conversations with law enforcement (mostly at management level, chie
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by thaumaturgy 2mo ago
You've already gotten a lot of replies about difference in degree, but there's also two differences in kind: one with visibility, and one with capability. A police cruiser sitting at an intersection is visible. People notice it an
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by thaumaturgy 2mo ago
That's cute and technically accurate but doesn't help when having conversations with the public. "Warrantless mass surveillance technology" creates a category into which these and similar devices can be aggregated togeth
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by thaumaturgy 2mo ago
It's almost as if acting solely in one's own self-interest is stupid.
16.
by thaumaturgy 2mo ago
I did this in Oregon earlier this year for legislation that sat at the intersection of tech and surveillance. I am currently a registered lobbyist as a consequence of those efforts (for which I have been paid $0). In my experience, yes, it
17.
by thaumaturgy 3mo ago
Hiiiiii, developer who hates LLMs here. waves I think I've avoided all of the LLM debate thus far, but I figure that some of my actual positions probably ought to be represented in this discussion instead of shadow-boxing. I hate LLM
18.
by thaumaturgy 3mo ago
> A majority eligible of voters chose to re-elect the incumbent. I wish you could have seen the meme-able face I made when I read this. Putin is similarly popular in Russia, China's government is also incredibly popular with its c
19.
by thaumaturgy 3mo ago
There's a glaring lie of omission when Singapore is cited as a "safe society" in a surveillance context without also mentioning that those same surveillance systems are used to aggressively suppress political dissent ( https:
20.
by thaumaturgy 3mo ago
Every time someone repeats this, they are telling a self-fulfilling story. I got a law passed -- a state law, about ALPRs, establishing a list of restrictions on them. I didn't do it alone, I had a lot of really important help, includi
21.
by thaumaturgy 3mo ago
Salem, Oregon, assembled its own using OpenALPR and an on-prem server. There are plenty of reasonable criticisms of that approach too, but it's currently the farthest thing from Flock on the municipal mass-surveillance tech scale bar t
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by thaumaturgy 3mo ago
The earliest versions of MacOS, all the way up through 9, had a ROM call at 0xA9F4 which was labeled `_exitToShell`. In the days before pre-emptive multitasking, this instruction's job was to force the current application to close and
23.
by thaumaturgy 3mo ago
I kind of want to be able to see a Flock (YC S17)-related thread on HN without feeling obligated to participate, but, alas. Just for background: I was one of the ringleaders of a community effort that successfully kicked Flock out of Eugene
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by thaumaturgy 4mo ago
I am a Hetzner customer. I was in the middle of migrating infrastructure from DigitalOcean to Hetzner, most of all because DO's i/o on their droplets has been abysmal for a long time now. Hetzner's latest price increase doubl
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by thaumaturgy 5mo ago
You may also like Information Graphics : https://www.taschen.com/en/books/graphic-design/44653/inform...
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by thaumaturgy 5mo ago
I have no insight into this particular case/incident, but I do have to deal with a lot of http traffic management, and I've lately been seeing Cloudflare IPs show up a lot more often in my logs for probes and nuisances, and not be
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by thaumaturgy 5mo ago
I'm not anyone you would know, so this probably isn't worth a whole lot, but you're one of my favorite people (in the set of people I'm not personally familiar with). I really appreciated everything you did for young stu
28.
by thaumaturgy 6mo ago
~jedberg is talking about a hypothetical law that would apply to ALPR data. In reply, you said "The information itself is evidence, used in active criminal investigations." ("The information" here referring to ALPR data.
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by thaumaturgy 6mo ago
The information is not in any way restricted to use in active criminal investigations, and further, has been found to frequently be used for a variety of other purposes. It's a bit like saying pornography is used in the study of human
30.
by thaumaturgy 6mo ago
Except that Flock very clearly benefits financially from having direct access to this data: owning (and in their own documentation, they very clearly do own it) a network of 80,000 surveillance devices across the country, and owning every

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