• fiat_lux@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    It’s a wonder people haven’t started throwing water balloons filled with mud and flour at the cameras. Perhaps he should be grateful that’s not a trend?

    • phutatorius@lemmy.zip
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      6 hours ago

      I think a drone with a remotely-actuated spray can of black paint would be more fun. Come down from above so nothing is caught by the camera. Control it by a fiber link so that there’s no signal to identify the drone.

      Funny you should ask, yeah, I was discussing this the other day with some fellow techies down the pub.

      • bluesheep@sh.itjust.works
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        6 hours ago

        I would’ve guessed that wireless would be the way to go since a fiber cable is quite literally a physical trace to your position. Are drones that easily identified by their wireless signal?

        • Tiger_Man_@szmer.info
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          2 hours ago

          setting up 2 recievers to calculate the signal source position is significantly easier than tracing a cable as thick as spider’s web

          • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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            53 minutes ago

            So don’t do it from your house, go to a remote, unrelated location. By the time they get the video, analyze it, track back the signal, the camera is painted, and you’re long gone.

            Of course there may be cameras near that remote, unrelated location, so be careful of anything identifying, like a vehicle or your face.

  • youmaynotknow@lemmy.zip
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    20 hours ago

    Can someone explain how this makes any sense? They were ordered legally to deactivate and remove, unilaterally decide to put them back up and reactivate, the authorities (whomever those are) resort to covering them instead of removing and destroying them because “removing them is illegal”?

    What the actual fuck is this?

    • 7101334@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      My guess (emphasis “guess”) is either some contractual bullshit or a result of state law superseding local law.

      • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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        11 minutes ago

        This is why when my city installed them (with a 3-2 vote from Council) they required them to all be installed in the Right-of-Way, which gives the city more authority to remove them if the contract is terminated (which it likely will be soon).

  • NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip
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    20 hours ago

    Does he care to explain why they leave town when cities or states simply tell them that all the data they collect becomes public domain?

    Oh, so they aren’t providing a public service, the only thing they care about is selling my data and keeping it secret.

  • blitzen@lemmy.ml
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    23 hours ago

    I used deflock to look for cameras around me; I CANNOT leave my city limits by car without passing by a Flock camera.

    • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      A question to nobody in particular: would it be possible to make license plate covers that are made out of the same material as those anti-facial recognition glasses?

      • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
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        7 hours ago

        It’s not just license plate readers anymore. They have cameras that perform facial recognition and other identifying recognition.

        Your car is in many ways uniquely identifiable by its markings and its model that vehicle with many pictures of it and that license plate are already in a database. If you have stickers, if you have big dents or additions and changes from the base model of your vehicle than you are quite identifiable within a particular geographical area depending on the urban density.

      • blitzen@lemmy.ml
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        11 hours ago

        There’s YouTube video out there, the name escapes at the moment, where he figures out how to basically insert “noise” over his license plate that can lead to flock cameras not recognizing it. Fascinating stuff.

        Two big issues IMO. 1) maybe it fools cameras now, but who knows if it continues to. 2) it’s illegal to cover your plate, probably doubly with the intent to obfuscate. My solution is bike rack. “Oops, didn’t meant to cover my plate” is good plausible deniability.

        • Shortstack@reddthat.com
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          8 hours ago

          It’s Benn Jordan

          Also, the way they catalogue info is not just license numbers, but any unique combinations of bike racks, bumper stickers or the like. So your bike rack would make you very trackable in a way, but at least your identity would be harder to pinpoint

          And about the intentional obfuscation, all kinds of princess pavement trucks and entitled BMWs deliberately use smoked license plate covers, and nobody bats an eye. So if there’s a law against that, it either has no teeth or is not enforced

          • emeralddawn45@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            21 minutes ago

            That guy is just the coolest person ever. Every time I hear his name its some new fucking based shit. His music as The Flashbulb is my favorite music of all time. He has unbelievable range and creativity as an artist and was one of the first people to fight against music labels going after torrenters/downloaders. He uploaded all his own torrents to a private tracker. Just an awesome fucking person who obviously just wants the best for everyone.

          • blitzen@lemmy.ml
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            2 hours ago

            Ya, he mentioned the “identifiable” thing in the video. I’m not really how much truth is in that. Even if true, I feel better about being logged as “unidentifiable [color] [make] [model] with bike rack,” over [license plate number] which can be used to look up my name and address.

            Even if his license plate trick worked under his conditions, there’s no way of knowing if it’s tricking Flock cameras or if it is, if it confines to do so with updates. And you never know if it fails, you’ll continue to think it’s working while it’s not.

            Neither way is perfect, so perhaps the better solution it to assume your vehicle is always tracked and to take alternate forms of transportation when engaging in something you don’t want logged.

    • TrollTrollrolllol@lemmy.world
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      22 hours ago

      My city is one of the few in my county that doesn’t have a contract with flock, but the county was nice enough to put them up around town anyway.

        • TrollTrollrolllol@lemmy.world
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          22 hours ago

          I’d be interested to know, the reason I know my city doesn’t have it is a bunch of residents pushed for it at multiple council meetings.

  • obvs@lemmy.world
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    24 hours ago

    Flock cameras need to be banned, and the ones that are left should absolutely be destroyed. There is no excuse for having these things in communities.

    • MangoCats@feddit.it
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      20 hours ago

      I believe the collection of the information is inevitable. What I would push for instead of driving them to make the cameras and databases more clandestine than they already are is for the information that they collect to be made openly available to all.

      As things are, it’s a very asymmetrical power tool for the advantage of the (government) operators.

      When ALL the information is available to everyone, we can talk about where the cameras do and do not need to be. And any unapproved cameras can be suppressed as evidence against private individuals.

      • Semester3383@lemmy.world
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        14 hours ago

        That’s like saying that it’s inevitable that murder and rape will happen.

        Just because someone is going to do it eventually doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have the death penalty for doing it.

  • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Since Flock CEO wants to give this movement some press

    Here’s Benn Jordan, he’s done a series of videos on the cameras, demonstrates their vulnerabilities, and talks about how Flock has been deploying secretly by co-opting local municipalities to subsidize their national rollout.

    First video, the one seems to have started the major anti-Flock push: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ

    Follow-up showing how easy they are to hack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY

    More live demonstrated vulnerabilities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo

    Not as directly related, but he discusses a way to use generative AI models to create noise masks for your specific plate that will disrupt the OCR process that ALPRs use. (Key term: Adversarial Noise) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_F4rEaRduk