This reporting was done in collaboration with Wired. Here's the discussion for Wired's article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49726586

Distributed Denial of Secrets has published the partition images: https://ddosecrets.org/article/flock-alpr-camera

At the same time, about every two minutes, code checked that the camera was still running and logged the message, “Who’s a good boy?!” More than 12,000 of those messages appear in the recovered logs.

I'm not sure why 404 has decided that the number or content of watchdog messages is so significant, but in other coverage of this article, (namely non-technical people making short-form technology 'content'), people seem to be really clinging onto this.