same, but i'm not sure how that's related to my comment. workarounds or alternate articles without significant new information are typically posted within the same submission, not separate ones.

Use the Bypass Paywalls Clean extension https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-fire...

No, they're the same article. I had only read 404's when I submitted them and I assumed they'd both be submitted regardless.

The oldest supported kernel is 5.10 and that loses support in December. That's wild they are using a 3.X kernel

It's almost as if they paid a contractor to design the hardware back in 2017 and put all the funding into marketing(bribes) since then. Shocker.

Security through obsolescence!

gaf770dc

missing a d(gaf)

sorry, had to get that out!

Thanks. Few saw that post: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49726577

https://archive.vn/NiIzH

Someone should sell branded black trashbags with a spraypainted penis on them.

We'll call it Cock Safety and help our community with patented JimmyHat technology to keep you safe and covered.

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?!

Axon is the default for the on-body camera system. The barrage of cop tv shows use them as part of their promotional relationships. Flock decided to not attack their market, in stead go for the adjacent space.

Bonus points: https://fccid.io/X4GS06009/Internal-Photos/Internal-Photos-8...

"Page 17" in the document shows a spicy little chip.

https://www.quectel.com/product/kg100s-amazon-sidewalk-modul...

Axon not only includes a cell modem... they're on Amazon Sidewalk, baby.

https://coverage.sidewalk.amazon/

Axon (among others) has operations hubs for data fusion centers and other platforms for police like Evidence.com, so it’s an easy sell to departments.

Communities are starting to pivot to the wider issue, but a reason that this issue found purpose is that Flock is a more evocative target than “ALPRs”. I think it wouldn’t be a bad thing if “Flock” becomes the generic name.

I live near Durango, CO and this happened last week.

This happened in a St. Louis suburb recently.

For those unaware, embedded devices usually have a "watchdog" timer that needs to be periodically reset ("fed"/"pet"/"kicked") when everything is operating correctly or else the device will reboot as a fail-safe.

This log message probably indicates when they're resetting the watchdog timer.

Axon and Motorola also do a lot more to court state agencies who have grand plans of monitoring some highway corridor so their buddies at DEA/CPB/SMD/whatever can tip them off and their "drug task force" can make a newsworthy bust.

Flock by contrast courts local PDs who will catch a package thief or two but they really just want to have the drag net at their finger tips so that when some more equal animal's cat gets stolen they can walk back in time and figure out the short list of who could've done it.

I work in a different embedded space but our keepalive heartbeat messages have a payload of <3

Reminds me why a friend picked RCN over Comcast for his Internet. “They’re the more incompetent evil company.”

But will it run Doom?

I don't disagree.

But there is some old rule about, even the best security can fail if the device is physically accessible.

i think this is actually good, because there are differences between the images they found, and security settings that the company claimed.

They had not admitted before to tracking people, but their software is clearly submitting them. They had not admitted before to looking at bumper stickers, but turns out they do.

I wonder if they could find all cars with Bernie Sanders bumper stickers within X blocks of a polling place.. I can imagine that (or similar queries) might be very useful in the wrong hands.

If it increases development or operating costs by $1 they won't do it unless there are consequences that could cost them more than that.

In a perfect world, yes, but this is a for-profit company and there's almost zero repercussion for doing it half-assed. They'd have to pay someone to implement it, and deal with the overhead and complexity.

Now they are in a position where they can sell new models with enhanced encryption and more features.

That's why I was asking if it was an older model initially.

As another commenter pointed out, any cheapo ARM core from the last 10 years could do the job Flock needs it to do, as long as it has a (very cheap and common) crypto engine strapped to it.

But, a question for you: even if it was the case that the hardware was the limitation, isn't that also an indictment of Flock? Selling something that cannot exist securely within the bounds of current technology? Or, at a minimum, bad chip selection leading to a compromised design?

It's a forever-fresh reminder about security versus your own government, but for malicious hackers and bots: the physical trip to visit you costs more than half their infrastructure.

Encryption matters, even if I would divulge everything long before the wrench appeared.

Its impossible, I tell ya

YC's finest https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety

Runs Android. Has (wireless?) internet access.

It seems that some enterprising Jolly Roger could start running a public mesh net on top of them without Flock even noticing.

has been for a long time - there's a sound engineer who developed quite a following (and is fairly involved with local movement hackerspaces) who demo'd how easy it was to hack Flock cameras nearly a year ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY

the Flock response has been 'it doesn't count if a Youtuber did it' lol: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ADb-qQ5hMY

You don't think that because it's called a "license plate reader," that it only captures license plates, do you?

Flock cameras capture the make, model, color, and body style of vehicles. They capture bumper stickers and other decals, as well as potentially identifying dents and scratches. They capture accessories like roof racks, bike racks, trailers, and toolboxes.

The OP story covers some of this. There's more at:

https://www.aclu.org/campaigns-initiatives/get-the-flock-out

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/10/us/flock-cameras-can-trac...

License plate data is bad enough (and unconstitutional in many jurisdictions, despite ubiquity).

Bobby? Bobby Tables? Is that really you?

Didn’t realize Jefferson misquoted Franklin

The devices are entirely open for all practical purposes - but worrying about individual cameras is silly, because they have no meaningful security at all around the API's to access all the cloud data - you can buy law enforcement credentials dirt cheap in dark web marketplaces to log in and track anyone/anywhere you want and access all footage.

Late stage capitalism?

Because we got the gray box IBM version instead...

Interesting that you frame it as "hoping" for a dystopia. Like even in our wildest imaginations we can't envision a future where society works for regular folks.

it seems like all the tech-fascists just read snowcrash and settled on that.

I say these people should not be in charge of choosing who gets insane amounts of money and networking opportunities

Let's just use Flock cameras to track all top-level YC people, publish everything we possibly can. Absolutely and utterly eliminate their privacy until they learn to respect ours.

I feel like most of this was already known when someone here in Dallas figured out they had wifi connectivity you could connect and get access. I may not have the details exactly correct but I think someone got access then.

Don't have the pitch deck directly, but do have some of the "what things looked like then" at https://www.ycdb.co/company/flock-safety

The front page then had "All the footage is yours. Your neighborhood 100% owns the data. Flock Safety will not share, sell, or access your data."

Unfortunately, flock has been excluded from wayback, so can't see other views of that page.

{insert Darth Vader: I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.}

(+45m edit) https://bestpitchdeck.com/flock-safety appears to be the pitch deck from 2020.

...

In 2019, Flock signed their first police department deal with Jersey Village, Texas.

The slides you see here are from Langley's pitch at a venture conference one month before closing a $47M Series C round in November 2020. The following July, Andreessen Horowitz led a $150M Series D investment in Flock as a cornerstone of their American Dynamism practice. Additional slides are included from keynote and sales presentations used in 2023.

...

It’s not an excuse, but gives some luxury of distance. We have a lot more hindsight now on how rotten things can become, so with that hindsight it’s easy to say that companies like Flock shouldn’t exist, or shouldn’t be invested in. Ten years ago required some more leaps in foresight that some people were making, I was, but even I didn’t think it would get as evil as it has.

Flock is a scourge on democracy.

Yes. Blame the pickaxe seller. Do not question the miners. Do not question the investors in the mining companies. Do not question the casual voter or internet commenter who thought all this was fine.

This isn't to say that flock not a scourge, but I think a lot of people (not saying you're one of them) could stand to look in the mirror here.

Back in ye olde dark ages of <checks notes> 2017, when YC was cutting Flock a check and when "big data" was the hot buzzword people of a certain bent couldn't get enough of this kind of stuff. Everyone was jacking off nonstop to the idea that we could just hoover up everyone's data ad then "efficiently" or "proactively" dispatch enforcement resources. People talked all sorts of big talk about stuff like cross referencing people's Home Depot spend with permit requirements, identifying small businesses that don't have healthy enough financials to be fully compliant, cross referencing invoices and delivery receipts to identify overloaded trucks, and generally finding all sorts of ways to fine the crap out of people for the pettiest of petty deviance. They considered this a noble goal.

Everyone's head was too far up their asses to look at the magic crystal ball called "history" and realize that a camera on every street corner watching who's going where all the damn time would be where it goes.

How many didn't get caught? Or did but the issue was quietly "handled" within the department.

emphasis on "can"

I don't care if a small amount of cops get in trouble if the other 99% of the time they get away with it.

Yes, only the unaccountable extra-judicial, legally immune low education, high domestic violence/divorce “law enforcement officers” should have access. It’s not like they would use it to stalk and surveil people … likes they have been caught doing all over and then get away with performative slaps on the wrist and get hired in the next jurisdiction down.

That might be debatable

https://ij.org/the-ij-database-of-alpr-abuse/

The images were deleted the moment they were uploaded. But the record in the log files persisted. The camera doesn't have enough memory to store that many data.

This is one of the most interesting comments on here.

Hints at unauthorized, illegal mass surveillance riding on top of authorized (but also possibly illegal) mass surveillance

Can you provide more details? Do you mean 100 public cameras anyone can access?

And my privacy? The threat to democracy? Does Flock own that? Why is always the poors that need to own morality?

But we own the cameras

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49422404

Then why bother using that language? The camera doesn't need rescuing, why not just "we took".

Also, is it really justified? Did we learn anything useful here that we didn't already know? There's more effective ways to push back against Flock, townships (like my own) are having plenty of success stories without stealing anything.

Anything becomes permissible when you believe yourself to be “on the right side of history.”

liberation is often used to refer to something that, while technically legal, the people that are subject to it did not agree to

“I kept trying to explain in between haymakers that we were better than this and on top of that it wasn’t likely to be ruled on favorably as far as the courts.” - Luke O’Neil https://flaminghydra.com/the-end-and-after-2/

You should be able to own that if you're going to do something like this.

Um, are you saying the hackers should admit they broke the law? Or that Flock should righteously own the data they collect?

Either way, I d/c. Flock cameras are probably insecure, and their data is potentially dangerous.

Bad laws exist, and following them may be prudent at times, but the act of following them isn't a moral imperative.

https://i.ibb.co/WWWYznHX/flock-future.png ;-)

See also: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/

Is there any recent example of a company getting breached and its data exfiltrated, where the business was actually hurt? I predict we'll get a standard boilerplate "We take security very seriously" press release, a narrative that blames the evil hackers entirely and not the company's negligence, and then that will be that.

Quite potentially, yes. Their name is already mud among many voters, if they're shown to be treating data insecurely then that's another reason why local governments might consider terminating contracts with them.

The normal explanation is plenty, unless you’ve never met, read about, or heard anyone talk about, law enforcement officers (who are human beings - for better and for worse).

That's why you or I would care, but that doesn't answer the question of why they would.

Large companies tend to be amoral. Unless it affects them monetarily (possibly indirectly) they're not going to care. Given what they do to make money, I don't see any of these things hurting them.

Getting persistent access to Flock's internal network is a high-priority item for every US adversary, that's just free intel collection on the movements of persons of interest. Knowing who the FBI and local cops are monitoring in is a cherry on top of the counter-counter-intelligence cake.

Any entity with access to flock servers can virtually stake-out anyone/everyone driving past Flock camera to monitor their movements. In a hot war, this would provide actionable data to support assassination via road-side bomb/drone strikes.

Many moons ago, I was involved in the technical side of volunteer work for domestic violence victims escaping abusive relationships with e.g. law enforcement (cops), who even fifteen years ago had sweeping powers to track and stalk their victims. Things like actual anonymous burner phones and the ability to e.g. create new email accounts without government identification were critical to the process of getting these people out safely, or alive, without fear of retaliation.

I can't even imagine how difficult this job must be nowadays, with bullshit like Flock spanning hundreds of police departments participating in their nationally-linked database. I have zero sources for what I'm about to say, but my instinct is that the political machines (expanding powers hidden behind "think of the children") behind how technology is evolving today has gotten people killed.

Feels like their purpose is to test the boundaries, take the hits, and eventually sell off

Because software engineering is not professional engineering.

Now, this doesn't always stops management, but when you have to have an engineering signoff it does make things a bit more difficult.

The flip side of this laziness is that now, when my elected representatives tell me "these are just license-plate readers that don't record video", I have evidence to show them that's false.

If Flock had done a more competent job of securing their system, it would be harder to demonstrate this in a compelling way. To a technically-inclined person, it's obvious from the get-go that somewhere in Flock's pipeline, video is being recorded and archived, and is therefore vulnerable to misuse. But the more they're allowed to keep the implementation proprietary, the easier this is to sweep under the rug.

Yeah, you could potentially MITM them with a rogue cell tower, I suppose. I'm curious about the researchers still having the device. They could also see all the cloud endpoints that were being accessed. Are they secure?

Antisec was right.

Flock has over 80% of the US market.

You've seen this level of attention on a market leader before: on Microsoft, on Adobe, and others.

I wonder if they were able to find any of the Bluetooth signal-data these cameras are said to be obtaining from devices within its' vicinity. This in itself is wild, im glad they're coming down around where I am

Commented something similar at the same time. I hate weasel wording like this. There is nothing that prevents this data from being used that way now or in the future.

edit: And to be clear, the cameras specifically recognize and record people for a reason. This does not appear to be a fault in the system. One reason might be off-camera facial recognition.

I’m sure the first approach has been ingesting vehicle registration data into Flock servers so that your ID photo pops up when your license is captured.

It seems the inevitable next step would be post-processed facial recognition (checked against those ready-for-the-taking ID photos) in their OS Investigator platform.

With that kind of protection it is guaranteed that that no Flock camera will ever be sold in Europe after december 2027... CRA et al...

I wonder what would happen if one of their customers asked for a 62443-4-2 certificate of compliance?

Interesting to note that if you don't look like a car or a person, through "adversarial fashion" or some other visual trick, your image potentially won't leave the camera and won't reach the flock cloud for further analysis.

It's surprising that an American company would forego so many common sense safety and security mechanisms just to protect their bottom line.

The other day I was imagining that everyone can just own any device near them. I suppose this implies that we have the resources and access to a capable model

Assuming the point of these cameras is security (and not just surveillance for stalker cops), being able to upload replacement footage would subvert that entirely. This has been a feature of many spy and cops/robber movies.

Teenagers are more easily manipulated into creating anti-social technology.