Since then we've forgotten how to enforce anti monopoly and media ownership rules. Similarly we've somehow completely turned campaign financing into an open competition for bribes.
And when there are more companies it's easier to tell people to buy a different one because that one is doing something shady. When Amazon does it, you recommend that unsophisticated people do what, use a Chinese camera which is presumably shunting the feeds to that government?
Unpopular take, I know, because it demands that people actually understand the technology they're using and where their data flows, and almost nobody has the skill, time, attention, money, and mindspace for that... but that's the only way to be a responsible networked camera user.
This isn't a capitalist or any other "ist" problem. It is a problem with society and social norms.
The cameras are there because people want them to be. The cameras get used because it is not politically toxic to do so. The use continues because the people objecting to the current abuse don't object on a principal level, they love the jackboot. They'd just rather see it used to levy ruinous fines upon middle class scofflaws (got I hate that word and the people who use it unironically) than whisk brown people off the street. Sure, different people would screech if the powers that be pivoted in that direction but at no point does the screeching add up to change because only the people who hate a specific abuse screech at any one time.
yes, some people genuinely do, and some people don’t.
some people have absolutely no understanding of what surveillance tech is doing and where it is going.
in terms of the “ist” problem you refer to, at the end of the day, the real answer is to deny anyone that amount of power. whether it’s corporations, religions, governments, or billionaires. none of these should have enough power to sway the world to terrifying places. none of them, including govs, billionaires, or corporations.
somehow we need to achieve separation of money and state with as much vigor as we used to separate church and state.
we should be incentivizing the power from all of those groups to be dispersed as much as possible.
This used to be called "equality under the law" and laws that could not be written equally or enforced equally were not written or overturned by the courts.
The US in particular had discrimination encoded in law for a long time. It took Rosa Parks in 1955 to end "white only" areas in public transport, and it took until 1965 until racial discrimination by law was finally outlawed.
"Equality under the law" always depends on who is considered to be part of the group that enjoys said equality. Even today, many countries still have laws on the books that discriminate between ethnicity and/or country of origin and/or citizenship. Just look at us in Europe - you usually have to be a citizen of an EU country to hold public office for example, residency is not enough. Or you got border patrol clearly profiling whom to control at a border checkpoint - whites get left alone and unbothered, non-whites get the full experience of what border control is allowed to do. That's not just discrimination, it's showing citizens that happen to have non-white skin that despite them being equal citizens by law, in practice there is no equality.
Focusing on race or any other distinction among the peasants is categorically missing the point. This isn't about peasants vs peasants. It's about peasants and small groups of peasants vs big moneyed interests. Some small time tire shop gets fined into oblivion for letting chemicals go down their drain meanwhile Jiffy Lube does that all day and doesn't get picked on because their lawyers can craft a story about why it's fine. In the old days everyone or nobody could dump it down the drain. Some homeowner can't put up an ADU because "hurr durr wetlands" but some megacorp can buy his land and put up a solar farm in the same damn wetlands because they can put fancy stuff on fancy letterhead and put it in front of the regulators. 100yr ago either everyone could build there or nobody could.
We've given our regulatory agencies massive, massive, discretionary power and insanely broad mandates. And what winds up happening is that they pick on the small and the weak because those targets are plentiful and easy. We created dragnet surveillance to "stop terrorists" (it was a crappy argument even then) and it gets used to round up brown people or chase down and bankrupt a random business because 1/20 of their trucks had a plate that was illegible to toll readers for years on end. We told the EPA to make the water clean and they go harass farmers for digging trenches. Don't get me started on the FDA and opium. NYPD couldn't get away with stop and frisk (well, they could and did for far too long but that's not the point) but law enforcement across the country can now stop damn near anyone for any BS pretext because a technological obfuscation layer gives them pretext (much like the fake bomb detectors we were selling to the Iraqis back in the day) and the scale and division of responsibility makes it hold up in court.
If one person or a small group can't do a thing then a big group shouldn't either. And if a big group can do a thing then the small group.
If it's ok for ICE to just stop brown people then it's ok for NYPD to do stop and frisk. And if that's not ok then adjust the law.
For what it's worth I fully agree with you!
The thing is, this just isn't achievable with modern politics. The big guns will always lobby for them to be exempted in some way, and even if only by funding the enforcement agencies only so limited that they have no way of enforcing the law againt the big fish.
And on top of that you got Conservatives (or whatever tries to sell themselves under that label these days) and Wilhoit's (misattributed) law [1]:
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
So why wouldn’t any accept capitalism and ignore its flaws?
"The Government" is not a entity with "wants" or "needs", it's a collection of people with their own motivations. Motivations that usually end up being about power or money, or a combination, because the people who end up in the government are capitalists.
> why it was the 2nd most important thing to those
I mean, not really? The 2nd amendment includes stuff that they didn't even think of originally when creating the constitution, so just because it was the second amendment that went through, doesn't mean it was "the 2nd most important thing", the most important things are the original articles in the constitution, so the amendments must start ranking at 8th place or something like that, 2nd amendment ends up being the 9th most important thing if we were to rank things like you did, but honestly.
The main issue is that its power only grows. No one sane would propose to reduce his influence and/or make his job harder and everyone has ideas on how to make his job easier. It's not about capitalism, communism or anything else. The only thing that plays a role is how many somewhat independent influence blocks you have and whether you have a system to stop the power creep and 'we only have to vote it in once' problem.
And it's not even strictly about 'easier' from the perspective of the worker. I imagine if you deal with police work and such spying probably seems a lot more reasonable since you're very exposed to the bad part of society, which does skew your view of the world, no matter how rational you think you are.
ICE are fat and woefully underqualified.
Surely in 2025 a ragtag group of people with some revolvers, pistols, hunting rifles, and a small minority owning assault rifles, with limited ammo will be able to fight against the most well-funded armed force with tanks, IFVs, assault helicopters, aircrafts, missiles, rockets, and military infantry armed to the gills wearing NVGs.
People who think 2A will do anything in case your government actually turns violent on you are just trying to maintain the illusion of control.
Elected in part by the useful idiots on HN and many other places. They were so ignorant of how government actually works they were happy to give it this power. They foresaw the jackboot being used to stomp petty criminals and fellow middle class types who don't "pay their fair share". But they had never cracked open a history book because if they had they would know that sort of stuff is never a top priority.
There's another word we can call them: juvenile.
Are we sure that formalized populist regulation is the boogeyman? Like, really absolutely super duper double-checked certain?
(Context, IBM helped the Nazis with recordkeeping.)
IBM did a ton of business with the Nazis.
These people don't care, they might put on a fake persona that pretends to care, but you outright don't care if you work at these places. You get a job somewhere else when you care.
What you hear from them isn't caring, it's just a way for them to pretend they are someone they aren't. The person they pretend to be would not be working there.
Cops need a warrant to track your phone, check which tower it connected to or tail your car for extended period of time.
Cops do not need a warrant to use Flock system. They have an app where they can simply put your license plate and they will get a path showing every move of your car as tracked by the flock cameras, and there are a looot of them (e.g. near San Jose: https://deflock.me/map#map=16/37.335318/-121.881316). And thats without the integration of ring.
This essentially allows them to GPS tag anyone, with no warrant, while "following the laws". So no, it's not all the same.
They definitely need to follow the law when they get it from the Telco, but Cops can use their CSS/IMSI catcher all they want, theres almost no way to tell. But they can not then go to court and say "Yeah—we listened to their phone call and searched the car."
With this its no problem. No Hailstorm to buy for the entire force and there isn't any federal oversight on this sort of thing as near as I can tell. If you think police don't do crimes I've got a bridge to sell you.
That part you can't do. Unless the battery is removed, phone can be turned back on remotely.
They can do it right up until the battery truly discharges. You can’t turn off WiFi/BT for real either. Icons will go dark and your WiFi and devices won’t work, but underneath the radios are still plenty active and powered on.
- You can disable this feature
- Disabling radios from Control Center behaves differently than from Settings
https://ring.com/support/articles/7e3lk/using-video-end-to-e...
People are buying these things out of fear anyways. I thought they'd be happy big brother is watching.
Even in the most dystopian sci-fi future where a hostile and totalitarian government watches everything everybody does, they would still use the information to investigate boring everyday crimes.
The (non rethoric) question is, are people willing to pay the increasing price of non-crime related surveillance as we see diminished security margins.
I live on a bucolic cul-de-sac in a house that I've lived in since the mid 1970s. Most of the neighbors are the same. I never in my life expected a random person to drive down the street, drag a lady out of his trunk, chase her around the cul-de-sac, and stab her to death in front of my house. I never expected to find the body in the woods 40' from my side door. This is when I also learned that nobody comes to clean up after a crime like that and that if I didn't want pools of blood in front of my house and a 50' streak of it crossing the circle or the splatters all over the mailboxes that I was going to have to go out there and clean it up myself. I was in PTSD therapy for a while after that. I'm glad the Ring camera caught some of the activity.
After an event like that, it's easy to lose a sense of security in your home. How are you supposed to sleep the night after that happens, when the perpetrator remains at large? You can't lock your doors hard enough or do anything at all to feel secure. That lack of sense of security does not go away in a day or a week or a month. It goes away when you can find "normal" again. It helped us to find normal by installing other cameras around the house.
I don't want Ring or Arlo or anybody to be automatically sharing my camera footage with anybody. Even with the murder event, it was my choice to go through the footage and share it with the authorities. I don't support authoritarian "law enforcement" activities, I don't want anybody tapping into my camera feed to find lost pets or for any other reason. They shouldn't be allowed to do it. Like many other services we all use, we're more of the product than the customer, as our data is harvested and used for other purposes.
Personal security is different than targeted advertising. Most people won't know they need or want a camera until after they have experienced something that makes them feel less secure in their home. I just hope they have the wits to read the Terms and understand what they're opting into before automatically accepting all of the opt-in-by-default data sharing.
But I definitely would not want to live in that world. And I think that's true for most people. It's kind of interesting too because there's some really nasty arguments one can make about this like, 'What, you'd rather see children kidnapped and even killed than consenting to surveillance that won't even be looked at unless you're under suspicion?'
But it's quite disingenuous, because with any freedom there is always a cost, and that cost is often extreme. 40,000+ people die per year because of our freedom to drive, yet few would ever use that as an argument to prohibit driving.
that is a fantastic argument to force reduced driving and shows up in virtually all discussions about car safety and public transit.
I think it's the opposite. I think people would prefer the peace of mind of living in a high trust society. People like predictability and being able to trust people. I also think people would enjoy that laws that people pass are actually applied and we can efficiently apply the will of the people to the country.
>with any freedom there is always a cost
Laws ultimately would be what restrict your freedom, not the enforcement of them. I don't think freedom should rely on poor enforcement of laws.
Your perceptions of other peoples' views are also off. Even with the current scope of government surveillance, 66% of Americans say that the potential risks outweigh the potential benefits. [1] And laws would not be what limit freedoms. Government and authority is not some abstract holistic entity. It's made up of people, like you and I. Would you feel comfortable with me being able to surveil every moment of your life? The difference between me and the person who would end up doing so is not this great gulf you might imagine.
For instance Snowden revealed that NSA officers would regularly collect and trade sexually explicit media obtained from surveillance. [2] They'd also use their position to spy on their love interests to the point it gained it's own little sardonic moniker 'LOVEINT'. The people that would be looking through those cameras are just people. And the government leadership overseeing these groups would include politicians off on an island screwing minors, or more upstanding fellows like Eric Swalwell, cheating on his wife with a Chinese spy while serving on the House Committee on Homeland Security that oversees the entire US intelligence apparatus under the Department of Homeland Security.
We're all just people, warts and all.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/11/15/key-takea...
[2] - https://time.com/3010649/nsa-sexually-explicit-photographs-s...
Your doorbell photo of a car was really the only evidence to convict someone of murder?
I'm glad I live somewhere that needs more proof that.
The owners I know consider it a convenience device.
Personally not a compelling enough reason to buy the camera in the first place, but those non crime notifications end up being the most common once it's up.
They are toys
IMO it properly reflects that what looks like an active affirmative choice by the user is actually not.
This f shameless pretention of doing something noble - barely helpful above normal practices btw. - while manipulating clueless users into turning on mass-surveillance is revolting and disgusting. And ordinary employees figured this out, phrased, created content, implemmented, pubished, and are maintaining this dirty practice. Many times with (very misplaced) pride. Shame on all of them actively participating in this coward scheme!
Even if it only provides deterrence, and a slight chance of after the fact punishment, I don't feel idiotic for buying a "doorstep Webcam", the door is visible from the street so there is no expectation of privacy and I really don't care that someone else could access those recordings.
If I had indoors cameras they would be in a private network. But for a front porch camera the easiest to install IOT junk is perfectly serviceable.
My wife is extremely upset about all of this, and I'm not going to be bullied out of the opinion that 24/7 cameras are actually a good thing.
The police knew the guy (young adults with bright orange hoodie are quite uncommon here) and they told me that he already did this a few time before moving in my neighborhood and that they never had enough evidences to do something else than fine him.
Also I think the police are bored in my city because there were 4 patrols cars in the street when I got back home.
just don't get ones owned by evil megacorps who have openly said they'll sell access to ICE
The reason Ring is popular isn't just marketing or network effect, it's that it works. Before Ring and clones, security camera / DVR combos were really hard to make effective, I tried. Maybe you'd have a totally reliable system with good video, but it'd fail to notify you when you need it to, or notify way too often. Battery power was infeasible because cameras couldn't sleep. Phone notifications were DIY. A long compounding list of things could go wrong and make you miss an important event or fail to record it entirely. I'm hoping those have caught up by now, but haven't found any.
At what point will the police request a warrant to run their own Search Party without consent?
“Search party lets you use your outdoor Ring cameras to help neighbors in your area”
Note: doesn’t mention pets yet. Then:
“Starting with lost pets, Search party will…”
What comes after lost pets? Very open ended
endangered animal conservation groups looking for rare birds
Are there any wireless (running power to these locations is not an option) doorbell cams that record to local storage instead of the cloud? I refuse to pay a subscription for these things.
Ideally they would record to my server instead of onboard SD card so that the footage can't just walk away if someone grabs the camera.
You can make this point stronger: Amazon is a police surveillance company (with Ring), just not primarily.
The second best time is today.
Unfortunately the public love this stuff, and are quite happy to have CCTV pointing at your house. Privacy never existed 300 years ago, it doesn't today. Accept your feudal masters and make peace with it, because they won years ago.
Have people never read/watched a sci-fi book/film before?
Sounds good from a security point of view, although it also says they disable functions like having more than one person able to view the camera (having a partner be able to answer the door seems pretty fundamental; they probably just can't be arsed to make such functionality work with safety turned on...)
Of course, just like with Signal or anything else that gets regular updates, they can push an update to your device specifically that sends the decryption key out. You'll always have to trust them to not do something like that, but that's a whole different level from subpoenaing data they have on a hard drive
Because when I reverse engineered my Tuya-based camera-equipped pet feeder, I've discovered that there was an encryption on the video stream, but they only encrypted I-frames and left P-frames unencrypted. Amazon is not Tuya, but IoT is IoT.
My point is, there are myriad of ways IoT vendor can boast "encryption" and "security" on the marketing materials, while the actual implementation could be flawed beyond redemption.
I'm not really pro-government, but modern surveillance capitalism really pushes against this view. Put to their own devices, the public will generally (and apparently) flock towards mass surveillance all on their own, and I think one possible implication is that the government surveillance policies are more popular then some folks in HN circles would suspect.
"Ignorance is bliss"
OpenAI is receiving far more data with a far greater privacy impact than social networks. And all this is happening at a time when the US is transitioning from a somewhat functioning democracy to an autocratic and fascist system.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/chatgpt-pa...
2 things.
1. Few people understand most surveillance legislation, including journalists.
2. Most governments use thought terminating cliches involving child safety to force compliance on the middle set of people who dont like surveillance and understand a minimum amount of what the legislation does.
These points leave anti surveillance campaigners fighting an uphill battle. Most people, when they have these laws clearly articulated and arent in danger of being called a pedo for opposing them, oppose them.
Data query around the Netherlands shows about a hundred are mapped so far as specifically doorbell cameras: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/2dQw (the tag does not yet seem established in the USA). There are also many thousands of cameras mapped that are either not doorbell-mounted, or simply not tagged to such detail. This is a convenient map to see all of them: https://sunders.intri.cat/
Joking, a little, but seriously: the culture in the US has rotted to such an insane degree. Not only are we not friends with our neighbors, I'm actually scared to talk to them!
The fear in people’s hearts is insane. One memorable one was a Little boy who decided to sell candy bars. I knew the kid from my son’s school. Some psycho followed him for a few hours, tracked down to his home and called the sales tax authorities and the city clerk as he didn’t have a peddler permit. She documented her “investigation”, complete with photos.
It's more casual than surveying e.g. addresses that may be hard to see if the building is recessed, but you'd still want to capture it because someone will want to route there sooner or later. Not so for cameras that only capture own property
StreetComplete has a "things" overlay that makes it very quick to add these at the position of a front door
https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=surveillance%3Aty...
For a "complete" search in the OpenStreetMap-data I suggest [Overpass Turbo](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_turbo).
In this specific case I'd take a little detour over taginfo (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Taginfo), e.g. search for `surveillance` (https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/search?q=surveillance) there. A little bit of clicking (Type > Values > ALPR) leads to https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/surveillance%3Atype=A... If you click on 'Overpass turbo' on the top right, you get to a pre-filled search on Overpass turbo. Scroll the map to the region you want to search (start small), and click 'Run' on the top left.
Voila.
However, even ALPR doesn't show any devices for me:
I'm glad citizens in the EU are more on top of this. I really wish we as USA citizens had access to the same database of GPS coordinates for each Blink, Ring, and Amazon Key device that police do. Does anyone know how/if something like that could be FOIA'd? This seems it would be particularly fruitful if FBI/DHS has a comprehensive dataset for the entire nation.
Though I do worry that they may not "have" the dataset, but rather just have "access" to it via a queryable Amazon/Palantir database/API.
If the authorities come knocking with a warrant, or frankly, even a nicely-worded sensible request, sure, have at it. But ain't nobody accessing the footage unnoticed and without my approval.
I'm sure the cops who trashed Afroman's place would have loved that ability.
However, I do not intend to make it easy to just grab my footage along with any other that can be found, without at least asking.
My problem is that the area around my front door where the doorbell is installed is solid timber, so it's not just a simple ethernet drop. I'm honestly not even sure how the builders ran the existing wire to that location. Maybe my only option is to add a second backup camera in a location where an ethernet install is easier.
If I had of had a webcam on my front door a few weeks ago I would have been able to identify the thieves that broke into my car and stole a bunch of stuff whilst I was asleep.
Since then I have "cammed" up, but I use my own hard wired network and connected to a Pi5 with a Hailo8 chip running frigate.
No third party apps, just the fun of more stuff on the network. I do run a Cloudflare tunnel on the PI so that I can connect to Frigate from anywhere when I get alerts.
But basically, it's me and only me accessing the content of those cameras. However I do plan to configure Frigate to upload the alerts and detections into S3 with a three month lifecycle.
Worst part was just running ethernet to the spots where the cameras needed to go (only crawlspace access) but nice not having to charge batteries and even nicer knowing i'm not sending video to netgear anymore.
If someone is in my house tapped into the network, cameras are the least of my problems.
I assume some of the concern around this is that folks don't want to live in a panopticon. If that's your objection, I can't really help with that. On the other hand, if your objection is that you don't want a backdoor built into your video doorbell (even one that you must opt into), I'm happy to report that there are good non-Ring options.
I switched to a Reolink video doorbell, and it has decent support for local-only operation. It has the ability to save footage to a local micro SD card, and if you're worried about someone stealing the entire doorbell and losing your footage, it also supports RTSP (a common IP camera protocol). You can even have it upload footage to a FTP server on a schedule. It also supports PoE if you're lucky enough to have ethernet at your doorbell, or don't mind doing the drop yourself.
Set up does require an app, but you don't need to use the app after that. Push notifs also require egress, but, iiuc, this is mostly because of how push notifications work. Push does NOT require a paid subscription.
I personally just use the app, but it's nice knowing that if Reolink tried to pull a fast one, I could just block egress on my VLAN and use it locally.
If you'd rather just go completely app-less, I imagine a dumb doorbell paired with an IP camera and a local ZoneMinder [1] install would provide most of the benefits of something like Ring. Of course, the tradeoff is you now have a second job being sys admin of your homelab. Pick your poison, I guess.
Yes, it's easier to captivate attention by evoking primal instincts - avoid predator, find food, reproduce, etc. These stories stick around in your head, the memetic survivors. They are easier to feed off.
But "Happy" doesn't mean a perfect utopia. The entire "classic" Star Trek is set in a utopian future, yet with plenty of space for intrigue. Usually a commentary on a contemporary problem, with a "happy ending" that's supposed to show us the road to a better solution, rather than a bland "forever after".
Even "First Contact" (a zombie/survival horror) is spun around the theme of "this is the history/future that we're saving".
Swapping grandma's casserole recipe for fighting mega-corps might be the big difference.
Now with the written word and how seemingly determinant people are in large numbers we are again super vulnerable.
i am totally a real person and use the nexus every day to improve my productivity -- it is a simple and intuitive tool.
Rich or poor, smart or dumb. We all are slaves to the mighty dollar.
AI/Surveillance are only gears in the machine.
And yet here we are complaining that our phones are over-listening to us and our cars no longer have knobs.
Sci-fi writers understood both what technology could create in the future (and what would be desirable), and also understood how people abuse power and the tools available to them to stay in power (or gain more).
In other words: they predicted the future, more than they inspired it. IMO, that also makes their writing that much more interesting.
It has been somewhat shocking to see how relevant the writing is seen through a 21st century lenses. Whether it's how media works, how cliques of people function, etc.
It truly feels timeless in a way that I've found very surprising. It also very much supports notions that people don't change even if means and methods do.
Cons: use your imagination.
Along those lines, I think it's weird that in some cities, a cop who dies choking on a chicken bone on his day off in his own kitchen gets the same benefits and massive traffic-clogging live-streamed publicly-funded funeral with politicians and media spectacle as a cop who gets killed by a bad guy while on duty.
Sure, but both construction worker and police officer are significantly more dangerous jobs than most of us here have sitting behind a desk.
Obviously it’s not a job where people are dying routinely, but suggesting death or serious injury are the only two risks of interacting with the public and responding to threatening or unstable situations is ignoring the reality. It’s a tough job. Much tougher than my time spent sitting at a desk.
When you seem some guy screaming on the street corner a monthly depot injection of an antipsychotic drug would probably calm them down but overall the drugs are unpleasant [1] and have serious side effects, particularly sedation, weight gain, and high blood sugar [2] A "functional" system would probably be one that can get people like that a diagnosis and get them treatment against their will.
Kanye West is a good example. He has a bipolar diagnosis but now thinks he is fashionably autistic so he quit taking his meds and now he is shooting music videos of black people in blackface giving the Hitler salute after a whiney autotuned complaint that they won't let him see his kids after he posted something on Twitter [3]. For him responsibility is not "don't cosplay as a Nazi" but "face up to your condition and take your meds" and he won't want to cosplay as a Nazi and they might let him see his kids.
I've known quite a few people who are schizophrenia spectrum without a diagnosis: one of them lived at our house for a year and a half until she threatened my wife with a knife and she took her own life a year later, another one called us up five times in one day last week with a scrambled story about how she got bit by a dog, I sat down and listened to her for about 20 minutes in which she got lucid just a few times and I was able to piece together the place where it happened, that she's talked to the security guard and the EMT but not the police, that she did see a doctor and get a Tetanus shot though she wasn't sure if it was a Rottweiler or a Pit-bull.
The good news is that new drugs are here and more are under development:
[1] no diversion risk!
[2] last year my condition got worse and my doc put me on the minimum dose of seroquel before going to sleep which is 1/10 the dose they'd give to someone who is really psychotic. It was effective at getting me quality sleep and avoiding "paranoia against objects" in the morning but I gained 15 lbs and my A1C was borderline in my last bloodwork and my doc thinks I should get off it. Even the smallest dose is so sedating I can't believe anyone could take it during the day, my guess is that if I cut the pills in half the sleep promoting effect will still be strong enough.
[3] oddly not "X"
I'm not convinced that being a cop is such a tough job. Most of it is sitting in your car waiting for speeders, or to warn traffic about road construction, or driving around looking for something unusual happening.
US courts have determined they don't even have a duty to risk their own lives to save civilians. Kinda the entire purpose of their job's existence, removed.
There's a lot of aggrandizement by and for cops; it's completely parallel to the worship of the military.
The tough parts of a job aren’t defined by the routine work. It’s the risks and edge cases. That’s like saying most of a construction worker’s job is measuring things and reading plans so it can’t be that tough.
It’s pretty obvious that a lot of commenters here have never known an actual police officer. They’re just choosing between two extreme archetypes that aren’t accurate: Either the heroic person risking their life on the daily to protect to the public, or the bumbling donut-eating cop who has been relegated to traffic duty only. Neither are true and comparing it that way is a false dichotomy.
The irony of us sitting at desks in our warm and comfortable offices while calling the job of someone who gets called to deal with troubling public situations “not tough” is ironic. I wouldn’t want to do that job and I bet you wouldn’t either.
There are plenty of instances where you would be correct, such as the origin of police forces in the American South (which were initially slave patrols), but that doesn't mean you are correct in all instances.
I'm not sure what joy you derive from spreading misinformation, but you should probably reconsider it.
And to be clear, my "argument" is that the parent poster is objectively incorrect, which is accurate. I decided not to posit on why the parent poster made an objectively incorrect statement, though I am curious.
you accused me of intentionally spreading misinformation for my own joy. bad faith argument is bad faith.
FYI, my response to your initial post wasn't for you.
This is your statement: "just to make this explicit, protecting civilians has never been the purpose of modern police forces. they were developed to put down rebellions/catch slaves/protect rich people's property"
That statement is incorrect, no matter what your definition of "modern police force" is. That's it. It's not complicated, despite your attempts to deflect from the invalidity of that statement.
So saying something that is correct but not for all cases (which ones would those be) is now "spreading misinformation"?
I'm not sure what joy you derive from dismissing statements you already acknowledge have an element of veracity with some blanket label of "misinformation", but you should probably reconsider it.
It's not funny, it's accurate.
Spending seconds looking into the history of policing worldwide, or in the US, would back up my claim.
Had the parent poster bothered to post evidence backing up their comment, I probably would have made the effort to post citations refuting it.
> So saying something that is correct but not for all cases (which ones would those be) is now "spreading misinformation"?
When you say that something is correct in all cases, yes.
> I'm not sure what joy you derive from dismissing statements you already acknowledge have an element of veracity with some blanket label of "misinformation", but you should probably reconsider it.
Nice try, but there is no "element of veracity" to an absolute statement that is objectively false.
Not only "not risk their lives", US courts have ruled they have no duty to act to prevent any crime in progress.
Highway patrol officers have a similar risk profile to construction workers. Mostly car accidents. Patrolmen in cities or towns get hurt in town or in altercations all of the time.
Court officers do not. Detectives largely do not. Police are more likely to get shot at, but way more likely to get hurt in a bunch of acute and long term ways. The nature of the stress that many police experience measurably shortens their lives.
The biggest issues with police with regard to officer and public safety are poor governance and macho culture. I live in New York so I’ll use them as an example. NY State Police are highway patrol focused - they wear grey and black uniforms and Stetson hats. NYPD Highway patrol units wear black leather jackets and cavalry breeches. It looks cool and has a certain elan — but officers would be safer in more functional dayglo attire.
In terms of governance, like many areas of American governance, checks and balances are weak. Example: Cozy relationships between various departments, prosecutors, and perhaps elected judges mean that many NY police avoid prosecution or and sanction for DWI.
My understanding is that the most predictive thing that harms you after traumatic events is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_injury
which can even come from situations where you want to help people but you can't so it also badly affects teachers, nurses and other people who come across people's dysfunction and suffering. It's worse to be made to feel that you violated your own values than it is to, say, get shot.
It’s part of the reason why an observant person can usually spot a cop or firefighter in plain clothes. They put on a facade as a coping mechanism that leaks into life.
Most problems at their root are a result of people not treating people like people. Many “advocates” for police are really just attracted to the perception of power, and see failures of accountability as a sign of strength. It’s the opposite.
Removing that one step just for community policing would completely change police interactions. Community policing is not the place to inject warrant enforcement, it too completely changes the dynamics.
Which is easier, Wifi 7 in all homes or gun restrictions ?
What the public does not understand though is that THEIR complicity and facilitation is not only integral, it is even necessary in a "democracy" where a psychological "consent" must be manufactured, not dissimilar to basic grooming tactics. And no, it's no coincidence that all the western leadership and institutions are effectively all various types of groomers, i.e., psychological manipulators and abusers.
but the other half of the wedding party they hit were not...
So yeah consider that the government is so dumb that one half of the government thinks the secular anti-jihadist militias supported by the other half of government are actually jihadists.
It's not a terrible assumption; if you study extremist circles for long enough you come across examples of people who completely flip sides because they were only ever in it for the extralegal opportunities. Of course, you can find similar chameleons in politics.
Yes, the current administration is morally capable of destroying random ships to claim victories over "bad guys". But they always had that ability.
The difference with this administration is that they aren’t even pretending to follow the nominal controls or rules to wield that force.
There was a legal concept around the drone/missile/commando/aerial strikes to assassinate targeted individuals in the Middle East. The morality of that action was dubious at best, but what’s happening in the Caribbean doesn’t even meet that very low moral, ethical, or legal bar.
This administration, with their craven collaborators on the Supreme Court, is solely focused on asserting virtually unlimited executive power to a fairly obvious end.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44416761
Signal processing is probably a general problem. This month we had news about transcribing speech from sound waves jiggling a regular computer mouse.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/07/mouse_microphone_secu...
WiFi routers can’t tell you where people are in the house. The routers don’t even know their own location within the house.
All of those papers you see on the topic have extensive additional information being put into their models. The routers don’t magically know the layout of your house.
At most, a WiFi device could infer movement in a house if the RSSI of devices is fluctuating where it is normally stable.
The floor plan of every home is not on file, especially older homes.
Police aren’t accessing your floor plan and then accessing your router and combining these into a perfect model that maps people’s locations. Where in this supposed plan are the police deducing the location of your WiFi router in the house and constructing a model of all materials and objects in the house that impact the model?
This just isn’t how those research papers work. It’s not something the police are going to combine with a file from the planning office and magically have a map of you in your house like in a movie.
But let's be real, police constantly barge in to the wrong address, looking for people that have been gone for years, accomplishing not much more than shooting a beloved dog on a hair-brained last second witch hunt. It's not that they can't do it, it's that they have the attention span and executive planning facilities of a burnt out coke addict 3 hours post their latest scratch off ticket winnings.
Think through it: Does your floor plan contain info about the precise location of your WiFi devices and any obstructions between them? Even that isn’t enough to get a WiFi location model, but it’s not in there regardless.
They're gonna pay Anduril, Palantir, and a whole host of other business or consulting firms a ton of your money to do that.
The criticism that "it's technically too challenging for the police department therefore its sci-fi" is extremely silly given that the current article literally is about private companies that are building surveillance networks that they will then sell to the police.
Which makes the entire situation a lot worse.
Tech companies are doing stuff and giving police free for all access and use. Which is worse, because as stated, police are worthless. You think they consider the consequences or the rights of the people they use those tools on? Come on now.
This can be provided as a service, if it isn't already. Im sure something similar already exists.
If a cop serves a warrant and the wrong address and ends ups murdering a child, that cop will receive sympathy and paid time off.
But also, don't builders have to submit plans of homes to the local government when building them for approval?
Your government probably knows your floor plan (though, I don't think they tend to be publicly accessible). Either way though, neither of these methods are anywhere near enough to do what was shown off in those Wi-Fi tracking demos. Here's hoping the tech doesn't get a lot better or has a series of unexpected breakthroughs.
You’re not going from a floor plan to a precise location model. Just think about how different the WiFi environment would be if someone put their router next to their steel computer case versus someone setting it on a nice MDF cabinet with no wires nearby. Completely different RF environment and pathing.
And if you don't have those, a lot of buildings have common patterns. Its very much in the realm of possibility to train a model using exterior and interior information so that you could have AI generate a floor plan using only exterior data.
Combine that with a small drone that could fly around a building and take different wifi signal readings to triangulate access point positions.
Once you have all that don't you have everything you need to detect movement in the building based on signal disruptions?
Yes, seems like a bit of work but it absolutely seems like the type of effort some governments would put effort into.
That seems like all you'd need anyway, skip the rest of this. Small autonomous drones with simultaneous location and mapping capability will absolutely revolutionize warfare (and firefighting, but I digress) whenever they stop being sci-fi.
I regret even engaging with the floor plan debate.
It doesn’t matter if they have a floor plan. That’s not enough information to characterize the RF environment of a house and how it responds to people moving through it.
A floor plan won’t tell you the position of all the WiFi devices, obstructions, and how the environment responds to moving those around. It won’t even tell you where the router is with any precision or if it’s next to a big chunk of metal like a computer case that’s blocking half the house and causing reflections.
It’s a red herring.
https://www.militaryaerospace.com/communications/article/167...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Visual_Augmentation... https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/11/anduril-to-take-over-microso...
It's just the brown people who are put in detention centers, isn't it?
Why does in your mind a "brown person" that is a foreign national who broke the law in and of America by entering and/or remaining in the USA, have more rights to have a job, make money, and even receive public assistance in America than a non-"brown person" that is a legitimate citizen of the USA?
What is worse, is that you don't even understand that your support of this kind of lawlessness is only for the purpose of allowing the rich to plunder the working and lower middle class, the real victims that through your words and actions hate with a passion.
Sure, burglars also benefit from burglarizing, but that does not make it any better than foreign nationals benefitting while the rich also use them like some crime boss in control of a burglary ring. How do you think, e.g., the home builders who make ~30% gross profit on homes that are poorly built due to "immigrant labor" report triple digit billion dollar returns?
You people baffle me that you cannot connect two dots as you at the same time lament that wages are too low, as you support floods of wage decreasing supply flooding "immigration".
No one is targeting "brown people" they just happen to be the majority of brown people the ruling class loves importing to profit from at the expense of the indigenous people, just like when the British and Hispanics did it through slavery. You are no different than the slavery rationalizers of the 17th-19th century. Today the ruling class just figured out how to manipulate you into supporting importation of brown people to undermine the indigenous people, and you don't have the intellect or integrity to understand you are being manipulated.
Do you believe that you aren't presenting a ridiculous false dichotomy?
It's the exact same problem HN has been talking about for years except now a group of wannabe commandos who stake out in the parking lots of Mexican restaurants now have a tool where they can just type in their stereotypes and have the AI find them.
I was always suspicious of Ring and never understood the people using it.
I swapped out to the Logitech doorbell which I like better anyway
They had some kind of deal with Amazon surely because it came with some amount of time free.
They're also illegal because you're not allowed to film public spaces without a good reason (it's up to the judge and case law to decide, e.g. if there has been arson in the area recently then it's reasonable to monitor your car that's parked at the kerb, for example). Nobody has yet gotten in trouble to my knowledge
Gotta love hypocrisy
If it was free, I could almost understand. Nothing is free, and if it cost the customer nothing, then the customer is the product. However, people paid for Ring gear and as a thanks have their privacy violated with no notice, no info and no choice.
There were women being stalked by ring employees. It was that bad. Teslas had (has?) a similar problem.
Sadly it is only going to get much worse before it gets better.
Then is up for the citzens to let it happen or react.
"History doesn't repeat itself but rhymes a lot" (or words to that effect). What is happening now in the US (and many other places) strongly echoes the events leading up to WW2.
Not sure how YC sees this.
They're "investors, not bosses" - https://www.ycombinator.com/principles/
Being an investor is not an excuse. It makes you amoral, too.
"I didn't build the bomb, I just funded the company that built it."
In case you haven't noticed, the surveillance state is 100% YC adjacent.
I struggle to reconcile.
Edit: added country
I hope people will join their local community groups.
Nobody is consenting to it out of fear.
When your fear the other the consent is internal.
Anybody can merely force someone else to do something. I can, you can. That's small fry stuff.
The real ticket is getting people to do the things you want with no force. Convincing them to act against their own interests. Now, thats much harder, and that's the type of thing the big dogs are looking at.
But let's say you're right: that means that laziness is enough to bring on the surveillance state.
For Ring users, the process is the same. Your privacy and control over your videos and information are non-negotiable, and your participation is completely optional. Public safety agencies can't see who received a notification or who chose not to respond. You can even turn off Community Request notifications altogether if you prefer. By combining community safety with strong privacy protections, Community Requests respects individual choice while helping neighborhoods thrive.Flock (deliberately, IMHO) has no verification on whether said agencies are allowed by law or regulation or whatever to have that access, it's just a free-for-all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQxQpzNSNZU&pp=0gcJCfwJAYcqI...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45382434 (discussion from 2025-09-26)
Some sort of jamming tech or scrambling tech. There’s no reason to lock everyone into a surveillance state when we should be fighting it. Fighting through legislation isn’t tenable anymore.
The bottom line with technology is that you either host and control it yourself or you're at the whims of the vendor's business strategy.
I'm usually against these types of "smart" devices, but only bought it because my house got burgled as a student (whilst I was asleep!), so I got pretty shaken up and got the cheapest thing I could find. Currently, I do have it connected to a local HA instance, but I'm pretty sure that relies on Ring's online services to access it, unless I'm mistaken.
Google for rtsp doorbell and you’ll find many discussion threads
This is us against the oligarchs, not us against each other. And something makes me worried that there is an impending recession/depression and that these surveillance devices will be use to quell any dissent. (I say this because of the insane rise in the price of gold)
I, for one, am canceling my Amazon Prime account and avoiding amazon as much as I can in this dystopia where it is the only place you can buy many goods anymore.
0: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/cameras-doorbells/collec...
100% recommended alternative.
(Reolink, Unifi/Ubiquiti, and Frigate are all good solutions for anyone who is not interested in supporting the proliferation of a police-state)
I wonder if it's because the G6 is (afaict) launching in Q4? I guess we'll just have to hold tight for now.
Unifi had an issue at the end of 2023 where users could access consoles they didn't own through remote access: https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/15/ubiquiti_camera_priva...
If I (or more specifically my spouse) could work the mobile app without SSO I'd be thoroughly satisfied. As it stands I have some regrets.
After some digging around, I found homebridge [0] (with the homebridge-unifi-protect plugin by hjdhjd [1]) which fixed that for me by tying the UI Protect system into Apple's HomeKit ecosystem (which also leverages the homekit secure video that keeps alerts/motion/snapshots on iCloud). Now all our devices are able to have it popup alerts for motions, packages, etc.
It's not perfect, but this way I'm able to get alerts without tying in to Unifi's SSO system. I also still like to open the UI Protect app when I'm not on the local network to sometimes archive videos, view cameras, mess with one of the new UI PTZ cameras, so I have backup access options, including Tailscale. Tailscale doesn't give me the alerts I want, but lets me access the app as if I were still at home. I also have it tied in with HomeAssistant and recently began playing around with go2rtc.
I'm a super-newb when it comes to all this but 2022 is when I began getting fed up with all these privacy nightmares and began to teach myself selfhosting, docker, etc so I can mitigate all this. Unfortunately, I'm the only one who knows how to tinker and keep all this updated. However, I do have documentation for my wife how to access everything and start fresh to make it easier on her by using UI's SSO way so it "just works" as they say in the Macintosh World, when I'm no longer around.
[0] https://homebridge.io/ [1] https://github.com/hjdhjd/homebridge-unifi-protect#readme
This is a little misleading. Flock is primarily an ALPR that can identify make/model/color/identifying-feature of vehicles. It's not facial recognition. It doesn't itself have a racial component. The modal "proactive" Flock intervention (as opposed to investigative searches after crimes) is to flag a moving vehicle as stolen.
But in practice, the outcomes of deploying Flock are racialized, because the hot lists states keep of stolen vehicles aren't accurate enough for real-time enforcement, so recovered vehicles stay on the lists and false-positive. You're disproportionately likely to have a vehicle on a hot list if you live in a low-income neighborhood.
Even then: it's not clear how any of this is apposite to a Ring/Flock partnership. You can't use a Ring camera to do realtime ALPR flagging of cars. Presumably, this supports Flock's "single pane of glass" product; they just want police going to Flock for all their video needs. Police already canvass Ring and Nest cameras during investigations.
https://www.flocksafety.com/products/flock-dfr
much much more dystopian...
I don't think that's a good thing --- I think PDs should continue to manually canvass for footage and specifically ask residents for footage when they need it, I think that's actually the right public policy and we don't need to innovate past it. But good or bad, it has nothing to do with Flock's "AI".
Wonder if that helps any.
https://ring.com/support/articles/7e3lk/using-video-end-to-e...
KMS access is based on IAM policies.
If law enforcement wants access to your KMS keys, they'll compel IAM, not KMS, to give them access. If you ask KMS about it, they'll play dumb.
I had to buy a surveillance camera recently, but I made sure mine doesn’t connect to the internet in any way.
I’ve decided that I’m not a high-profile target for covert operatives, but I am a target of opportunity for people who have access to my data once that data is outside of my control. The decisions I make based on that are decisions like, “No surveillance feed goes into cloud services operated by companies I don’t trust,” but “I don’t need to encrypt my NAS”.
Some people have the setting on where it starts announcing stuff any time it sees a person, which it does all the way to the sidewalk. So you go on a walk and get yelled at through a super shitty speaker several times.
And it’s about as dystopian as you can imagine with people posting recordings constantly on the neighborhood Facebook group and arguing.
I swapped to HomeKit secure video because of no additional subscription, included in the iCloud one I’m paying anyway. Allegedly end to end encrypted too.
That's concerning. Now we have to worry about spyware coming pre installed on houses. I wonder how much the developers got paid to install those?
The data shows people like video doorbell. If the developer has to install a dumb one, then they would benefit by installing video doorbells.
Who knows how long that utility lasts with cheap video editing on the horizon.
I would love to see legislation banning this kind of automated harassment.
Never done it, but on late night walks home I've imagined banging on the doors of the houses with these just to inform them I got the message.
What sort of stuff does it say?
Is it as secure as a cloud service? Depends on what you consider secure. I closely monitor access logs and use strong passwords, Amazon has billions to spend on encryption, apps, and datacenters but they also have thousands of employees that can access your data at any time for any reason.
I would love it if some commercial host-it-yourself product were released but that goes against the pay to play model that has been chosen for all modern tech.
If anyone is having trouble understanding the support load, start by traveling to your local assisted living home and explaining to everyone static vs. dynamic IP address assignment.
You can do it fairly easily by bouncing off a server you control... aaaand we're right back where we started.
I use it with a few friends and we do stuff like host backups for each other. It makes it easy to securely allow that one server to be available to my hosts.
This doesn't solve the primary problem of your neighbours turning your country into a surveillance state.
They have 0 employees who can do that.
That's just being a realistic technology user in 2025.
I don't think this is a solution, personally.
Reality has become more stupid than even visionaries could have predicted.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/06/a16z-backed-toka-wants-to-...
The whole flock thing is brilliant as the FBI is the sales force through their grant programs.
sriram_malhar•18h ago
c0balt•18h ago
hopelite•14h ago
Even public information clearly describes how it is the "CIAs" one trick pony, whether it's orchestrating a "color revolution" for "democracy", instigating conflicts and war to feign innocent self-defense, implementing social engineering and Constitutional subversion, or implementing mass surveillance specifically. It's the same wife-beater and child rapist type pattern of grooming abuse that then feigns innocence and deflects blame to anything and anyone else.
Most people are really not all that different than any run of the mill battered wife (even if only in the making), psychologically. I get it a lot when I point out what a trap and an illegitimate, enemy entity that the EU is (not to pick on the EU, because it also applies to the US and many other places, but it's far more pronounced with the "EU-cultists")... You get the constant predictable defenses of the love-bombing "abusive boyfriend"/wife beater in the making responses. "you don't understand", "the EU really loves me", "you never want anything good for me", "he showers me with all kinds of benefits and slick marketing", "we are going to be happy forever".
It's sad, and as someone that has watched that cycle unfold even in my own family, it's really kind of demoralizing and somewhat depressing to know exactly where it's heading and being unable to counter the forces that have roots a long long time ago, forces of nature. So, the US and the EU will have to suffer that which is predictable and was preventable, no matter how much they wanted to see the world through rose colored glasses.
Maybe for humanity's sake, China can free the world of the scourge of this cycle and the psychopathic, narcissistic, maniacal group of people that causes it all... if they don't just kill all life on the planet because if they can't be in control then no one can be in control.