- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
I am standing on the corner of Harris Road and Young Street outside of the Crossroads Business Park in Bakersfield, California, looking up at a Flock surveillance camera bolted high above a traffic signal. On my phone, I am watching myself in real time as the camera records and livestreams me—without any password or login—to the open internet. I wander into the intersection, stare at the camera and wave. On the livestream, I can see myself clearly. Hundreds of miles away, my colleagues are remotely watching me too through the exposed feed.
Flock left livestreams and administrator control panels for at least 60 of its AI-enabled Condor cameras around the country exposed to the open internet, where anyone could watch them, download 30 days worth of video archive, and change settings, see log files, and run diagnostics.
Archive: http://archive.today/IWMKe
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iirc they weren’t even the first ones to discover this because there was already someone on the blackmarket selling data collected from exposed cameras and endpoints which included PII of entire police departments.
Wholly fuck!
Is there a directory of these cameras? Or are they gonna make me do all the legwork?
These specifically or just Flock cams?
Here’s a start: DeFlock Me
I meant the unlocked interfaces. I’m familiar with deflock.me and have contributed to it. But thank you.
I was living in a 10th story penthouse apartment as a new building started beside us. The contractor put a webcam high up on the structure so people could watch construction live on a website. They left the control panel fully exposed so all you had to do was find the IP address of the camera and boom, you had full control. I would point it directly at my apartment’s window and wave, or my friends would do silly shit. Every morning the cam would be reset, but they never actually secured it. That’s when I realized how fucked we were, 20 years ago.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it got found by Shodan, which scans the entire internet, indexes it and is easily searchable.
There’s actually quite a few open webcams on the internet that shouldn’t be.
Honestly? Good. These cameras should either be public or dismantled. I’d like to see them dismantled, but worst case scenario is the current one where they’re selectively used by law enforcement
I seem to recall an early 00s screed, perhaps by Bruce Schneier or someone of that ilk, suggesting a future in which yes we have surveillance in the public square, but since it’s public, everyone has full access to all the public-place cameras at any time. So you could use it to, say, see around the corner of an alley at night.
That was David Brin in The Transparent Society. He has continued to riff on the theme periodically since then.
Benn Jordan did a recent video on his…explorations of Flock cameras. Essentially, they’re easily hackable and really should be an urgent matter of national security.
Dude, he just released another one where they accessed dozens of real, currently in use cameras. They didn’t even “hack” them, they just used a search engine to find publicly exposed cameras, opened their unsecured internal web panel, and could download and view any footage over the past 31 days, including from the new face tracking cameras that zoom in and pan on people’s unsuspecting faces as they walk by.
Truly wild.
This only serves to justify my secret low key paranoia that my like is like The Truman Show… I wish my parents were better about limiting some of the movies I was allowed to watch growing up… Arachnophobia was another lasting damage banger…
Reading flock their own response about their security and recording it via one of their active and installed cameras was fucking great. I mean, it was nightmare shit, but at a certain point, you have to appreciate the irony.
My own mother (pensioner) sent me the video asking “is this real?” But could only follow the first minutes of it.
I lol’d at that part and had to explain the brilliance of it. Then she lol’d, too.
It’s nice to share in the shadows humor, as a family, while we feel our liberties erode.
All that and they can’t catch real criminals, gotta harass “illegals” and law abiding citizens for speeding a little.
And stalk women!
Yeah he is working with 404 media
You can bet your ass foreign spy agencies are laughing their arses off about this as they track whatever targets they like
Snip their wires, spray paint their lens, or put a hammer on the end of a tall stick. it should be easy to take these things out. Of course don’t do anything or have anything on you that would identify you were in the area at the time of these actions.
There is now enough adjacent cctv coverage to follow your approach and exit from the scene of the crime. The rush is that another Flock camera is used to identify, and then make an example out of you or me.
Air rifles are pretty cheap too if you can shoot straight.
I am wondering if a super soaker with very salty water would work. It should heavily obscure the lens when dried and if someone doesn’t clean it properly it will scratch it to hell.
Water with flour and dye
Rain is a thing.
If the lens is getting wet, it’s an awfully shitty surveillance camera.
Did you miss the part about unencrypted admin creds being widely available on the internet?
Cameras are typically angled down and have a little rain hood.
The idea that you’re somehow not entitled to privacy based on the publicity of a space has got to be one of the most successful propaganda campaigns used to strip privacy against the will of people.
Fuck you, I want to take a walk and generally travel freely without being tracked by some fucking “Flock” or Ring camera, or uploaded unblurred to some randos Instagram where Meta and Clearview will train facial recognition and generative AI, or having my entire life story and biometric data collected at some airport.
Take me back to the thousands of years humanity existed without obscenely invasive tech.
It reminds me a little of Game of Thrones, where all the major players, the royals etc all have spy networks. This is a world where very poor peasants and servants are everywhere and many of them, including children, end up in the employ of this person or that person, watching who is coming and going and reporting back, such that one’s movements and meetings are trackable to a minute degree. The better your spy network, the more power you have.
Of course Varys, spymaster to the crown, is famed for the effectiveness of his network, which spans the continent and even across the sea to other major cities.
He himself is a master of disguise. This was left out of the show entirely but he frequently appears by surprise, whipping off the guise of an old woman and later leaving the scene dressed as a priest, etc. He grew up with actors and uses makeup and costume changes to hide his tracks. He can change his voice and gait at will and routinely shocks people by his ability to blend in and appear or disappear at will. He knows how to leave a place by a different entrance than he came in, and knows all the secrets passageways of the castle.
Basically, in a world with no privacy, the world’s foremost surveillance master is a model for all of us in these times. If you want to move freely in public but do so without a trace, be prepared to pull your hood up and when you leave a restaurant, take off the hoodie you were wearing when you went in. Practice different postures to throw off gait tracking.
You don’t have to like it, but this is the world we live in.
It’s the “common sense” part of the laws.
A honest person has right to live without being tracked. You shouldn’t care how they’ll do it and you shouldn’t care if they go out of business.
And of course you shouldn’t fear to be public about it and demand answers, LOL, the most notable for me personally part about today’s politics is that in English-speaking countries that fear seems to have become a thing. Well, because any protest that’s more than a demonstration is becoming dangerous and costly.
While literal legalism always helps tyranny.
It’s not much different from USSR in the 70s and 80s, “yeah, you can have all your rights, a defendant and all, and correspondence and you won’t be tortured for submitting a complaint, and Soviet laws will be followed to the letter, but good luck, prove you’re not a camel”.
Since USSR and western nations no longer exist in the same time period, it’s easy to discard even the thought that the latter are gradually becoming similar to the former in some regards, and might even overshoot it.
Anyway, I live in Russia, here things are for the last few months at the point where I can get jailed for writing even this, just because. LOL again.
A honest person has right to live without being tracked.
The implied corrolary here is that a dishonest person doesn’t have this right? How is one determined to be dishonest?
I’m pretty sure that the “non entitled to privacy” part was not about getting organisationally stalked, but that if someone were to randomly take a picture outside and post it somewhere, then you don’t get to make them take down photos.
Also, if you are creating a scene in public, other get to film you as they get to see you.This is not a problem about privacy in public. This is a problem of:
- organisational stalking
- misrepresentation of actions
- shirking accountability and responsibility
A city in the KC Metro just signed a contract with Flock for drone cameras. Fuck that Big Brother bullshit.
red light companies most likely use some form of AI/facial recognition.
red light cameras - at least in australia - are stock standard canon DSLRs… they take images, but not video
there are some newer ones that do things like photos of people using their phones stopped at lights etc, but generally speed/red light and “single purpose” cameras will just be doing stills, and wouldn’t be too useful for anything other than a single photo when the sensor triggers it
WA police just introduced cameras that recored the inside of a vehicle (including the backseat so yay to childrens privacy) and using AI deternine whether you are driving dangerously.
yeah they do certainly exist, but bog standard “red light cameras”… ie single purpose cameras are not that kind of problem… imo, as long as they’re deployed to combat actual issues they’re very much a beneficial tool
i think it’s important to differentiate these new kinds of cameras from the single purpose cameras so that arguments against them can be made independently
deleted by creator
Benn Jordan did a great video on this: https://youtu.be/vU1-uiUlHTo
He co-released a video with 404Media on this new dystopian finding today as well.
I do not consent.
Tear em down
Or point a very powerful laser at them
Or like someone in Hacker News comm suggested, use this to track a US Senator for 24 hours, make it all public, then see if they’re still OK with this…
I feel like this is being done now but by the ‘adversaries’ that would love to keep the vulnerabilities a secret they can exploit later.
Often the case, yep.
Do a SCROTUM and find out of they’re still sending people to SECOT.
They’ll just make it illegal for just them. Like the Internet privacy
Might as well use it to track ICE
Hacker News Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355548
Without the ycombinator
That’s the first I’ve seen a HN web client. Why does it exist, and what’s the reason against linking directly to Y Combinator?
Ycombinator is the Thiel funded Altman led cancer VC that originated the surveillance capitalism
neonazitechbro situation we have today. It spearheaded the death of US democracy.Peter Thiel invested in Flock through Y Combinator
YCombinator is a VC fund trying to pretend like they’re hacker(tinkering) friendly community, when their business model is boosting their own companies/startups. And companies aren’t hitting those profits with people tinkering.
https://soatok.blog/2025/12/17/the-revolution-will-not-make-the-hacker-news-front-page/
In all, that doesn’t align with the hacker ethos. They’re just capitalizing on what it stands for with a lot of techbro hubris.
The first step of limiting their influence is using a different opensource frontend.
Fuck “Hacker News”, the people that hang around there are in major ways responsible for the shitty state the internet -and the world- is in now.
How so? HN is literally the only forum I know of which doesn’t require email to regsiter an account and has a free, publicly accessible API.
Look at the people who hang around there.
This is the way.
Again? How insecure are these things? I am honestly wondering how easy it would be to get into one and shut down the entire system.
Install a hardware-frying virus on it
I studied coding for a while (and it has been a while since I punched in code), but I never coded a virus. I am hesitant to ask an LLM to do it since I have no idea if it’ll work, and I also need to test it to see if it works first. Not sure if I have any sacrificial electronics to do that.
It’s obvious that these guys are fucking amateur hour Techbros, running this shitshow as they have. I don’t doubt they’re underpaying and undertraining the contractors they hire to install these things.
If anything, they might have written most of the infrastructure using LLMs. It’s easier for vibecode to forget about security because LLMs often forget context or hyperfixate on the wrong features.
Original is better
The original is better because no higher resolution version actually looks like the original. It’s so weird, it’s not hars at all to make a higher res one that’s almost identical to the original yet all the ones I’ve seen just look like shit. I’m gonna take some time tomorrow and make a high resolution version with the details correct.
I don’t think it’s an upscale. I think it’s an mspaint recreation. There’s no reason an AI upscale would turn the cheek circles into ellipses and move them away from the edge of the cheek. All the colors are also different, and the geometry differs in places too.
The high res one looks better as a cutout instead of the full background, but the jpeg adds to the charm IMHO.
The high-res one also removes all the shadows, I assume the upscaling algorithm believed they were blur
I swear to God if this is AI upscaled
