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Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera

586 points · 270 comments · driverdan

  1. iamnothere · · focus · HN ↗
    I think I should start posting a reminder in Flock threads that Axon is a Flock competitor, is also engaged in mass surveillance, and is possibly even worse, but there’s rarely any mention of it. Journalists need to do some digging there. This shouldn’t just be a Flock story, or Flock will just get bought up or something and everyone will move on.

    (The above should not be read as supporting Flock or discouraging further investigation.)

    > The camera’s logs also show the camera struggling with storage. Its logs recorded more than 27,000 “no space left on device” errors while trying to save full-resolution images, along with tens of thousands of related errors, crashes, and reboots. At the same time, about every two minutes, code checked that the camera was still running and logged the message, “Who’s a good boy?!” More than 12,000 of those messages appear in the recovered logs.

    Lol

    1. cuvinny · · focus · HN ↗
      While Axon's system should be under the microscope too I don't think they have the nation wide cloud that Flock is doing and requires specific agreements to share data. Maybe that is getting abused to form a national database but I imagine it was designed so say a county sheriff department and local city PDs could share resources. I don't think most people are that concerned about things like that (though they should be), it is the nation wide surveillance that creeps people out. That and the stalking of course and both systems can be used for that.
      1. cucumber3732842 · · focus · HN ↗
        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.

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