Which is often intentional.

We live in 2026. You can order an artillery or drone strike in Ukraine from a tablet and it'll be delivered within minutes. Data processing speeds are essentially instant for data sets not on LLM sizes. We have automation everywhere when it suits the right people. e.g. that speeding ticket you received for going 12 km/h over the limit? No human ever so much as saw that. Full automated process. Takes 6-12 weeks. Why? Because otherwise you might still remember how fast you were actually going or that you weren't even in that street on that day, and fight it. Same principle here: The slower the bureaucracy, the more people will just give up and go away. It's a self-regulating system to reduce the number of inquiries to the amount that the public servants can comfortably process.

that's a per-character stat.

If your average license plate has, say, 6 characters, you get a 78% total probability that it reads them right.

If you have 8 Flock cameras in your town of let's say 100,000 people, sitting at busy roads or intersections, 10 to 20 thousand cars per day is a reasonable estimate, which means you get 62,400 to 124,800 mis-read license plates. Per day. Every day. Under optimal conditions.

That's more false readings than you have people.

I wonder if just randomly assigning traffic tickets to license plates in your register wouldn't get you a lower false positive rate.

At least for me and many others I spoke to.

Go and use books to train AI.

Just don't fucking destroy them afterwards! Many of these are out of print, impossible to replace! How much of a douchebag do you have to be to destroy them ?

You are so wrong. The country I live in now has it. It's not called the same, but it amounts to the same. Near impossible to sue the police here.

I'm pretty sure most countries have something similar on the books.

I'm fairly sure at least one entire department at MS is tasked with making sure people don't switch to other formats, that despite on-paper "open" XML it remains incompatible and no competitor software can flawlessly read and write it.

So no, unless you can hire a dozen people full-time to counter that, you don't have a chance to break through that.

Qualified immunity is a reasonable concept that I agree is needed for police work.

It's just being completely overdone, used to cover up clear abuse. The basic idea of "when in doubt, police still needs to be able to act" is sound. The actual practice "unless you can prove to criminal standards and beyond, that the police officer knew at that exact moment, that what they were doing was totally definitely illegal and they intentionally decided to break a law. That's quite a bit too much of "err on the side of caution".

What a complete and utter surprise... to the three people who are so high their brain stopped working but miraculously didn't kill them.

For everyone else, this was literally the first thing we thought about, right? Please tell me I'm not the last sane person on planet Earth. Nobody expected that this would NOT be abused in such ways, right?

Which is why you never answer "yes" to anything a prosecutor asks you. It's always a trap. In this case, asking if this is your account and not asking if you sent those messages is the trap.

Hard disagree.

There are mistakes that can happen - getting a phone number wrong, knocking on the wrong street number, stuff like that, sure.

But all of those mistakes need to be found and fixed DURING the investigation. This is the duty of the police officiers.

Not finding any evidence and STILL going to trial - that's on the prosecution. But I doubt that there would have been a conviction if police had not omitted things or outright lied in court. I doubt any courd would hand down a guilty verdict if all the police involved said that they found no evidence of anything.

You can call a piece of coal "off-white, tending towards darkish", or you can call it "black". Both are technically not incorrect. Only one of them is not intentionally misleading.

The whole shit is obviously intended to chill critique. If you are seriously offended by someone calling you an incompetent ass, then politics isn't for you, go get a real job.

And the police really have more important things to do than scaring pensioners who got a bit emotional online. (one of the most famous raids was in 2024 against a 64-year old guy who had called a minister "Schwachkopf" (english: dimwit).

Tell me you think that justifies sending the police to someone's home. Seriously, these people need to get a grip. You can call me dimwit all day and I wouldn't dream of sending the police after you.

What else would you call it when police arrives at your home at 6 am to search it because you posted something online? (like they would find a reddit posting in your sock drawer, I mean come on, seriously?)

During the ""Aktionstage gegen Hasspostings" (Action Days Against Hate Speech), around a hundred or so such raids are conducted on the same day, and a substantial portion of those is for insulting politicians.

The details are clickbait, and the take questionable, but there is enough truth in it. From my perspective (I'm Germany, but I currently live elsewhere, but still follow German politics closely):

One, there is a considerable crisis in the German manufacturing industry. And the current government has pushed through (with questionable methods) and insane military spending bill while at the same time complaining everywhere else that there is no money and they need to cut this and that and everything else.

Two, there is a strong US influence in european politics, and especially in Germany. A long list of recent and current high-ranking German politicians has direct connections to US think tanks or corporations, and an even larger number found employ with these or US universities, etc. after they were voted out. One would have to be incredibly naive to think that they're hired for their competence or out of charity.

This is not the only case and there HAVE been police raids and quite a bit of police overreach, all in the name of a law specifically made to protect politicians. There have been several HUNDRED cases brought by politiciians against ordinary people for things they posted online.

You can discuss individual cases, but that doesn't change the pattern.

And, btw., this is not a right- oder left-wing topic. The dude in question here is a right-wing politician (the CDU being Germany's equivalent to the Republicans). Not the most right-extremist-wing, but clearly right-wing, pro-corporation, fuck-the-working-class right-wing.

Some famous Frenchman once said: Give me ten lines, written by the most innocent man, and I'll find something in them to hang him for.

Once the government becomes oppressive, there is no such thing as non-problematic data.

Corporations never, ever (pinky-swear) destroy evidence. What they do is destroy data before it BECOMES evidence. That's the whole trick. It's what they try to argue here: As soon as they asked, destroying the data they had asked to see became illegal. I sincerely hope this gets thrown out.

Can we please pressure Apple and Google into making duress passwords a standard feature on all OSs?

We need this to become common.