I agree, and such as mistake could easily end wrong, as the officers pointed out. I am not excusing the mistake made by the police, but there are a few compounding errors that made this happen. First - no check if it is a valid tag number on entry. You'd think Flock would at least do that, as well has have some pattern recognition to pull up an error when the entered number does not match the expected sequence to flag it for review. Secondly, no check to see how often taht tag number pops up and where so if it gets a hit the same day a thousand miles away lag it for review. CA only allows stolen for missing tags. I don't know what info Flock provides, but giving make/model/color with the tag could also help prevent errors since the cops would realize the stolen tag matched the car using it; although depending on how manufacturer tags are used it may not have helped in this particular situation. This is the classic cascading failures that resulted in the outcome.

A pro also isn't going to HD with his wife. Thefts by pros disappear quickly because, well, they are pros and want to avoid getting caught.

The problem, as shown in TFA, is the 10 are 2 small numbers stacked vertically between the 34 and DTM, so they get overlooked. Should the police looked closer, sure, but I can also see why the made the error because the 34 DTM is in much larger font size.

Yes, and should be legally liable for damages in cases like this. At. minimum, if there system catches 34 DTM in multiple areas at the same time, that's signs of a problem, and the art of pattern a computer should be good at detecting. The inability to report a tag as lost also means for this edge case it gets a stolen marker. You could tag it as lost and inform the tag owner not to reuse it if found, and if the correct number was entered if it shows up on a vehicle again mark it as stolen. That of course, would require work and changing a system.

From TFA:

Seems Apple has what they may need from their own systems. Given Apple's penchant for secrecy, they should have known Apple could see what tehy did and use it against them and OpenAI. I would also not be surprised if some employees who interviewed but didn't leave Apple told the approbate people was OpenAI was asking or in interviews.

What I don't get if you're a long term Apple employee at a relatively senior level, why risk everything you've made in stock alone by doing something that risks losing everything or a big chunk of it in a settlement? OpenAI could through them under the bus to save the company if needed, after all.

The difficulty would depend on what data the camera provides, analysis of traffic past the camera and available information about the locations of potential interest. A serious effort would be more than hacking cameras, it would include on the ground surveillance to collect information on route terrain, what identifying information cameras openly broadcast, correlating that with camera information and footage collected, etc. Government cameras such as traffic cameras might be a better target since they would likely be on areas of interest already and fewer to review.

Machine learning tools could make it somewhat easier to sort results into cameras of interest. Of course, it's a huge data set to go through if you want useful information. Depending on how many cameras you accessed you could just have people look at them and decide that way.

Is this some intelligence operation? Who knows. It's not cheap nor easy to get useful information, but something a state actor could certainly attempt to do if they want to dedicate the resources to it.

The $5K a year just gives you a $300 per person per visit discount. So pays itself back in 15 visits or so.

Per TFA,it's civilian cameras on transit routes, so what it sounds like is they look for cameras along major roads and hack into them to follow shipments. It would not surprise me if they were trying to hack phones/watches/fitness bands or anything that can track individual then look at data to try to find the drivers by correlating the data with traffic data.

Plenty of us nerds can afford this and want to see news about this.

It's a snowman, of course it has water...

True, but the internet assures those few are a force multiplier that enables the masses to bypass guardrails, just like radar detectors were created by those few fuckers and used by the masses to evade punishment for violating speed laws.

Exactly. No matter how much we learn, we still waste money on other things...

Exactly. A local school has a bunch of high tech solutions designed to restrict student access to various sites, I teacher I know caught one of her students printing out porn downloaded on a school issued device to a school printer; and he wasn't exactly a tech genius, nor even a genius a he got caught when he went to pick up the printouts. Companies can put all sorts of protections in place and many kids will simply find a work around; you could require a government issued photo id, no id equals no access, and facial recognition each time you sign on. Even so, someone would find way to circumvent and as soon as they did it's be plastered all over the web.

Countries set themselves up as tax havens to encourage countries to locate there; to the point is one of their largest industries.

Years ago, when I worked for Generous Electric, some brilliant CFO decided the way to cut costs was to offer early retirement with a generous package to get rid of expensive engineers. All the senior engineers I worked with spent their days justifying why they should get a package, and ultimately they did. Six month Slater tehy were rehired when GE discovered they were the only ones that really understood how to fix the systems when they broke, since they had years of experience doing just that. The upshot was they kept all their retirement package benefits plus got those of a full time employee.

As I said, I'm an aeronautical engineer. Close is good enough, 6 is close enough to 4 for large values of 4, and in case, it'll still fly... If it doesn't just add bigger engines. As I told my accounting prof, I'll just hire an accountant (and I did).

Mine is an HP45. Later got an 41CV. RPN means never having family borrow your toys...

In my ay, we had to rely on bribes and neopotism to get into goood schools, no fancey technology to help us.