Of course people should beware. Anyone who has a problem with Flock is surely aware that they are only a fraction of "the problem," though among the more visible.

I'm concerned that some Flock haters might take us down a slippery slope to where you can't have a camera in your house if it looks out onto the street, or that you shouldn't be allowed to record cops, or that I shouldn't be allowed to have a camera attachment on my Manhattan apartment balcony telescope that I normally just use to furiously goon to the good people of NYC who don't close their curtains. (Oops, forget that third example.)

I can't say I'm a fan of Flock but if their rights are infringed in a way that might possibly expand to everyone else, then they will need to be defended.

That said, I have a modest proposal for the law-enforcement-related problems of surveillance vendors. Require non-warrant sharing with LE to be unreliable. For every geo search, remove a random half of the applicable results and replace them with deliberate, randomized false positives, so that LE will know the data shouldn't be taken too seriously on its own. If cops act without confirmation while KNOWING it's _at least_ 50% likely to be wrong, that'll help with the civil suits for false arrests.

You do know this is an option you can just turn off? Also, the way I assume it works is that it "learns" your charging habits and won't do anything that ends up with you having a dead phone in the morning or a non-charging phone when you're actually plugging into your car or at a Starbucks to charge, because it uses location to determine if you're at home.

It could end up being an issue if your life doesn't follow a routine schedule, which again, is why it can be disabled. I suppose you could argue that the default setting is annoying, but that's true across the entire tech industry - no matter what OS you go with, you're going to have to dig into the settings and turn off someone else's ideas for how they wanted you to use their product.

I dunno, why aren't more people vandalizing devices that can snap your picture and upload to the cloud (to a database the authorities can search with no oversight) while you're actively in the process of committing what would likely result in felony charges in most states? The reality is Flock cameras have negative scrap value (they're essentially e-waste), and if you're really intent on picking up garbage from the streets, you might as well stick to the kinds of trash that are perfectly legal to collect and dispose of.

Non-destructively vandalizing the cameras (e.g.: putting a plastic grocery bag over them) probably has a better chance of being interpreted as a "protest" if you get a sympathetic judge, but you're still just as likely to get caught. People messing with Flock cameras is one of the lesser crimes that police tend to actually take somewhat seriously. There was a story recently of a cop that actually put up a fake 3D printed Flock camera so he could stake it out and catch someone when they tried to vandalize it (and it worked, they caught the guy).

HEIC is worthless because it's illegal to implement unless you get permission. Maybe in 20 years it'll be usable.

Don't like that fact? Then we need to find and support (oh no, and be?) political candidates who oppose software patents.

You shouldn't need anyone's permission to write a computer program. It's infuriating.

This. So much this.

I'm a night owl. I hate mornings. Screw forcing me to get up an hour earlier every year because people can't just turn on their damn headlights or bring a flashlight with them. Hell, they could rename noon to "Central America o'clock" for all I care, just pick one time standard and stick with it all year. The difference between DST and standard time will all sort itself out in adjusted scheduling anyway. It's not as if there's a law that says work, school or store openings have to start at specific times.

Your honor, my script was a "rogue," so therefore it is responsible and I am not.

If the cops receive an anonymous tip that CowboyNeal is an insensitive clod, and then decide to arrest him without checking out any of the evidence, I blame the cops. There's plenty to bitch about with Flock but "the cops don't care about doing their job" isn't one of them. That's a cop problem.

Don't treat any stupid robots as somehow "better" than an anonymous tip called in from a payphone. It's just, like, something's opinion, man.

I'm quite a bit older than Gen Z and even I think AM radio is a waste of spectrum. We've got cell phones now and supposedly Starlink is even capable of providing cell coverage from space. The cell networks are also quite a bit more resilient than people give them credit for, too. Last major hurricane we had here (Irma), I watched the weather radar on my phone throughout the entire storm. Power went out, Spectrum was down, but the cell service stayed up the whole time.

Also, AM radio just sounds like absolute ass. I don't understand how anyone would willingly subject themselves to that when you can get a crystal clear audio feed via modern online streaming. I get it, it was an amazing achievement in its day and a necessary stepping stone to better technologies, but please just let it finally die.

We now live in a fully connected world where most users are connected through web browsers and are the intended victims.

This particular story is an exception to that. Remote software, accessed through a web browser, normally does not have read/write access to your local filesystem. But people are granting local filesystem access to proprietary AI services.

I think that granting such access is .. wow. I wouldn't do it, though I can see how if you use a specialized account for it, and if you're confident that your OS has no local user priv escalation bugs, it might be ok. In your sandbox you trust.

But GP's comment is about whose decision that is. If you use Linux, then it's your decision. If you use iOS, then it's Apple's decision. And MacOS is becoming less Linuxy and more iOSy every year. I think it makes plenty of sense for stories like this to result in people dumping MacOS for Linux. (But daaamn, their values surprise me. You wanna make your computer less secure instead of more? Oh well, like Rumsfeld said, freedom is untidy!)

No, if the state were renamed, it would be to Old America. NM might not be the true original, but if you look at it through the eyes of European colonization and continuous governance, then New Mexico has the best claim of the fifty. (Though if you take a less racist view, then I guess Alaska had the real OGs.)

Randi McGinn, a lawyer for New Mexico, said applying the full $5,000 penalty to the number of violations would create too large of a penalty under the US Constitution's protections on due process.

I ass/u/me this refers to the Eighth Amendment, but I don't remember seeing any monetary constants encoded within that text.

Google's telling me Meta is worth about $1.8 trillion so how would a mere $40B be "excessive?" It's only about 2% of their worth! Civil penalties in excess of 2% of someone's worth are routinely accepted as constitutional, aren't they? If this case were about me driving drunk and killing a whole family, I bet no one would flinch at the 8A implications of taking 2% (!?!) of my assets, and everyone would laugh at my lawyer if he brought up 8A for such an insignificant fine.

I understand why we have 8A, and everyone deserves mercy, but I don't see why Meta deserves exceptional mercy as a singular special case that we would be horrified to see applied anywhere else. Bringing up 8A for such a tiny fine would be giving Meta a very unique carve-out that we normally would not apply.

It may be that $5k is too much to charge criminals per act, in that each crime didn't really cause that much loss, but bringing up due process concerns seems like bullshit when the fine is already so small. NM and Meta had been trying to negotiate the cost of illegal business for years before negotiations failed and it went to trial. Meta decided to let a jury decide, and the jury's come up with a fairly tiny fraction of their assets.

If Meta thinks the price of illegal business is still too high, then they can lower the number of willful violations they commit per year, to optimize the advantage they gain from illegal actions at an affordable rate.

Geez, Zuck, just do less of it. If $40B seems like a lot, then maybe try only $10B worth of crime next time. What's the big deal? Live and learn. After this little fine you still have 98% of the company left to go on and incur the next wave of liabilities.

burn down institutions that actually work; they are too stupid to understand how they work.

Khrushchev would love that our government is full of people who disagree with the principle of Chesterton's Fence. It's appalling that "conservatives" have become so far to the left of "The Left."

Vote conservative: vote Democrat.

What's next? If we accept this, then the next thing will be that public officials won't be allowed to sell Amway/Herbalife, heroin, or fake patents? This is viciously partisan, clearly intended to keep a certain major political party from running for office.

Brainrot social media probably is bad for kids. Lots of stuff out in the real world is bad for kids, too. That's why parents are supposed to do this thing called "parenting" and not let their spawn have access to things that aren't age appropriate.

It absolutely baffles the fuck out of me that so many parents just said to their kids "here's a smartphone, don't do anything stupid with it" and then went all surprised Pikachu faced when their kids went and did the stupid anyway - exactly as anyone with a half functioning brain could've predicted.

Use them?! First: why would I want to be locked into Meta's proprietary APIs? And second: it doesn't even include a near-infrared swimsuits mode. I can't believe they omitted such a basic feature. (Zuck, you call these perv glasses!?!)

Besides, from a style perspective, they just aren't nearly gargoylie enough. Whatever perv glasses I buy will have erect antenna(s) (not integrated into the frame), much larger aperture cameras for astronomy, and lots of blinkenlights (including a cool-looking Locutus-style laser). It doesn't surprise me at all, that the more style-conscious sex isn't buying them.

Meta's specific product is ridiculous. But I nevertheless defend the overall tech.