Flock's automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras are in more than 5,000 communities around the U.S. Local police are doing lookups in the nationwide system for ICE.
  • GreenKnight23@lemmy.worldEnglish
    884·
    4 months ago

    and this is why my security system will never connect to the Internet.

    I’ve had cops ask for my footage before that sneer at me sending them the raw files. “why can’t you just pull up the app?” or my favorite, “you should use ring, then we can just send a request to them for the footage.”

    sure, pig. sure. I’ll open my home as a part of your distributed network surveillance botnet. /s

    • spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      30·
      4 months ago

      It is surprising how difficult most camera companies have made it to avoid their subscription services.

      Multiple companies that used to offer local rstp streaming have summarily removed support in firmware upgrades without notifying their customers. Even companies that support it (like Foscam) demand developer agreements be signed to get basic camera command information. Tp-link supports rstp but requires an phone app and Internet connection to configure their cameras.

      Like you, I will never connect my cameras to the Internet, but we are slowly approaching a time when that by itself will be a cause for police investigation.

        • FordBeeblebrox@lemmy.worldEnglish
          71·
          4 months ago

          I learned about VPNs and torrenting thanks to corporations like EA releasing trash with a price tag on it, suppose I’ll start reading up on low voltage security systems so I can build my own, thanks for the tinkering idea fascists 👍

    • cortex7979@lemm.eeEnglish
      18·
      4 months ago

      you should use ring, then we can just send a request to them for the footage."

      YIKES, thats whats called a weird flex.

  • formulaBonk@lemm.eeEnglish
    274·
    4 months ago

    It’d be a shame if anonymous types started working on poisoning all publicly accessible cameras with ai poison pills that brick whatever model you try to run on the footage

    • GrumpyDuckling@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      22·
      4 months ago

      I read that glow in the dark material will trigger an ir motion sensor. So don’t plant small flags coated with glow in the dark paint across from the cameras because it will cause them to take and send thousands of useless images and make them think their camera is broken.

      • Raltoid@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        4 months ago

        Most of them will trigger from reflected IR, which is easy to do with some metallic mylar. Those emergency blankets cut into strips should work like a charm.

        • notfromhere@lemmy.mlEnglish
          3·
          4 months ago

          That requires an IR source. The glow in the dark might trigger without an external IR source. So depends on the capabilities of the system in question. Some have active IR scene illuminators, some are passive.

          • Raltoid@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            4 months ago

            It’s been a while since I did that sort of thing, but from what I remember: The vast majority of “night vision” cameras are active IR, or sensitive enough that proper reflective surfaces trigger activity if they change a large enough area.

            And the type of imagery these searches are looking for, would most likely be fooled by a couple of reflective strips blowing in the wind. Although I might recommend using strips of that reflective stuff on safety vests, that way you’d really “poison the pool”.

            EDIT:

            Don’t tape the strips across the street. Hang them nearer the camera so they occupy a larger area of the footage and triggers more easily. Although not on/close to the lens, that will make them notice too soon. You can even just tape a stick on top of the camera that goes up like a fishing rod, with some strands of fishing wire to reflect light in the moisture that condenses(basically a fake spiderweb).

    • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zipEnglish
      158·
      4 months ago

      While they’re at it, why not just hack the government to reverse last year’s election, amirite?

      I know most of us loved Mr Robot and watching dinozzo and abby double team a keyboard and Wolverine getting a blowy and all that fun stuff, but that really isn’t how things work.

      These aren’t off the shelf pre-trained models. The model is a big part of the company’s product and, increasingly, the cost of training is being partially offloaded to customers under the guise of “tune the model to your data”.

      And IF we have a Bones situation where someone has inscribed a virus onto human remains to destroy a one of a kind machine or whatever: That is what version control is for. “Hmm. The May 2025 model isn’t working. Okay, switch back to April”

      Also, these “models” are a lot closer to just running OCR on a feed and logging which traffic camera saw one of the flagged license plates.

      • formulaBonk@lemm.eeEnglish
        74·
        4 months ago

        You watch too much tv. All you need is to degrade the quality of the recorded video on any camera exposed to the public internet enough for ai to have divergent results due to how ambiguous the images captured are. There are thousands of hobby projects that let you browse actual feeds from such cameras and usually that means you can get hardware metadata and in most cases change how the video is recorded by patching the driver running on the already publicly accessed cameras. Why make an exaggerated strawman argument while at the same time pretending you know better than everyone else?

        • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.worldEnglish
          51·
          4 months ago

          This article says it is local cameras installed by local police that are being used for ice by the local police department.

          Claiming anonymous could do anything about it by poisoning AI models is absurd. Then you call out the skeptic for watching too much TV?

          Besides, Anonymous hasn’t done anything significant in 10 years They dos’ed Israel last year. Did it do anything? Was one less Palestinian killed?

          • formulaBonk@lemm.eeEnglish
            3·
            4 months ago

            Ahh yes the local police! An infamous bastion of web security, IT infrastructure, and thinking long term. Who could ever crack the default passwords on their IT setup? How could we ever hope to social engineer these above average intelligence elite local cops into plugging in a usb drive to their work computer. This is all definitely impossible, no local police branch has ever been a victim of ransomware so we know for sure it can’t be done and deserves all the cynicism and comparisons to Hollywood movies from the 80s.

            Of course we also know that by “anonymous types” I meant that one specific group of people you have in mind who did that one thing 10 years ago and not just socially conscious programmers with basic knowledge of social engineering and web infrastructure. That would be a ridiculous thing to mean of course.

            • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.worldEnglish
              12·
              4 months ago

              It’s your claim that Anonymous would do anything when they won’t and do it by AI poisoning that’s absurd.

              If your initial claim was, “It would be a shame if someone hacked their local police.” it wouldn’t have sounded like you just watched Mr. Robot.

          • formulaBonk@lemm.eeEnglish
            11·
            4 months ago

            That’s fair, you probably won’t brick their ai model but it can make it useless for that particular camera output.

            • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zipEnglish
              3·
              4 months ago

              Which… is basically worthless because of just how many cameras there are out there.

              A “fun” exercise a couple buddies and I did a few years (… decade?) back was to just use an afternoon of plugging python packages together and scraping county traffic cam feeds to track someone, with their consent, over a few days. And it was ridiculously easy to get their schedule down basically day one and even get a LOT of data on who they were seeing or where they went after parking just based on when and where the car “disappeared”.

              And that is just publicly available traffic cameras. Not the giant mess of speed and red light cameras and all the other crap we have in a modern surveillance state.

              So even if people are climbing traffic poles and midlining over to the actual boxes to smash them? Those are even less of an issue than normal outages from rain on a windy day.

  • einlander@lemmy.worldEnglish
    61·
    4 months ago

    Green high powered lasers, they can burn cmos sensors. Also the iPhone and some car lidar sensors can burn cmos sensors.

    Not the question is if the Flock plate readers are susceptible to this.

    • GrumpyDuckling@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      5·
      4 months ago

      They use a basic ir sensor to trigger the camera, they’re just a cheap trail camera that sends images when motion is detected. You could put a black sticker over the ir sensor and then they would be wondering why it’s not taking photos.