[HN Gopher] Flock Hardcoded the Password for America's Surveilla...
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Flock Hardcoded the Password for America's Surveillance
Infrastructure 53 Times
Author : fuck_flock
Score : 63 points
Date : 2026-01-09 16:49 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nexanet.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (nexanet.ai)
| fuck_flock wrote:
| Flock is fond of saying this:
|
| > "I'm writing to you directly because I want there to be zero
| confusion about what's happening. Flock has never been hacked.
| Ever."
|
| They are just lying at this point. If you get involved in
| advocacy related to flock you will likely hear their reps parrot
| this. Be ready to combat it with concrete examples like this!
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Do the MBAs now running tech just have a hardon for becoming the
| scifi dystopians they read as children?
| DauntingPear7 wrote:
| Yes, from what I have seen
| thmsths wrote:
| The dystopian tech does not seem that bad when you believe you
| will be the one controlling it.
| zzrrt wrote:
| Not always, sometimes they like to role-play as fallen angels
| from fantasy books (see Palantir.) (Edit: upon review, the
| metaphor is strained because Sauron didn't create the
| palantiri... he did control them later, and there is deeper
| metaphor that they are unreliable.)
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| If I had a billion dollars I would shrimply role-play as an
| actual angel
| sekh60 wrote:
| That attitude is sadly probably a small factor in you not
| having a billion dollars.
| cmxch wrote:
| Then time for responsible disclosure or CFAA charges.
| nxobject wrote:
| Sheer incompetence. I hope (probably in vain) that police
| departments and local governments become more savvy technical
| evaluators of fancy tech solutions.
|
| There was a huge fracas re: ShotSpotter in my town, where both
| the municipality's CIO and auditor (+ their internal research
| capacity) were sidelined. It took a sad amount of handholding
| elected officials through ShotSpotter's technical claims for them
| to shelve a planned deployment.
| baggachipz wrote:
| Who could have guessed that the greedy, opportunistic, evil
| corporation whose sole intent is to invade our privacy in the
| name of "security" would be run by incompetents in the security
| realm?
| ncr100 wrote:
| Here's an elucidation, taking that question seriously,
| supplying a bunch of "Why's" --
|
| * https://medium.com/@ajay.monga73/why-developers-still-
| hardco...
| eddyg wrote:
| Previous related discussion:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355548
| chaps wrote:
| (this is not the same thing...)
| eddyg wrote:
| Didn't say it was the same thing; I was linking to a recent
| _related_ discussion about these cameras
| chaps wrote:
| Ah, apologies. Happy friday.
| ncr100 wrote:
| This does link to an example real-world video showing children
| playing in a park, as recorded by FLOCK CAMERAS, of which the
| feed is publicly exposed to the Internet.
| fwip wrote:
| Does anyone else feel like the LLM-tone of this article makes it
| difficult to understand what's actually important in it? It's not
| clear to me if the issue is ongoing (like it says) or that it's
| been resolved by rotating the API key (like it also says). And
| that's like, the most basic piece of information the article
| could have in it.
| xnx wrote:
| Public camera feeds should be public
| bryant wrote:
| In fairness to flock, they just hired a CISO and are actively
| recruiting for a head of product security as well. So I'm not
| surprised they're dealing with some of this.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| A bit late in the game, considering how widely their stuff is
| deployed?
| zzrrt wrote:
| That's fairness to a new employee. Does the multibillion
| company of a widely-deployed sensitive product deserve a pass
| for having poor or nonexistent employees doing security
| previously? Not really IMO.
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(page generated 2026-01-09 23:00 UTC)