Tear em down
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
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Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. 404 Media Tracked Themselves.
(www.404media.co)
Or like someone in Hacker News comm suggested, use this to track a US Senator for 24 hours, make it all public, then see if they're still OK with this...
They'll just make it illegal for just them. Like the Internet privacy
Hacker News Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355548
Without the ycombinator
That's the first I've seen a HN web client. Why does it exist, and what's the reason against linking directly to Y Combinator?
Peter Thiel invested in Flock through Y Combinator
YCombinator is a VC fund trying to pretend like they're hacker(tinkering) friendly community, when their business model is boosting their own companies/startups. And companies aren't hitting those profits with people tinkering.
https://soatok.blog/2025/12/17/the-revolution-will-not-make-the-hacker-news-front-page/
In all, that doesn't align with the hacker ethos. They're just capitalizing on what it stands for with a lot of techbro hubris.
The first step of limiting their influence is using a different opensource frontend.
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This is the way.
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I do not consent.
Original is better
The original is better because no higher resolution version actually looks like the original. It's so weird, it's not hars at all to make a higher res one that's almost identical to the original yet all the ones I've seen just look like shit. I'm gonna take some time tomorrow and make a high resolution version with the details correct.
The high res one looks better as a cutout instead of the full background, but the jpeg adds to the charm IMHO.
The high-res one also removes all the shadows, I assume the upscaling algorithm believed they were blur
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I swear to God if this is AI upscaled
Again? How insecure are these things? I am honestly wondering how easy it would be to get into one and shut down the entire system.
It's obvious that these guys are fucking amateur hour Techbros, running this shitshow as they have. I don't doubt they're underpaying and undertraining the contractors they hire to install these things.
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Benn Jordan did a recent video on his...explorations of Flock cameras. Essentially, they're easily hackable and really should be an urgent matter of national security.
Dude, he just released another one where they accessed dozens of real, currently in use cameras. They didn't even "hack" them, they just used a search engine to find publicly exposed cameras, opened their unsecured internal web panel, and could download and view any footage over the past 31 days, including from the new face tracking cameras that zoom in and pan on people's unsuspecting faces as they walk by.
Truly wild.
Reading flock their own response about their security and recording it via one of their active and installed cameras was fucking great. I mean, it was nightmare shit, but at a certain point, you have to appreciate the irony.
My own mother (pensioner) sent me the video asking "is this real?" But could only follow the first minutes of it.
I lol'd at that part and had to explain the brilliance of it. Then she lol'd, too.
It's nice to share in the shadows humor, as a family, while we feel our liberties erode.
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I was living in a 10th story penthouse apartment as a new building started beside us. The contractor put a webcam high up on the structure so people could watch construction live on a website. They left the control panel fully exposed so all you had to do was find the IP address of the camera and boom, you had full control. I would point it directly at my apartment's window and wave, or my friends would do silly shit. Every morning the cam would be reset, but they never actually secured it. That's when I realized how fucked we were, 20 years ago.
I wouldn't be surprised if it got found by Shodan, which scans the entire internet, indexes it and is easily searchable.
There's actually quite a few open webcams on the internet that shouldn't be.
Benn Jordan did a great video on this: https://youtu.be/vU1-uiUlHTo
He co-released a video with 404Media on this new dystopian finding today as well.
A city in the KC Metro just signed a contract with Flock for drone cameras. Fuck that Big Brother bullshit.
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I seem to recall an early 00s screed, perhaps by Bruce Schneier or someone of that ilk, suggesting a future in which yes we have surveillance in the public square, but since it's public, everyone has full access to all the public-place cameras at any time. So you could use it to, say, see around the corner of an alley at night.
That was David Brin in The Transparent Society. He has continued to riff on the theme periodically since then.
Snip their wires, spray paint their lens, or put a hammer on the end of a tall stick. it should be easy to take these things out. Of course don't do anything or have anything on you that would identify you were in the area at the time of these actions.
There is now enough adjacent cctv coverage to follow your approach and exit from the scene of the crime. The rush is that another Flock camera is used to identify, and then make an example out of you or me.
Honestly? Good. These cameras should either be public or dismantled. I'd like to see them dismantled, but worst case scenario is the current one where they're selectively used by law enforcement
iirc they weren't even the first ones to discover this because there was already someone on the blackmarket selling data collected from exposed cameras and endpoints which included PII of entire police departments.
Is there a directory of these cameras? Or are they gonna make me do all the legwork?
These specifically or just Flock cams?
Here's a start: DeFlock Me
I meant the unlocked interfaces. I'm familiar with deflock.me and have contributed to it. But thank you.
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