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Flock Cameras Have a People-Love-Smashing-Them Problem

Flock Cameras Have a People-Love-Smashing-Them Problem

Flock cameras have become such attractive targets for destruction that some police have become protective of information about where they’re mounted. A local news story Friday in Louisville, Kentucky detailed the Louisville police’s effort to keep the locations secret.

The story also mentions that when the locations of some of the cameras were released, they were almost immediately destroyed.

On Saturday, Brian Merchant of the tech criticism newsletter Blood in the Machine catalogued a wider trend regarding Flock, the company famous for its networked, AI-enhanced, solar-powered license plate readers, video cameras, gunshot detectors, and “drone as first responder” tech: vandalism against Flock equipment is happening all over the country, seemingly without coordination.

Most recently, on February 16 in La Mesa, California, a city in the San Diego metro area, a local news outlet reported two destroyed Flock cameras—one smashed, the other sabotaged.

But most entertainingly (that is if you’re the kind of sicko who is entertained by acts of vandalism) in October of last year in Eugene and Springfield, Oregon, six Flock cameras were apparently cut down from poles and destroyed. A sticker with the note, “Hahaha get wrecked ya surveilling f***s” was applied to one of the poles below the spot where it was cut.

In and around Suffolk, Virginia, last December, an arrest was made after 13 cameras were destroyed. 41-year-old Jefferey S. Sovern, acknowledged, according to the local news, that “he used vice grips to help him disassemble the two-piece mounting poles,”  and that he had kept things like wires, batteries and solar panels from the camera assemblies.

Sovern started a gofundme, where he wrote: “I appreciate a quiet life and am not looking forward to this process, but I will take the silver lining that this can be a catalyst in a bigger movement to roll-back intrusive surveillance.” He also links to an activist site called deflock.org.

Last month in Lisbon, Connecticut, police said they were investigating a destroyed Flock camera.

The Sheriff’s department in Greenview, Illinois said last month that two of its Flock cameras were cut down and destroyed.

Some other interesting facts about Flock: Its CEO Garrett Langley was 38 as of last September, and has indicated that he believes sufficiently widespread use of his mass surveillance technology, along with the deployment of his other ideas, can eliminate all crime in America. He has all sorts of ideas (Forgive people’s student debt if they become cops, for instance) and talked all about them two months ago on the YouTube channel of the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. Andreessen Horowitz, by the way, has invested $275 million in Flock.

But if you’ve heard only one thing about Flock lately, it probably has something to do with Ring’s eerie Super Bowl commercial involving its since-aborted partnership with Flock.

The intention behind the ad, in which Ring doorbell cameras are integrated into Flock’s law enforcement-affiliated footage-sharing system, seems to have been to sell people on the idea that mass surveillance in their neighborhoods is good because it will help more lost pets get found. People and politicians evidently disagreed, and a fierce backlash ensued. The relationship between Flock and Amazon-owned Ring ruptured in short order.

When reached for comment, Holly Beilin, chief of staff to Flock’s chief communications officer provided six links to news stories and the following statement:

“We respect and value concerns and feedback raised about our technology, and building trust is important to us. We are regularly on the ground in communities across the country answering questions and providing education on what our technology does and does not do.”

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#Flock #Cameras #PeopleLoveSmashingThem #Problem

The video game disc is dead, and Sony’s been planning to kill it for some time, according to a report out of Austria. The man who leads Sony’s discmaking operations, Sony DADC president Dietmar Tanzer, told ORF Salzburg that the company’s Thalgau plant produces 600,000 discs every day, half of which are for PlayStation. But since it’ll only be making 10 percent of that volume in 2028, it’s planning to retrain all 300 employees to work on optical microlenses instead.

Thalgau isn’t just one of Sony’s disc plants. It’s where the disc-making division is headquartered, and appears to be its only remaining wholly owned disc manufacturing facility. Sony made discs in the United States for decades, originally in Terre Haute, Indiana and later in New Jersey, but it closed the latter plant in 2011 and moved all manufacturing from Indiana to Thalgau in 2022. Today, the Indiana facility markets itself to automakers who need help packaging and assembling headlights and the like instead.

This transition didn’t happen overnight. A behind-the-scenes video from December 2024 shows that the Thalgau plant was already working on microlenses as of then:

Those lenses, too, are created using discs:

ORF Salzburg writes that Sony has now invested €30 million to manufacture these microlenses, and that mass production may begin “as early as next year.”

Microlenses are theoretically used in all kinds of emerging applications where you might want to bend light, including headsets, but it appears that Sony may cater to automakers here, too. The head of Sony’s micro optics division gave ORF Salzburg the example of “a car turn signal that is projected onto asphalt.”

All of this is to say: Sony didn’t make this decision in a hurry, and it isn’t likely to change its mind despite the predictable backlash. It’s been winding down disc manufacturing for decades, and it’s ripping off one last band-aid with PlayStation.

According to Sony DADC’s website, it has produced over 26.4 billion discs to date — the vast majority, 23 billion of them, were made between 1983 and 2022 in Terre Haute, Indiana.

#Sonys #PlayStation #disc #factory #repurposedGaming,News,PlayStation">Sony’s PlayStation disc factory is already being repurposedThe video game disc is dead, and Sony’s been planning to kill it for some time, according to a report out of Austria. The man who leads Sony’s discmaking operations, Sony DADC president Dietmar Tanzer, told ORF Salzburg that the company’s Thalgau plant produces 600,000 discs every day, half of which are for PlayStation. But since it’ll only be making 10 percent of that volume in 2028, it’s planning to retrain all 300 employees to work on optical microlenses instead.Thalgau isn’t just one of Sony’s disc plants. It’s where the disc-making division is headquartered, and appears to be its only remaining wholly owned disc manufacturing facility. Sony made discs in the United States for decades, originally in Terre Haute, Indiana and later in New Jersey, but it closed the latter plant in 2011 and moved all manufacturing from Indiana to Thalgau in 2022. Today, the Indiana facility markets itself to automakers who need help packaging and assembling headlights and the like instead.This transition didn’t happen overnight. A behind-the-scenes video from December 2024 shows that the Thalgau plant was already working on microlenses as of then:Those lenses, too, are created using discs:ORF Salzburg writes that Sony has now invested €30 million to manufacture these microlenses, and that mass production may begin “as early as next year.”Microlenses are theoretically used in all kinds of emerging applications where you might want to bend light, including headsets, but it appears that Sony may cater to automakers here, too. The head of Sony’s micro optics division gave ORF Salzburg the example of “a car turn signal that is projected onto asphalt.”All of this is to say: Sony didn’t make this decision in a hurry, and it isn’t likely to change its mind despite the predictable backlash. It’s been winding down disc manufacturing for decades, and it’s ripping off one last band-aid with PlayStation.According to Sony DADC’s website, it has produced over 26.4 billion discs to date — the vast majority, 23 billion of them, were made between 1983 and 2022 in Terre Haute, Indiana.#Sonys #PlayStation #disc #factory #repurposedGaming,News,PlayStation

video game disc is dead, and Sony’s been planning to kill it for some time, according to a report out of Austria. The man who leads Sony’s discmaking operations, Sony DADC president Dietmar Tanzer, told ORF Salzburg that the company’s Thalgau plant produces 600,000 discs every day, half of which are for PlayStation. But since it’ll only be making 10 percent of that volume in 2028, it’s planning to retrain all 300 employees to work on optical microlenses instead.

Thalgau isn’t just one of Sony’s disc plants. It’s where the disc-making division is headquartered, and appears to be its only remaining wholly owned disc manufacturing facility. Sony made discs in the United States for decades, originally in Terre Haute, Indiana and later in New Jersey, but it closed the latter plant in 2011 and moved all manufacturing from Indiana to Thalgau in 2022. Today, the Indiana facility markets itself to automakers who need help packaging and assembling headlights and the like instead.

This transition didn’t happen overnight. A behind-the-scenes video from December 2024 shows that the Thalgau plant was already working on microlenses as of then:

Those lenses, too, are created using discs:

ORF Salzburg writes that Sony has now invested €30 million to manufacture these microlenses, and that mass production may begin “as early as next year.”

Microlenses are theoretically used in all kinds of emerging applications where you might want to bend light, including headsets, but it appears that Sony may cater to automakers here, too. The head of Sony’s micro optics division gave ORF Salzburg the example of “a car turn signal that is projected onto asphalt.”

All of this is to say: Sony didn’t make this decision in a hurry, and it isn’t likely to change its mind despite the predictable backlash. It’s been winding down disc manufacturing for decades, and it’s ripping off one last band-aid with PlayStation.

According to Sony DADC’s website, it has produced over 26.4 billion discs to date — the vast majority, 23 billion of them, were made between 1983 and 2022 in Terre Haute, Indiana.

#Sonys #PlayStation #disc #factory #repurposedGaming,News,PlayStation">Sony’s PlayStation disc factory is already being repurposed

The video game disc is dead, and Sony’s been planning to kill it for some time, according to a report out of Austria. The man who leads Sony’s discmaking operations, Sony DADC president Dietmar Tanzer, told ORF Salzburg that the company’s Thalgau plant produces 600,000 discs every day, half of which are for PlayStation. But since it’ll only be making 10 percent of that volume in 2028, it’s planning to retrain all 300 employees to work on optical microlenses instead.

Thalgau isn’t just one of Sony’s disc plants. It’s where the disc-making division is headquartered, and appears to be its only remaining wholly owned disc manufacturing facility. Sony made discs in the United States for decades, originally in Terre Haute, Indiana and later in New Jersey, but it closed the latter plant in 2011 and moved all manufacturing from Indiana to Thalgau in 2022. Today, the Indiana facility markets itself to automakers who need help packaging and assembling headlights and the like instead.

This transition didn’t happen overnight. A behind-the-scenes video from December 2024 shows that the Thalgau plant was already working on microlenses as of then:

Those lenses, too, are created using discs:

ORF Salzburg writes that Sony has now invested €30 million to manufacture these microlenses, and that mass production may begin “as early as next year.”

Microlenses are theoretically used in all kinds of emerging applications where you might want to bend light, including headsets, but it appears that Sony may cater to automakers here, too. The head of Sony’s micro optics division gave ORF Salzburg the example of “a car turn signal that is projected onto asphalt.”

All of this is to say: Sony didn’t make this decision in a hurry, and it isn’t likely to change its mind despite the predictable backlash. It’s been winding down disc manufacturing for decades, and it’s ripping off one last band-aid with PlayStation.

According to Sony DADC’s website, it has produced over 26.4 billion discs to date — the vast majority, 23 billion of them, were made between 1983 and 2022 in Terre Haute, Indiana.

#Sonys #PlayStation #disc #factory #repurposedGaming,News,PlayStation

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