Its not even just Rails ppl. In embedded ive seen so many consultants say things like, "no problem. I just started working on the ultimate, perfect way to set up a state machine." Confidence theater
Srsly... the ram inside a core router is some of the most precious resources around... this is an ooold idea.. people were doing at least as far back as the 2000s.. i showed them how our router (Avici TSR) worked and said "please don't use the super fancy fabric temporary store for this."
It's not inevitable. It's up to us in a shared world to decide how to govern ourselves and live our lives. Not to be at the whims of a small group of powerful strangers.
Theres a parking lot... what are the 10 wealthiest car owners...and the 10 frailest oldest people... or maybe the 20 women aged 19-25 blond under 150 pounds... and when do they get off work tired, drive home each day? What's the most isolated gas station,convenience store they stop at? Ones where few other cars pass by? Who's homes don't show a 2nd car in driveway? Owned by 6'5" 200 pound man? Who frequently visits a karate studio?
Or: im a car salesman, in comes a customer, whining abt lowering the price bc Theyre broke... lemme just look up where they eat supper every night! How much time they spend at airports! What school they drop off their kids! Who comes to their house? Nannies? Oh look drug dealers, i can threaten them with blackmail!
Sound ridiculous? All the data brings it into focus. A local detective told me theyre focusing on robberies of $ethnicity restaurants bc that group stockpiles cash in their homes...
And this is all assuming good info, but when u get creative:
..what if we look for mistakes... hey that annoying $religious neighbor pissed me off with his loud music. His kids car shows up as visiting thr wrong side of town..probably a wrong digit but lets report him anyway!!!
Or:
Hey lets scan all the wifi dbs for ssids that seem like defaults, then offer them csam-insurance: you pay me $1000 cash rn and ill insure i dont browse csam from your network! And my alpr data says when youre home and your iot devs tell me when you go to sleep so we'll slip it in at before-bed-wank-time!
Oh no, I can think very evil. I just don't see what kind of evil thinking would arrive at "Hey lets use this website to collect IP address/license plate pairs at a small scale"
That just doesn't strike me as a very efficient way of doing evil.
You can just go on accurint and find the oldest people living alone in the richest neighbourhoods near you. You can even fairly reliably find out whether or not they have living relatives.
All this deeply sensitive data is already readily available. I don't think IP+license plate data would be particularly interesting unless you're Google and able to gather that at an absolutely massive scale. But even then, you'd be using it for extremely boring kinds of evil.
That is oft-repeated, but case law is starting to show it's not strictly true:
See Mosaic + Carpenter case which say “Yes, each scan is public; yes, aggregation is different. "
Carpenter shows the Court recognizes that aggregated location data can be constitutionally significant.
Individual observability vs. systemic observation:
A passerby can note a single plate at a single place/time. But a system of ALPRs, distributed spatially and continuous in time, indexed and retained, can map a person’s entire movements, associations, repeated visits, and behavioral patterns. That’s exactly the “mosaic” insight: the whole reveals things the pieces don’t. (Maynard / Jones reasoning).
Not automatically. There's aleeady case law(0x1) that ruled that images captured by Flock ALPR cameras are public records, even though the data are stored by Flock (a private vendor), not directly by the city.
The court rejected the notion that “because the data sits on a private server, it’s not a public record.” Instead, it said that since the surveillance is paid for by the public (taxpayers) and used by a public agency, the data must comply with the state’s public-records law.
This shows that — in at least one jurisdiction — using a private company to run ALPRs doesn’t shield the data from public-records requests.
IANAL: That court's decision was based on the contract w/ Flock. It does not move the needle wrt public records.
I may read the decision, testimony, and any amicus briefs. During the 00's, Wash Citizen's for Open Govt had a prominent blindspot wrt tension between privatization and public records (in the shape of Tony Nixon). I'm curious if they were involved with this case, and if their positions have matured.
tptacek writes on here sometimes about their activity in local politics. This perspective (from my reading) is that it has a lot of strong support that is difficult to oppose, not that we should give up. Read "give it a year or two" as "give it a year or two of things going as they are".
I strongly suspect a neighborhood in Chicago composed of the kind of demographics the "nice" suburb's residents are worried about would have a very different take on the issue.
And by "strongly suspect" I mean "know because I live in that kind of neighborhood in a different city in a different state".
> strongly suspect a neighborhood in Chicago composed of the kind of demographics the "nice" suburb's residents are worried about would have a very different take on the issue
I live in Jackson Hole. None of my neighbours knew what these were. They’re getting taken out.
Don’t presume what folks are worried about without asking them.
I’m pretty confused by the innuendo in the posters comment to even get what they are saying, but I can report from the south side of chicago that surveillance cameras are largely popular across demographics.
You don't know anything about me or about Oak Park. We killed our Flock contract. I did a good bit of the policy lifting to make that happen, including co-writing our initial pilot ALPR police General Order to lock them down and set up the transparency reporting that enabled us to make the case for killing them. But, keep going, I'm interested in what else you can confidently state about my work.
Speaking as a person of color, the government Oak Park prosecuted me for reasons of my blackness which is racist. The controversey that followed, if you ask me, is why the cameras got shot down. Transparency and not being big brother is just a convenient excuse to put a positive spin on it, as politicians do.
Knowing in extreme and annoying detail exactly the series of events that led us to kill our Flock contract, I do not believe this is at all true. I don't think trolling is a good plan here.
Vitamin D and sodium are examples out of a couple core nutrients, and I could list other nutrients such as sugar or fat too. So the rate is not excellent.
> How many errors do police make? Actuaries? Security researchers?
They make plenty of mistakes too. What's your point?
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