@IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world
member since 23 Jun 2023 02:00
comments
- on Smart devices can testify against you: How home robot data is being used in court in c/technology@lemmy.world · 4d ago
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on New website lets drivers check whether their license plate has been searched on Flock database - Dexerto in c/technology@lemmy.world · 17 Aug 2026
Go drive/walk by your local police station and note all the plates of unmarked cars in the area. Many of them are likely police vehicles or private vehicles of employees. Do the same near a courthouse. Use those as fodder for this tool.
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on New website lets drivers check whether their license plate has been searched on Flock database - Dexerto in c/technology@lemmy.world · 17 Aug 2026
So start feeding it lots of random 2 to 8 letter/number strings.
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on Flock says its new tool will help identify police abuse, but hasn’t explained how it works in c/technology@lemmy.world · 15 Aug 2026
I don’t know if this incident involved Flock or a competing product, but John Oliver recently described an incident on his show that demonstrates one of the major issues with this technology.
Apparently an ALPR reported a “hit” on the license plate of an SUV in a shopping center parking lot. The vehicle was reported stolen. So a half dozen or so police performed a felony arrest of the woman in the car along with a number of family members, including small children.
The problem was that while the letters & numbers on the license plate matched, the actual stolen vehicle was a motorcycle from a completely different state. So if any of those half-dozen cops had bothered to confirm even one additional detail about the stolen vehicle then this wouldn’t have happened.
How will Flock improve their technology so that police actually do more than the bare minimum when being told of an ALPR “hit”?
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on New sodium-ion battery skips mechanical cooling with 97.9% efficiency in c/technology@lemmy.world · 10 Aug 2026
Heck, if energy density is an issue the use this initially for grid storage, home solar, etc. where a larger size isn’t a huge deal. That would increase existing lithium ion supplies for EVs.
Smart washing machine: ours is in the basement and my wife and I used to regularly forget we had laundry in it. I now have Home Assistant text us when a load is complete. But it only texts us if we are home and can do something about it. If nobody is home it waits until one of us gets home to text us.
BUT: The washer and dryer are still dumb, pre-IoT generation. I built light sensors that are taped to the displays, and Home Assistant relies on those to determine if the appliances are on or off. No need for cloud-based monitoring, etc. A little creativity like that can work just as well or better than a convenient cloud-based solution.