Funny, because literally every single apple product page gets posted as "news" to HN and every time I see one I think it's just apple marketing astroturfing. Especially since most of the product updates the last few years seem to fall into the, "BUT SHE'S GOT A NEW HAT" territory.
>I'd be interested to see if opponents of mass surveillance could draft good legislation to curb potential abuses
Isn't this just warrants? We have infrastructure in place, if police have reasonable suspicion a crime has occurred, they go to a judge and convince them they have enough evidence and the judge gives them a warrant. The problem is police and Flock are constantly arguing they shouldn't need a warrant to use the data, and it creates a system designed for abuse.
>And what you have ended up with is something that looks like.... A whip!
Had a similar feeling come to me as I watched this video a few weeks ago. It made me really want to see someone make a whip-based trebuchet that uses a big spring like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkQZU-CBwhk
Whips work because they gradually get lighter and lighter along their length meaning the same energy as it propagates down the length results in higher and higher speeds. Strapping a projectile to the end throws all of that off unless you make the whip extremely heavy to compensate.
Not sure if you watched the video, but the chain they're using is extremely heavy. I would think the projectile would be on the order of one of the single chain links at the end of the small side.
A 3d printed ball like in the OPs video would only be less than 3grams I imagine.
Either way, the weight of the whip is hardly important right, as you are just doing an energy transfer from the falling weight into the small ball, the lighter the whip the better, as long as it doesn't break. If the whip is heavier, it will soak up the energy budget in momentum
Couldn't you make the same arguments for basically all other due process or privacy protections? I think I can accurately summarize your statement here to:
Mass Surveillance deters crime and makes the job of law enforcement easier. I'm happy to live with Mass Surveillance because I don't think the drawbacks of having it aren't that bad, there are some benefits to me, and I trust institutions to implement safeguards.
Now replace Mass Surveillance with any of the following, and I think the your argument is the same:
- Warrantless Searches
- Giving Police the ability to convict in the field
- Permanent and mandatory position tracking for all citizens
- Required public identities for all online activity
It's funny how our perceptions are driven by the source of our news. I generally perceived the positive coverage in regular news as unrelenting. I know the tech news sources I read were constantly complaining about rule changes and manipulations on the part of Spacex, but run-of-the-mill national news outlets seem to be endlessly hyping the stock to the point that a few of my non tech-savvy family members were asking if they needed to buy it as soon as they went public.
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6398250508112
"SpaceX makes its historic stock market debut today, set to be the largest IPO of all time with a $1.77 trillion valuation. Elon Musk, founder and CEO, anticipates becoming the world's first trillionaire. Shares will go live at $135 each, potentially surging immediately due to high demand"
https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/12/business/live-news/spacex-goe...
"What we covered here
• SpaceX soared Friday in its blockbuster stock market debut, with shares gaining 19% after Wall Street’s biggest-ever IPO.
• The rocket and AI company, which Elon Musk founded in 2002, is now valued at over $2 trillion, joining Musk’s Tesla as one of the world’s top-ten most valuable companies.
• Musk, who owns nearly half the company’s stock, has now made history as the world’s first trillionaire."
Dan Hanson, a senior portfolio manager at Neuberger Berman, which invested in SpaceX while it was still private said investors should think of SpaceX not just as a rocket company, but as a combination of its launch business, Starlink satellite internet network and artificial intelligence ambitions.
“This team is just getting started,” he said. “There’s a significant opportunity for them to create value as they execute.”
I suspect the vast majority of americans are getting their news from cnn, fox, nbc, abc, pbs.... And I doubt a ton of them are reading the irish times, montana skeptic, or the verge.
As we see in this case, the (likely) person in this case was actually found from the relatively small number of people who fit this criteria, so police were (likely) right to suspect these people.
The issue is not who the police may or may not suspect. it is about reasonable expectation of privacy. If they had obtained this exact same list of people who were near that bank for that time by a means that did not violate their reasonable expectation of privacy, then the evidence couldn't be challenged on that basis.
I’m fully aware of the privacy concerns here; but that wasn’t the topic I was engaging in.
I’m saying that practically, being within a radius as the bird flies does not make you functionally “within the area” when there’s a huge z axis in a city.
When someone robs the retail of the ground floor of a high rise, there are many people who were right on top of the crime scene measured by lat/lon but were actually 10 minutes away by foot, hundreds of feet away in actual distance, and in no way aware it was even happening.
Imagine in the 1980s if every citizen was compelled to carry a ghetto blaster with 100W amplifier and speakers that relentlessly blared our SSN, phone number, home address and bank accounts.
In biblical times, of course, lepers were legally compelled to identify themselves and warn others with analogous methods.
Now today we all voluntarily carry around radio transceivers that loudly blare unique identifiers, perpetually, omnidirectionally, to anyone and anything that will listen.
Wired connections are so aggressively deprecated that we’re also perpetually exchanging every private conversation, and every secret SMS MFA code, and every DNS lookup, over public airwaves.
It’s not our fault and it’s beyond our control, but if you carry such a ghetto blaster, don’t cry to us about expecting privacy.
Surely one of those thousand can be made to look guilty enough for a prosecution. Solves the problem of looking like you're doing something real well.
The system does not care about prosecuting criminals. It cares about prosecuting people for crimes. While it may prefer to prosecute criminals for their specific crimes that is by no means a hard requirement.
Only if it's known that you were ever there in the first place, and people that typically wouldn't ever be considered, like someone who is quietly visiting in the living room of someone who lives nearby, will fall under scrutiny when police are just getting the data of everyone in a certain radius.
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