There are levels to defending against physical attacks, and Flock half-assed theirs by leaving the encryption key right on the file system, according to the reporting. Those more serious about security — like Apple — store keys in an "enclave" chip so it can't be easily extracted by an attacker doing the bare minimum
Apple did that… eventually. Early iPhones weren’t very secure. Apple only got serious after they dominated the market and reducing the theft value of iPhones became a priority.
Even the cheapest commodity encryption chips have had this capability for well over a decade now, Unlike Apple, Flock are not a hardware pioneer, not by a long shot.
The Android documentation has an example of how to use hardware keys, and a Chinese OEM (IIRC) was found using the example key provided by Android sample code - and yet that was more effort than Flock applied, since their ARM SoC support it.
Getting persistent access to Flock's internal network is a high-priority item for every US adversary, who doesn't want free intel collection on the movements of persons of interest? Knowing who the FBI and local cops are monitoring in is the counter-counter-intelligence cherry on top of a self-inflicted dragnet surveillance cake.
Any entity with access to flock servers can virtually stake-out anyone/everyone driving past Flock camera to monitor their movements. In a hot war, this would provide actionable data to support assassination via road-side bomb/drone strikes.
Nevermind the wedge driven when moderates who think of themselves as being on the left agree with the idea that past weak attempts to nudge things leftward "went too far", or that there actually is an issue with "government waste". Sir/Ma'am - you are complicit in moving the Overton window to the right.
I've been called a "shrill far leftist" and a "fascist appeaser" so does that make me a centrist? Any labeling I may apply to myself is for convenience of packaged assumptions about my values.
> moderates who think of themselves as being on the left agree with the idea that past weak attempts to nudge things leftward "went too far"
Examples please? Not a challenge, I just am not pickup up what you're laying down.
As for "government waste" of course it exists but to various degrees and in various areas. For example, Medicare fraud is estimated $60 billion to over $100 billion annually. That doesn't mean we should get rid of it -- it means we'd be well served to invest a fraction of that amount in preventing such numbers.
And as far as shifting the Overton Window to the right, that has been the Right itself, via culture war bullshit.
Look, sir/madam, I have no tribe, no political party, no religion, no beliefs that I'm unwilling to change when presented with compelling evidence. I've tracked US politics likely longer than you've been alive. I understand how the game is played and this Red vs Blue is a master class in political manipulation. And the culture war is the key tool used to render it.
So you telling me that I'm the reason why the Overton Window is shifting right is a tell that you're the confused one.
I could have been more clear in my writing, but I was adding to your point of things that trap the left. The "Sir/Ma'am" was addressing a hypothetical left-ish "moderate" who gets trapped into criticizing other on the left by conservative talking points - not accusing you personally. I have no idea what your politics are.
My politics are based on secular humanism and that we all effectively live in a commons.
I'm rabidly anti-partisan but align with Dems because they are the least worst option.
> gets trapped into criticizing other on the left by conservative talking points
One thing I'll concede about the Right -- they excel at defining the language and debate and the Left is almost always playing defense.
But to be a broken record here: the Culture War is the only thing the Right has to offer in the realm of political debate. It's a cheap and nasty, yet incredibly effective tool to manipulate people to vote against their own interest by their induced fear, hate, and anger.
> Meanwhile, actual humans go fuck off to raise their kids while being paid by AI finance and HR departments
I was able to suspend my disbelief until this line. Unless Capitalism has been upended by 2029, AI companies will continue to have capitalist goals like maximizing value for their shareholders. AI HR won't pay humans that don't positively move the needle on the P&L
It would be interesting if AI actually did optimize the P&L at most companies.
Right now, the vast majority of office jobs are bullshit jobs, because the director who holds the budget is incentivized to maximize headcount rather than P&L. The job is not strictly necessary, but if the money is not spent, it disappears, and so the director has an incentive to ensure everything is spent.
The reason these jobs can continue to exist is because of poor information flow within the organization. Directors distort both the importance and required resources for the projects they're working on, making them seem harder and more lucrative than they actually are. It's notoriously difficult to credit an actual transaction back to a particular product feature that made someone buy, so there is no actual verification of these. Then these project proposals are looked at by an FP&A analyst who has maybe 5 minutes to evaluate each, so of course 100 headcount to maintain a 3-screen CRUD mobile app seems reasonable.
A rational, omniscient AI would look at this and say "This is ridiculous. I can code this app in 50ms." And so if we actually did put AI in charge of the P&L, they would likely fire 100% of the employees, as well as doing other shady stuff like charging all stored credit cards multiple times, gaslighting consumers as to the existence of the product, and DDoSing the court system.
But again, this strengthens my thesis. So the AI has now fired 100% of the humans in the workforce and is running amuck with the financial system. What do the remaining 100% of unemployed people do? Start trading their skills for old-fashioned analog currency, like gold coins or even paper dollars. They just disconnect the AI, turn off the computers, and go about their daily business.
> Right now, the vast majority of office jobs are bullshit jobs, because the director who holds the budget is incentivized to maximize headcount
This may have been briefly true during the Zero-Interest regime. The economy isn't doing so hot right now, outside of AI. If squeezed companies doing multiple rounds of layoffs keep those "bullshit jobs", maybe they are not bullshit. Perhaps coordinating people, and keeping up with bureaucratic demands like paying taxes, not breaking the law and growing the business requires warm bodies.
> What do the remaining 100% of unemployed people do? Start trading their skills for old-fashioned analog currency.
History books suggest a different outcome. Firing 100% of employees in a growth-based, consumer economy only works when you're the only one using that strategy. If a critical mass of companies do the same, then you're staring at a managed decline at best.
> She does have a track record of achieving things she probably did not attend: e.g. ensuring total Chinese dominance of US household robotics.
Why should the FTC consider the policy of another sovereign when investigating domestic anti-trust violations? Either you have the rule of law that binds everyone equally, or you have the rule of man who chooses which parties are allowed to break the law for outcomes in random market slices, like avoiding the dominance of US household robotics.Where would that end?
> humans on call for robots isn't the future I want.
Disposable reverse-centaurs are the key to unlocking trillions in shareholder value, you may not want it, but capital demands it on the basis of getting returns on the supersized AI investments.
> Note that China itself is a protectionist economy. So in some sense protectionism is recognizing that China has a pretty good industrial policy and copying it.
China's protectionism is emplaced to support long-term goals. Amodei's policy suggestion is explicitly in support of short term goals (1-5 years), a time window he claims to be "critical" without evidence. A cynic may link that window to forthcoming AI IPO's, and allowing current CEOs to secure ridiculous golden parachutes before leaving the mess of how to deal with the unpaced Chinese frontier models to their successors and future US legislature.
Letting AI companies set your foreign policy (voluntarily ceding global primacy to maximize domestic[1] profits) may have awful higher-order effects for the US. What's hilarious is the shameless about-face: for years, the same companies have been declaring that it is vital American AI innovation not be encumbered by new laws. Until the Chinese models glided to the frontier.
1. Maybe they hope to browbeat Europe too, like how they pushed out Huawei equipment from Euro telecoms. An alternative reading is that the loss of primacy is involuntary, so they may as well spin the reality, and salvage a win by colluding to eliminate better, open-weight models from the markets in "democracies" with the excuse that they are unpaced and therefore dangerous. What will predictibly happen is there will be `Qwen-8.1` for RoW, and a lobotomized `Qwen-8.1-paced` for Americans.
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