I am standing on the corner of Harris Road and Young Street outside of the Crossroads Business Park in Bakersfield, California, looking up at a Flock surveillance camera bolted high above a traffic signal. On my phone, I am watching myself in real time as the camera records and livestreams me—without any password or login—to the open internet. I wander into the intersection, stare at the camera and wave. On the livestream, I can see myself clearly. Hundreds of miles away, my colleagues are remotely watching me too through the exposed feed.
Flock left livestreams and administrator control panels for at least 60 of its AI-enabled Condor cameras around the country exposed to the open internet, where anyone could watch them, download 30 days worth of video archive, and change settings, see log files, and run diagnostics.
Archive: http://archive.today/IWMKe
Tear em down
Or like someone in Hacker News comm suggested, use this to track a US Senator for 24 hours, make it all public, then see if they’re still OK with this…
Might as well use it to track ICE
Hacker News Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355548
Without the ycombinator
https://www.hckrnws.com/stories/46355548
That’s the first I’ve seen a HN web client. Why does it exist, and what’s the reason against linking directly to Y Combinator?
Fuck “Hacker News”, the people that hang around there are in major ways responsible for the shitty state the internet -and the world- is in now.
Peter Thiel invested in Flock through Y Combinator
YCombinator is a VC fund trying to pretend like they’re hacker(tinkering) friendly community, when their business model is boosting their own companies/startups. And companies aren’t hitting those profits with people tinkering.
https://soatok.blog/2025/12/17/the-revolution-will-not-make-the-hacker-news-front-page/
In all, that doesn’t align with the hacker ethos. They’re just capitalizing on what it stands for with a lot of techbro hubris.
The first step of limiting their influence is using a different opensource frontend.
https://github.com/rajatkulkarni95/hckrnws
They’ll just make it illegal for just them. Like the Internet privacy
This is the way.