A city near me has installed a device that tracks vehicles based on their tpms (Tire Pressure Monitoring System) sensors.
All cars after 2008 in the US have TPMS. Inside the tire, integrated with the vale stem, are little pressure sensors with a radio that broadcasts on the 315Mhz band. Each one uses a slightly different frequency so that your vehicle can tell which of the four tires is low.
So each vehicle in the US made after 2008 has four unique radio signals being broadcast from it, and now there are police departments with equipment that can track those signals, and can assign each car a signature based on the frequencies the sensors are broadcasting on.
That’s alarming, but how much can these really vary? I’d be surprised if a lot of vehicles weren’t the same.
They vary by enough, and have unique identifiers. And there are four of them per car, which makes it easier to build a profile for each car. This car has these four identifiers, this other car has these four, etc. Couple that with info from license plate cameras and you can track a car without seeing it’s plate.
Well, from my knowledge, the person you replied to is inaccurate. All tires will transmit at the same frequency. But every X seconds, when each tire transmits its data, it transmits an ID unique to its transmitter with it.
Every X seconds is pretty generous. My Subaru only seems to poll the sensors every few minutes, and only when the wheel speed is above 35 MPH or so, at least via what I’ve observed with my diagnostic tool. The sensors are battery powered and I suspect the low refresh rate is a deliberate gambit to conserve battery life.
You are correct on the ID point, though. They can contain up to 16 hexidecimal digits as far as I’ve seen, and while there doesn’t seem to be any mechanism for truly enforcing uniqueness the chances of an ID collision are so low that you may as well consider it impossible. Some aftermarket sensors can be wirelessly reprogrammed with an arbitrary ID, though, which may be of marginal utility for the truly paranoid. (My diagnostic tool can do this, too. The intended use case is cloning the ID from an OEM sensor for a car whose TPMS relearn procedure is more trouble than it’s worth.)
Regardless of your vehicle’s polling frequency, most sensors can be woken up any time by a specific radio pulse, which my diagnostic tool can also do, and the range is surprisingly long. Just my car’s own BMS where the receiver is (above the rear left wheel well) can pick up the sensors in my snow tire rims even when said rims are sitting in their storage rack inside my garage, about three car lengths away.
If my memory serves well, it is configurable. I say X seconds because it can be 5, 10, 30, but of course also 60, 120… This is my programmer brain talking :)
Thanks for the comment though. Much more complete than mine.
can’t believe i’m quoting a transformers fanfic but here we are…
“Hang on,” Wheeljack said, “I’d worry about passive systems, not active. This mech wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about where he was going. I’d bet on some kind of system he wouldn’t be able to control at all—better yet, something that doesn’t rely on power or signal at all. Something he couldn’t rip out, or block by hiding—”
Hook and Scrapper had come over. “Exterior composition,” Scrapper said instantly. “I’ve thought of doing something of the sort for transport containers—stripe the cladding with varying amounts of a neutrino-scan-visible material for tracking, even underground. Megatron, if that’s the method they’ve used, we don’t have enough appropriate materials to block it. They’ll be able to locate him with satellite scanners, and they’re certainly sweeping for us already. We’ve got to dispose of him at once. Ideally, by melting him down.”
“Hey!” Ratchet stood up. “How about we don’t jump to slagging one of my patients!”
Hook stared at him as if he was insane. “What melodramatic nonsense. You’ve never even spoken to him!”
“He’s on my table, he’s my patient!” Ratchet said.
“Enough,” Megatron said. “Offer me a rational alternative, or shut up.”
Great, that wasn’t pressure or anything. “Fine, how about this: destroying him is stupid,” Ratchet said. “We still don’t know basically anything about this planet, we’ve nearly been taken down twice already, and now they know for sure we’ll be trying for the Excelsior, which means they’re going to be waiting for us there with everything they’ve got. We need intel, and he’s probably got it.” Megatron’s face didn’t change, but he kept listening, at least. “And we don’t need to cover him head to toe with palladium sheathing. We just need to make sure he doesn’t match the pattern they’re scanning for.”
“Well?” Megatron said to Scrapper.
“We’d have to isolate the material they used… but I suppose Mixmaster could analyze a panel of his frame,” Scrapper said grudgingly. “We could disguise him…”
“Except then they will find a pattern here that doesn’t match anything in their database,” Hook said.
“Yeah, but they can’t have a negative-match process,” Wheeljack put in. “They’re not energy-bound, right? They’re materials-bound. That’s why they—recycle instead of smelt down. Any one of their mechs is probably carrying a dozen old parts, and you’d get a negative match any place two patterns overlap. They probably just make sure each new mech gets at least some parts in a unique pattern, and that’s what they’ll be looking for.”
but if there’s also cameras everywhere then every time a negative match comes out then it just triggers the cameras to pick out those cars. best bet would be collectively agreeing to use one set of specific id for everyone, not a randomized id and thus unique id’s
Just like everyone is quitting facebook, ChatGPT, and all the other things people are boycotting that seem to never have anything happen to them.
Already deleted my FB. Instagram is getting close with how many “suggested” posts they cram into my feed that should be just my friends.
Not sure the lemmy crowd is representative of the general public trends.
Most likely not.
I vandalized my own Ring cameras. It didn’t feel right to resell them just so they can spy on me from someone else’s front porch.
How would I go about finding a Flock camera?
i suspected there was some near our area, considered the speed cameras are suspiciously placed on an area that doesnt have much traffic to begin with.
What are the chances that it’s NOT a porn site?
I suppose we could make Flock feeds into porn sites…
Be brave, my random Internet friend. Click the link. It’s either the info you want, or it’s titties.
I was sorely disappointed to learn that the site did contain titties
Hell yeah brother
Good. We need to teach these pigs a lesson
The fun part is that these cameras are not owned, operated or property of your local jurisdiction. They are hardware/software as a service. IANAL, but I think Flock would have to sue you.
I have not personally de-flocked anything, but my local area doesn’t have any that aren’t tied to a business parking lot.
If some show up, I can’t imagine a 5 minute walk with a hat, face mask and a can of spraypaint wouldn’t be sufficient to disable one without risk. Might need a stool.
The flock cameras local to me only face one direction, which makes it a little easier. Still better mask up.
Every time I see one I get curious about the solar panel. Wonder how much non-nazi stuff it could run?
The shitty part is it’s your tax dollars you’re smashing, but you’d think they’d get the hint and just give up on it.
Heartwarming.
based
You most definatly shouldent make a cell phone app that you can put in front of the camera that just cycles through random plates and includes copies of conststution. I wonder if you can do 10 per second. 36000 per hour all day long.
Nice catch, defiantly kinda (almost) works here too… 😤
Don’t be rediculous.
Oh, Great news!
Fun fact: lots of them have exposed cables that should not be cut with a long arm pruning pole found in your grandmother’s shed.
Another thing you should never ever do: mix paint and dot3 in a handheld pressurized garden poison sprayer.
Be aware brake fluid is like antifreeze, it tastes good to animals if they don’t put bad taste in it, and kills them.
They’re dying for an honorable cause. /s
Why shouldn’t dot3 mixed with paint? Just so I know why to avoid it.
Brake fluid would etch the glass of the lenses. Cleaning the surface wouldn’t return the camera to service. Better than paint would be any other substance to thin out the brake fluid for application, particularly if it were less noticeable than paint. That would cause the repair order to come in from lost data collection rather than a report of vandalism, denying them creeping time and that sweet, sweet data. Definitely don’t do that.
guessing because it goes through the sprayer
Thins the paint’s viscosity down maybe?
I don’t know. I’m not a wizard
What would brake fluid do?
Why not?
Because that would be illegal, and advice in easy-to-acess ways to sabotage fascism should not be shared anywhere.
Fuck centralized surveillance.
I would like to have a brief discussion with whoever downvoted you.
I think it was accidental.
That’s the beauty of downvotes: no f-ing context on why people disagree with you or if they even do and are just holding a vendetta from somewhere else, since they aren’t forced to indicate why.
The account enjoys making a lot of very questionably inconsistent downvotes over their far fewer upvotes and even comments their own suggestion on how to sabotage Flock surveillance cameras in the thread yet doesn’t seem to be an edgelord in their own comments, so who knows. Unlike upvoting, where you presumably agree with a comment, downvoting provides no context as you have no clue why or how much they disagreed with something. Presumably the statement was too simplistic to resonate with their refined tastes, which to avoid the downvote should presumably have been stated with the collection of words they would favor as an argument, if they ever bothered to make it.
I don’t take is so personally. I have someone periodically following me around downvoting everything I write too it appears. It’s pathetic.
I think >50% of my up votes are me swiping right to go back but missing the screen border by a tiny bit, causing the jerboa swipe to vote to kick in.
so who knows, maybe they just accidentally hit the downvote arrow while scrolling?
Sometimes my big finger hit the wrong button.
Yeah, accidental voting happens to me when I’m using my phone. Kind of inevitable unless someone uses an app where voting is done through pulling left or right as opposed to tapping.
Do comments around here get disappeared or hidden if they get enough downvotes? If not, then I could give two fucks whether a comment gets 1 downvote or 100.
Nope makes no difference.
I just learned HGTV has a Jan 7 2026 show called “Neighborhood Watch”. It’s like America’s Funniest Home Videos, but it’s all doorbell/security cameras. User-submitted, I think. I absolutely refuse to believe this was a casual idea from HGTV as they struggle to maintain viewership. There’s no way this isn’t funded by one of these companies, meant to continue making everyone comfortable with constant surveillance and increasing the desire to have constant recording devices to catch these one-off comedic moments.
Tagline: “Everywhere you go, cameras are recording. Your neighbors are watching.”
Good, fuck this panopticon dystopia shit.
Also, some guy sliced the entire pole and left a message:
hahaha get wrecked ya surveilling fucks
Props to the camera person for showing the message.
Every small resistance counts ✊
They sell battery powered angle grinders at Harbour Freight.
You can get the same thing cheaper via Craigslist and they’ll have a harder time tracing ownership. A crackhead Hawking stolen hardware store crap is not going to really be as helpful to the surveillance state as they’d like.
Paint ball guns with permanent ink ammunition works too.
Waaaaay easier and cheaper to replace the lenses than a whole pole, including everything that was on it. And I think an angle grinder with some disks would cost about as much as a paintball gun with permanent ink ammo, and the former being much more bang for your buck in terms of damage done and also use other than for this.
But the way this are repaired and replaced, one ability to damage or obstructe the camera quickly and without being noticed is going to be the most important thing. Ankle grinding on a poll for 2 min isn’t ideal. What is the camera isn’t mounted on a poll? The result is going to be a technician coming out and installing a new camera. Swing back around a couple well placed shots from 50 years away. Beats having to spend another 2min with a grinder.
powerful laser pointers can burn camera sensors out too
Just please wear properly rated safety glasses and keep them away from bystanders.
i prefer the one in the picture by a commentor, permanently remove the flock camera.
Permanently remove that camera. They can always put up another. Inking the leanse or dome will still require I new camera installed. Actually shooting the camera with a real gun is probably the best option.
Pay cash
Wear a mask
And smoke a little grass?
Definitely eat ass
No need to be crass.
Enough with the sass
hahaha get wrecked ya surveilling fucks
lol
Damn that’s aluminium, not steel. You can do that with an angle grinder, reciprocating saw, or even a mapp gas torch
I can definitely cut steal with my angle grinder.
But what about steel?
“crime”
This news man lol
Killing nazis is also a crime. Both currently, and throughout nazi Germany. Do with that information what you will.
Guess who else also needs to be “vandalized”
looks like he tore it off at the end after slicing most of it.
panopticon
Great word choice.
It’s quite common to hear we’re living in a digital panopticon. See modern philosophers.
Can’t have shit in Detroit.
lol that’s so cool!
