Flock and Cyble Inc. weaponize “cybercrime” takedowns to silence critics
haveibeenflocked.com
haveibeenflocked.com
But they don't, because the former would require them to perjure themselves, and the latter just requires them to lie to a hosting company.
Misrepresentation of Fact
Knowledge of Falsity
Intent to Induce Reliance
Justifiable Reliance
Resulting DamagesAt first that seems pretty unlikely, but I could see them wanting to nip this in the bud so it doesn't become more common.
I’d argue in court that this is a pattern, not a one-off event and the damages need to be large enough to prevent this repeating.
Also, service providers are not identical. They chose Cloudflare because it was the “best” service. So damages include being moved to a worse service.
However, ICANN has a whole procedure they follow where complaints are fact-checked, whereas DMCA takedowns put an unreasonable burden on hosting providers that requires immediate action, and many hosting providers will take such action automatically to protect themselves.
I doubt they care about perjury. They care about results, and the DMCA gets them exactly that.
The phishing reports are interesting, providers aren't necessarily required to act as fast on those. Although, I suspect companies like Cloudflare who get used by countless phishers will probably also set up some kind of automated anti phishing system.
You are confusing false claims with filing DMCA requests on behalf of someone you don't have permission from.
>and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed
A false DMCA request is misrepresentation.
Those take on the order of months to go through. Even if they did so, you wouldn't notice until much later. Meanwhile cloudflare and hetzner are faster. If you want to reduce harm by taking down a site you can't just let it stay up for weeks while the ICANN process plays out.
Doesn't stop anyone with DMCA... DMCA is coming up on almost three decades of being a law, and requires statements made under penalty of perjury.
However many millions (likely billions) of DMCA takedowns issued, who knows how many false/bad faith... I wonder how many have led to prosecutions for perjury, even when filing tens of thousands, en masse...
No need to wonder, the answer is simple. Starts with a "Z" and ends in "ero".
But I think the real issue with Flock will be private security. Random Home Depot parking lots, etc.
https://www.29news.com/2025/12/17/charlottesville-ends-flock...
If someone would like to engage in grassroots activism on this, may I suggest the perfect domain: getTheFlockOutOfMyCity.com
dang/tomhow, does Y Combinator have a code of ethics that comes into play when one of your funding recipients does something unethical and/or illegal like this?
To HN's credit I haven't seen this rule violated.
For example I wouldn't have known it was a YC company if not for your comment.
Well, that’s what dang says he does. There’s no transparency and no publicly available data that would demonstrate adherence to the rule.
> To HN's credit I haven't seen this rule violated.
I don’t think you’d observe anything different if it were violated.
If the mods were in the practice of moderating like this, yes, it would almost certainly be noticed by someone whose post/comment got deleted.
HN, like every other community on the Internet, relies on trust between the users and mods. If you don't trust them, you can always leave.
Would it?
HN has all sorts of sneaky punishments to keep people from noticing what's going on. Shadow bans, limiting how many comments you can post per day, sometimes outright refusing to serve you pages with a "Sorry." error, and even flagging isn't visible to the person whose comment got flagged. HN doesn't notify you in any way for any of this. How often do you check your comments while logged out? That includes old comments, of course, which need to be rechecked on a periodic basis. Archives provide some limitation to how much manipulation can happen, but flagging is a thing, can be abused by anyone with enough karma, and provides a lot of plausible deniability for dang should he opt for a stealthier approach to moderation.
Even this account is shadowbanned - and this comment automatically flagged - because I had the audacity to create an account with a VPN, in a world where VPNs are a requirement for unrestricted Internet access for a growing number of people living in "democratic" countries. The only way I know this is through testing, of course, because HN gives no indication that your account will be shadowbanned on creation.
Another way of putting this is that HN has very standard mechanisms in place to combat spam and other sources of low-signal comments.
> Shadow bans, limiting how many comments you can post per day
Like these.
> Sometimes outright refusing to serve you pages with a "Sorry." error,
This just sounds like downtime/server problems. Every site has them, and even the most law-abiding posters on HN will see that sometimes.
> even flagging isn't visible to the person whose comment got flagged.
Yes it is?
> HN doesn't notify you in any way for any of this.
This is by design; HN doesn't offer notifications of anything on its own. Besides, most platforms don't usually notify people of these things by default either?
> Even this account is shadowbanned - and this comment automatically flagged - because I had the audacity to create an account with a VPN, in a world where VPNs are a requirement for unrestricted Internet access for a growing number of people living in "democratic" countries. The only way I know this is through testing, of course, because HN gives no indication that your account will be shadowbanned on creation.
I don't think you need to be so indignant. VPNs are also abused. All of these mechanisms are tradeoffs for making HN one of the best sites I've ever been on for productive, intelligent discussion; and the mods are well aware of this and manage to balance it well. For example, you were still able to register, and you and I are still able to exchange comments. If you contribute to discussions (on an account you don't just throwaway) for a little while, the limitations go away.
I'm not sure this is the supportive argument that you think it is, as HN doesn't notify users of anything akin to what you're discussing, be it positive or negative, ever. They don't have notifications whatsoever.
>Even this account is shadowbanned - and this comment automatically flagged...
No it's not. Edit: mea culpa, see response
>The only way I know this is through testing, of course...
How did you test this? Your single comment on a brand new account appears to be showing up just fine, as any new account would. Did you unflag your throwaway comment from a different account?
I get the feeling you pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable here at one point, and didn't like the result.
It was, actually. New accounts' comments being flagged by default is, I'm fairly certain, very much a thing.
Odd, I don't remember that being a thing when I joined. Mine showed up a-okay.
> If the mods were in the practice of moderating like this, yes, it would almost certainly be noticed by someone whose post/comment got deleted.
“You” in the original was referring to avaer specifically, not the generic “you.” They were the ones making the observation on little to no data.
> HN, like every other community on the Internet, relies on trust between the users and mods.
This is exactly my point. One must trust (or more precisely have faith in) them, because claims like the one up-thread are impossible to verify.
What kind of data would satisfy you? I imagine any data coming directly from YC would be untrustworthy and third-party data would be incomplete (say, it wouldn't catch content removed before it's published).
Is there a similar data set for other private platforms?
* how I will now always refer to them
That said, I don't think Flock has anything to do with speed cameras in school zones or anywhere else.
"Even if you can't see kids at a school you should assume they're around".
Judge had about as much patience for that argument as I did. Dismissed.
License plates are trivially short, hashing them accomplishes no additional level of privacy if the hashes could be bruted in seconds on an antique GPU.
I think it'd sound pretty dumb.
(Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper_(cryptography) off you want to be fancy)
I don't support this decision but I respect it.
Curious what the Cloudflare HNers have to say about this debacle.
Professionally, they're marginalized by finance-bros, who actually decide what gets built and which morals get followed. Privately, everything you might want to repair or tweak or invent is still getting locked down or patented or criminalized.
I have yet to see it. All the stereotypical “asshole jocks” I can recall from school tended to be from upper middle class families. They’re doing much better than many of the nerds many of who are unemployed NEETs.
Though I admit these sort of social cliques are much more complex in real life than in a corny 80s coming of age movie.
I understand that childhood bullying can leave some scars. I have faced my fair share too. But life teaches you ever bigger lessons and shifts your priorities. There are much bigger problems now! But if you had the luxury of harboring your grudges against some kiddie bullies, then you have some serious insecurity problems and too much time in your hands. In fact, that's exactly the problem that convert some shy rich kids into destructive oligarchs who lack any empathy. They end up with the delusions that they're somehow special, extra-intelligent and the rightful heirs to the future of humanity. They see their former bullies as sub-human creatures who stand in the way of their and humanity's glory.
I'm not making this up. Go ahead and read the literature that guide these techno-authoritarians. You'll see this philosophy repeated time and again. If you don't want to put in that much effort, there are numerous articles and media that psychoanalyze them based on these literature. You can see that fingerprint in all of their destructive behavior, including their disdain for democracy. And then check your own comment. See how much it resembles them!
Flock does this well in terms of bios spinlock releases, whereas a secure measure is stress-testing network traffic.
the fact that these majority do accept the distraction points to lack of intelligence and discipline in critical thinking and future planning. The populous has half the blame - not just those who do these manufacturing of distractions.
There is a tonne of civic action against Flock, specifically, in the works, in many cases with successful results.
Not much I can do about that over here in the coastal Northeast.
I'm still offended though.
Fucking a lot of smart people in Mass., Vermont, Conn., New York, Maryland, DC.
Smart people, as measured by educational attainment, live in the NE coastal states and exceptionally stupid people (by the same metric) live in the South and Midwest. As a guy from Iowa, I was offended, but humbled by the reality of the numbers.
A Carnegie Mellon study found that people with PhDs were more likely than any other educational attainment level to be against the Covid-19 vaccine: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.20.21260795v... (page 17)
Gallup polls during the Vietnam War found that higher-educated Americans were more likely to be pro-war while the most anti-war group were those with only a grade school education: https://afterthewarproject.org/files/original/3e5e5a47a15203... (page 19 of the PDF, page 38 of the document)
said without an ounce irony as the proverbial rug is yanked right out from under your feet
The average does tend to vary from state to state. It actually is a bit lower in the southern and midwestern states, but only by a few points.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/average-iq-...
People tend to believe without questioning it that there are geographical/regional surveys of "IQ". But have you ever been compelled to take an IQ test as part of a survey like that? I've never heard of that happening. In fact: those kinds of surveys do not exist.
Scholars have from time to time thrown their careers away by trying to get better numbers, inevitably some group doesn't like the outcome and they become embroiled in endless debate while their career implodes. For example, the major sources cited in The Bell Curve have had their titles stripped and been hounded to the ends of the earth.
All these years later people are still specifically authoring papers to debunk their work.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
We will never see real numbers. This, or other things like it, are literally the best it will ever get unless someone sacrifices their career, and maybe their own safety, to gather better data.
The people who actually are (/were) hounded are people like Richard Lynn, the godfather of "average IQ by country" data sets. That's because their data sets are fraudulent; not in a subtle way, but very directly: for instance, data for Sub-Saharan African countries are taken in many cases exclusively from mental health facilities, the only places IQ tests are done in any significant numbers in those places.
> It's a fertile field and people are coming at it from multiple angles
One of these things must not be 100% accurate. Do you know of any real dataset thats based on actual testing? I can't find one for the life of me. I've looked.
If someone just... tested people we would have numbers. They aren't. Its been 30 years since the bell curve and our data is no better now than it was then as far as I can find.
There must be some reason for that discrepency.
*EDIT* To clarify, I don't think Lynn was right, and even if he was he was an asshole. I'm just annoyed that nobody followed up and did it properly.
It does not follow from the intractability of that problem that nobody's doing intelligence or behavioral genetics research. Plenty are, which is why there are front page stories on HN about the "missing heritability" issue.
Again, I think it's interesting that the notion of these data sets don't flunk more people's sanity checks, because most of us have no recollection of ever being asked to take an IQ test. I sure haven't. A mass testing regime none of us have ever heard of, apparently run in secret, is generating global IQ rankings? That doesn't sound weird to you?
Yes, that would be less accurate than a test administered in office by a professional, but it would also be more accurate than basing it on educational attainment or standardized tests intended for other purposes.
With a little effort the tests true purposes could easily be disguised. These very clever researchers know this, they just won't.
Thats also a fair theory to explain the lack of real data. Given the frequency with which I've had similar conversations it feels off to me, but that may just be my bias.
It certainly seems to be a very interesting problem to researchers. Thirty years later it is still cited frequently enough that Elsevier is having to hunt and destroy papers that cite it.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/dec/10/elsevier-rev...
The data discussed in the Guardian article you cited there is fraudulent. They're hunting it down because it's bad data. It's exactly the same impulse as the Data Colada and Retraction Watch people, which is celebrated on HN. But now the wrong ox is getting gored, and people are uncomfortable with it.
I'm not mad the ox was gored, just that nobody replaced it after they were done sacrificing it. Bad science deserves to die, but in my mind it should always be replaced with better science. Not just left as an empty gap.
> Again: there is active science being done at some of the largest research universities in the world on the questions you're talking about.
I wish I could find it. Neither Google, Kagi, ChatGPT, or Gemini could point me towards anything relevant. They just keep spitting out the old discredited hogwash. Maybe that's more a failing of the search engines than of the science though.
Either way, I appreciate the conversation. It's a topic that fascinates me, even if it isn't particularly relevant to my own life. I hope you have, or are actively having, a great holiday!
These are, like, high-profile names, but of course there are many dozens more people actually doing work in these fields.
“If (people are) worried about privacy, a license plate reader is the dumbest way to do surveillance. You have a cell phone. A cell phone knows your exact location at all times,” he said. “If you don’t trust law enforcement to do their job, that’s actually what you’re concerned about, and I’m not going to help people get over that.”
Just means I have to have a Faraday bag alongside my polesaw and high-powered laser. I can compete with your shitty outdated Android SoM and a shitty Raspberry Pi webcam in an enclosure.
Datapoint: one.
* no money was exchanged just some guarantees to not disclose their client and remove tweets.