If Flock truly believed that the domain name infringes on their trademark, they would file an ICANN UDRP complaint instead of Cloudflare and Hetzner abuse reports.
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.
Cloudflare would have to bring that suit since they were the ones defrauded. The site owners probably can't sue Cloudflare because of their contract. So the site owners probably have to go basic "tortious interference" and be ready to show actual damages.
No, if the site owners have been harmed by Flock + Cyble knowingly filing a false takedown notice then they can sue Flock + Cyble. If Cloudflare's reputation has also been harmed then they could sue Flock + Cyble as well.
The "resulting damages" is pretty small though, they just had to move off of cloudflare. I'm not sure it would be worth it, especially if the other side doesn't end up paying their legal costs.
False accusation of criminal behavior is defamation and in many US states such accusations are assumed to be damaging. No evidence of damage is needed.
Knowingly filing false DMCA claims will also perjure them.
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.
>Knowingly filing false DMCA claims will also perjure them.
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
> 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.
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".
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.
The local credit union in Eugene had installed Flock cams at the entrances to all their branches. They took em down after only a few of our community members began protests out front a few branches and emailing with the CU's leadership before our city terminated our contract and removed the cams
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?
> no publicly available data that would demonstrate adherence to the rule.
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?
> it would almost certainly be noticed by someone whose post/comment got deleted
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.
> HN has all sorts of sneaky punishments to keep people from noticing what's going on
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.
To some extent, YCombinator partners are on the record[0] supporting the idea of their startups doing illegal things. Generally they'll frame this as challenging outdated regulations, but they acknowledge that the founders whose strategies they fully support sometimes come into office hours and discuss how they're worried that the strategy puts them at risk of going to jail.
VC system with multiple investors means YC can't tell their company what to do. No mote than you can tell Google what to do because you have $100M in shares.
There are economies of scale. But if one of your investors owns even a single digit percentage of your company and calls you to comment on direction or strategy, if you're wise, you pick up the phone.
So these are the scumbags putting cameras in front of schools and sending tickets to people on Sundays. Thank you for making peoples lives materially WORSE.
> The site’s only input fields accept license plate numbers (which are hashed client-side before transmission and cannot be harvested)
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.
They have indexed publicly available data. The privacy was long gone before you even entered a license plate number.
Or do you think other actors didn’t have the same data but without a frontend to show it to you?
This might be referring to k-anonymity where you truncate the hash so that it matches about 1000 hashes, then the client matches against that list. Which makes it so the operator can't really narrow down what exact license plates correspond to which searches.
Some hashing algorithms are tunable into being very expensive and difficult to brute-force even for very short inputs, but I virtually guarantee that whoever designed this system most likely would not even be aware those existed.
What about doing it all client side? Or perhaps let the user type one or two characters then fetch that from the server for all matches and do the remaining matching client side. There are ways you could truly isolate yourself from the PII.
Being able to say "Our server never sees user-input license plate numbers", even though from a technical perspective the hash is just as identifiable, does have value. Even though it offers no additional privacy, it does let non-technically-minded users and so on feel safer, and that's valuable.
Well aware of these, however that would not benefit in this case. Their main protection is against pre computed lookup tables. But since the operator needs to be able to lookup the license plate within their own database, then they would not be using either of these.
If the operator really wanted to do this in a safe way for the user then the whole database should exist client side.
You can romance Shadowheart as Laezel if you want and they hate each other at the start of the game.
Don’t need Gale for that. You can “win” in act 1 with Gale though.
If these folks get in trouble, they might try hosting with Freedom.nl . It's +/- the old xs4all crew, and they might be in for some more fun in the 21st century.
Remember when Zuck called his fellow students at harvard who used facebook “Dumb fucks”? The US is accelerating into techno-authoritarianism, and all of these tech companies adopted “companies over countries” motto since the start, it’s not a surprise now.
The context is given, it’s all about users’ data. facebook, google, plantir, flock, you name it, the end goal is to harvest data as much as possible to sell it, profile the individuals, manipulate the public opinion (facebook did a mood-manipulation “experiment” back in 2012, you can only imagine now in the era of social media dependency and AI), invade people’s privacy, among many other things. Now add to that mix a mandatory digital ID, and let’s hear what these CEOs will call the public behind closed doors, I’m sure it’s worse than “dumb fucks”. Fun fact: Zuck early days business card printed with “I’M THE CEO, BITCH.”
it is fairly evident that contextualisation is paramount in objectively assessing a situation ... in the context of having god like power over billions , it seems entirely moot to debate the merits of why such a god like individual would label his subjects as idiots ...
In the sense that the US has been anti-intellectualist for decades, I'm kind of ok with it. All the kids who fucked around in school and picked on the nerds for just existing are kind of getting their comeuppance. It's definitely cut off your nose to spite your face type shit, but does give me a little bit of joy. "You stuffed me in a locker and destroyed my social life because I read a book at lunch. I'm going to automate your job away and help billionaires make sure you'll never rise out of poverty."
> I'm kind of ok with it. All the kids who fucked around in school and picked on the nerds for just existing are kind of getting their comeuppance
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.
All the kids who fucked around in school and picked on the nerds for just existing are running the government. Not sure this is the win you're painting it as?
How much does food and electricity cost you (if the electricity is even on for you at all)? Also, uh, this isn't high school anymore, and the "nerds vs. jocks" framing says a lot more about your own internal state than it does about the state of the world, which is being run into the ground by wealthy oligarchs. If you have bad high school memories to process, that can be done elsewhere.
Do you realize that many of those nerds who were bullied in high school are fighting on the other side, trying to take on even bigger bullies - the oligarchs, to save democracy? Meanwhile, many of those bullies have grown up too, realized how cruel and shameful their conduct was, and are now fighting on the same side!
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!
I don't think "the nerds" are really dishing out much comeuppance here.
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.
Absolutely unacceptable behavior. Wild that Americans are so distracted by pointless social issues that they haven’t even realized the ruling elite are treating them like cattle. Absolutely pathetic.
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.
That's an easy trap to fall in. This industry costs trillions every year to operate for a reason. The people never really stood a chance. It's not as if school educated them to live in the world we actually inhabit.
Flock's CEO basically went to the public and said "you all have phones" like the Blizzard people.
“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.
It's not about stupid people, there are stupid people everywhere, it's about the .1% elite controlling all the wealth and power, using flaws in the ways humans work (stupid or not every human has to have shelter and food to survive).
People with advanced degrees accumulate in those specific states, despite not significantly different rates of HS graduation from other states.
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.
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)
This is just an extrapolation of NAEP testing. It's more or less a chart of SES and how many students in each state need English language supports.
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.
Yeah. The linked source is upfront about that, but its the closest thing we have to a real study sadly. As I said, the averages are close anyhow.
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.
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.
There's a persistent myth that it's impossible to do science in this field and that people who try are cancelled. That's obviously false. You can just look this up. It's a fertile field and people are coming at it from multiple angles --- just watch arguments between behavioral and molecular geneticists on Twitter some time.
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.
> 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.
No, those statements aren't in tension at all! The idea that there would be reliable data for country-by-country or even state-by-state IQ comparisons is an extraordinary claim. Think about the amount of work that would go into generating representative samples. Globally? Forget about it.
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?
I dont think the problem is intractable at all. We have the internet now and can just test people. We don't.
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.
I don't know what to tell you about reducing this problem to an online survey and hoping for the best. There are people doing actual science --- including with modern IQ tests --- working on these problems. I think the bigger thing here is that, outside of message boards and Twitter, there just aren't that many people interested in a global country-by-country inventory of "average IQ".
> there just aren't that many people interested in a global country-by-country inventory of "average IQ".
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.
Again: there is active science being done at some of the largest research universities in the world on the questions you're talking about. What there isn't is a global country-by-country survey of representative samples of people to generate "average IQ", not because such a thing would be forbidden knowledge (we're awash in data that would be equivalently "forbidden"), but because the cost of such a project likely swamps any utility it might have. It's an idee fixee of message boards.
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.
> 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!
Sasha Gusev and Alex Strudwick Young are two good follows on opposing ends of the spectrum of research beliefs here, both link constantly to new studies. From a more psychometric and behavioral perspective, Eric Turkheimer is a good starting point. On the other end of the spectrum from Turkheimer is Richard Haier.
These are, like, high-profile names, but of course there are many dozens more people actually doing work in these fields.
They don't actually allege anything. They add in the keywords without going so far as to say "this website is doing X." It's enough to trip the keyword filters at Cloudflare and other hosting providers and reverse the burden of proof.
Problem is they have way more money to fight and that’s basically their whole playbook. I was caught up in a fraudulent libel claim that had to settle* back in the Twitter days. When those companies want to come after you, it’s really hard to fight back.
* no money was exchanged just some guarantees to not disclose their client and remove tweets.
If Flock truly believed that the domain name infringes on their trademark, they would file an ICANN UDRP complaint instead of Cloudflare and Hetzner abuse reports.
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.
I wonder if Flock + Cyble can be sued for fraud. There are 5 elements in a fraud:
Cloudflare would have to bring that suit since they were the ones defrauded. The site owners probably can't sue Cloudflare because of their contract. So the site owners probably have to go basic "tortious interference" and be ready to show actual damages.
No, if the site owners have been harmed by Flock + Cyble knowingly filing a false takedown notice then they can sue Flock + Cyble. If Cloudflare's reputation has also been harmed then they could sue Flock + Cyble as well.
Tortious interference with contract, cut and dry.
> Cloudflare would have to bring that suit
At first that seems pretty unlikely, but I could see them wanting to nip this in the bud so it doesn't become more common.
The "resulting damages" is pretty small though, they just had to move off of cloudflare. I'm not sure it would be worth it, especially if the other side doesn't end up paying their legal costs.
They’ve done it twice now.
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.
You would need damages
False accusation of criminal behavior is defamation and in many US states such accusations are assumed to be damaging. No evidence of damage is needed.
Knowingly filing false DMCA claims will also perjure them.
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.
>Knowingly filing false DMCA claims will also perjure them.
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.
Not one single person in the history of the DMCA has been prosecuted for perjury related to filing a DMCA claim.
Cloudfare and Hetzner should see this vulnerability of their own making and DO SOMETHING about it.
Cloudflare is becoming the great firewall of America more and more every day
> 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.
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".
>they would file an ICANN UDRP complaint
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.
My city just ended our pilot Flock program. I hope others do the same.
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...
The local credit union in Eugene had installed Flock cams at the entrances to all their branches. They took em down after only a few of our community members began protests out front a few branches and emailing with the CU's leadership before our city terminated our contract and removed the cams
> My city just ended our pilot Flock program. I hope others do the same.
If someone would like to engage in grassroots activism on this, may I suggest the perfect domain: getTheFlockOutOfMyCity.com
My town in Colorado just did the same. Pretty happy with the result.
Part 2: Flock and Cyble Inc. Continue to File False Notices
https://haveibeenflocked.com/news/cyble-part2
This is a Y Combinator company? https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
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?
One long-standing code is that they moderate YC companies less on HN, allowing criticisms like yours to stand: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320816
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.
> One long-standing code is that they moderate YC companies less on HN, allowing criticisms like yours to stand:
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.
> no publicly available data that would demonstrate adherence to the rule.
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?
A public moderation log would satisfy me just fine, and is common practice on other forums.
> 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.
> > 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.
“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.
> it would almost certainly be noticed by someone whose post/comment got deleted
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.
> HN has all sorts of sneaky punishments to keep people from noticing what's going on
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.
>HN doesn't notify you in any way of this.
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.
> No it's not.
It was, actually. New accounts' comments being flagged by default is, I'm fairly certain, very much a thing.
Ah, you must've vouched for it. :)
Odd, I don't remember that being a thing when I joined. Mine showed up a-okay.
To some extent, YCombinator partners are on the record[0] supporting the idea of their startups doing illegal things. Generally they'll frame this as challenging outdated regulations, but they acknowledge that the founders whose strategies they fully support sometimes come into office hours and discuss how they're worried that the strategy puts them at risk of going to jail.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm-ZIiwiN1o&t=8m46s
yeah their code of ethics is to laugh all the way to the bank and be untouchable. nothing will happen to them from YC.
Are dang and tomhow involved at all in YC member ethics? I expect they know about ethical behavior on HN.
VC system with multiple investors means YC can't tell their company what to do. No mote than you can tell Google what to do because you have $100M in shares.
There are economies of scale. But if one of your investors owns even a single digit percentage of your company and calls you to comment on direction or strategy, if you're wise, you pick up the phone.
First time?
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So these are the scumbags putting cameras in front of schools and sending tickets to people on Sundays. Thank you for making peoples lives materially WORSE.
Speeding tickets are not related in any way to why Flock (YC S17)* is bad.
* how I will now always refer to them
Cameras at schools, I can see how that could be concerning. But what's wrong with ticketing drivers on Sundays?
Nothing, I guess, but don't try to tell us it's about "safety" when school-zone speed limits are enforced on Sundays when school is out.
That said, I don't think Flock has anything to do with speed cameras in school zones or anywhere else.
Hah, about a decade I had a cop try to pull that one on me, pulled over for speeding in a school zone on a Saturday morning.
"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.
> The site’s only input fields accept license plate numbers (which are hashed client-side before transmission and cannot be harvested)
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.
They have indexed publicly available data. The privacy was long gone before you even entered a license plate number. Or do you think other actors didn’t have the same data but without a frontend to show it to you?
Entering your licence plate into this site gives the operator your geodata/ip address tied back to your licence plate.
Unless you use a VPN to access the site. Flock has your real location on camera.
This might be referring to k-anonymity where you truncate the hash so that it matches about 1000 hashes, then the client matches against that list. Which makes it so the operator can't really narrow down what exact license plates correspond to which searches.
Some hashing algorithms are tunable into being very expensive and difficult to brute-force even for very short inputs, but I virtually guarantee that whoever designed this system most likely would not even be aware those existed.
Technically true. Flock could present an unfounded argument that I might be brute-forcing my own security and privacy measures.
I think it'd sound pretty dumb.
If the security depends on the person it's supposed to be secure against not trying to break it...
What about doing it all client side? Or perhaps let the user type one or two characters then fetch that from the server for all matches and do the remaining matching client side. There are ways you could truly isolate yourself from the PII.
Being able to say "Our server never sees user-input license plate numbers", even though from a technical perspective the hash is just as identifiable, does have value. Even though it offers no additional privacy, it does let non-technically-minded users and so on feel safer, and that's valuable.
That "value" here lets them mislead policymakers.
The value is being able to mislead your users
Sure, Jan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_(cryptography)
(Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper_(cryptography) off you want to be fancy)
Well aware of these, however that would not benefit in this case. Their main protection is against pre computed lookup tables. But since the operator needs to be able to lookup the license plate within their own database, then they would not be using either of these. If the operator really wanted to do this in a safe way for the user then the whole database should exist client side.
Related: Flock Said It Does Not Use Dark Web Data. Code Analysis Tells a Different Story - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46341674
Cyble, with a large team of dark Web researchers based out of India cover that while giving flock plausible deniability
> With the new Divinity game in the works, I decided to do a run as Gale in BG3.
I don't support this decision but I respect it.
Curious what the Cloudflare HNers have to say about this debacle.
Can't be less than what support has had to say up until now.
Everyone knows that it all hinges on why they’re being Gale. If they’re doing it so they can romance Shadowheart then it’s permissable.
You can romance Shadowheart as Laezel if you want and they hate each other at the start of the game. Don’t need Gale for that. You can “win” in act 1 with Gale though.
If these folks get in trouble, they might try hosting with Freedom.nl . It's +/- the old xs4all crew, and they might be in for some more fun in the 21st century.
Flock is trying their best to usher in dystopia
Remember when Zuck called his fellow students at harvard who used facebook “Dumb fucks”? The US is accelerating into techno-authoritarianism, and all of these tech companies adopted “companies over countries” motto since the start, it’s not a surprise now.
it’s important to contextualize that quote: he called them dumbfucks specifically because they trusted him with their data.
The context is given, it’s all about users’ data. facebook, google, plantir, flock, you name it, the end goal is to harvest data as much as possible to sell it, profile the individuals, manipulate the public opinion (facebook did a mood-manipulation “experiment” back in 2012, you can only imagine now in the era of social media dependency and AI), invade people’s privacy, among many other things. Now add to that mix a mandatory digital ID, and let’s hear what these CEOs will call the public behind closed doors, I’m sure it’s worse than “dumb fucks”. Fun fact: Zuck early days business card printed with “I’M THE CEO, BITCH.”
it is fairly evident that contextualisation is paramount in objectively assessing a situation ... in the context of having god like power over billions , it seems entirely moot to debate the merits of why such a god like individual would label his subjects as idiots ...
If you operate in a world where your goal is to scam others then anyone displaying any amount of trust is obviously a dumb fuck.
In the sense that the US has been anti-intellectualist for decades, I'm kind of ok with it. All the kids who fucked around in school and picked on the nerds for just existing are kind of getting their comeuppance. It's definitely cut off your nose to spite your face type shit, but does give me a little bit of joy. "You stuffed me in a locker and destroyed my social life because I read a book at lunch. I'm going to automate your job away and help billionaires make sure you'll never rise out of poverty."
> I'm kind of ok with it. All the kids who fucked around in school and picked on the nerds for just existing are kind of getting their comeuppance
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.
All the kids who fucked around in school and picked on the nerds for just existing are running the government. Not sure this is the win you're painting it as?
How much does food and electricity cost you (if the electricity is even on for you at all)? Also, uh, this isn't high school anymore, and the "nerds vs. jocks" framing says a lot more about your own internal state than it does about the state of the world, which is being run into the ground by wealthy oligarchs. If you have bad high school memories to process, that can be done elsewhere.
Do you realize that many of those nerds who were bullied in high school are fighting on the other side, trying to take on even bigger bullies - the oligarchs, to save democracy? Meanwhile, many of those bullies have grown up too, realized how cruel and shameful their conduct was, and are now fighting on the same side!
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!
I don't think "the nerds" are really dishing out much comeuppance here.
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.
Absolutely unacceptable behavior. Wild that Americans are so distracted by pointless social issues that they haven’t even realized the ruling elite are treating them like cattle. Absolutely pathetic.
The pointless social issues are manufactured specifically in order to distract Americans from the fact they are being treated like cattle.
And they/we absolutely love the distraction
Because our educational system has been dismantled
Which is precisely part of the strategy to keep everyone distracted and confused.
Cloudflare outage on Dec. 5 on remote servers were /user/ parsing errors in HTTP.
Flock does this well in terms of bios spinlock releases, whereas a secure measure is stress-testing network traffic.
> are manufactured specifically
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.
That's an easy trap to fall in. This industry costs trillions every year to operate for a reason. The people never really stood a chance. It's not as if school educated them to live in the world we actually inhabit.
Cattle is as Cattle does
Moooo
> Wild that Americans are so distracted
There is a tonne of civic action against Flock, specifically, in the works, in many cases with successful results.
Flock's CEO basically went to the public and said "you all have phones" like the Blizzard people.
“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.
I'm an American blue collar that does NOT carry a cell phone.
Datapoint: one.
And yet... many communities are in the process of ending their contracts and lawsuits are being filed against them?
Like what?
America is huge and there's a lot of exceptionally stupid people especially in the South and Midwest.
Not much I can do about that over here in the coastal Northeast.
"us smarties would never fall for such obvious bread and circus. not like those silly dumdums what live in {region}!"
said without an ounce irony as the proverbial rug is yanked right out from under your feet
It's not about stupid people, there are stupid people everywhere, it's about the .1% elite controlling all the wealth and power, using flaws in the ways humans work (stupid or not every human has to have shelter and food to survive).
I was offended and then I defined "exceptionally stupid" a few ways and all the statistics support this claim.
I'm still offended though.
Fucking a lot of smart people in Mass., Vermont, Conn., New York, Maryland, DC.
I’m pretty sure anywhere there’s a lot of people (the northeast of the US for example) you’re going to find a lot of smart people.
People with advanced degrees accumulate in those specific states, despite not significantly different rates of HS graduation from other states.
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.
All things considered, I don't think advanced degrees necessarily correlate with intelligence. It's often just a marker of socioeconomic privilege.
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)
I think you will find that fifty percent of people are of below average intelligence regardless of where you live.
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-...
This is just an extrapolation of NAEP testing. It's more or less a chart of SES and how many students in each state need English language supports.
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.
Yeah. The linked source is upfront about that, but its the closest thing we have to a real study sadly. As I said, the averages are close anyhow.
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.
There's a persistent myth that it's impossible to do science in this field and that people who try are cancelled. That's obviously false. You can just look this up. It's a fertile field and people are coming at it from multiple angles --- just watch arguments between behavioral and molecular geneticists on Twitter some time.
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.
> 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.
No, those statements aren't in tension at all! The idea that there would be reliable data for country-by-country or even state-by-state IQ comparisons is an extraordinary claim. Think about the amount of work that would go into generating representative samples. Globally? Forget about it.
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?
I dont think the problem is intractable at all. We have the internet now and can just test people. We don't.
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.
I don't know what to tell you about reducing this problem to an online survey and hoping for the best. There are people doing actual science --- including with modern IQ tests --- working on these problems. I think the bigger thing here is that, outside of message boards and Twitter, there just aren't that many people interested in a global country-by-country inventory of "average IQ".
> there just aren't that many people interested in a global country-by-country inventory of "average IQ".
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...
Again: there is active science being done at some of the largest research universities in the world on the questions you're talking about. What there isn't is a global country-by-country survey of representative samples of people to generate "average IQ", not because such a thing would be forbidden knowledge (we're awash in data that would be equivalently "forbidden"), but because the cost of such a project likely swamps any utility it might have. It's an idee fixee of message boards.
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.
> 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!
Sasha Gusev and Alex Strudwick Young are two good follows on opposing ends of the spectrum of research beliefs here, both link constantly to new studies. From a more psychometric and behavioral perspective, Eric Turkheimer is a good starting point. On the other end of the spectrum from Turkheimer is Richard Haier.
These are, like, high-profile names, but of course there are many dozens more people actually doing work in these fields.
Thank you!
Come on, there are exceptionally stupid people almost everywhere. No need for ad hominem.
Flock helped catch the Boston/Brown shooter.
the guy who took himself out? what did flock do to assist there?
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Is this not libel?
They don't actually allege anything. They add in the keywords without going so far as to say "this website is doing X." It's enough to trip the keyword filters at Cloudflare and other hosting providers and reverse the burden of proof.
Problem is they have way more money to fight and that’s basically their whole playbook. I was caught up in a fraudulent libel claim that had to settle* back in the Twitter days. When those companies want to come after you, it’s really hard to fight back.
* no money was exchanged just some guarantees to not disclose their client and remove tweets.
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