• trackball_fetish@lemmy.wtf
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    7 days ago

    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.

      • hector@lemmy.today
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        6 days ago

        Be aware brake fluid is like antifreeze, it tastes good to animals if they don’t put bad taste in it, and kills them.

        • wookiepedia@lemmy.world
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          5 days ago

          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.

          • elucubra@sopuli.xyz
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            4 days ago

            I didn’t know that, and I have used liters of the stuff. Learn something every day.

            Is it just Dot3? Dot4 is more common these days.

            BTW, kids, we are talking about brake fluid, so don’t go spraying it on your camera lenses!

            • wookiepedia@lemmy.world
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              2 days ago

              Was away for a few days and just saw this reply. Yeah, brake fluid is super corrosive, especially on glass. The DOT rating (3, 4, 5, etc.) doesn’t play a role in how corrosive it is, it’s more about the different additives and composition of the specific fluid and what it’s service life is. The more you know…

              • elucubra@sopuli.xyz
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                1 day ago

                Yeah, Ive been working on engines (mostly my own, for fun) for decades, and I never knew about brake fluid and glass.

        • Sunflier@lemmy.world
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          6 days ago

          Because that would be illegal, and advice in easy-to-acess ways to sabotage fascism should not be shared anywhere.

      • TheObviousSolution@lemmy.ca
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        6 days ago

        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.

        • hector@lemmy.today
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          6 days ago

          I don’t take is so personally. I have someone periodically following me around downvoting everything I write too it appears. It’s pathetic.

          • TheObviousSolution@lemmy.ca
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            4 days ago

            I don’t take any particular downvote personally, I just have a problem with the whole unregulated concept of downvoting is, and I think there’s a reason why the same networks that brought it into popularity over the predecessors that didn’t have are also the ones rampant today toxicity, cult-on-demand bubbles, circlejerks, and the like. Lemmy is the one platform where downvoting really isn’t worth anything - well, at least unless the piefed guys have a say in it, from my understanding. If it ever became popular to try to act like the upvote/downvote ratio means something in Lemmy, it would be far easier to manipulate and take advantage in contrast to non-federated platforms, and I already commonly see accounts with almost no comment or post participation since a few months just being used to slap upvotes and downvotes on an hourly basis.

            It would just be so simple to improve, but people just keep trying to clone the same flawed systems that made them leave other platforms.

        • JustTesting@lemmy.hogru.ch
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          6 days ago

          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?

          • Lfrith@lemmy.ca
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            6 days ago

            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.

            • thlibos@thelemmy.club
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              6 days ago

              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.

  • CADmonkey@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    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.

    • yeehaw@lemmy.ca
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      6 days ago

      That’s alarming, but how much can these really vary? I’d be surprised if a lot of vehicles weren’t the same.

      • iglou@programming.dev
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        6 days ago

        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.

        • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
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          5 days ago

          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.

          • iglou@programming.dev
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            5 days ago

            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.

          • oyenyaaow@lemmy.zip
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            5 days ago

            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

      • CADmonkey@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        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.

  • maplesaga@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    Just like everyone is quitting facebook, ChatGPT, and all the other things people are boycotting that seem to never have anything happen to them.

    • null@lemmy.org
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      6 days ago

      Already deleted my FB. Instagram is getting close with how many “suggested” posts they cram into my feed that should be just my friends.

    • mmmac@lemmy.zip
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      7 days ago

      Yeah I’m based in one of the highest density ALPR regions in the country, this would just be going off constantly lol

  • XeroxCool@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    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.”

  • RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    Well, the CEO did openly invite and approve of this. In his own words, Flock cameras aren’t forced on anyone. So the only logical conclusion is to destroy them if so desired.

  • BanMe@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    There’s one a block from my house, and three blocks from my work, so they can see me coming and going each direction.

    …BRB

    • ramenshaman@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      There’s two on each of the roads to my favorite local freeway and there’s two in the parking lot of my local hardware store

  • cohete@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    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.

  • njordomir@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    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.

  • LemUser@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    They are beginning to disguise them in cones, barrels and small ones on a pole as small as rebar.

    • korazail@lemmy.myserv.one
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      6 days ago

      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.

      • CADmonkey@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        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?

    • yeehaw@lemmy.ca
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      6 days ago

      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.

  • partofthevoice@lemmy.zip
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    7 days ago

    Yeah, I was actually thinking about acquiring one myself. I want to dissect it, hook it up to some monitoring equipment/ software, see what I can learn about it… functionality, vulnerability, anything. But I’m also worried about the potential I accidentally show up on a video feed stored somewhere remote. I’ve been checking eBay for them, but honestly… there are several right by my home. We’ll see what happens, in time.

      • piecat@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        Agreed. To do properly, you would probably want a verified screen room / faraday cage room. What they use for professional EMC testing. Might be able to jerry rig one I guess, but you’d want to test it for leaks if personal safety is on the line.

        • thlibos@thelemmy.club
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          6 days ago

          Thank you for saying “jerry rig” and not “jury rig”. I looselose my shit everytime I “hear it”.

          • zourn@lemmy.world
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            6 days ago

            Why would you get upset at jury rig? It’s the original term and older than jerry rig.

            • thlibos@thelemmy.club
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              5 days ago

              I always thought “jury-rig” was a nautical term that fell out of use centuries ago and has only reappeared because some people who heard the phrase “jerry-rigged” and were not familiar with the word “jerry” thought they must have said “jury”. Meh, wouldn’t be the first time I didn’t know what I was talking about.

    • muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works
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      6 days ago

      They’ve already been analyzed and their security is atrocious. It’s ancient android nonsense. It’s theoretically possible to break into the wirelessly, that’s how bad these are.

      The whole thing is about grabbing as much data as fast as thy can. There’s damn near nothing keeping it restricted or secure. Might as well be an open IP cam on the internet.