>“The city of Dunwoody is one city in our demo partner program,” a Flock spokesperson told 404 Media. “The cities involved in this program have authorized select Flock employees to demonstrate new products and features as we develop them in partnership with the city.

the two things i still dont understand are:

1) why is there not a dedicated demo environment for demos, like practically every other software? i cant think of any reason why they need live data for a demonstration. (this might be addressed in the article, but the paragraph where it looks like it might be mentioned is also where the article is cut off)

2) is the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta (MCJCCA) city-owned? if not, the city should not be able to give permission to use the cameras. if so, was the MJCCA notified that the cameras would be used for demo purposes? were the parents notified?

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chneu 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Answer to 1 is simple and obvious based on Flocks previous actions: they have no idea what they are doing and are reacting instead of planning.

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roysting 5 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

They all should be prosecuted and jailed for life for the egregious harm and, if citizens, their blatant treason of the nation and the constitution.

I don’t think people are aware just how bad things are with these tyrannical and dystopian Flock cameras and the tyrannical illegitimate, treasonous government officials that install them.

They are tracking your egress and arrival in your neighborhood, your patterns of life, your coming and going, your personal movements. They’re tracking your travel on the interstate. They’re tracking your travel on rural roads and everything in between. They’re tracking every single bottleneck, choke point, and intersection.

Even the Deflock.me type sites miss a critical point; that it’s not the cameras themselves at specific points, it’s that the cameras are placed specifically to catch every single path anywhere. A better defrock.me type map would show all the paths, i.e., roads, that are fully tracked.

This is tyranny in modern form… a tiny little box with a solar panel that provides tyranny and totalitarian control no tyrant or dictator or megalomaniac psychopath all throughout history could have ever even dreamt of. This is not American. It is tyranny. It is the final nail in the coffin of this is not ended immediately.

Unfortunately, I believe the psychopathic, narcissistic ruling class will pull out all the stops to rationalize why this clear tyrannical and treasonous violation of the constitution is really Constitutional, in spite of your lying eyes and the fact that every single founder of America would be irate that we haven’t disposed of all these tyrants by now.

And no, mods, that’s not flame baiting. It’s just reality, objective reality. Regardless of whether proper want to rationalize and elude themselves into how it’s really not all that bad that the tyrants that rape and murder children by the dozens have a totalitarian surveillance stranglehold around everyone else’s neck.

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PunchyHamster 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

or they have exact idea what they are doing and don't give a shit

	▲	roenxi 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Cluelessness seems more likely. They'd have to be pretty stupid to use a live video for a demo in this way - there is almost literally no benefit compared to something more carefully curated, pre-recorded and staged. The money saved would not justify the risk of something weird happening on camera and disrupting the sale. Or, case in point, the current headline. If they want a creepy vibe approach or to appeal to the powerful paedophile market or whatever they're trying to do here then it is a lot easier to just hire some actors.

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ToucanLoucan 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

mOvE fAsT aNd bReAk tHinGs

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heironimus 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’ve seen dozens of these types of demos and it’s always live footage from a semi public place like this.

It’s much easier to just show live footage rather than rig up canned looping footage.

It’s pretty astonishing how no one watching the demo with me seems to care. No one asking “Hey, will you just be able to do this with our video if we buy from you?”

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chamomeal 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I would think they would have a real set of cameras for demos, but like in their own office or something. Not pointed at unwitting children. So dystopian

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TZubiri 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's just not very concerning. The buyer presumably cares about safety and their risk model are guns. Having a vendor show a couple of seconds of live footage to a potential buyer probably doesn't rank high in their threat model.

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mulmen 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Does this mean there is no testing environment?

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xp84 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Generally on multi-tenant SaaS kind of systems you do have testing environments, but they're filled with garbage data, plus they are usually running pre-release versions that aren't yet ready for the light of day. It's where QA and CI/CD operates. Sales demos are generally done on a production environment, but on dedicated tenants that are set up with "nice looking" well-organized data (e.g. company is named Contoso, users have names like "Jason Anderson" and "Maria Ramirez"). Testing environments have users with names like "1111111" and "`<script>alert(window.domain);`"

I think it's probably a just laziness here, which makes some sense - it would be easy to set up 5 Flock cameras on the sales demo tenant sitting in a storage room at HQ, but it would make for incredibly uncompelling demo. Rather than set up a pipeline to run stock footage in as a camera feed, they got lazy and used real tenants.

	▲	mulmen an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Sounds like the testing stage is sticky? It could exist without the tooling to reset it to a known baseline and/or create multiple environments which would enable safe demos.

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0xbadcafebee 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The camera's main selling point is instilling fear: better not misbehave, because Big Brother is watching. The creepier it is, the easier it is to sell to powerful people looking for invasive control.

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exe34 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If it really has to be a live system, they could just set one up in a broom closet at hq?

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throwway120385 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I would put it in the lobby or outside the HQ building.

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heironimus 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That does not demo well at all.

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pornel 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, the kids didn't like the broom closet.

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lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The employees were concerned about the lack of privacy setting it up at the entrance.

	▲	NonHyloMorph 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Hehe

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5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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