<p>it&#39;s ridiculous how it&#39;s now normal that computers are adversarial to their owners and using a computer now means to be working around constantly hostility of software designed specifically to not help you, and this is accepted enough that for young people that&#39;s their whole idea of what a computer is, a sort of scammy robot always trying to pull one over you</p>

<p>Flock Threatens Open Source Developer Mapping Its Surveillance Cameras</p><p><a href="https://www.404media.co/flock-threatens-open-source-developer-mapping-its-surveillance-cameras/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">404media.co/flock-threatens-op</span><span class="invisible">en-source-developer-mapping-its-surveillance-cameras/</span></a></p>

<p>Not sure if there&#39;s any point to me posting all of this except to say that if you&#39;re concerned about the growth of the surveillance state in your local area, the place to fight it might actually be at city hall. Or, at least at a city council meeting. /end</p>

<p>In any event, the main &quot;selling point&quot; of police departments seems to be mainly focused around stolen vehicles and Amber alerts. If such a car enters the area, they&#39;ll probably get an alert about it in under a minute.</p><p>You might be able to find some follow-up reports in city council meetings where the PD reports upon incidents actually involving the cameras. Usually it&#39;s recovery of a stolen vehicle in the parking lot of a shopping mall or something.</p>

<p>I think I was just getting to the good part</p>

<p>My goal for today is to not do any coding for fun. It is my belief that I need to avoid doing coding for fun today so I will have the capacity to do coding for work tomorrow. This is quite frustrating because it means denying myself the joy of writing a garbage collector</p>

<p>Privacy is a recurring theme in city council meetings (people are paying attention). But, presentations (usually made by the local police department) are sketchy. You&#39;ll see statements like &quot;cameras capture license plates&quot;, but then in the very next sentence it will say &quot;no personally identifying information is captured.&quot;</p><p>... well, except for the freaking license plate! That part is seems to be easily forgotten.</p>

<p>Moderately interesting things found.</p><p>Each camera cost $2500 to install and $2500/year to operate. A small village might have 10-20 cameras. </p><p>Cities don&#39;t own any of the equipment and are contractually forbidden to touch it in any way, unless it&#39;s literally on fire and the FD has to douse it or something.</p><p>A lot of meeting discussion is focused on the fact that neighboring areas have cameras (peer pressure). Wouldn&#39;t want to have a &quot;camera gap&quot; with freaking Winnetka.</p>

<p>do you remember when it was possible to search things with computers? those were the days</p>