The Dark Knight was released in 2008. In that movie, Batman hijacks citizens' cellphones to track down the Joker, and it's presented as a major moral and ethical dilemma as part of the movie's overall themes. The only way Batman remains a "good guy" in the eyes of the audience is by destroying the entire thing once he's done.
Crazy to think that less than two decades later, an even more powerful surveillance technology is being advertised at the Super Bowl as a great and wonderful thing and you should totally volunteer to upload your Ring footage so it can be analyzed for tracking down the Jok... I mean illegal imm... I mean lost pets.
Pulled from IMDB, Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox voices the consternation perfectly:
> Batman: [seeing the wall of monitors for the first time at the Applied Sciences division in Wayne Enterprises] Beautiful, isn't it?
> Lucius Fox: Beautiful... unethical... dangerous. You've turned every cellphone in Gotham into a microphone.
> Batman: And a high-frequency generator-receiver.
> Lucius Fox: You took my sonar concept and applied it to every phone in the city. With half the city feeding you sonar, you can image all of Gotham. This is wrong.
> Batman: I've gotta find this man, Lucius.
> Lucius Fox: At what cost?
> Batman: The database is null-key encrypted. It can only be accessed by one person.
> Lucius Fox: This is too much power for one person.
> Batman: That's why I gave it to you. Only you can use it.
> Lucius Fox: Spying on 30 million people isn't part of my job description.
That system is nothing compared to the geolocation databases curated by Apple and Google, with GPS sensors combined with Wi-Fi wardriving, IMEI tracking, cell tower handoffs, and the rest of the insane amount of telemetry they collect collect in real time. And that’s before even considering BLE and the Find My network. Imagine the “God mode” dashboards they could have in Cupertino (or more likely, in Mountain View).
Imagine a Google Maps / Google Earth where you can see everyone’s location and identity in real time, with tagging/targeting/following capabilities and quick links to thorough personal profiles.
Go back a little bit further to another Morgan Freeman movie - Se7en (1995) and a big plot point was that it is unthinkable for big brother to be keeping records of what library books people are checking out. Times sure have changed...
Unfortunately a very realistic depiction of how many of the brands advertising their security the strongest often have the most ridiculously broken security (flock)
There are performance concerns with base64. Hardware-assisted null-key encryption offers security that's a non-strict superset of base64 encryption and with superior performance.
> The only way Batman remains a "good guy" in the eyes of the audience is by destroying the entire thing once he's done.
A key part of that is when he tells Alfred that he did not even trust himself with that level of surveillance and coded it to only grant access to Alfred. Further, Alfred agrees to aid Batman by accessing the data but simultaneously tenders his resignation.
I doubt Amazon has anyone like Alfred in charge of this thing. Because if they did, the resignation would already have been submitted.
These kinds of resignations are interesting. The character is such a good protagonist, he resigns rather than do Bad Thing. But that pretty much guarantees the boss will hire someone more pliable. Why not instead swallow the pride and do Bad Thing but with some level of moderation? That would surely be a better outcome overall.
The argument is that it would destroy the character's honor or whatever. But that is also a kind of sacrifice for the greater good. Maybe a lot of those are in fact happening but just not visible.
> Why not instead swallow the pride and do Bad Thing but with some level of moderation?
A better answer is "refuse to do it without resigning". To begin with it gives you a better chance of preventing it, because maybe they back down, whereas if you do it or leave, someone does it. Then if they fire you, well, that's not really that much worse for you than resigning, but it's worse for them because now they're retaliating against someone for having ethical objections. How does that look in the media or in front of a jury? Which is all the more incentive for them to back down.
The problem with "well just do it a little bit" is that you can travel arbitrarily far in the wrong direction by taking one step at a time.
> Why not instead swallow the pride and do Bad Thing but with some level of moderation? That would surely be a better outcome overall.
This is a common debate, especially given current events in US politics. The theory goes that you can do more to effect change by staying inside the system than by resigning.
For powerful positions, it doesn’t really work if there is significant disagreement about what’s being done. If you do the requested actions that you disagree with, you become part of the problem and lose credibility in the process. You also lose some of your ability to blow the whistle because you have some culpability in what happened.
If you resist or try to interfere, it becomes noticeable very rapidly. Sooner than a lot of people in this position expect, from what I gather. Then you find yourself fired for performance problems or insubordination, which makes any future whistle blowing look like cheap attempts at retaliation for being fired. If you did carry out some of the orders then you’ve also lost some standing to blame others.
So resigning, publicly, is the only surefire way to retain your credibility and send a message without becoming involved with the thing you’re trying to prevent.
It's hard to not become disillusioned with our industry when most of it is just the manifesting of that Torment Nexus tweet. It's like no one in the tech world actually understands any piece of fiction that they have ever consumed.
I knew plenty of people growing up who thought Fight Club was just a fun movie about guys who like to fight and make a club to do so and it gets a little crazy, then cut to credits. They then theorized making their own such club. This to say, yeah, I think sometimes the audience can be overestimated in their ability to understand deeper meaning in art.
It's said that Starship Troopers failed to do as well in USA because people thought it was pro-fascist propaganda ... it doesn't seem possible that could genuinely be the case.
I remember _movie critics_ clutching their pearls in disgust at the fascism. I was an autistic teen just out of a village and even I could see the satire. To this day I have no idea if they were reviewing in good faith, it still feels so far-fetched.
Starship Troopers (the movie) is a terrible example of satire because it fails to show anything substantially bad. When you present a society that's more ethical than real life, nobody's going to care if some people wear uniforms that look a bit like Nazi uniforms.
There is a genuine existential risk, and it's addressed in the best way possible. Military slavery ("conscription") is more evil than disenfranchisement, especially when citizenship is not required to live a good life. Nobody is tricked or coerced into signing up for military service. Potential recruits are even shown disabled veterans to make the risk more salient. There are no signs of racism or sexism.
Other objections are not supported by the film. There is no suggestion that the Buenos Aires attack is a false flag. I've seen people claim it's impossible for the bugs to do this, but it's a film featuring faster-than-light travel. The humans are already doing impossible things, so why can't the bugs? I've also heard complaints that there is no attempt at peace negotiations. There is no suggestion that peace is possible. It's possible among humans because most humans have a strong natural aversion to killing other humans. Real life armed forces have to go to great lengths to desensitize their troops to killing to prevent them from intentionally missing. But humans generally have no qualms about killing bugs, and the bugs in the movie never hesitate to kill humans.
The movie is an inspiring story about people making the right choices in a difficult situation. Some people look at it objectively, and some only react to the aesthetics. Those who look objectively understand it's actually faithful to the spirit of the book despite Verhoeven not intending that.
The only hung I see about the asteroid was that Carmen’s collision (caused by her showing off) knocked the rock which caused it to hit Earth, where originally it may well have missed.
Seems reasonable (although clearly not the intent of the story and not a deliberate “false flag”)
This is all intentional. The film is emulating the type of film that would be produced by this fascist regime, of course it isn't going to include proof of the fascists being wrong. But we also don't see any evidence in support of their claims of an "existential threat" beyond the fascists claiming there is one. And since it's from the fascist perspective, the lack of evidence justifying their actions ends up supporting the idea that there is no real justification for their actions.
The movie's goal is showing the attractiveness of fascism and showing that people like you are incredibly open to fascist ideologies as long as the fascists have a scary "other" to put forward as an existential threat regardless of how real that threat truly is.
There definitely is. No one on screen looks into camera and says this directly, but the whole recurring "Would you like to know more?" bit is supposed to tip the viewer off that what they're watching is a product of the government's propaganda efforts.
I truly don't know how you can watch this [1] and conclude we're meant to fully trust them as the 100% honest truth.
The "would you like to know more" segments are inner nested stories. Those actually are presented as in-universe video, and qualify as epistolary narrative. But to claim that the movie as a whole is anti-fascist satire relies on the assertion that the whole movie is epistolary, which goes against the narrative conventions of film-making. Judging only by what we see on screen, we have to take it at face value. To do allow otherwise permits bizarre interpretations of any fiction you like, because you can always claim it's unreliable narration.
To differentiate between the potentially unreliable in-universe material and the conventional narrative of the rest. There's no on-screen evidence to justify a second level of nesting.
That confuses me because you seemingly aren't disagreeing with anything in the "unreliable in-universe material". The primary difference I see between those segments and the rest of the movie is simply tone.
The tone marks the difference between epistolary narration (which by convention may be unreliable) and omniscient narration (which by convention is always reliable). I'm well aware what Paul Verhoeven intended, but he failed at conveying that intention on the screen. What we actually see is a society that's more ethical than any real world society in times of war. If Verhoeven didn't want us to believe that then he shouldn't have used the omniscient narration of a conventional action movie. Any movie that relies on external sources to convey its message has failed as a movie.
>I'm well aware what Paul Verhoeven intended, but he failed at conveying that intention on the screen.
Poe's law suggests that what you're asking for is impossible, there will always be people unable to read sarcasm or parody. Knowing this, I believe Verhoeven included those "Would you like to know more?" segments as the equivalent of a ;-) or /s to indicate his intent. I'm sorry to be blunt, but obviously some of us were able to understand his message so attributing your own inability to see that message on a failure of Verhoeven and not yourself comes off as self-centered.
He could have introduced a second level of narrative nesting with a single title card at the beginning. Something like "United Citizen Federation presents: Heroes of the Bug Wars" would have made it clear. Lacking evidence to the contrary we have to assume it works like every other movie. Failing to provide this evidence when it would have been easy to do so is bad film-making.
>Lacking evidence to the contrary we have to assume it works like every other movie. Failing to provide this evidence when it would have been easy to do so is bad film-making.
Which brings us full circle back to my first reply to you, there is no evidence in the movie either way on the justification for their actions. You're reading that we must trust the fascists in the film due to film conventions is just as reliant on outside knowledge as my argument that we shouldn't trust the fascists in the film because they are fascists.
The evidence is shown on screen. We see the asteroid fired at Earth. We see Buenos Aires destroyed. We see the bugs killing the humans. If you call this unreliable narration it becomes impossible to discuss any fiction at all, because once you reject basic narrative conventions you can make up any nonsense you like and nobody can argue against it.
Calling the characters "fascists" because they use fascist aesthetics is basically acting like an LLM. It's only engaging with the surface detail without having a solid world-model to back up your thoughts. You could call it "vibe watching". If you look at what's actually happening, following the standard conventions of motion picture story-telling, the characters are not fascists. And if the director intended them to be fascists but omitted anything that would make that clear, he shouldn't be surprised when people watch it like a normal action movie.
No, we don't. The bugs have no technology. How could they send an asteroid from light-years away with enough speed and accuracy to hit Earth on any reasonable timeframe? It's not even a good lie. It's a story that strains credulity the second you actually think about its logistics. The only reason you believe it is that characters in the movie say it.
>We see Buenos Aires destroyed.
Sure, but asteroids also have natural origins. The government coopts the disaster for their own ends in an obvious mirroring of the Reichstag fire. The true cause of the destruction is irrelevant, the only thing that matters is what the crisis can be used to justify.
>We see the bugs killing the humans.
Sure, after the humans invade the bugs home. If you go on a hike, find a beehive, and then start poking it with a stick, no rational person would blame the bees for stinging you.
>Calling the characters "fascists" because they use fascist aesthetics is basically acting like an LLM. It's only engaging with the surface detail without having a solid world-model to back up your thoughts.
The government portrayed in the movie is fascistic because it shows a society that is entirely governed by military might and structure. The classroom scenes at the beginning of the movie discuss the failure of democracy and how that led to veterans taking control through force. We are also repeatedly told that basic rights of citizenship are only awarded to veterans. When they're at boot camp and all going around explaining their reasons for joining the military, one person says she wants to start a family and military service is the best path to getting a license for it. This is a highly structured and totalitarian society ruled by a military class. How would you describe that if it isn't "fascism"?
Once again, you seem to be guilty of the same thing you're accusing me of doing. The only evidence that this isn't a fascist society is the surface-level details of things like a bunch of happy high school students. Any discussion of the actual society they live in paints a clear picture of fascism.
The bugs are shown firing projectiles to orbit. This is a setting with FTL travel; it's clearly not hard sci-fi. By the standard narrative conventions of soft sci-fi action movies, the bugs are capable of firing asteroids at Earth.
>The true cause of the destruction is irrelevant
It's critically important to the ethical justification for military response. According to the information actually presented in the movie, the destruction was deliberate murder of millions of civilians. Any other interpretation is fan-fiction.
>no rational person would blame the bees for stinging you.
They'd blame them for killing everybody they know. And that initial provocation was not the fault of the United Citizen Federation.
>Any discussion of the actual society they live in paints a clear picture of fascism.
It has objectively more freedom in times of war than any real life society.
I refuse to believe that you are actually engaging with the issues being discussed if you're claiming that needing a license to have children is "objectively more freedom in times of war than any real life society." Your stubbornness has bested my patience, so I'm done here.
I support reproductive freedom. I oppose slavery. My opposition to slavery is stronger than my support for reproductive freedom. When there's a conflict between the two, reproductive freedom has to be sacrificed.
Anybody who didn't support raising a slave army to liberate the Chinese from their one-child policy implicitly agreed with me.
And some extreemist are using fight clubs to gather followers, emulating the movie in the other direction. So-called "active clubs" are springing up using "fitness" to gather young angry males to the cause. Most join without realizing. Even gym owners are surprised to discover thier facilities have become clubhouses.
I like the quote that claims that as a science history is probably closer to animal husbandry than anything else.
Don't get me wrong I like history and think it a critical thing to study. but it is very telling to try ones hand at meta-history, the history of history, look to how the narrative of a historical subject changes through time and space.
An easy one is world war 2 documentaries. The difference in tone and focus of those done right after the cessation of hostilities compared to those done later is fascinating.
its far simpler than that; not caring about what they've built if the check is big enough. because they've taught us that "if i don't build it, they'll just hire someone else. might as well be me that gets the money." but if there was solidarity or more regulation it'd be much less of a guarantee that these things would be built.
You'll see on HN itself how many people want to work on this surveillance. How many people want all white collar work eliminated by AI. How many people want a quick buck at anyone's expense, the morality be damned.
The Amazon Knight (2028): Batman hacks Ring cameras to track down the Joker, showing himself to be a rebellious vigilante who's not afraid to break a company's ToS to make justice happen. After the job is done, cut to a montage of Batman telling an Amazon worker about Wayne Enterprises' new villain-detection technology that could be used to upgrade Ring, then screwing in cameras in every room of every building of the city, and then proudly telling the bystanders that they won't have to suffer any more. He's invited to a ceremony where Jeff Bezos thanks him. A swarm of anti-evil Amazon drones takes off, flooding the city streets. The morning sun rises over Gotham City, colors become more saturated, faint shots of executing every criminal in the city can be heard. The civilians run to the streets to cheer it on, finally free from oppression. The screen fades to white, revealing the Ring Camera Pro 3 Batman Edition, complete with a Batman logo on its black outer shell. "Now only $99! (Available for free in partner municipalities)"
This is a bit orthogonal to the article, but Christopher Nolan gives me the willies. Almost all his films have this kind authoritarian apologia in them.
Is that the same willies as something like 1984 or Black Mirror? All they are doing is taking some idea present now, and just taking it too the darker places of it while society is currently only seeing the rosy side of things. It's stories like this that might be first time someone might actually consider other implications of ideas.
I think they take issue with how it was ultimately okay to do to catch the Joker as long as Batman didn't use it and gave power to Luscious who resigned, instead of just calling it out as terrible and not doing it. That's how I read their comment anyway. "apologia"
Batman is a vigilante using brutal violence to pursue his goals outside of any legal system. The whole concept of the comics, movies, etc. is predicated on him being a virtuous guy that you can trust will always do the right thing (mostly, I'm sure he's a villain or anti-hero in some of them). The surveillance system really isn't anything different and it was ridiculous that Luscious had a problem with it in the first place.
There's real media illiteracy in watching a character in a film do a thing and assume that means the filmmaker is endorsing that thing. This has the same vibe as the Hays Code[1] which mandated that the bad guys in film must always get their comeuppance.
> All criminal action had to be punished, and neither the crime nor the criminal could elicit sympathy from the audience, or the audience must at least be aware that such behavior is wrong, usually through "compensating moral value".
Modern cinema and cinematic critique has been so flattened by the constant accusations of filmmakers supporting some "-ism" or another by failing to have their characters directly speak out against it. It's ridiculous.
A major defect with the Hays Code is that it assumes everything illegal is unethical.
But when you have Hollywood producing this Jack Bauer trash where the protagonist is doing everything that should never be done and is still painted as our hero and champion, that's rightfully criticized as propaganda.
The problem isn't when the bad guys are seen to get away with it, the problem is when the bad guys are made out to be the good guys. If they get away with it and it doesn't leave you feeling uncomfortable then it better be because the point was that they were never really the bad guys, because the alternative is to make you sympathize with the wicked.
Most (all?) of Batman is based on the idea that sometimes you need a good guy who operates outside of the law. Given that Batman isn't real but the problems he encounters often are real, the natural conclusion is that we should make up for our low Batman levels by letting law enforcement off the chain.
But this is hardly unique to Nolan. Probably 90% of Hollywood movies that involve crime have this message in some form.
The fact that Batman is an ultra wealthy 1 % which dishes out justice with his expensive toys while hiding from most of the authorities is also quite a message.
The popular ones with extra-human abilities - Flash, Superman, Spiderman, Captain America, etc, have more normal backgrounds.
Boys with toys though - Batman, Ironman, The Atom, are the 1%. Ant Man I guess is more normal, but he stole his suit (but Hank Pym was reasonably normal too)
No, it's more like the militarism in a Heinlein novel. It is, at best, an unexamined assumption and, at worst, a celebration, or sometimes a passive acceptance, of violence to enforce the status quo.
In the context of the Dark Knight/surveillance example, it comes across to me as more of a recognition that the arguments in favor of these things can easily be made compelling if you evaluate them with no tradeoffs (don't you want to catch the bad guys??).
Then again, I guess the film ends up doing the same thing by only demonstrating concrete benefits alongside theoretical, but unrealized, harms...
He also beats up the Joker while he's in custody, because you gotta stop the badguy at all costs. And then there's Cops vs Protestors brawl in the other Nolan batman.
There is, admittedly, a precedent within the basic premise of the Batman story itself (and Frank Miller, author of the Dark Knight Returns comic is a noted right-wing libertarian) so in the case of that franchise, Nolan isn't inventing whole-cloth but it's also not something that's limited to just his Dark Knight films
The whole idea about any superhero media is a special dude going on a violent spree because the authorities (in their eyes) can't do their job properly. The whole concept is anti-government and society as a whole.
Do not mistake Nolan's ability to call out the failures of both absolute freedom and absolute control and their interaction with him advocating for any of them.
Don't get the willies from the warning, learn from it.
His brother and the writer, Jonathan Nolan, is the greatest prophet of our era.
The Dark Knight Rises (the batman movie with Bane) seemed especially notable in this way - almost directly caricaturing the Occupy Wall St protests that were relevant at the time.
I think it’s because in the early 2010’s these companies were doing truly awesome things, at least in my pov. Google search felt like magic and a portal to a web you could only imagine, facebook actually connected you with friends, nothing like amazon ecommerce had existed yet, cloud shit was insanely cool. Hell, my primary motivation in pursuing my degree was to work at google. I recoil in horror thinking about it now.
I think the trust gained there will be hard to break from people, that in my experience, genuinely do not realize what a complete 180 these companies have done. I sometimes wonder and am fearful at what type of thing would need to happen before people en masse realize it.
The Dark Knight was released in the summer of 2008. This was almost 7 years after 9/11.
Many aspects of that film were deliberately done to explore post 9/11 America. This includes the methods Harvey Dent uses, the things the Joker says, and the surveillance scenes and more.
These discussions surrounding surveillance have been around long before 2008.
Of course. The use of mass surveillance in the movie is not-so-subtly referencing the PATRIOT Act. But again, it's presented as a moral dilemma, and multiple protagonists acknowledge that it's far too powerful to exist, and its use is a last resort. It falls into the larger theme of Joker pushing Batman to violate his ethics for the greater good.
One could argue that because it was successfully used to catch Joker, the movie concludes that mass surveillance is sometimes necessary to stop evil, but it's at least presented as a dilemma. A massive corporation coming out and saying "mass surveillance is awesome because you can find lost pets" is a crazy escalation of the surveillance state.
Person of Interest is really good. Unfortunately I learned too much about the lead's IRL behavior, and it's on my shelf of shows I'll enjoy once the involved parties aren't collecting royalties anymore.
It absolutely takes people on a police procedural that drags viewers unwittingly into watching a science fiction show, and I'm totally here for all of it.
I see it as a textbook approach of a show that built up the characters with "number of the week" episodes and then integrated the world-building and big arcs gradually.
Very hard to do and less common these days with shorter series.
oh and the actor will be getting royalties until he dies so you are are effectively waiting for that. Maybe get the episodes in a way that doesn't give him money.
If you want to see where the discussion on privacy and tech has gone since, suffer through the recent “film” Mercy. A sane reading of the premise would suggest a profoundly anti-surveillance and AI message, but it’s quite the opposite.
In an way it’s best paired with the Amazon mess War of The Worlds, which is so thematically empty that it ultimately seems to suggest that while you can’t trust the government with your data, Amazon is a great custodian!
I mean the message in The Dark Knight is really messy. The characters believe it’s immoral, but they use it anyway, and it saves lives and stops the Joker.
Yeah, as I say in a sibling comment, it's a fair reading of the movie that it's ultimately pro-surveillance because it shows that despite being immoral, unethical mass surveillance catches the bad guy. But "surveillance is unethical but necessary when battling the forces of evil" is worlds away from "surveillance is totally awesome and everyone should buy a Ring camera."
let's get this stupid social media purity test thing out of the way: blah blah blah, i oppose surveillance.
now that that's over, the phone is definitely more powerful surveillance technology than a ring camera
you can turn off your phone, so uh, it's not as powerful as it seems.
and practically speaking, ring cameras run out of battery all the time. and also, you can cover them.
the stupidest thing about this whole discourse is that, by participating in it in the particular way that you are, you are feeding directly into what Amazon wants, which is for their absolutely dogshit technology to be perceived as something a lot more valuable and powerful than it really is.
Even more concerning is that Ring is partnering with Flock [1], which has been the subject of quite a bit of controversy recently [2][3][4], with the CEO lashing out at critics with inflammatory language [5][6].
There would be less backlash to the Ring ad if the ad was honest about how people actually use it. Show us porch pirates, burglars and stupid neighbor who backs into your car being caught on camera.
But instead, they have to come up with something "wholesome" like finding your lost doggo. The wholesomeness is so forced and cringe that it makes you think they have something to hide. It almost feels like the people who wrote this ad and the people who greenlit it knew something was wrong so they have to come up with a cover story. But like a child smiling at you with his biggest smile while anxiously keeping his hands behind his back, it only makes them more suspicious especially in a time when big tech feels more and more like an adversary than a friend.
Isn't the whole point of the ad that they have a new feature and they want people to know about it? They're not making up the idea of finding lost dogs. They have a new feature where you upload a photo of your lost dog and it automatically looks for the dog in camera feeds.
It absolutely boggles my mind that it's legal in the US for a deliverer to just leave a package out in the open for anyone to pick up and consider it "delivered". Might as well just throw it out of the window of your car, it has the same chance of getting picked up by the recipient. Where I live the package has to be handed over to the recipient. If the recipient is not available it will be handed over to a neighbour and this will be noted on a little card that's placed in the recipient's mail box. If that is not possible it will be taken back to the mail office and the recipient can pick it up in person.
Adding video surveillance is no solution. OK, so you saw a random stranger pick up your package. Now what? What are you going to do with that information? Are the police going to start a manhunt because of your 50$ Amazon order?
No thanks. I want packages delivered when I’m not home. If i want it to be handed to me I can require it be handed to me, picked up, or delivered to a nearby store. If I wanted to go pick up a package I would just go to the store in the first place.
Most stuff doesn’t matter, and is rarely stolen. If something matters I’ll just have the delivery company do what I guess is required in where you live, I can choose.
Do you live somewhere with high crime? The reason deliveries work this way in the US is that porch pirates are uncommon. There is a flurry of them during the holidays, but even then, the vast majority of deliveries are just fine.
> What are you going to do with that information?
Nothing, because by the time I look at my doorbell camera I would already have told the shipper the package was swiped and they will have shipped a replacement. They might take it up with the shipper, or call it a cost of doing business, whatever, but it won't be -my- problem.
Porch pirates are so uncommon that it became a yearly hunt/thing for a major american youtuber and is the only reason people outside the US even know it exists!
Ah yes, porch pirates do not exist anywhere but in the US.
You know that the reason someone can make it newsworthy is because it is uncommon, yeah?
A security firm, which may have a particular interest in the numbers being skewed in a certain direction, pegs the number at 250K packages stolen from porches every day. Sounds like a huge problem! There are 60M packages delivered every day. Even if they are providing accurate numbers, which I doubt, it is uncommon.
In China, kids are accustomed to face recognition early.[1] The kids are checking into school via fare gates with face recognition.
Here's an ad for Hikvision surveillance systems showing the whole system.[2]
Hikvision has a whole series of videos presenting their concept of a kindly, gentler Big Brother. This is probably the most amusing.[3]
Amazon's concept is in some ways more powerful. They don't need full coverage. Just sparse, but widespread coverage. Anything that moves around will pass through the view of cameras at some point.
Suspicious behavior can be detected in the back end cloud processing, which improves over time.
Flock has the same concept. Flock coverage is sparse in terms of area, but widespread.
The situation with the Nancy Guthrie disappearance and Nest camera footage is related, and interesting. It seems that she had a Nest doorbell camera, but didn't pay for the subscription plan ($100/yr?). As a result, the camera records short snippets but doesn't save them to the cloud in a user-accessible way.
After a week, Google finally hunted down/coughed up the footage. I imagine there were some people within Google who realized that if they provided the footage immediately, then it could discourage people from paying for the subscription.
Of course, they must also realize that by not providing the footage sooner, they may have allowed the perp to get away, or the victim to be killed.
I do. The battery life on our units varies depending on the amount of foot traffic that they see. One is at our front door, where package deliveries and entry/egress trigger 5-10 times daily, and the other is in our backyard, where it is triggered a 5-10 times weekly. The backyard camera lasts much longer per charge.
This tends to indicate that they are only recording/uploading in response to specific triggers. They also have LEDs that supposedly light up whenever they are recording.
It was some attempt at reductio ad absurdum. If you are concerned about letting Alexa into your home, you must be as irrational as Chris Hemsworth. Edit: I'm misusing reductio ad absurdum, but somebody will please tell me what the fallacy here is called.
It's not really about the individual people. They're probably all pretty normal interpersonally. Our systems reward this behavior, so people do it. Surveillance is desired by the politically and economically powerful, and the contravening forces are weak and largely unorganized. Do we punish politicians or businesses for bad behavior? No? Then they'll engage in whatever behavior advances their interests.
You could purge the world of every single person with evil intentions, and things would maybe get better for a little while, but without fundamentally changing the underlying rules of the system the same thing would play out again with different actors.
I like your take. I see this same thing playing out across many parts of the world.
Dont hate the player hate the game
It is about incentives and rules of the "game" that drive things. Sure, there are a few evil people but the vast majority of it is normal people responding to broken rules/incentives. Probably you and I both fall in this category :)
To be clear, you can absolutely hate the player in addition to the game. That's for you to decide on a case-by-case basis. It's just important to recognize the broader context, especially if want to leave a positive impact.
> It's not really about the individual people. They're probably all pretty normal interpersonally. Our systems reward this behavior, so people do it.
Sorry, but people who do things they normally wouldn't because they are rewarded are not good people. They may be 'normal' in a distribution sense, but that doesn't mean the behavior becomes acceptable through it becoming commonplace.
The idea is compelling to consider though - I just saw a clip of comedian Romesh Ranganathan saying that a reason he hasn't cheated on his wife is lack of opportunity; another side of the same idea.
Perhaps we would all be shit-head billionaires if given the opportunity.
Most of us stay within our ethical lane, but then we don't have the money to afford a private island to abuse people on; we don't have to resist the temptation to incite an insurrection, or to shift gold markets by threatening a war ... perhaps we'd be tempted?
> Perhaps we would all be shit-head billionaires if given the opportunity.
Statistically, if we were living in WWII Germany, most of us would not become freedom fighters. We'd keep our head down and support the regime. I think most people like to think of themselves as the exception but that's just "cope".
> Surveillance is desired by the politically and economically powerful
It's also desired by consumers. Parents love tracking their children, spouses track each other. Everyone wants to get a camera to catch porch pirates. Let's not pretend this is something being forced on us by some external evil. The evil is coming from inside the house.
this is entirely misses the point about exactly what makes it dangerous
there's nothing bad with having a camera to spot porch pirates, as long as the data stays private
it becomes problematic when everyone's hooked up to one central place (plus the "AI")
same as the common talking points about CCTV, which always miss the distinction that there's minimal risk if it's only going to some video recorder in the back of the store
it only becomes dangerous when every shop and house are fed back to one central location
and the general public do not understand the difference
> there's nothing bad with having a camera to spot porch pirates, as long as the data stays private
It's still surveillance, and it's subject to subpoena so it can become government data as needed. The centralization makes things worse, sure, but the desire to monitor others often comes from individual actors.
I can walk down my street and I will be recorded every step of the way by someone. The government didn't mandate this, each homeowner decided they "needed" a camera.
Because if you don't do what you are told at work, you may be forced to uproot your family, spouse, kids, and leave the country. You may be forced to abandon your pets and never see them again, forced to send your kids to suddenly school in a different, foreign-to-them language. You may be forced to pay tens of thousands in moving expenses. You may be forced to pay mortgages for a house you are not allowed to live in. All it takes is one unhappy manager at Amazon, or falling it the wrong bucket at stack ranking time.
Or you can do what your manager asks you to do, over-deliver on it year after year, and you won't have to deal with the above. You may be unhappy with what you do at work, but your kids and spouse will live happy lives, and you can keep your pets and house.
There’s no need to fear the construction of mass surveillance anymore. It’s already here. We built it one convenience at a time [0]. When I see all my friends with Alexa devices at home, ring cameras, and a million food apps on their phones, it feels like it’s already too late.
Even if it can and will only be used to track dogs, that means if I have a photo of someone's dog I can track it and learn that the owner is (likely) away from their house.
The main issue is that fearmongering, aggressive marketing (as seen here), and subsidized pricing has convinced people to buy that spyware. The playbook is very much the same as for the Alexa and other "bugs" people now willingly pay for and place in the middle of their homes, constantly recording and monitoring their activities.
In reality, these cameras are next to useless when it comes to protecting the owners as seen in other news. If you fear a home invasion, it's a shotgun that you need, not a Ring camera.
Amazon marketing broke a fundamental rule about consumer tech: Don't remind users about how much Big Tech knows about you.
Your various devices track everywhere you go, who you communicate with, what you search for, what you buy, what audio you listen to, what videos you watch, what games you play, who your family is, all your pictures and video you take, who comes and goes from your house, when you sleep, your health data, and much more.
And as a fundamental part of Big Tech's business they accumulate, aggregate and analyze all that information in various ways to increase profits. They don't keep this a secret, but wisely they normally don't brag about it to the general public.
Consumers have shown that are totally willing to give up privacy for convenience. Just don't remind them of it.
Yeah in a world where if you post a Ring video of someone taking a crowbar to your mailbox which gets a strike in your neighborhood group and the video down for "hate", yeah, as useful as it is, the mass surveillance stuff is pretty alarming.
That ad gave me a visceral shudder of revulsion, not so much for the specific functionality on display as for the timing, which absolutely could not have been accidental. They might as well have just put 'and we're working on automatic alerts for ICE!' in the ad.
Ring has experienced backlash before when they allowed police departments to browse the imagery without any kind of oversight or warrant. And has changed their policies as a result (in the most minimal way but ok)
And these are pretty high profile people whose job it is to represent the people who will also have concerns but don't all contact the verge about it :)
By the way i use ring cameras too but I've already mitigated them a lot. Installed telephoto lenses that can only see the specific area I want them to see, and I removed the microphones so they can't hear what I'm saying. I got some free with my ring alarm so I didn't really want to waste the hardware either.
Everyone I’ve talked to about the Super Bowl ads has mentioned that one and said that it is creepy af. The backlash is mostly word of mouth in my experience.
Exactly. There are certainly more than 9 of us who value privacy and understand where this is going, but in comparison to millions of normies we aren't even a screeching voice of minority[1].
I found out that on Reddit people go there and ask things like this (someone asked recently): "My girlfriend and I are looking for something to do. Are there any protests going on today we can go to?"
Can you imagine people actually searching things out like that? These "people voicing concerns" are like that. Someone has to find something to be enraged about for the sake of finding something to do.
Yet massive numbers of people (I'm sure including many on this thread) are buying and installing Ring cameras. It's always been a surveillance network.
Part of the problem here is that people who love it are affecting people who do not. If you want to put cameras to record inside your home, fine, but this is people recording their neighbors without consent. The sales pitch is finding Fido, but I doubt that is the end game here.
Thank you for that. But please consider taking down the camera, too; it's just as much of a problem without a subscription, because you are the service being sold, not just the customer. Get one that stores and processes video entirely locally instead.
I thought Ring was already sending data to law enforcement agencies (that paid Amazon for it). Also, I thought the EULA included language that basically said, "All your data are belong to us", so they could already do whatever surveillance they want.
I think Nancy Guthrie and the release of the doorbell video by scouring Google’s caches has done far, far more to make people want video cameras and cloud storage than any ad.
The fears of mass surveillance are some of the funniest things I can think of. Do you think a tree grows a leaf and then says I don’t care what you do leaf.
1st amendment auditors = confrontational streamers who deliberately take public filming to an extreme.
Any cameras are fine for recording any public property. That’s the whole idea of being in public: others can see you, you can see them, and you aren’t (shouldn’t) be doing something you wouldn’t mind being recorded. You have no expectation of privacy standing on a sidewalk.
I'm fine that others can see me. But we don't have to extend that to unlimited recording. We don't have to extend that to robots.
50 years ago you didn't have privacy walking around outside but you weren't subject to constant surveillance and tracking. The current state isn't some inevitable fact of life. It's fixable without any draconian action.
The Dark Knight was released in 2008. In that movie, Batman hijacks citizens' cellphones to track down the Joker, and it's presented as a major moral and ethical dilemma as part of the movie's overall themes. The only way Batman remains a "good guy" in the eyes of the audience is by destroying the entire thing once he's done.
Crazy to think that less than two decades later, an even more powerful surveillance technology is being advertised at the Super Bowl as a great and wonderful thing and you should totally volunteer to upload your Ring footage so it can be analyzed for tracking down the Jok... I mean illegal imm... I mean lost pets.
Pulled from IMDB, Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox voices the consternation perfectly:
> Batman: [seeing the wall of monitors for the first time at the Applied Sciences division in Wayne Enterprises] Beautiful, isn't it?
> Lucius Fox: Beautiful... unethical... dangerous. You've turned every cellphone in Gotham into a microphone.
> Batman: And a high-frequency generator-receiver.
> Lucius Fox: You took my sonar concept and applied it to every phone in the city. With half the city feeding you sonar, you can image all of Gotham. This is wrong.
> Batman: I've gotta find this man, Lucius.
> Lucius Fox: At what cost?
> Batman: The database is null-key encrypted. It can only be accessed by one person.
> Lucius Fox: This is too much power for one person.
> Batman: That's why I gave it to you. Only you can use it.
> Lucius Fox: Spying on 30 million people isn't part of my job description.
That system is nothing compared to the geolocation databases curated by Apple and Google, with GPS sensors combined with Wi-Fi wardriving, IMEI tracking, cell tower handoffs, and the rest of the insane amount of telemetry they collect collect in real time. And that’s before even considering BLE and the Find My network. Imagine the “God mode” dashboards they could have in Cupertino (or more likely, in Mountain View).
Imagine a Google Maps / Google Earth where you can see everyone’s location and identity in real time, with tagging/targeting/following capabilities and quick links to thorough personal profiles.
Go back a little bit further to another Morgan Freeman movie - Se7en (1995) and a big plot point was that it is unthinkable for big brother to be keeping records of what library books people are checking out. Times sure have changed...
Lmao did they really say it's null-key encrypted?
Unfortunately a very realistic depiction of how many of the brands advertising their security the strongest often have the most ridiculously broken security (flock)
I rewatched recently. That's what he says all right.
He also says "aflongaflongkong". https://youtu.be/0ukMXA0SJaM
I mean it is technobabble but in some way it is also poetic.
It's funnier than typical technobabble because they're literally saying its not encrypted. The writers knew what they were doing, I'm sure
They should have used base64 encryption.
How about ROT13? Ideally applied twice for twice the encryption.
ROT13 is cheap enough that you can afford to apply it many more times. I use one million iterations to store passwords securely.
640k oughtta be enough for anybody.
There are performance concerns with base64. Hardware-assisted null-key encryption offers security that's a non-strict superset of base64 encryption and with superior performance.
null-key encryption is write-once, read-never, so you don't have to cache it.
Lmao did they really say it's null-key encrypted?
You know movies aren't real life, don't you?
Wait until he sees the main character is a super hero
Batman is technically not a super (as in superhuman) hero, though. He's just rich and determined.
The Nolan Batman movies are absolutely risible in retrospect. It's hard to believe how seriously everyone took them back then.
Not a single person in the world took any of them "seriously."
They're blockbuster movies about a comic book.
They’re good entertainment, not a documentary haha
> The only way Batman remains a "good guy" in the eyes of the audience is by destroying the entire thing once he's done.
A key part of that is when he tells Alfred that he did not even trust himself with that level of surveillance and coded it to only grant access to Alfred. Further, Alfred agrees to aid Batman by accessing the data but simultaneously tenders his resignation.
I doubt Amazon has anyone like Alfred in charge of this thing. Because if they did, the resignation would already have been submitted.
These kinds of resignations are interesting. The character is such a good protagonist, he resigns rather than do Bad Thing. But that pretty much guarantees the boss will hire someone more pliable. Why not instead swallow the pride and do Bad Thing but with some level of moderation? That would surely be a better outcome overall.
The argument is that it would destroy the character's honor or whatever. But that is also a kind of sacrifice for the greater good. Maybe a lot of those are in fact happening but just not visible.
> Why not instead swallow the pride and do Bad Thing but with some level of moderation?
A better answer is "refuse to do it without resigning". To begin with it gives you a better chance of preventing it, because maybe they back down, whereas if you do it or leave, someone does it. Then if they fire you, well, that's not really that much worse for you than resigning, but it's worse for them because now they're retaliating against someone for having ethical objections. How does that look in the media or in front of a jury? Which is all the more incentive for them to back down.
The problem with "well just do it a little bit" is that you can travel arbitrarily far in the wrong direction by taking one step at a time.
> Why not instead swallow the pride and do Bad Thing but with some level of moderation? That would surely be a better outcome overall.
This is a common debate, especially given current events in US politics. The theory goes that you can do more to effect change by staying inside the system than by resigning.
For powerful positions, it doesn’t really work if there is significant disagreement about what’s being done. If you do the requested actions that you disagree with, you become part of the problem and lose credibility in the process. You also lose some of your ability to blow the whistle because you have some culpability in what happened.
If you resist or try to interfere, it becomes noticeable very rapidly. Sooner than a lot of people in this position expect, from what I gather. Then you find yourself fired for performance problems or insubordination, which makes any future whistle blowing look like cheap attempts at retaliation for being fired. If you did carry out some of the orders then you’ve also lost some standing to blame others.
So resigning, publicly, is the only surefire way to retain your credibility and send a message without becoming involved with the thing you’re trying to prevent.
Dr John wrote a song about this dilemma, “Such a Night”
> Alfred
Wasn't it Lucius Fox?
It was :) Morgan Freeman not Michael Caine.
I’d trust Morgan Freeman over Michael Caine any day.
Oh you’re night! I had Morgan Freeman’s face in my mind too.
same difference
It's hard to not become disillusioned with our industry when most of it is just the manifesting of that Torment Nexus tweet. It's like no one in the tech world actually understands any piece of fiction that they have ever consumed.
I knew plenty of people growing up who thought Fight Club was just a fun movie about guys who like to fight and make a club to do so and it gets a little crazy, then cut to credits. They then theorized making their own such club. This to say, yeah, I think sometimes the audience can be overestimated in their ability to understand deeper meaning in art.
And Scarface was an inspiring rags-to-riches story.
It's said that Starship Troopers failed to do as well in USA because people thought it was pro-fascist propaganda ... it doesn't seem possible that could genuinely be the case.
I remember _movie critics_ clutching their pearls in disgust at the fascism. I was an autistic teen just out of a village and even I could see the satire. To this day I have no idea if they were reviewing in good faith, it still feels so far-fetched.
Starship Troopers (the movie) is a terrible example of satire because it fails to show anything substantially bad. When you present a society that's more ethical than real life, nobody's going to care if some people wear uniforms that look a bit like Nazi uniforms.
There is a genuine existential risk, and it's addressed in the best way possible. Military slavery ("conscription") is more evil than disenfranchisement, especially when citizenship is not required to live a good life. Nobody is tricked or coerced into signing up for military service. Potential recruits are even shown disabled veterans to make the risk more salient. There are no signs of racism or sexism.
Other objections are not supported by the film. There is no suggestion that the Buenos Aires attack is a false flag. I've seen people claim it's impossible for the bugs to do this, but it's a film featuring faster-than-light travel. The humans are already doing impossible things, so why can't the bugs? I've also heard complaints that there is no attempt at peace negotiations. There is no suggestion that peace is possible. It's possible among humans because most humans have a strong natural aversion to killing other humans. Real life armed forces have to go to great lengths to desensitize their troops to killing to prevent them from intentionally missing. But humans generally have no qualms about killing bugs, and the bugs in the movie never hesitate to kill humans.
The movie is an inspiring story about people making the right choices in a difficult situation. Some people look at it objectively, and some only react to the aesthetics. Those who look objectively understand it's actually faithful to the spirit of the book despite Verhoeven not intending that.
The only hung I see about the asteroid was that Carmen’s collision (caused by her showing off) knocked the rock which caused it to hit Earth, where originally it may well have missed.
Seems reasonable (although clearly not the intent of the story and not a deliberate “false flag”)
I don't think the amount of ship that it touched imparted much of a momentum vector for a thing of that mass.
This is all intentional. The film is emulating the type of film that would be produced by this fascist regime, of course it isn't going to include proof of the fascists being wrong. But we also don't see any evidence in support of their claims of an "existential threat" beyond the fascists claiming there is one. And since it's from the fascist perspective, the lack of evidence justifying their actions ends up supporting the idea that there is no real justification for their actions.
The movie's goal is showing the attractiveness of fascism and showing that people like you are incredibly open to fascist ideologies as long as the fascists have a scary "other" to put forward as an existential threat regardless of how real that threat truly is.
>The film is emulating the type of film that would be produced by this fascist regime.
There's no frame story to support this. Going by the available evidence in the movie itself, it's a conventional action movie.
>There's no frame story to support this.
There definitely is. No one on screen looks into camera and says this directly, but the whole recurring "Would you like to know more?" bit is supposed to tip the viewer off that what they're watching is a product of the government's propaganda efforts.
I truly don't know how you can watch this [1] and conclude we're meant to fully trust them as the 100% honest truth.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cktmS-yaxM
The "would you like to know more" segments are inner nested stories. Those actually are presented as in-universe video, and qualify as epistolary narrative. But to claim that the movie as a whole is anti-fascist satire relies on the assertion that the whole movie is epistolary, which goes against the narrative conventions of film-making. Judging only by what we see on screen, we have to take it at face value. To do allow otherwise permits bizarre interpretations of any fiction you like, because you can always claim it's unreliable narration.
Why do you think those segments were included in the movie if it wasn't to get us to question the reliability of the narrative they're presenting?
To differentiate between the potentially unreliable in-universe material and the conventional narrative of the rest. There's no on-screen evidence to justify a second level of nesting.
That confuses me because you seemingly aren't disagreeing with anything in the "unreliable in-universe material". The primary difference I see between those segments and the rest of the movie is simply tone.
The tone marks the difference between epistolary narration (which by convention may be unreliable) and omniscient narration (which by convention is always reliable). I'm well aware what Paul Verhoeven intended, but he failed at conveying that intention on the screen. What we actually see is a society that's more ethical than any real world society in times of war. If Verhoeven didn't want us to believe that then he shouldn't have used the omniscient narration of a conventional action movie. Any movie that relies on external sources to convey its message has failed as a movie.
>I'm well aware what Paul Verhoeven intended, but he failed at conveying that intention on the screen.
Poe's law suggests that what you're asking for is impossible, there will always be people unable to read sarcasm or parody. Knowing this, I believe Verhoeven included those "Would you like to know more?" segments as the equivalent of a ;-) or /s to indicate his intent. I'm sorry to be blunt, but obviously some of us were able to understand his message so attributing your own inability to see that message on a failure of Verhoeven and not yourself comes off as self-centered.
He could have introduced a second level of narrative nesting with a single title card at the beginning. Something like "United Citizen Federation presents: Heroes of the Bug Wars" would have made it clear. Lacking evidence to the contrary we have to assume it works like every other movie. Failing to provide this evidence when it would have been easy to do so is bad film-making.
>Lacking evidence to the contrary we have to assume it works like every other movie. Failing to provide this evidence when it would have been easy to do so is bad film-making.
Which brings us full circle back to my first reply to you, there is no evidence in the movie either way on the justification for their actions. You're reading that we must trust the fascists in the film due to film conventions is just as reliant on outside knowledge as my argument that we shouldn't trust the fascists in the film because they are fascists.
The evidence is shown on screen. We see the asteroid fired at Earth. We see Buenos Aires destroyed. We see the bugs killing the humans. If you call this unreliable narration it becomes impossible to discuss any fiction at all, because once you reject basic narrative conventions you can make up any nonsense you like and nobody can argue against it.
Calling the characters "fascists" because they use fascist aesthetics is basically acting like an LLM. It's only engaging with the surface detail without having a solid world-model to back up your thoughts. You could call it "vibe watching". If you look at what's actually happening, following the standard conventions of motion picture story-telling, the characters are not fascists. And if the director intended them to be fascists but omitted anything that would make that clear, he shouldn't be surprised when people watch it like a normal action movie.
>We see the asteroid fired at Earth.
No, we don't. The bugs have no technology. How could they send an asteroid from light-years away with enough speed and accuracy to hit Earth on any reasonable timeframe? It's not even a good lie. It's a story that strains credulity the second you actually think about its logistics. The only reason you believe it is that characters in the movie say it.
>We see Buenos Aires destroyed.
Sure, but asteroids also have natural origins. The government coopts the disaster for their own ends in an obvious mirroring of the Reichstag fire. The true cause of the destruction is irrelevant, the only thing that matters is what the crisis can be used to justify.
>We see the bugs killing the humans.
Sure, after the humans invade the bugs home. If you go on a hike, find a beehive, and then start poking it with a stick, no rational person would blame the bees for stinging you.
>Calling the characters "fascists" because they use fascist aesthetics is basically acting like an LLM. It's only engaging with the surface detail without having a solid world-model to back up your thoughts.
The government portrayed in the movie is fascistic because it shows a society that is entirely governed by military might and structure. The classroom scenes at the beginning of the movie discuss the failure of democracy and how that led to veterans taking control through force. We are also repeatedly told that basic rights of citizenship are only awarded to veterans. When they're at boot camp and all going around explaining their reasons for joining the military, one person says she wants to start a family and military service is the best path to getting a license for it. This is a highly structured and totalitarian society ruled by a military class. How would you describe that if it isn't "fascism"?
Once again, you seem to be guilty of the same thing you're accusing me of doing. The only evidence that this isn't a fascist society is the surface-level details of things like a bunch of happy high school students. Any discussion of the actual society they live in paints a clear picture of fascism.
>The bugs have no technology.
The bugs are shown firing projectiles to orbit. This is a setting with FTL travel; it's clearly not hard sci-fi. By the standard narrative conventions of soft sci-fi action movies, the bugs are capable of firing asteroids at Earth.
>The true cause of the destruction is irrelevant
It's critically important to the ethical justification for military response. According to the information actually presented in the movie, the destruction was deliberate murder of millions of civilians. Any other interpretation is fan-fiction.
>no rational person would blame the bees for stinging you.
They'd blame them for killing everybody they know. And that initial provocation was not the fault of the United Citizen Federation.
>Any discussion of the actual society they live in paints a clear picture of fascism.
It has objectively more freedom in times of war than any real life society.
I refuse to believe that you are actually engaging with the issues being discussed if you're claiming that needing a license to have children is "objectively more freedom in times of war than any real life society." Your stubbornness has bested my patience, so I'm done here.
I support reproductive freedom. I oppose slavery. My opposition to slavery is stronger than my support for reproductive freedom. When there's a conflict between the two, reproductive freedom has to be sacrificed.
Anybody who didn't support raising a slave army to liberate the Chinese from their one-child policy implicitly agreed with me.
And some extreemist are using fight clubs to gather followers, emulating the movie in the other direction. So-called "active clubs" are springing up using "fitness" to gather young angry males to the cause. Most join without realizing. Even gym owners are surprised to discover thier facilities have become clubhouses.
https://www.jfed.net/antisemitismtoolsandresources/neo-nazi-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Clubs
I've had a startling number of conversations exactly like this:
"Oh, you read as well? What do your read?"
"[this book], [that book]"
"Those are all non-fiction, any fiction?"
"I don't read fiction. If I'm not going to learn anything, it's a waste of time."
"..."
Oh man, have I gotten to read a lot of history recently.
And also fiction.
Frequently at the same time.
I like the quote that claims that as a science history is probably closer to animal husbandry than anything else.
Don't get me wrong I like history and think it a critical thing to study. but it is very telling to try ones hand at meta-history, the history of history, look to how the narrative of a historical subject changes through time and space.
An easy one is world war 2 documentaries. The difference in tone and focus of those done right after the cessation of hostilities compared to those done later is fascinating.
Fiction is my favorite, because the authors admit they are just making it up.
Video games are jammed with the follies of man. Elden Ring: Nightreign is a recent anthology of moral lessons.
its far simpler than that; not caring about what they've built if the check is big enough. because they've taught us that "if i don't build it, they'll just hire someone else. might as well be me that gets the money." but if there was solidarity or more regulation it'd be much less of a guarantee that these things would be built.
You'll see on HN itself how many people want to work on this surveillance. How many people want all white collar work eliminated by AI. How many people want a quick buck at anyone's expense, the morality be damned.
Money and only money talks nowadays. It's sad.
Never doubt they understand, there's just too much money to be made making the Torment Nexus
The Amazon Knight (2028): Batman hacks Ring cameras to track down the Joker, showing himself to be a rebellious vigilante who's not afraid to break a company's ToS to make justice happen. After the job is done, cut to a montage of Batman telling an Amazon worker about Wayne Enterprises' new villain-detection technology that could be used to upgrade Ring, then screwing in cameras in every room of every building of the city, and then proudly telling the bystanders that they won't have to suffer any more. He's invited to a ceremony where Jeff Bezos thanks him. A swarm of anti-evil Amazon drones takes off, flooding the city streets. The morning sun rises over Gotham City, colors become more saturated, faint shots of executing every criminal in the city can be heard. The civilians run to the streets to cheer it on, finally free from oppression. The screen fades to white, revealing the Ring Camera Pro 3 Batman Edition, complete with a Batman logo on its black outer shell. "Now only $99! (Available for free in partner municipalities)"
This is a bit orthogonal to the article, but Christopher Nolan gives me the willies. Almost all his films have this kind authoritarian apologia in them.
Is that the same willies as something like 1984 or Black Mirror? All they are doing is taking some idea present now, and just taking it too the darker places of it while society is currently only seeing the rosy side of things. It's stories like this that might be first time someone might actually consider other implications of ideas.
I think they take issue with how it was ultimately okay to do to catch the Joker as long as Batman didn't use it and gave power to Luscious who resigned, instead of just calling it out as terrible and not doing it. That's how I read their comment anyway. "apologia"
Batman is a vigilante using brutal violence to pursue his goals outside of any legal system. The whole concept of the comics, movies, etc. is predicated on him being a virtuous guy that you can trust will always do the right thing (mostly, I'm sure he's a villain or anti-hero in some of them). The surveillance system really isn't anything different and it was ridiculous that Luscious had a problem with it in the first place.
Do you think they also say it's ultimately okay to beat up people as a vigilante ?
There's real media illiteracy in watching a character in a film do a thing and assume that means the filmmaker is endorsing that thing. This has the same vibe as the Hays Code[1] which mandated that the bad guys in film must always get their comeuppance.
> All criminal action had to be punished, and neither the crime nor the criminal could elicit sympathy from the audience, or the audience must at least be aware that such behavior is wrong, usually through "compensating moral value".
Modern cinema and cinematic critique has been so flattened by the constant accusations of filmmakers supporting some "-ism" or another by failing to have their characters directly speak out against it. It's ridiculous.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hays_Code
A major defect with the Hays Code is that it assumes everything illegal is unethical.
But when you have Hollywood producing this Jack Bauer trash where the protagonist is doing everything that should never be done and is still painted as our hero and champion, that's rightfully criticized as propaganda.
The problem isn't when the bad guys are seen to get away with it, the problem is when the bad guys are made out to be the good guys. If they get away with it and it doesn't leave you feeling uncomfortable then it better be because the point was that they were never really the bad guys, because the alternative is to make you sympathize with the wicked.
Most (all?) of Batman is based on the idea that sometimes you need a good guy who operates outside of the law. Given that Batman isn't real but the problems he encounters often are real, the natural conclusion is that we should make up for our low Batman levels by letting law enforcement off the chain.
But this is hardly unique to Nolan. Probably 90% of Hollywood movies that involve crime have this message in some form.
The fact that Batman is an ultra wealthy 1 % which dishes out justice with his expensive toys while hiding from most of the authorities is also quite a message.
It’s not uncommon. Green Arrow the same.
The popular ones with extra-human abilities - Flash, Superman, Spiderman, Captain America, etc, have more normal backgrounds.
Boys with toys though - Batman, Ironman, The Atom, are the 1%. Ant Man I guess is more normal, but he stole his suit (but Hank Pym was reasonably normal too)
No, it's more like the militarism in a Heinlein novel. It is, at best, an unexamined assumption and, at worst, a celebration, or sometimes a passive acceptance, of violence to enforce the status quo.
In the context of the Dark Knight/surveillance example, it comes across to me as more of a recognition that the arguments in favor of these things can easily be made compelling if you evaluate them with no tradeoffs (don't you want to catch the bad guys??).
Then again, I guess the film ends up doing the same thing by only demonstrating concrete benefits alongside theoretical, but unrealized, harms...
He also beats up the Joker while he's in custody, because you gotta stop the badguy at all costs. And then there's Cops vs Protestors brawl in the other Nolan batman.
There is, admittedly, a precedent within the basic premise of the Batman story itself (and Frank Miller, author of the Dark Knight Returns comic is a noted right-wing libertarian) so in the case of that franchise, Nolan isn't inventing whole-cloth but it's also not something that's limited to just his Dark Knight films
To be fair that's more than a little bit present in most superhero media.
The whole idea about any superhero media is a special dude going on a violent spree because the authorities (in their eyes) can't do their job properly. The whole concept is anti-government and society as a whole.
Do not mistake Nolan's ability to call out the failures of both absolute freedom and absolute control and their interaction with him advocating for any of them.
Don't get the willies from the warning, learn from it.
His brother and the writer, Jonathan Nolan, is the greatest prophet of our era.
The Dark Knight Rises (the batman movie with Bane) seemed especially notable in this way - almost directly caricaturing the Occupy Wall St protests that were relevant at the time.
I think it’s because in the early 2010’s these companies were doing truly awesome things, at least in my pov. Google search felt like magic and a portal to a web you could only imagine, facebook actually connected you with friends, nothing like amazon ecommerce had existed yet, cloud shit was insanely cool. Hell, my primary motivation in pursuing my degree was to work at google. I recoil in horror thinking about it now.
I think the trust gained there will be hard to break from people, that in my experience, genuinely do not realize what a complete 180 these companies have done. I sometimes wonder and am fearful at what type of thing would need to happen before people en masse realize it.
Surely it's problematic that Batman doesn't have consent to hijack phones? Whereas participating in Ring is voluntary?
Anyway, movies aren't, like, the arbiters of truth. Sometimes they just have simplistic themes.
Is it voluntary to be recorded by Ring cameras?
And now Palantir sells exactly this product, literally named Gotham https://www.palantir.com/platforms/gotham/
The Dark Knight was released in the summer of 2008. This was almost 7 years after 9/11.
Many aspects of that film were deliberately done to explore post 9/11 America. This includes the methods Harvey Dent uses, the things the Joker says, and the surveillance scenes and more.
These discussions surrounding surveillance have been around long before 2008.
Of course. The use of mass surveillance in the movie is not-so-subtly referencing the PATRIOT Act. But again, it's presented as a moral dilemma, and multiple protagonists acknowledge that it's far too powerful to exist, and its use is a last resort. It falls into the larger theme of Joker pushing Batman to violate his ethics for the greater good.
One could argue that because it was successfully used to catch Joker, the movie concludes that mass surveillance is sometimes necessary to stop evil, but it's at least presented as a dilemma. A massive corporation coming out and saying "mass surveillance is awesome because you can find lost pets" is a crazy escalation of the surveillance state.
In the series Person of Interest, there's a scene where you can see racks of servers which allows to track everyone in a city (New York?).
When I first saw the scene I said: "This amount of servers is not remotely enough to pull something like this".
When I think of the scene now: "These amount of servers can do much more than the scene portrays".
I mean, most of the tech presented in the series is almost standard operations procedure via mundane equipment now.
Scary.
I believe they also pull this off with a fleet of PS3s, at one point.
Subsequently in PoI we see two imperfect super-intelligent AIs let loose in the real world fight each other for domination and their objectives.
For me, it’s a question of when, not if this happens in real life.
Person of Interest is really good. Unfortunately I learned too much about the lead's IRL behavior, and it's on my shelf of shows I'll enjoy once the involved parties aren't collecting royalties anymore.
It absolutely takes people on a police procedural that drags viewers unwittingly into watching a science fiction show, and I'm totally here for all of it.
I see it as a textbook approach of a show that built up the characters with "number of the week" episodes and then integrated the world-building and big arcs gradually.
Very hard to do and less common these days with shorter series.
oh and the actor will be getting royalties until he dies so you are are effectively waiting for that. Maybe get the episodes in a way that doesn't give him money.
> you are are effectively waiting for that
That's essentially what I was saying. I sort of hope when people are dead I can enjoy their performance more fondly even if I know they sucked before.
> Maybe get the episodes in a way that doesn't give him money.
I've owned the whole series on Blu-ray for a number of years. It really is just one of those things that feels tainted, at least for now. :/
My read is that it's immoral because it's a surveillance hijack without the knowledge of the users, as opposed to an opt-in.
And its not just opt in for the camera owner/licensor it should be explicitly optin for anyone who gets recorded
In the US, you don't have an expectation of privacy in public places.
If you want to see where the discussion on privacy and tech has gone since, suffer through the recent “film” Mercy. A sane reading of the premise would suggest a profoundly anti-surveillance and AI message, but it’s quite the opposite.
In an way it’s best paired with the Amazon mess War of The Worlds, which is so thematically empty that it ultimately seems to suggest that while you can’t trust the government with your data, Amazon is a great custodian!
I mean the message in The Dark Knight is really messy. The characters believe it’s immoral, but they use it anyway, and it saves lives and stops the Joker.
Yeah, as I say in a sibling comment, it's a fair reading of the movie that it's ultimately pro-surveillance because it shows that despite being immoral, unethical mass surveillance catches the bad guy. But "surveillance is unethical but necessary when battling the forces of evil" is worlds away from "surveillance is totally awesome and everyone should buy a Ring camera."
That kind of change in morality seems possible for an 18 year timespan? If anything the slope is closer to typical than to the maximum recorded.
The moral norms of societies, in many aspects, changed even more from 1928 to 1946.
let's get this stupid social media purity test thing out of the way: blah blah blah, i oppose surveillance.
now that that's over, the phone is definitely more powerful surveillance technology than a ring camera
you can turn off your phone, so uh, it's not as powerful as it seems.
and practically speaking, ring cameras run out of battery all the time. and also, you can cover them.
the stupidest thing about this whole discourse is that, by participating in it in the particular way that you are, you are feeding directly into what Amazon wants, which is for their absolutely dogshit technology to be perceived as something a lot more valuable and powerful than it really is.
Even more concerning is that Ring is partnering with Flock [1], which has been the subject of quite a bit of controversy recently [2][3][4], with the CEO lashing out at critics with inflammatory language [5][6].
[1] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-safety-and-ring-partn...
[2] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-roundup
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/10/ice-school-c...
[4] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/effs-investigations-ex...
[5] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-ceo-goes-...
[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46903556
There would be less backlash to the Ring ad if the ad was honest about how people actually use it. Show us porch pirates, burglars and stupid neighbor who backs into your car being caught on camera.
But instead, they have to come up with something "wholesome" like finding your lost doggo. The wholesomeness is so forced and cringe that it makes you think they have something to hide. It almost feels like the people who wrote this ad and the people who greenlit it knew something was wrong so they have to come up with a cover story. But like a child smiling at you with his biggest smile while anxiously keeping his hands behind his back, it only makes them more suspicious especially in a time when big tech feels more and more like an adversary than a friend.
> Show us porch pirates, burglars and stupid neighbor who backs into your car being caught on camera.
This is what their ads have been showing for the last many years.
The dog thing is the new feature they're hawking.
The infrastructure is still there. It's the infrastructure that's the problem, the marketing is kind of whatever...
Ring has been a problem and it has only gotten worse now.
Isn't the whole point of the ad that they have a new feature and they want people to know about it? They're not making up the idea of finding lost dogs. They have a new feature where you upload a photo of your lost dog and it automatically looks for the dog in camera feeds.
> porch pirates
It absolutely boggles my mind that it's legal in the US for a deliverer to just leave a package out in the open for anyone to pick up and consider it "delivered". Might as well just throw it out of the window of your car, it has the same chance of getting picked up by the recipient. Where I live the package has to be handed over to the recipient. If the recipient is not available it will be handed over to a neighbour and this will be noted on a little card that's placed in the recipient's mail box. If that is not possible it will be taken back to the mail office and the recipient can pick it up in person.
Adding video surveillance is no solution. OK, so you saw a random stranger pick up your package. Now what? What are you going to do with that information? Are the police going to start a manhunt because of your 50$ Amazon order?
No thanks. I want packages delivered when I’m not home. If i want it to be handed to me I can require it be handed to me, picked up, or delivered to a nearby store. If I wanted to go pick up a package I would just go to the store in the first place.
Most stuff doesn’t matter, and is rarely stolen. If something matters I’ll just have the delivery company do what I guess is required in where you live, I can choose.
Do you live somewhere with high crime? The reason deliveries work this way in the US is that porch pirates are uncommon. There is a flurry of them during the holidays, but even then, the vast majority of deliveries are just fine.
> What are you going to do with that information?
Nothing, because by the time I look at my doorbell camera I would already have told the shipper the package was swiped and they will have shipped a replacement. They might take it up with the shipper, or call it a cost of doing business, whatever, but it won't be -my- problem.
Porch pirates are so uncommon that it became a yearly hunt/thing for a major american youtuber and is the only reason people outside the US even know it exists!
Ah yes, porch pirates do not exist anywhere but in the US.
You know that the reason someone can make it newsworthy is because it is uncommon, yeah?
A security firm, which may have a particular interest in the numbers being skewed in a certain direction, pegs the number at 250K packages stolen from porches every day. Sounds like a huge problem! There are 60M packages delivered every day. Even if they are providing accurate numbers, which I doubt, it is uncommon.
They don't have a lost-kid feature?
In China, kids are accustomed to face recognition early.[1] The kids are checking into school via fare gates with face recognition. Here's an ad for Hikvision surveillance systems showing the whole system.[2] Hikvision has a whole series of videos presenting their concept of a kindly, gentler Big Brother. This is probably the most amusing.[3]
Amazon's concept is in some ways more powerful. They don't need full coverage. Just sparse, but widespread coverage. Anything that moves around will pass through the view of cameras at some point. Suspicious behavior can be detected in the back end cloud processing, which improves over time.
Flock has the same concept. Flock coverage is sparse in terms of area, but widespread.
"1984" was so last cen.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SMKG8aLTJ38
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnHFJz-u85A
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otAuH6FDhgw
The WeRateDogs guy broke character and put out a video attacking that ad
https://bsky.app/profile/weratedogs.com/post/3mejrtyvkyc2o
The weratedogs guy has been posting political messages for as long as I can remember. This is completely in character for him.
"They aren't good politicians, Bront."
The situation with the Nancy Guthrie disappearance and Nest camera footage is related, and interesting. It seems that she had a Nest doorbell camera, but didn't pay for the subscription plan ($100/yr?). As a result, the camera records short snippets but doesn't save them to the cloud in a user-accessible way.
After a week, Google finally hunted down/coughed up the footage. I imagine there were some people within Google who realized that if they provided the footage immediately, then it could discourage people from paying for the subscription.
Of course, they must also realize that by not providing the footage sooner, they may have allowed the perp to get away, or the victim to be killed.
That is one of the weirder aspects of this run of the simulation.
Ring: just want you to know that we record everything whether you pay us or not and we know where you dog is.
Savannah: Where's Ma?
Ring:
FWIW, Nancy's camera was a Nest, not Ring.
My mistake. Despite that, I don't have much confidence that nest isn't also uploading everything at all times.
I do. The battery life on our units varies depending on the amount of foot traffic that they see. One is at our front door, where package deliveries and entry/egress trigger 5-10 times daily, and the other is in our backyard, where it is triggered a 5-10 times weekly. The backyard camera lasts much longer per charge.
This tends to indicate that they are only recording/uploading in response to specific triggers. They also have LEDs that supposedly light up whenever they are recording.
Amazon also had the ad about Alexa killing you. Not sure what they were thinking exactly.
It was some attempt at reductio ad absurdum. If you are concerned about letting Alexa into your home, you must be as irrational as Chris Hemsworth. Edit: I'm misusing reductio ad absurdum, but somebody will please tell me what the fallacy here is called.
Straw man?
That ad was great. I'm not sure how it sells Alexa products, but it was hilarious.
Well you’re talking about it and not Siri
Jokes on them. I won't buy either. I'll stick with my home assistant a d locally owned devices.
Lost internet today for hours and for once, my local devices had no issues. It depresses me I was even interested in app-based devices.
The Circle (2017) is by no means a perfect movie, based on a 2013 book which I’m told is only marginally better.
But it did do a surprisingly accurate job of depicting pretty much this exact scenario, 9 (13) years in advance.
As in: sleek FAANG holds a grand showcase of mass surveillance using its ubiquitous user-installed smart cameras, under the guise of a good cause.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Mro9RCAhvE4
(The fictional story is slightly more blunt about it, the good cause being finding wanted persons, rather than lost dogs).
that advert is just so horribly manipulative it's borderline evil
how can normal people go to work and produce this output?
(I suppose everyone that is prepared to work at Amazon corporate is... a certain type of person)
It's not really about the individual people. They're probably all pretty normal interpersonally. Our systems reward this behavior, so people do it. Surveillance is desired by the politically and economically powerful, and the contravening forces are weak and largely unorganized. Do we punish politicians or businesses for bad behavior? No? Then they'll engage in whatever behavior advances their interests.
You could purge the world of every single person with evil intentions, and things would maybe get better for a little while, but without fundamentally changing the underlying rules of the system the same thing would play out again with different actors.
I like your take. I see this same thing playing out across many parts of the world.
Dont hate the player hate the game
It is about incentives and rules of the "game" that drive things. Sure, there are a few evil people but the vast majority of it is normal people responding to broken rules/incentives. Probably you and I both fall in this category :)
> Dont hate the player hate the game
To be clear, you can absolutely hate the player in addition to the game. That's for you to decide on a case-by-case basis. It's just important to recognize the broader context, especially if want to leave a positive impact.
Especially as we could all... stop playing, and then the game would end.
> It's not really about the individual people. They're probably all pretty normal interpersonally. Our systems reward this behavior, so people do it.
Sorry, but people who do things they normally wouldn't because they are rewarded are not good people. They may be 'normal' in a distribution sense, but that doesn't mean the behavior becomes acceptable through it becoming commonplace.
The idea is compelling to consider though - I just saw a clip of comedian Romesh Ranganathan saying that a reason he hasn't cheated on his wife is lack of opportunity; another side of the same idea.
Perhaps we would all be shit-head billionaires if given the opportunity.
Most of us stay within our ethical lane, but then we don't have the money to afford a private island to abuse people on; we don't have to resist the temptation to incite an insurrection, or to shift gold markets by threatening a war ... perhaps we'd be tempted?
> Perhaps we would all be shit-head billionaires if given the opportunity.
Statistically, if we were living in WWII Germany, most of us would not become freedom fighters. We'd keep our head down and support the regime. I think most people like to think of themselves as the exception but that's just "cope".
> Surveillance is desired by the politically and economically powerful
It's also desired by consumers. Parents love tracking their children, spouses track each other. Everyone wants to get a camera to catch porch pirates. Let's not pretend this is something being forced on us by some external evil. The evil is coming from inside the house.
this is entirely misses the point about exactly what makes it dangerous
there's nothing bad with having a camera to spot porch pirates, as long as the data stays private
it becomes problematic when everyone's hooked up to one central place (plus the "AI")
same as the common talking points about CCTV, which always miss the distinction that there's minimal risk if it's only going to some video recorder in the back of the store
it only becomes dangerous when every shop and house are fed back to one central location
and the general public do not understand the difference
> there's nothing bad with having a camera to spot porch pirates, as long as the data stays private
It's still surveillance, and it's subject to subpoena so it can become government data as needed. The centralization makes things worse, sure, but the desire to monitor others often comes from individual actors.
I can walk down my street and I will be recorded every step of the way by someone. The government didn't mandate this, each homeowner decided they "needed" a camera.
> They're probably all pretty normal interpersonally.
have you seen the cult like statements they make you emit if you want to pass the interview?
I had a colleague that interviewed there (and was accepted)
over the space of that month he completely changed
(and not for the better)
Because if you don't do what you are told at work, you may be forced to uproot your family, spouse, kids, and leave the country. You may be forced to abandon your pets and never see them again, forced to send your kids to suddenly school in a different, foreign-to-them language. You may be forced to pay tens of thousands in moving expenses. You may be forced to pay mortgages for a house you are not allowed to live in. All it takes is one unhappy manager at Amazon, or falling it the wrong bucket at stack ranking time.
Or you can do what your manager asks you to do, over-deliver on it year after year, and you won't have to deal with the above. You may be unhappy with what you do at work, but your kids and spouse will live happy lives, and you can keep your pets and house.
Sorry, just a dose of reality.
Grow a spine, you don't get a pass to do unethical things because your job depends on it.
as a species, we are fucked if there's many people that fit your description
your kids have to live on this earth too, and they'll suffer the consequences of cowardly people like that
You pay a third party to make something like this for you. They can best be described as nihilists.
There’s no need to fear the construction of mass surveillance anymore. It’s already here. We built it one convenience at a time [0]. When I see all my friends with Alexa devices at home, ring cameras, and a million food apps on their phones, it feels like it’s already too late.
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/we-have-all-we-need-for-mass-survei...
Fears of mass surveillance? It's already mass surveillance
This nitpick in language adds nothing to the conversation and is fundamentally incorrect. "Fears of" does not imply the thing feared doesn't exist.
Fear of bears in the woods? We already had bears.
Very much appreciated the internet's #1 dog-rating account covering this:
https://www.instagram.com/reels/DUlye8NETR3/
I wonder if we'll see backlash of people wandering around ripping out/smashing/destorying ring cameras from their neighbors doors.
https://archive.is/J7KGU
Archive link posted because in some cases (not all, strange enough) there's a paywall ("subscribe to continue reading")
A mobile phone is the surveillance dictators' wet dream.
What are my subjects doing...tap tap tap...ah there they are. Oh him, he needs to be cancelled, he isn't where I wanted him to be.
We are all now dogs
Even if it can and will only be used to track dogs, that means if I have a photo of someone's dog I can track it and learn that the owner is (likely) away from their house.
It's so overt that I wouldn't blame you for thinking that they don't care and that they want you to know.
What exactly are the "neighborhood cameras" mentioned in the article?
Everyone's Ring doorbells and cameras.
Is it legal in the USA to point them on public ground?
Yes it's legal to record spaces that are generally visible to the public.
The main issue is that fearmongering, aggressive marketing (as seen here), and subsidized pricing has convinced people to buy that spyware. The playbook is very much the same as for the Alexa and other "bugs" people now willingly pay for and place in the middle of their homes, constantly recording and monitoring their activities.
In reality, these cameras are next to useless when it comes to protecting the owners as seen in other news. If you fear a home invasion, it's a shotgun that you need, not a Ring camera.
Amazon marketing broke a fundamental rule about consumer tech: Don't remind users about how much Big Tech knows about you.
Your various devices track everywhere you go, who you communicate with, what you search for, what you buy, what audio you listen to, what videos you watch, what games you play, who your family is, all your pictures and video you take, who comes and goes from your house, when you sleep, your health data, and much more.
And as a fundamental part of Big Tech's business they accumulate, aggregate and analyze all that information in various ways to increase profits. They don't keep this a secret, but wisely they normally don't brag about it to the general public.
Consumers have shown that are totally willing to give up privacy for convenience. Just don't remind them of it.
Did they not realize that it is already a mass surveillance network?
Fears?
This has already been happening for years.
Yeah in a world where if you post a Ring video of someone taking a crowbar to your mailbox which gets a strike in your neighborhood group and the video down for "hate", yeah, as useful as it is, the mass surveillance stuff is pretty alarming.
Are you a dog?? No?? So you do not have anything to worry about!!
So they say.
That ad gave me a visceral shudder of revulsion, not so much for the specific functionality on display as for the timing, which absolutely could not have been accidental. They might as well have just put 'and we're working on automatic alerts for ICE!' in the ad.
"Helping abusive husbands find their escaped wives."
Just airtag your dog? Jesus Christ.
Quoting from the press release: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/01/apple-introduces-new-...
"Designed exclusively for tracking objects, and not people or pets"
(emphasis mine)
That’s just so you don’t sue the over your lost dog
Or your dog eating the AirTag with the button battery inside it
What backlash? "People voiced concerns" turns out to be 9 people if you follow the link. Where exactly is this backlash and why can't I smell it?
Ring has experienced backlash before when they allowed police departments to browse the imagery without any kind of oversight or warrant. And has changed their policies as a result (in the most minimal way but ok)
And these are pretty high profile people whose job it is to represent the people who will also have concerns but don't all contact the verge about it :)
By the way i use ring cameras too but I've already mitigated them a lot. Installed telephoto lenses that can only see the specific area I want them to see, and I removed the microphones so they can't hear what I'm saying. I got some free with my ring alarm so I didn't really want to waste the hardware either.
Everyone I’ve talked to about the Super Bowl ads has mentioned that one and said that it is creepy af. The backlash is mostly word of mouth in my experience.
Exactly. There are certainly more than 9 of us who value privacy and understand where this is going, but in comparison to millions of normies we aren't even a screeching voice of minority[1].
[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/746588/apple-discusses-screeching-...
If you search for this story on other sites, the comments are full of backlash.
At what number of people do you consider it a backlash?
1% of subscribers
What about people who aren't subscribers and do not want their privacy invaded?
I'm afraid it's GDPR for them
I'm glad it's GDPR for me.
The subtext is that idiots are buying these things and should at least become aware that there are reasons for backlash that haven't occurred to them.
I found out that on Reddit people go there and ask things like this (someone asked recently): "My girlfriend and I are looking for something to do. Are there any protests going on today we can go to?"
Can you imagine people actually searching things out like that? These "people voicing concerns" are like that. Someone has to find something to be enraged about for the sake of finding something to do.
Can you imagine people actually believing a post on Reddit, and then extrapolating that to everybody who is going to a protest?
Or people are concerned about living in a surveillance state and wish to protest that or some other issue. Why downplay legitimate societal concerns?
So instead of drinking or shopping they want to support a cause?
My god how do they live with themselves.
What an absurd take.
I'm afraid that ship has sailed
Yet massive numbers of people (I'm sure including many on this thread) are buying and installing Ring cameras. It's always been a surveillance network.
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46950915
Bullshit. The only people worried are the ones that were already concerned and never bought a Ring.
I guarantee the vast majority of people LOVE this new feature.
Part of the problem here is that people who love it are affecting people who do not. If you want to put cameras to record inside your home, fine, but this is people recording their neighbors without consent. The sales pitch is finding Fido, but I doubt that is the end game here.
A Ring camera pointed at a sidewalk or street is the clearest example of legally allowed filming in public I could imagine.
"I guarantee the vast majority of people LOVE this new feature." And you base this guarantee on?
Bullshit to you sir. I have a ring and have cancelled my subscription because of their scummy behavior
Thank you for that. But please consider taking down the camera, too; it's just as much of a problem without a subscription, because you are the service being sold, not just the customer. Get one that stores and processes video entirely locally instead.
Know what is super easy to do? Not buy Amazon Ring products.
Know what is super hard to do? Leave your house without being caught by someone else's Ring camera.
A country ruled by fear has their "security" systems turned on themselves. We truly live in an Orwellian dystopia
I thought Ring was already sending data to law enforcement agencies (that paid Amazon for it). Also, I thought the EULA included language that basically said, "All your data are belong to us", so they could already do whatever surveillance they want.
I think Nancy Guthrie and the release of the doorbell video by scouring Google’s caches has done far, far more to make people want video cameras and cloud storage than any ad.
What's not given as much coverage is how she didn't have a subscription, yet the footage was still recorded pulled from servers. That's concerning.
It's you. You're the dog. Now roll over and sit-pretty for your oligarchical overlords.
Amazon has a very bad track record in this area. https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/amazon-is-wagi...
> joseffritz
As an Austrian I have to wonder, is this name a homage to Josef Fritzl, one of the most well known Austrians of modern time?
Move Fast and Stasi Things ...
The fears of mass surveillance are some of the funniest things I can think of. Do you think a tree grows a leaf and then says I don’t care what you do leaf.
Recording public spaces should be illegal. Public street? Public sidewalk? Not your turf, no cameras, no recording.
I'm not sure you've thought this through. That would mean you can't record law enforcement or any other abuse of power.
The issue here isn't the recording, it's the packaging it up for sale that's the issue.
I think that goes too far, but limiting public space recordings to a camera you're operating in person would be a good starting point.
Good idea: keep the confrontational 1st amendment auditors, lose the benefits of security cameras. /s
No idea who you mean by the first group.
Security cameras are fine for filming your own property.
1st amendment auditors = confrontational streamers who deliberately take public filming to an extreme.
Any cameras are fine for recording any public property. That’s the whole idea of being in public: others can see you, you can see them, and you aren’t (shouldn’t) be doing something you wouldn’t mind being recorded. You have no expectation of privacy standing on a sidewalk.
I'm fine that others can see me. But we don't have to extend that to unlimited recording. We don't have to extend that to robots.
50 years ago you didn't have privacy walking around outside but you weren't subject to constant surveillance and tracking. The current state isn't some inevitable fact of life. It's fixable without any draconian action.
So google maps streetview should be illegal?