license plate
Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera. Its Data Shows How the System Really Works
A hacker collective pulled down a Flock camera and dumped its data. The files included thousands of videos and logs showing that the device captured 1.6 million images of 50,000 vehicles in 21 days. Hackers ripped down a Flock camera above a roadway, made a near-complete copy of the data stored inside it, and shared the files with 404 Media and WIRED, revealing in new detail how exactly Flock Safety's cameras track the movements of both vehicles and people . The hackers say they are also publishing details on how they managed to obtain the software, in the hopes that other people may copy them. The breach provides an unprecedented look inside a system that Flock has described as protected by on-device encryption .
A Georgia Cop Used Flock to Track 2 Other Cops: His Ex and Her Friend
After an affair with a fellow police officer ended, a Georgia cop used Flock to track her movements--and those of a man whose vehicle often showed up near hers, internal investigation records show. In recent months, there has been a surge in reports of police officers misusing automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) sold by Flock Safety to stalk former romantic partners--but details about these incidents are often scarce. Now, with documents obtained via a public records request, WIRED can reveal specific details about one extensive Flock-fueled surveillance campaign and the subsequent investigation and fallout. Dustin Bozzo, who until this month worked as a patrolman in the Atlanta-area suburb of Alpharetta, Georgia, allegedly used Flock 56 times between March and May to search for the license plate of a former romantic partner--a fellow member of the Alpharetta Police Department. When Bozzo noticed that his ex's car was often near that of another police officer, he began searching for that officer's vehicle as well.
Have you been Flocked? This website lets you find out
Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable Selects Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series More than 4.6 million license plates appear in the website's collection of public Flock records. Olivia Tauber is the deputy editor of digital culture, covering creators, media, movies, beauty, and more. Based in New York, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Cut, Teen Vogue, Complex, and Interview Magazine. She holds a Master's degree in Journalism from NYU and a Bachelor's from the University of Michigan. She also runs Fan Mail, a weekly pop-culture newsletter.
OV-PARTS: Towards Open-Vocabulary Part Segmentation (Supplementary Material) Coauthor Affiliation Address email
The supplementary material is organized as follows:1 Implementation Details.(Sec. Except for the Object Mask Prompt and Compositional Prompt Tuning designs,7 we follow the default architecture in the original ZSseg paper. The number of part queries is set to 50.8 All the two-stage baselines are trained with AdamW optimizer with the initial learning rate of 1e-49 and weight decay of 1e-4. A poly learning rate policy with a power of 0.9is adopted.
OV-PARTS: Towards Open-Vocabulary Part Segmentation (Supplementary Material)
The number of part queries is set to 50. SGD optimizer with the initial learning rate of 2e-2 and weight decay of 5e-4 is used. We sample 128 training samples for each object part class. The initial value of the learnable fusion weight is 0.5 . The total batch size is 8, and the training iterations amount to 40k.
Flock Uses Overseas Gig Workers to Build Its Surveillance AI
An accidental leak revealed that Flock, which has cameras in thousands of US communities, is using workers in the Philippines to review and classify footage. Flock, the automatic license plate reader and AI-powered camera company, uses overseas workers from Upwork to train its machine learning algorithms, with training material telling workers how to review and categorize footage including images people and vehicles in the United States, according to material reviewed by 404 Media that was accidentally exposed by the company. The findings bring up questions about who exactly has access to footage collected by Flock surveillance cameras and where people reviewing the footage may be based. Flock has become a pervasive technology in the US, with its cameras present in thousands of communities that cops use every day to investigate things like carjackings. Local police have also performed numerous lookups for ICE in the system.
Cleaning Maintenance Logs with LLM Agents for Improved Predictive Maintenance
Dimidov, Valeriu, Hawlader, Faisal, Jafarnejad, Sasan, Frank, Raphaël
Economic constraints, limited availability of datasets for reproducibility and shortages of specialized expertise have long been recognized as key challenges to the adoption and advancement of predictive maintenance (PdM) in the automotive sector. Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) presents an opportunity to overcome these barriers and speed up the transition of PdM from research to industrial practice. Under these conditions, we explore the potential of LLM-based agents to support PdM cleaning pipelines. Specifically, we focus on maintenance logs, a critical data source for training well-performing machine learning (ML) models, but one often affected by errors such as typos, missing fields, near-duplicate entries, and incorrect dates. We evaluate LLM agents on cleaning tasks involving six distinct types of noise. Our findings show that LLMs are effective at handling generic cleaning tasks and offer a promising foundation for future industrial applications. While domain-specific errors remain challenging, these results highlight the potential for further improvements through specialized training and enhanced agentic capabilities.