My biggest take away from this is that there's still a market niche for small, independent, feisty hosting companies that have some balls. For instance archive.is (which undoubtedly receives many legal threats) seems to be in a /24 IP block belonging to an Estonian hosting company in Talinn.

The bigger a hosting company gets the more likely it is to near fully automate its abuse process.

> If your host is lazy and paranoid (like OVH), they will block your IP immediately

I would guess that this is something like a process that, if it's even reviewed by a human at all, some grossly overworked, underqualified and underpaid person working in a call center type environment looks at it for 20 seconds in a massive abuse queue pile of tickets, and has a GUI button in front of them to mash which disables an account and all its services immediately.

> claiming that you're running a phishing website

Is this not defamation?

So why can't people do the same to Doppel? Back in the day folks use to take bad people offline, take down their sites, their phone lines, turn off their electricity. They are lucky these stupid kids hacking rubbish sites haven't found them yet and a will to fight what some might consider the good fight.

They are also lucky that folks are not fighting them in court and draining their wallets.

Government officials should be highly transparent. Privacy for the people, transparency for the government.

Some of that is already happening, in DC of all places, where the DC Police Officer's Union is protesting against use of Flock by ... the DC Police (albeit Internal Affairs).

Something about "this technology is invasive and violates the right to privacy of our members"...

Y Combinator had no problem backing Flock, you should give them a try.

It’s hilarious that the entire business model is based on aggregating information recorded in public, and now they’re objecting to having their information publicly recorded and aggregated.

Perhaps if they could explain why they don’t want that information to be available, they’ll understand how their victims feel.

I’m working on an OpenStreetMap-powered map generator in Godot, this would probably be quite easy to build.

It would be cool too that a person could input it's most usual daily routes and know how many cameras will watch her.

That would make for a “fun” (if depressing) Glider environmental hazard.

It’s only available in the USA. Does anyone know why?

Can Google/Apple/et al be held liable if demonstrated that any criminal used maps in prep for any crime?

Could Milwaukee tools be held liable if Flock can demonstrate one of their cordless angle grinders was used to destroy cameras?

Highly unlikely (but hey, anything's possible when you're flirting with an authoritarian regime). They would need to demonstrate that the map was made TO destroy cameras if to have real merit.

In my uninformed opinion that would be a dangerous precedent if there is no proven collusion or conspiracy to act together. I anal though so I'll wait for people who know the law to respond.

Blocked for some in US too.

for what it's worth, the DeFlock maps also include Axon/Motorola cams. they pick up my city's custom implementation too so the anti-surveillance movement is really benefiting from this Flock-focused hate

Jimmy CIA here to sell you a new security product.

The zip file available as a download on the site(link at the bottom of this page: https://flocksurveillance.org/table.html) could be torrented.

The technology is only half of the puzzle; the other half is the availability of the data. For example, many toll roads use license plate readers. Police cruisers may also read a license plate.

Flock the technology would be less of a problem if it had reasonable guards around access, such as requiring search warrants for each query, in each jurisdiction the results touch.

Here in America we think the UK took those steps long ago.

>they are taking a very roundabout way of accomplishing it

  Doppel requested the site be taken down.

Using a 3rd party trademark enforcement company is an excellent way to minimize PR fallout for a company wanting to silence transparency around (or criticism of) a company.

Let's be real here; Would Doppel give any fucks about trying to do a trademark request if Flock wasn't paying them money?

I look forward to trying to understand your reasoning.

The fact that they can't go to the court and say "It pisses me off that this guy is doing what he's doing" and instead have to, ya know, try a case based on the actual laws that exist, seems to be confusing you about what "direct legal action" is.

> "AI-native social engineering defense platfom"

Is that the description of the law firm? Because it sounds like how a law firm would self-describe. Let's get some founders of law firms to put this in their mission statements.

Furthermore, the EFF and Cory Doctorow could embrace this slogan. Especially the FSF. Richard M. Stallman would totally have adopted this description 35+ years ago.