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.
Not only that: also nth-order interactions (Alice—Bob, Bob—Charlie, Charlie—Deborah, …), connectivity clustering, time spent in same location heatmaps, etc.
These devices are very few in reality. One reason why I keep investing in almost every company that makes a Linux based smartphone. Still need the 2FA and digital magazine for the loo.
Even large retails install bluetooth tracking in their buildings now. Was interviewing for one of them and they ask what you would use that style of tracking for to support the consumer. Giving the consumer a reason to use it helps validate and maximize the meta data.
I'm sorry but I just don't think that's the threat at all. I think these companies actually realize the existential risk and harm this data has, and do a lot to anonymize it quickly & effectively. If the government was actively backdooring Apple or Google to get realtime data like this, it would be found, and it would be a shitstorm that would greatly impact these companies.
We really need to get a little more discerning in our hatred. Apple especially I think is a real piece of work. But there are so many worse hideous monsters out there. Clearview AI just signed with DHS for access to a facial tracking database. Flock is out here basically giving playbooks to law enforcement to tell them to use only the most vague indirect reason when asking for data. There's so many other even less visible but incredibly dangerous data-broker foes to society, doing such harm.
Google and Apple have a level of caring far far far far far far above the vile anti-human campaign happening now. I just think you are off by a million miles, that you're not even on the right planet, for where the actual real harm is coming from.
But that seems far different to me than directly making their own products whose express purpose is to send data to the feds / local law enforcement.
Google is not a huge data broker selling your data to the world. They keep that inside, & sell ads based in data they have. But if they started trying to be a data seller or data provider, like Amazon has been, I think they realize that would almost surely be a huge crisis.
There's many good reasons for all the big tech hate. But I do think that Google and Apple have extremely strong incentives to not become a go-to everyday source for law enforcement, I think the person I was responding to has a level of suspicion that is wildly over critical & hyper rampant, and I think we would know if stuff was that bad, and I think we would all be a lot more pissed & many people would have found the door out by now.
The past gives a lot of lessons, all negative ones. Power people are endlessly greedy for more power, there is no end in that spiral. All top folks are like that, if you look for the signs you can see it in their behaviors outside PR rooms. Sociopaths to the last one, all big names and then some more.
So, when in doubt, feel free to have good faith in these behemoths. I don't. Secret court orders for example can force any company into anything, and it can be pro bono for some gov contract later. Why would they disclose this, ever? We had Snowden and others.
Come on lets be realistic here, all that data is a wet dream and ultimate goal of any 3 letter agency all around the world.
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...
I'm going off memory, but I thought the library books led them to John Doe's apartment, something he was not planning for, and required him to change his plans somewhat. He did want to be caught, but not that soon, before he had finished his work, and required a hurried escape.
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.
Hah. People absolutely took them seriously and still do. They are pitched as if they're serious important art about issues. People discussed it like it was King Lear.
I mean, one actor took their role so seriously they locked themselves up in hotel room for a month in isolation to prepare for their role as Joker. Many people in film took it seriously.
Just because a piece is fictional or imaginative doesn't mean it can't be taken seriously
> 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.
Sometimes, though, it's a question of retaining actual power vs. sending a message that won't be listened to by the people who need to hear it. Jan 6-7 2021 could have ended very differently if Mike Pence and the other relatively normal Republicans in Trump's first administration had resigned in protest at some earlier point and been replaced by loyalists.
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 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.
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.
It's not clear to me that the bugs have FTL indeed we don't see them use such in movie or book. Moreover sending a single small rock makes zero sense FTL and knowledge of humanities only major world would have allowed them to wipe out the threat in a stroke.
You could A) warp in a rock of sufficient velocity that a small one destroys life on the planet or B) warp in and move a bigger rock in system.
It only makes sense as a false flag by the humans.
You're ignoring genre conventions. Every soft scifi movie is nonsense if you look at it from the perspective of real-life physics. Sending a single rock via unspecified FTL to attack Earth makes as much sense as the human-piloted fighter spacecraft in Star Wars. The aliens are capable of bombarding Earth across interstellar space because it makes for a good visual spectacle. Watch (or more likely read) hard scifi instead if you need everything to make logical sense.
>What if the real fascist propaganda was implicit in the standard narrative conventions we made along the way?
Ding ding ding. Endemic to fascism, among other things, are heavy State involvement in the curation of, shall we say, "the corpus culturále". Even in the United States, particularly in the earlier half of the 20th Century, there were certain lines you could not cross and still end up on broadcast television. Renditions of the Government, Police/Authorities, or the Courts in an unflattering light was an express lane to non-syndication. Go ahead, look for syndicated media that that highlighted the People's struggle against a corrupt Government where another part of the Government isn't also complicit in "cracking down on the bad apples" (thereby distancing itself from being party to the dysfunction, and reinforcing it's own Supreme legitimacy). No points if it's not in the United States. We're great at syndicating everyone else's problems. Not so much our own. Point is, those network decency standards were, in essence, formulations of what the governing authority considers invalid art. Art, on the other hand, is all encompassing. Ironically, mrob, you're pulling from the fascist art critic's handbook to dismiss the possibility of the work of satire being a fascistly produced piece of media consumption into and unto itself, by doing exactly what a fascist state does. Referencing guidelines and norms that lay out the boundaries of acceptable artistic practice.
In reality, art is as much the characteristics and execution of the workpiece itself, the cinema Starship Troopers, as it is the collective viewer's response to it. In essence, both you and the other poster have equal claims to artistic merit. Though I tend to side with the "this is fascist af" side of the argument given that despite the limitations of the medium, it is very clearly illustrated that what the military junta says goes, period. States are not containers or facilitators of the monopoly on violence. They are incubators for collective action. By trimming down the collective, and setting price of admission to "do our bidding or no representation"; you undeniably tread what in mid-20th century historical experience outlines as "the road to fascism". Disenfranchise the undesirable. Rule according to sensibilities of the desirables. Funnily enough, in it's own way, the U.S. of today is fascistic in that regard, given we absolutely adore the disenfranchisement of the felon, which seems more peppered through legal system than your Grandma's favorite spice.
I support the freedom to produce unconventional art. I'm just pointing out the empirical fact that if you produce a work of art that follows the conventions of a genre, people are going to judge it according to those genre conventions. That's how communication works, it's entirely normal and expected. If you want to subvert a genre, you have to actually subvert a genre. Just intending to do so is not enough.
For fellow HN'ers reading this epically long back and forth:
sig appears to be taking the more mainstream stance that Starship Troopers is satire. This is reinforced my popular interpretations from, say, Wikipedia, but refuted by others, like say, IMDB.
mrob is part of the coalition (that included many critics when the film was released) that asserts the film has no elements that are satirical. I admit pointing to specifics that show the satire is tough. "Do you want to know more?" was the biggest tipoff to me.
But my point is that this argument is still going on in wider society. Lots of people say satire, and lots don't. But the balance say it is:
> Since its release, Starship Troopers has been critically re-evaluated, and it is now considered a cult classic and a prescient satire of fascism and authoritarian governance that has grown in relevance.
> This is reinforced my popular interpretations from, say, Wikipedia, but refuted by others, like say, IMDB.
Not "refuted", "disputed". If you "dispute" something you disagree with it. If you "refute" something you not only disagree with it but you conclusively prove you are correct.
They certainly haven't done the latter.
This word is very frequently used incorrectly. Sometimes on purpose by people (such as politicians) who would love to be able to actually refute some allegation, but instead just disagree with it and say that they refute it.
Yeah, I just looked at the tags for the genre on IMDB, and confirmed "Satire" wasn't there for Starship Troopers, but is there for other satires.
Thanks for the language lesson. You're of course correct, but "refute vs. dispute" isn't one of my language pet peeves (like "less vs. fewer" is), so thanks for the correction.
I had no idea that people seriously think that the film isn't satire - I thought it was just people who had barely paid attention to it and weren't really giving it much thought that didn't spot the satirical elements throughout the film.
They're even wearing fascist style uniforms and all the commercials are so over-the-top.
Maybe part of it is due to how it was promoted - in the UK, it was promoted as satire, but I believe the USA promoted it as a straight action film.
> “I remember coming out of Heathrow and seeing the posters, which were great,” Verhoeven added. “They were just stupid lines about war from the movie. I thought, ‘Finally, someone knows how to promote this.’ In America, they promoted it as just another bang-bang-bang movie.”
> They're even wearing fascist style uniforms and all the commercials are so over-the-top
The big clue to me is when they visit the recruiter. The man is sitting at a desk and says something along the lines of "the galactic marines made me the man I am today", only for him to push back and reveal he's lost both his legs.
This seems.. wrong? From the director's mouth, confirming it's satire [0]
> Robert Heinlein’s original 1959 science-fiction novel was militaristic, if not fascistic. So I decided to make a movie about fascists who aren’t aware of their fascism. Robocop was just urban politics – this was about American politics. As a European it seemed to me that certain aspects of US society could become fascistic: the refusal to limit the amount of arms; the number of executions in Texas when George W Bush was governor.
I really have no idea why Wikipedia says what it does. Someone should edit it.
I'm of the opinion that if you want to make a satire, intending to make a satire isn't enough, you have to actually make a satire. Others might disagree. The famous Roland Barthes essay "The Death of the Author" is relevant here:
The Mormon missionaries settled on a bug planet. Human's attempting to colonize worlds already inhabited and getting killed is not an existential risk or threat. Choosing to go and exterminate the local population in response is not defense.
Assuming the Buenos Aires attack is from the bugs, it only happened after humans invaded multiple bug worlds. Since the bugs never seem to attempt to invade any human worlds, peace could have happened by just leaving the bugs alone and not attempting to take worlds from them. Paul Verhoeven grew up during WWII, so the idea of fascists exterminating the native population to make room, or Lebensraum, isn’t exactly a crazy idea.
>Choosing to go and exterminate the local population in response is not defense.
The Mormons were not the United Citizen Federation, they were an independent group. The bugs indiscriminately attacked all humans in response.
>exterminating the native population to make room
The problem with this comparison is the bugs aren't humans. Extending human-like moral weight to even non-human mammals is a rare idea (most people aren't vegans). Extending it to non-mammals is even more rare (most vegans don't care about the insects killed in farming). Extending it to literally alien bugs, that don't even share the evolutionary history of Earth bugs with us, is an incredibly niche idea. And this situation is symmetrical, so the alien bugs almost certainly have the same attitude toward humans. There's no reason to think that peaceful coexistence is possible.
> Extending human-like moral weight to even non-human mammals is a rare idea
It's actually pretty frequent to demonstrate deep empathy and give more importance to pets that to unrelated humans. Some also argue that humans can be morally inferior to others. Drawing a line between human and non-humans may be tempting but the opinons down there are very diverse. Just a few years back and a common agreement would be "Extending white-like moral weight to even non-white..."
> most vegans don't care about the insects killed in farming
Of course they do! But found out it's the compromise with the lowest externalities. Most meat eater also don't like slaughterhouses but think it's a necessity.
> Extending it to literally alien bugs [...] is an incredibly niche idea
I bet if humanity do encounter alien bugs, this idea will be way more discussed. Moral is often somewhat put aside when engaging a fiction: Starship Troopers or Happy Tree Friends are perfect exemple. Most would's joke about that if that was real.
If humans encounter alien bugs that respond to a non-violent provocation by a minority group with attempted genocide of all humans, I hope that discussion would not be taken seriously. By your logic, taking antibiotics to cure a life-threatening infection is mass murder. The characters in the movie are obviously morally correct, and also obviously morally superior to real-life humans because they figured out a way to pull off large-scale group defense without resorting to slavery. Heinlein should be considered a great moral philosopher for coming up with the concept.
I can see only two possible reasons for disagreement. Either you are not actually addressing the movie itself, and are instead talking about an extended work of the movie plus the director's commentary, or you fundamentally disagree with me about human rights and do not consider slavery to be a serious problem.
You got it: I wasn't addressing the movie or the book itself but the general ideas about moral developed in your precedent post.
Antibiotics are obviously mass murder toward bacteria, that's exactly their function I guess? Using them to cure a life-threatening infection (bacterias) isn't seen as immoral by most, neither do I. May you point out what part makes you think otherwise?
I agree that slavery is not morally acceptable but i'm not sure to follow you point afterward. Perhaps you rank slavery as the worst moral practice and as some humans still enslave others, the movies's characters that don't are "morally superior"? That's a fair and rational view. I also see invasion, violence and a lot of sadism from the humans in that movie. I don't give them a moral advantage.
My whole understanding is close Slg post [0] about the fascist critique. It's also a very popular view: A quick search on internet return many articles in this frame and as you referenced "director's commentary":
1 > I decided to make a movie about fascists who aren’t aware of their fascism
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.
Just had the pleasure of listening to a Turing Award winner, and to answer a question about how to know what issues could come up. His response, "Read science fiction!" helps scientists imagine the future. I'll take his advice and
stick to my mostly fiction reading :)
Man, I’m the opposite. In the information age, in my leisure time reading books, I don’t want to learn any more facts and data points. I just want to enjoy a good story.
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.
It’s important to note that fiction does not map to reality. It’s fiction. You cannot learn how the world works through fiction. It’s just the author’s ideas about the world in a narrative framework that may or may not be true.
I find it very frustrating when people confuse the two. Reading fiction doesn’t give you an interpretive lens for reality. Reading history does. Saying this is “just like when in Harry Potter / Star Wars / Star Trek x happened” is totally meaningless and not predictive of anything in the real world.
If we're looking globally, the huuge majority of our industry isn't part of manifesting the Torment Nexus. Unfortunately a lot of HN is, because interest in SV/VC strongly biases towards interest in achieving personal goals (including but not limited to financial earnings), over caring about building something that helps society.
And no, of course not everyone in SV is like that, and not every VC-funded company helps inch towards the Torment Nexus. But there's inherently a strong bias towards it.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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)
Well, a lot of Batman also expressly questions whether Batman is really good and emphasizes the point that he became Batman because of the trauma of seeing his parents murdered. Given that most of the villains he fights also have a tragic backstory, the suggestion is that he isn't really all that different from them.
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 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.
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.
Every single Hollywood movie has authoritarian apologia, you don't have to go to Christopher Nolan or Forrest Gump. The most recent example is One battle after another.
"Wait, There’s Torture in Zootopia?" DOI:10.1017/S1537592719005012
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.
Not at all. They have their roots in the projection of a defined moral trajectory that the superhero is charged to lift society along and the disagreement they have with the state is that it can't do that enough, not that it's going in the wrong direction. Modern superhero stories have completely inverted and fucked with and abandoned this narrative but the original stories were absolutely supportive of the state, fundamentally modernist.
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.
My background is aerospace engineering. Specifically, I have managed technical risk on a variety of aircraft fleets including SAR, military tactical aviation, and special missions aircraft. In a nutshell my job was to look at complex systems, identify likely failure modes, and come up with engineering solutions. I'm very good at it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out that identifying failure modes in complex systems is a highly transferable skill.
When I launched my first startup shortly after COVID I realized that that skillset makes me shitty at raising capital because I tend to only see the faults in my ideas and I end up with a "nobody would pay for this" mindset. But I also tend to easily spot the ways that tech companies' products can (will, do) go sideways. I am a perennial late adopter. I don't own an Alexa or really anything "smart" equivalent because I knew early on that they would become dystopian surveillance devices and/or security risks.
My personal question to you: were you able commercialize your error finding skills? I am electrical engineer, I predict very early the week when shit hits the fan. Nobody listens and most of my job nowadays is cleaning the shit. I am sooo tired of being right. I want to find a way to use my future forecast skill instead of fixing obvious things afterwards. One manager told me it’s a normal process to hit the wall at full speed and the re-scope project and move from there. But damn… I don’t want to waste my lifetime doing obvious errors and fixing them. To be clear, errors happen and it’s fine. But most of them are easily predictable.
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!
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.
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.
Charlie's Angels (circa 2000) uses voice recognition and geolocation of cell signal as the terrifying new technology that allows the villain to track down his nemesis, Charlie. The entire film is about the Angels getting hoodwinked into giving Sam Rockwell access to the mainframe. Fun movie.
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].
> the reduction in crime is not solely due to Flock, but is has definitely helped.
what's the theory? murderers see flock cams and decide not to murder? most of the general public doesn't even know what these cameras are (or that they even exist).
only if the cameras exist but the perpetrators don't know that they exist. If they know they are being watched on camera it doesn't take a genius to realize you just need to switch cars out of sight. And that is assuming they didn't do that already anyways.
I didn't. Does a strict rule of law and enforcement of said law lead to no murders? No. Does it reduce the amount of murders that occur? Yes (see Singapore).
By that logic, and looking at the data [1] you should come to the conclusion that one should remove the death penalty, because Europe has less homicides compared to the US and does not have a death penalty. So there are actually less murders without death penalty.
Obviously, that conclusion is flawed, because the data also shows otherwise in some countries I guess - and just using the death penalty as data point is useless. There are way more factors in play that lead to murder.
People tend to behave if they know they are being watched.
Yeah it's not going to stop crime 100%, but I bet you it will (and it has) help reduce crime by double digit percentages.
Look at places where there are CCTV cameras all over, there is very little crime there compared to the United States. I won't use China as an example because then you are going to attack me for saying it's an authoritarian state. In that case I will use democratic examples: Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore.
> People tend to behave if they know they are being watched
People tend to behave in the ways that the people who own the surveillance apparatus want them to behave. This assumes that the people who own and operate the apparatus (oftentimes private corporations) can be trusted to monitor and act in the best interests of society. Unfortunately, the people who own and operate these have shown that they are largely untrustworthy and motivated by profit and power.
Regardless, most people would not sacrifice personal agency and democracy for supposed safety. "Behave" just means "obey" or "comply" when used in the context of "people tend to behave if they are being watched"; consent is notably absent.
People tend to behave if they know they are being watched.
As in: no mass protests, no anti-ICE measures but most importantly: no more pesky journalists filming and photographing everything. If we then disable the upload of amateur videos of social unrest to TikTok, we're halfway there, just a little more intimidation of civil rights advocate's via observing their every move via the cars and people will behave even better. /s
Me, absolutely not. Unfortunately, my opinion seems to be increasingly in the minority and more and more people will happily be surveilled for even just an illusory promise of safety.
The harsh truth is that safety/security can never be guaranteed. No amount of surveillance will 100% prevent any individual from being a victim of a crime. Surveillance might help catching the criminal to face justice afterwards, but it will never 100% prevent.
Because of that, and because of the potential for abuse, it is better to not be under constant surveillance than it is to give up your rights and privacy for no guarantees.
There is no expectation of privacy in the public setting though. Anyone can record you in public without your permission.
> No amount of surveillance will 100% prevent any individual from being a victim of a crime.
No, but if it reduces crime by 99% would you be in favor of it? (See South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore.. examples of democratic countries with CCTVs all over the public space.. and before you say well those are racially homogenous countries.. I say look at Singapore. Singapore is very diverse racially, and yet they have very low rates of crime. This is because they have strict laws against crime and these laws are actually enforced)
India has a very low crime rate. The homicide rate is 2 in 100,000. Murder/homicide is basically unheard of in major cities. For instance Mumbai has a homicide rate of 0.7 in 100,000 making it one of the safest cities in the world.
The source is World Population Review. The US was used as an example of a country with higher crime that needed more CCTV to be safer. The US and India are almost identical in this ranking of crime.
Singapore is very diverse racially… with groups that aren’t generally known to be very criminal. It’s mostly a mix of Chinese, Malays and Indians. I doubt the CCTVs have much to do with it.
Also, banning guns would do even more good. Strange that the people in favor of Flock cameras to reduce crime tend not to be in favor of banning guns to reduce crime.
Banning guns does nothing without removal of guns or enforcement of laws. Assault weapons are "banned" in California, has it stopped anyone from getting their hands on them? Extended magazines are "banned" in California, has it stopped any criminals from getting them? Almost every other day a criminal is caught w/ extended magazines found on them. A concealed carry permit is notoriously hard to get in California, and yet criminals still walk around with guns concealed without a CCW permit every day in California.
You have to ban them everywhere in the US. You can’t have them available one state over and expect a ban to do anything. It works really well, even criminals in the UK use knives for their crimes. Same with most of the rest of the world. You’re right there needs to be a removal too because we already own dozens of guns per American.
I'm pretty sure that if you need ubiquitous surveillance to ensure that your citizens don't commit crimes, you don't have a high-trust society, by definition.
Surveillance and a high trust society are diametrically opposed concepts. You don’t need a high trust society if you have total surveillance and vice versa.
Of course they do some good. You could improve things even further by implementing a system like Judge Dredd, and we'd save a ton of money as well.
This is the problem with limits on law enforcement. There are tradeoffs, and people really don't like tradeoffs. Many people prefer to just assume that law enforcement will use their powers for good, rather than have to think about whether any given change will do more harm than good due to enabling bad law enforcement.
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.
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.
> 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".
The actual answer to your conundrum here is that the package isn't actually considered delivered.
When you order something, it's the seller's responsibility to get it to you. They have the choice of having their deliveries require a signature to be delivered but that costs more so they consider stolen packages as a cost of business.
If a package is stolen, it hasn't been delivered. You report to the company you bought from and they send you a new one. They can negotiate with the shipping company if they are at fault.
The reason for the practice of leaving packages at your door is that it's cheaper to replace the few stolen packages for free than it is to pay a driver to require signatures for each package.
High value or non-replaceable items can be shipped more securely.
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.
No, they live somewhere with a working postal law like Germany. Hand it directly to the addressed or a person authorised by the addressed (in which case inform the recipient via card or sms) or deposit it in a postbox, post office. This way it is secure that you receive your stuff even if you are not at home: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Fachthemen/Post/Regelung...
>No, they live somewhere with a working postal law like Germany. Hand it directly to the addressed or a person authorised by the addressed (in which case inform the recipient via card or sms) or deposit it in a postbox, post office. This way it is secure that you receive your stuff even if you are not at home: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Fachthemen/Post/Regelung...
Sure. And that's great. But we're not talking about Deutsche Post, or even the US Postal Service.
We're talking about Amazon Logistics subcontractors who are so over-scheduled that they routinely need to urinate in bottles[0] rather than stop to use a restroom or they won't be able to fulfill their delivery quota for the day.
Those folks are assuredly not going to do anything more than the bare minimum (and not necessarily because they don't want to) because their delivery quotas don't allow for anything more than dumping a package on a porch (or in an unattended apartment building lobby) and maybe ringing the doorbell/intercom.
Those folks are assuredly not going to do anything more than the bare minimum (and not necessarily because they don't want to) because their delivery quotas don't allow for anything more than dumping a package on a porch (or in an unattended apartment building lobby) and maybe ringing the doorbell/intercom.
So, implement surveillance of all, not only for the fracture of a percent of dogs returned but also because there are no functioning labour laws. Right. Got it. (/s)
>So, implement surveillance of all, not only for the fracture of a percent of dogs returned but also because there are no functioning labour laws. Right. Got it. (/s)
Why stop there? People actually lie once in a while and say they never received a package that was supposedly delivered. We need to put those cameras inside peoples' homes, especially in the bathrooms and bedrooms where they hide the packages that were "never delivered." And why stop there? if we find that folks are lying about that, they should be tased, beaten and sent to prison (or just shot dead on the spot) for many years because they tried to defraud the powers-that-be ^H^H^H megacorps, and we can't allow that now can we? /s[0]
On a more serious note, there actually are labor (but without that extraneous 'u', friend!) laws in the US. But those generally only apply to "employees" and not subcontractors. Here's a page from Amazon about how to become a "delivery service partner"[1] (read: subcontractor so Amazon can avoid pesky things like labor laws, minimum wages, health care coverage, etc.), so you too can spend thousands and finally be allowed to urinate in plastic bottles. Good times!
[0] My '/s' is much broader and more absurd than yours. Please get ready for round two of the /s-waving contest :)
I will say that we don't use those limey flavoured spellings over here across the pond, nor do we allow such things in our adverts either, even if we're filling our caravans up with petrol.
It's an honour to be singled out for this, especially as I was whinging about it. ;)
The US is very rural compared to Germany. If I had to drive to a post office for every package that would be a ridiculous hassle. Plus if the delivery try companies needed to hand it to people in person that’s going to take a lot more time, most of which will be completely wasted as people are at work. That means they’ll need a ton more delivery drivers, they’ll use a ton more gas, and our shipping rates will go up a lot.
Where I live nobody can even see my door from the road. Our laws “work” just fine for our situation.
The post depot boxes are located every couple of kilometers, you could walk there. You can define the people allowed to receive your parcel, don't tell me you don't have at-home neighbours at all in your street/block. I prefer this to total neighbourhood surveillance and laws that work "just fine" except where they need to protect my privacy.
I don't even live in a super rural area, but if you think you could just walk a couple of kms in a couple of foot of snow to get something like a bookcase and bring it over is hilarious. Also, I would rather not receive packages for my neighbors, and I assume they wouldn't for me either. Ring works fine, I don't share the footage but I feel it is a cost of living in high crime regions.
You leave out that they can keep it in a warehouse at the other side of the country for pickup and there is no law saying that it cannot be further away than the point of origin. Fun times.
Sadly I rarely see an option for "place it with a neon sign on my front porch" when I order things online, because the chance of having things stolen would often be preferable to a daytrip to the middle of nowhere.
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.
If you live somewhere with high property crime and a large fent problem, the problem isn’t that uncommon. But I have lots of cameras and yell them off (and pick up deliveries quickly).
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.
The ad states that 1 million dogs are lost every year and that Ring returns 1 dog every day. Could the uselessness of the feature be any more prominent?
If you cannot take care/train of your dog maybe you shouldn't have one. Total neighbourhood surveillance for the benefit of the 0.03% is way out of proportion.
What's the threshold for it being worthwhile to build a ubiquitous surveillance system? 365 dogs saved per year is apparently enough. How about 100? 10? 1?
I'll also note that this is just a count of the dogs found by the system, not a count of dogs that otherwise would not have been found.
Did anyone catch the recent development in the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping story?
For days it was explained that, while she had a Nest doorbell camera (which was stolen by the kidnapper) it was sadly useless because Nancy wasn’t paying for cloud storage. Just live video and notifications.
Well what do know happened today? The video of the kidnapper was magically produced by Google. I guess, even when you don’t pay for storage, they’re… you know…. Recording and saving the video anyway.
No one’s really bothered to point this out as they’re all just so excited that the video has turned up.
Google doorbell cameras send clips to the cloud. They're accessible to users for 3 hours for free, and a month or two if you pay. While they become unavailable to users after 3 hours, it's unlikely that they're deleted immediately—partly for operational reasons (easier to clear out many clips periodically in a batch process, rather than individual clips one by one exactly when they expire), and partly because Google keeps a lot of data around for a short period (a week or two) to be able to debug systems. Even when data is requested to be deleted, it's often possible to recover it from off-site backups or soft-deleted data stores for a while. Google ensures that all user data is actually, irrecoverably deleted within 2 months after a deletion request (see https://policies.google.com/technologies/retention).
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.
I think the initial plan was to introduce lost-kid/elderly plan, but they thought people will be more willing to accept a pet version (pun indented) first.
Also the implementation is quite strange as well. I can imagine a version where the camera itself compares the recorded footage against a well-known database of lost children, just like the milk cartons.
Not who you are replying to, but I think mass surveillance is bad and evil, period. So, any person or company contributing toward mass surveillance is bad.
Most bad things have some good part you can point to. Mass surveillance and all of the other police and government aiding technologies usually point to improved conviction rates or something similar. But making police more efficient at convicting people isn't the only goal of society. That's only one part of what makes up a country and it's society. And, as the saying goes: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
That's beside the point? Gaining security by losing freedom was always on the table. What's interesting is the cultural shift toward not caring about losing freedom.
I think it is the point: there is a balance between freedom and safety.
For example, it is illegal to carry a loaded handgun onto a plane. Most people would agree that is an acceptable trade of freedom for safety.
There are places with even less safety and more “freedom” than the US so people who take an absolutist view towards freedom also need to justify why the freedoms that the US does not grant are not valuable.
> I think it is the point: there is a balance between freedom and safety.
Sometimes. But freedom and security are not always opposed.
It’s possible to trade freedom for security but it’s also possible that freedom creates security. Both can be true at the same time. Surveillance, not security, is what opposes freedom. Surveillance simply trades one form of insecurity for another at the cost of freedom.
> For example, it is illegal to carry a loaded handgun onto a plane. Most people would agree that is an acceptable trade of freedom for safety.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
2A seems to make the case that the freedom to bear arms creates security. Given how history played out it’s hard to argue against. I’m not arguing we should be able to take guns on planes but 2A is an example of freedom creating security.
How about just general privacy? I mean do you really want someone / the government to be able to track everywhere you go?
- Going to your girlfriends place while the wife is at work
- Visiting a naughty shop
- Going into various companies for interviews while employed
With mass surveillance there is the risk of mass data leak. Would you be comfortable with a camera following you around at all times when you're in public? I wouldn't be.
It's a crime to leave the state to get an abortion. They can prosecute when you return home.
There have been vigilante patrols in West Texas, watching the necessary routes out of the state. The law gives any resident the grounds to turn in their neighbor for planning to get an abortion.
The right to privacy, to not let the government have a master record of everywhere you've ever been and everything you've ever said just in case they decide to someday revoke free speech and due process, or decide it doesn't apply. Lately we have plenty of examples of how quickly that can happen.
The Stasi were "tough on crime" too, back when that was expensive. How quickly we forget. Well, you're welcome to find a panopticon to live it, but excuse other for not finding it a good tradeoff.
The problem with the current push on "illegal immigrants" is that
1. It has been incredibly brutal
2. Many of the currently "illegal" immigrants were not illegal until their status was revoked by the current president.
3. The question of your immigration status, under the current system, is decided without proper access to legal representation.
These problems are very much worth drawing a line in the sand over.
---
Some people feel that the current push is solving a real problem in the real world.
Unfortunately, the real world is actually very complicated, and you can't flatten that complication without violence.
If that is hard to imagine, replace the ICE acronym with Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, Bureau of Land Management, or Internal Revenue Service.
Because we decided the Constitution doesn't apply to a huge group of people living within the United States, and that seems wrong to those of us raised to believe the Constitution was important and the actual law of the land. It kind of doesn't work at all once we add a government decided 'subjective' layer on top of it. You could argue that already happened but this is the first most obvious in our faces instance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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".
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.
Wealth should be a source of power and agency, not an excuse for getting dogwalked. On the bright side, given that kids and houses and spouses are all becoming luxury items, there may be fewer people in the future who have to make that choice.
"Learn to live on lentils, and you will not have to be subservient to the king"
I need to pay rent, pay medical bills, eat, and survive. As long as I'm dependent on an income to do that, I do whatever the employer wants as long as it's legal.
When I'm financially free, I'll have the space to think about the ethics of my work.
You want better? Fix the system so that I'm financially free earlier in life. Tax me less, charge me less rent, give me free healthcare, and let me save up cash for the rest of my life. When the system has delivered that OKR to me, I'll be able to put ethics first going forward.
Until then, I still need to earn money to survive.
I worked for Amazon for a couple years. Not on the above project, but nevertheless, I did what I was told. One of the reasons I went there was that I needed a surgery to replace my implanted defibrillator, which my life depends on, and (a) Amazon's sponsored health insurance would pay for it (b) Amazon's cash comp would be enough to hire lawyers to fight with insurance if necessary. Insurance companies usually pay what they're supposed to if there is a big tech HR behind it; they have a habit, in my experience, of not paying out what they're supposed to if they don't have something to fear. I was in startup land before, and often couldn't pay my medical bills (because insurance would cop out and not pay, and I didn't have money for lawyers to fight them) and had to forgo critical cardiac imaging procedures during that time.
I'm currently unemployed myself because I didn't want to work for a big tech company that announced a public partnership with Palantir.
I get the "family to feed" etc angle. But at some point we have to realize that this is not some kind of abstract moral dilemma, not when that software is actively hurting other people.
> we are fucked if there's many people that fit your description
The reality is 95% of people, especially outside the HN community, fit that description, that's why I wrote it.
The number of people in the greater world who would put employer ethics before survival and livelihood of their family is vanishingly miniscule. Legal systems are how employers stay in check, not people caring about ethics.
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.
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.
I genuinely want someone to build nice tech to solve this problem, I have a cctv at my home and once a month a cop shows up to get some info on a crime that has happened in my area, tech like homomorphic encryption should get really really good so that searching for a image or video in a footage should not create privacy nightmare.
The frog has been boiled when it comes to information privacy and if you were an alien you'd think humanity sacrificed privacy and safety for something important but no, it's to trace someone's lost dog. Hilarious.
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.
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.
I think it’s also for practical reasons: your dog needs to be near a person with an iPhone. If the dog is in the middle of the woods it won’t show up. Generally most objects require a person to move them and so the chances of them being near an iPhone are much higher.
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.
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.
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.
"Recording their neighbors without their consent" implies that consent was ever expected or required. You're walking down a public street and have no expectation of privacy in the US, and correspondingly 0 legal or even "ethical" recourse.
The 1st amendment protects your right to film in public, so my statement is correct.
The limitations only come from edge cases, like stalking, interfering with active law enforcement, or recording conversations in all-party consent states; none of which would apply to a security camera recording a public view.
A camera pointing at the sidewalk is fairly innocuous.
A camera pointing at the sidewalk that live streams everything it sees to several megacorps and law enforcement agencies is troubling. A million cameras doing this is a surveillance state. That's bad!
Legal? Yes. Dangerous to the populous? Also yes. Something can be legal and also be very very bad. You get that, right? Your argument comes across as "well, I'm within my rights to shout the N-word in a public place!!" Sure, and you're also an asshole. Not for having a camera, but for sending the footage to a bunch of creeps and thinking that's a fine thing to do.
Genuinely asking how is that realistically dangerous to the populace?
Set aside a slippery slope argument, because we’re just talking about security cameras in public areas: do you really think you have a right to privacy on a sidewalk?
If someone recognizes a criminal on a sidewalk from a wanted poster, or a missing child from a milk carton, is that surveillance state? Are they an asshole for calling the tip line, instead of keeping quiet?
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 would expect so, yes; I certainly wouldn't bet against it. I can think of any number of ways for a network-connected camera to figure out approximately where it is, and even if it doesn't know approximately where it is, it can still provide video and that video could go through any amount of server-side analysis.
I've given a bit of thought on this, and I think the best path might be civil liability for the privacy loss-- defined broadly. Private security camera that never goes anywhere? You're fine. Start posting that same footage online where it results in people being massively tracked: big liability.
I think otherwise it's too difficult to define the exact boundary between harmful and harmless use-- instead it's better to say that if your use harms someone you'll regret it.
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.
What needs to be fixed about that for a regular person, realistically?
What harm is a regular person suffering from being recorded by the security camera at Home Depot, their neighbor’s Ring doorbell, or even the TSA face recognition at the airport?
Ignoring the fact that there’s alternate-construction approaches to tracking all that (credit cards, your nosey neighbor just looking out a window, phone tracking, passenger manifests, etc), there’s just no realistic harm you incur by being tracked in those ways. If you’ve repeatedly shoplifted at the Home Depot or stole your neighbor’s Amazon package, I get it, but otherwise, what are you doing in the middle of a street that can’t be recorded forever?
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.
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.
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.
Or Palantir of NOTHANKS.
And see everyone they interacted with in the last 24 hours
Not only that: also nth-order interactions (Alice—Bob, Bob—Charlie, Charlie—Deborah, …), connectivity clustering, time spent in same location heatmaps, etc.
but one can choose not to use a device which is tracked, I cannot opt out of other people's cameras.
These devices are very few in reality. One reason why I keep investing in almost every company that makes a Linux based smartphone. Still need the 2FA and digital magazine for the loo.
Even large retails install bluetooth tracking in their buildings now. Was interviewing for one of them and they ask what you would use that style of tracking for to support the consumer. Giving the consumer a reason to use it helps validate and maximize the meta data.
I'm sorry but I just don't think that's the threat at all. I think these companies actually realize the existential risk and harm this data has, and do a lot to anonymize it quickly & effectively. If the government was actively backdooring Apple or Google to get realtime data like this, it would be found, and it would be a shitstorm that would greatly impact these companies.
We really need to get a little more discerning in our hatred. Apple especially I think is a real piece of work. But there are so many worse hideous monsters out there. Clearview AI just signed with DHS for access to a facial tracking database. Flock is out here basically giving playbooks to law enforcement to tell them to use only the most vague indirect reason when asking for data. There's so many other even less visible but incredibly dangerous data-broker foes to society, doing such harm.
Google and Apple have a level of caring far far far far far far above the vile anti-human campaign happening now. I just think you are off by a million miles, that you're not even on the right planet, for where the actual real harm is coming from.
Google literally has a partnership with Palantir, whose software is underpinning ICE activities right now.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/alphabet-palantir-team-superc...
I hate it!
But that seems far different to me than directly making their own products whose express purpose is to send data to the feds / local law enforcement.
Google is not a huge data broker selling your data to the world. They keep that inside, & sell ads based in data they have. But if they started trying to be a data seller or data provider, like Amazon has been, I think they realize that would almost surely be a huge crisis.
There's many good reasons for all the big tech hate. But I do think that Google and Apple have extremely strong incentives to not become a go-to everyday source for law enforcement, I think the person I was responding to has a level of suspicion that is wildly over critical & hyper rampant, and I think we would know if stuff was that bad, and I think we would all be a lot more pissed & many people would have found the door out by now.
Those companies are all in the same unethical goddamn country, controlled by the same unethical goddamn goverment.
Where is the real harm coming from? America is the answer.
The past gives a lot of lessons, all negative ones. Power people are endlessly greedy for more power, there is no end in that spiral. All top folks are like that, if you look for the signs you can see it in their behaviors outside PR rooms. Sociopaths to the last one, all big names and then some more.
So, when in doubt, feel free to have good faith in these behemoths. I don't. Secret court orders for example can force any company into anything, and it can be pro bono for some gov contract later. Why would they disclose this, ever? We had Snowden and others.
Come on lets be realistic here, all that data is a wet dream and ultimate goal of any 3 letter agency all around the world.
Amazon?
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...
Having rewatched that movie recently I found it absurd that all the killer would have had to have done to evade capture was purchase books with cash.
Slight digression and spoiler alert, but, IIRC, wasn't it a significant part of the plot that he wanted to be caught?
I'm going off memory, but I thought the library books led them to John Doe's apartment, something he was not planning for, and required him to change his plans somewhat. He did want to be caught, but not that soon, before he had finished his work, and required a hurried escape.
Ahh, okay. That makes sense.
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)
"Null key" is technobabble, which I appreciate more than an actual real world technology reference which is wrong or gets outdated.
I rewatched recently. That's what he says all right.
He also says "aflongaflongkong". https://youtu.be/0ukMXA0SJaM
He says "What's wrong with a phone call?".
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.
Md5 encryption would be far superior.
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.
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
Or its encrypted with no key meaning theres no way to open 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.
Wait till he sees a billionaire sacrificing himself for others.
Technically not a super hero. He's whatever Gotham needs him to be
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.
Hah. People absolutely took them seriously and still do. They are pitched as if they're serious important art about issues. People discussed it like it was King Lear.
I mean, one actor took their role so seriously they locked themselves up in hotel room for a month in isolation to prepare for their role as Joker. Many people in film took it seriously.
Just because a piece is fictional or imaginative doesn't mean it can't be taken seriously
You're conflating an actor taking their role seriously to a viewer taking fiction seriously.
Film critics, viewers, media writers, online video essayists, etc all took the films very seriously
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.
Sometimes, though, it's a question of retaining actual power vs. sending a message that won't be listened to by the people who need to hear it. Jan 6-7 2021 could have ended very differently if Mike Pence and the other relatively normal Republicans in Trump's first administration had resigned in protest at some earlier point and been replaced by loyalists.
Are you Saruman by any chance?
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.
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
Also see: The Art of Self Defense
It's groomer behavior
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.
It's mad that people actually side with the aliens.
Next they'll be expecting sentient lifeforms to be given rights! Madness!!
Yes! It's important that we give an alien murderous swarm that wants to destroy humanity full access to legal counsel.
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.
Thanks for fighting the good fight in this thread. You had more patience than I would have.
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.
It's not clear to me that the bugs have FTL indeed we don't see them use such in movie or book. Moreover sending a single small rock makes zero sense FTL and knowledge of humanities only major world would have allowed them to wipe out the threat in a stroke.
You could A) warp in a rock of sufficient velocity that a small one destroys life on the planet or B) warp in and move a bigger rock in system.
It only makes sense as a false flag by the humans.
You're ignoring genre conventions. Every soft scifi movie is nonsense if you look at it from the perspective of real-life physics. Sending a single rock via unspecified FTL to attack Earth makes as much sense as the human-piloted fighter spacecraft in Star Wars. The aliens are capable of bombarding Earth across interstellar space because it makes for a good visual spectacle. Watch (or more likely read) hard scifi instead if you need everything to make logical sense.
> the standard narrative conventions of soft sci-fi action movies
What if the real fascist propaganda was implicit in the standard narrative conventions we made along the way?
>What if the real fascist propaganda was implicit in the standard narrative conventions we made along the way?
Ding ding ding. Endemic to fascism, among other things, are heavy State involvement in the curation of, shall we say, "the corpus culturále". Even in the United States, particularly in the earlier half of the 20th Century, there were certain lines you could not cross and still end up on broadcast television. Renditions of the Government, Police/Authorities, or the Courts in an unflattering light was an express lane to non-syndication. Go ahead, look for syndicated media that that highlighted the People's struggle against a corrupt Government where another part of the Government isn't also complicit in "cracking down on the bad apples" (thereby distancing itself from being party to the dysfunction, and reinforcing it's own Supreme legitimacy). No points if it's not in the United States. We're great at syndicating everyone else's problems. Not so much our own. Point is, those network decency standards were, in essence, formulations of what the governing authority considers invalid art. Art, on the other hand, is all encompassing. Ironically, mrob, you're pulling from the fascist art critic's handbook to dismiss the possibility of the work of satire being a fascistly produced piece of media consumption into and unto itself, by doing exactly what a fascist state does. Referencing guidelines and norms that lay out the boundaries of acceptable artistic practice.
In reality, art is as much the characteristics and execution of the workpiece itself, the cinema Starship Troopers, as it is the collective viewer's response to it. In essence, both you and the other poster have equal claims to artistic merit. Though I tend to side with the "this is fascist af" side of the argument given that despite the limitations of the medium, it is very clearly illustrated that what the military junta says goes, period. States are not containers or facilitators of the monopoly on violence. They are incubators for collective action. By trimming down the collective, and setting price of admission to "do our bidding or no representation"; you undeniably tread what in mid-20th century historical experience outlines as "the road to fascism". Disenfranchise the undesirable. Rule according to sensibilities of the desirables. Funnily enough, in it's own way, the U.S. of today is fascistic in that regard, given we absolutely adore the disenfranchisement of the felon, which seems more peppered through legal system than your Grandma's favorite spice.
Ain't Art grand?
I support the freedom to produce unconventional art. I'm just pointing out the empirical fact that if you produce a work of art that follows the conventions of a genre, people are going to judge it according to those genre conventions. That's how communication works, it's entirely normal and expected. If you want to subvert a genre, you have to actually subvert a genre. Just intending to do so is not enough.
> But we also don't see any evidence in support of their claims of an "existential threat" beyond the fascists claiming there is one.
That is pretty clutching at straws argument. It would turn basically any movie into satire, because this thing is normal.
Like, it was a bad movie and failed both as satire and as action movie.
The threat is undeniably real in the movie.
The point is that it doesn't justify the fascist society also depicted therein.
For fellow HN'ers reading this epically long back and forth:
sig appears to be taking the more mainstream stance that Starship Troopers is satire. This is reinforced my popular interpretations from, say, Wikipedia, but refuted by others, like say, IMDB.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers_(film)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120201/
mrob is part of the coalition (that included many critics when the film was released) that asserts the film has no elements that are satirical. I admit pointing to specifics that show the satire is tough. "Do you want to know more?" was the biggest tipoff to me.
But my point is that this argument is still going on in wider society. Lots of people say satire, and lots don't. But the balance say it is:
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/11/-e...
https://screenrant.com/starship-troopers-movie-meaning-fasci...
From Wikipedia:
> Since its release, Starship Troopers has been critically re-evaluated, and it is now considered a cult classic and a prescient satire of fascism and authoritarian governance that has grown in relevance.
> This is reinforced my popular interpretations from, say, Wikipedia, but refuted by others, like say, IMDB.
Not "refuted", "disputed". If you "dispute" something you disagree with it. If you "refute" something you not only disagree with it but you conclusively prove you are correct.
They certainly haven't done the latter.
This word is very frequently used incorrectly. Sometimes on purpose by people (such as politicians) who would love to be able to actually refute some allegation, but instead just disagree with it and say that they refute it.
Yeah, I just looked at the tags for the genre on IMDB, and confirmed "Satire" wasn't there for Starship Troopers, but is there for other satires.
Thanks for the language lesson. You're of course correct, but "refute vs. dispute" isn't one of my language pet peeves (like "less vs. fewer" is), so thanks for the correction.
What do people involved with the production of the film have to say about it?
The director intended to make a satire, but critics (and mrob) assert that he failed to do so.
I had no idea that people seriously think that the film isn't satire - I thought it was just people who had barely paid attention to it and weren't really giving it much thought that didn't spot the satirical elements throughout the film.
They're even wearing fascist style uniforms and all the commercials are so over-the-top.
Maybe part of it is due to how it was promoted - in the UK, it was promoted as satire, but I believe the USA promoted it as a straight action film.
from: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/anti-fascist-leanings-paul-verh...
> “I remember coming out of Heathrow and seeing the posters, which were great,” Verhoeven added. “They were just stupid lines about war from the movie. I thought, ‘Finally, someone knows how to promote this.’ In America, they promoted it as just another bang-bang-bang movie.”
> They're even wearing fascist style uniforms and all the commercials are so over-the-top
The big clue to me is when they visit the recruiter. The man is sitting at a desk and says something along the lines of "the galactic marines made me the man I am today", only for him to push back and reveal he's lost both his legs.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mLt-lDOzD1k
The recruiter also has a metal, presumably replaced arm as well.
This seems.. wrong? From the director's mouth, confirming it's satire [0]
> Robert Heinlein’s original 1959 science-fiction novel was militaristic, if not fascistic. So I decided to make a movie about fascists who aren’t aware of their fascism. Robocop was just urban politics – this was about American politics. As a European it seemed to me that certain aspects of US society could become fascistic: the refusal to limit the amount of arms; the number of executions in Texas when George W Bush was governor.
I really have no idea why Wikipedia says what it does. Someone should edit it.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/22/how-we-made-...
I'm of the opinion that if you want to make a satire, intending to make a satire isn't enough, you have to actually make a satire. Others might disagree. The famous Roland Barthes essay "The Death of the Author" is relevant here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author
>There is a genuine existential risk
The Mormon missionaries settled on a bug planet. Human's attempting to colonize worlds already inhabited and getting killed is not an existential risk or threat. Choosing to go and exterminate the local population in response is not defense.
Assuming the Buenos Aires attack is from the bugs, it only happened after humans invaded multiple bug worlds. Since the bugs never seem to attempt to invade any human worlds, peace could have happened by just leaving the bugs alone and not attempting to take worlds from them. Paul Verhoeven grew up during WWII, so the idea of fascists exterminating the native population to make room, or Lebensraum, isn’t exactly a crazy idea.
>Choosing to go and exterminate the local population in response is not defense.
The Mormons were not the United Citizen Federation, they were an independent group. The bugs indiscriminately attacked all humans in response.
>exterminating the native population to make room
The problem with this comparison is the bugs aren't humans. Extending human-like moral weight to even non-human mammals is a rare idea (most people aren't vegans). Extending it to non-mammals is even more rare (most vegans don't care about the insects killed in farming). Extending it to literally alien bugs, that don't even share the evolutionary history of Earth bugs with us, is an incredibly niche idea. And this situation is symmetrical, so the alien bugs almost certainly have the same attitude toward humans. There's no reason to think that peaceful coexistence is possible.
Let me give others perpectives:
> Extending human-like moral weight to even non-human mammals is a rare idea
It's actually pretty frequent to demonstrate deep empathy and give more importance to pets that to unrelated humans. Some also argue that humans can be morally inferior to others. Drawing a line between human and non-humans may be tempting but the opinons down there are very diverse. Just a few years back and a common agreement would be "Extending white-like moral weight to even non-white..."
> most vegans don't care about the insects killed in farming
Of course they do! But found out it's the compromise with the lowest externalities. Most meat eater also don't like slaughterhouses but think it's a necessity.
> Extending it to literally alien bugs [...] is an incredibly niche idea
I bet if humanity do encounter alien bugs, this idea will be way more discussed. Moral is often somewhat put aside when engaging a fiction: Starship Troopers or Happy Tree Friends are perfect exemple. Most would's joke about that if that was real.
If humans encounter alien bugs that respond to a non-violent provocation by a minority group with attempted genocide of all humans, I hope that discussion would not be taken seriously. By your logic, taking antibiotics to cure a life-threatening infection is mass murder. The characters in the movie are obviously morally correct, and also obviously morally superior to real-life humans because they figured out a way to pull off large-scale group defense without resorting to slavery. Heinlein should be considered a great moral philosopher for coming up with the concept.
I can see only two possible reasons for disagreement. Either you are not actually addressing the movie itself, and are instead talking about an extended work of the movie plus the director's commentary, or you fundamentally disagree with me about human rights and do not consider slavery to be a serious problem.
You got it: I wasn't addressing the movie or the book itself but the general ideas about moral developed in your precedent post.
Antibiotics are obviously mass murder toward bacteria, that's exactly their function I guess? Using them to cure a life-threatening infection (bacterias) isn't seen as immoral by most, neither do I. May you point out what part makes you think otherwise?
I agree that slavery is not morally acceptable but i'm not sure to follow you point afterward. Perhaps you rank slavery as the worst moral practice and as some humans still enslave others, the movies's characters that don't are "morally superior"? That's a fair and rational view. I also see invasion, violence and a lot of sadism from the humans in that movie. I don't give them a moral advantage.
My whole understanding is close Slg post [0] about the fascist critique. It's also a very popular view: A quick search on internet return many articles in this frame and as you referenced "director's commentary":
1 > I decided to make a movie about fascists who aren’t aware of their fascism
0 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982514
1 https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/22/how-we-made-...
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.
Just had the pleasure of listening to a Turing Award winner, and to answer a question about how to know what issues could come up. His response, "Read science fiction!" helps scientists imagine the future. I'll take his advice and stick to my mostly fiction reading :)
Man, I’m the opposite. In the information age, in my leisure time reading books, I don’t want to learn any more facts and data points. I just want to enjoy a good story.
Fiction is my favorite, because the authors admit they are just making it up.
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
It’s important to note that fiction does not map to reality. It’s fiction. You cannot learn how the world works through fiction. It’s just the author’s ideas about the world in a narrative framework that may or may not be true.
I find it very frustrating when people confuse the two. Reading fiction doesn’t give you an interpretive lens for reality. Reading history does. Saying this is “just like when in Harry Potter / Star Wars / Star Trek x happened” is totally meaningless and not predictive of anything in the real world.
If we're looking globally, the huuge majority of our industry isn't part of manifesting the Torment Nexus. Unfortunately a lot of HN is, because interest in SV/VC strongly biases towards interest in achieving personal goals (including but not limited to financial earnings), over caring about building something that helps society.
And no, of course not everyone in SV is like that, and not every VC-funded company helps inch towards the Torment Nexus. But there's inherently a strong bias towards it.
> It's like no one in the tech world actually understands any piece of fiction that they have ever consumed.
Of course they don't. Have you seen how common it is in tech circles to deride humanities education?
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.
Video games are jammed with the follies of man. Elden Ring: Nightreign is a recent anthology of moral lessons.
Give me an example. One game I didn't expect to see was Nightreign.
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"
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.
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.
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)
Well, a lot of Batman also expressly questions whether Batman is really good and emphasizes the point that he became Batman because of the trauma of seeing his parents murdered. Given that most of the villains he fights also have a tragic backstory, the suggestion is that he isn't really all that different from them.
Do you think they also say it's ultimately okay to beat up people as a vigilante ?
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 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.
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.
Every single Hollywood movie has authoritarian apologia, you don't have to go to Christopher Nolan or Forrest Gump. The most recent example is One battle after another.
"Wait, There’s Torture in Zootopia?" DOI:10.1017/S1537592719005012
Where was it in one battle after another?
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.
Not at all. They have their roots in the projection of a defined moral trajectory that the superhero is charged to lift society along and the disagreement they have with the state is that it can't do that enough, not that it's going in the wrong direction. Modern superhero stories have completely inverted and fucked with and abandoned this narrative but the original stories were absolutely supportive of the state, fundamentally modernist.
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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.
And now Palantir sells exactly this product, literally named Gotham https://www.palantir.com/platforms/gotham/
My background is aerospace engineering. Specifically, I have managed technical risk on a variety of aircraft fleets including SAR, military tactical aviation, and special missions aircraft. In a nutshell my job was to look at complex systems, identify likely failure modes, and come up with engineering solutions. I'm very good at it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out that identifying failure modes in complex systems is a highly transferable skill.
When I launched my first startup shortly after COVID I realized that that skillset makes me shitty at raising capital because I tend to only see the faults in my ideas and I end up with a "nobody would pay for this" mindset. But I also tend to easily spot the ways that tech companies' products can (will, do) go sideways. I am a perennial late adopter. I don't own an Alexa or really anything "smart" equivalent because I knew early on that they would become dystopian surveillance devices and/or security risks.
And I am so off-the-charts tired of being right.
My personal question to you: were you able commercialize your error finding skills? I am electrical engineer, I predict very early the week when shit hits the fan. Nobody listens and most of my job nowadays is cleaning the shit. I am sooo tired of being right. I want to find a way to use my future forecast skill instead of fixing obvious things afterwards. One manager told me it’s a normal process to hit the wall at full speed and the re-scope project and move from there. But damn… I don’t want to waste my lifetime doing obvious errors and fixing them. To be clear, errors happen and it’s fine. But most of them are easily predictable.
I left Aerospace and am currently building a privacy-preserving digital identity system that I think has technical, commercial, and social merit.
We'll see how it goes. Hoping to do a Show HN in a month or so.
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!
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.
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. :/
I believe they also pull this off with a fleet of PS3s, at one point.
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.
Charlie's Angels (circa 2000) uses voice recognition and geolocation of cell signal as the terrifying new technology that allows the villain to track down his nemesis, Charlie. The entire film is about the Angels getting hoodwinked into giving Sam Rockwell access to the mainframe. Fun movie.
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.
I'm in the US. I have an expectation of privacy in public places.
I suppose you can expect whatever you want, but the law is not on your side.
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.
By that logic having a phone is voluntary as well
Is it voluntary to be recorded by Ring cameras?
In the US, we don't have an expectation of privacy in public spaces.
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
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> the reduction in crime is not solely due to Flock, but is has definitely helped.
what's the theory? murderers see flock cams and decide not to murder? most of the general public doesn't even know what these cameras are (or that they even exist).
Lets take the current example of the famous kidnapping of the TV anchor's mother in AZ for example.
If Arizona was blanketed in CCTVs, do you think this kidnapping would have happened?
And if it still did happen, I'm 100% sure the suspects would have been caught by now (11th+ day since the disappearance now).
only if the cameras exist but the perpetrators don't know that they exist. If they know they are being watched on camera it doesn't take a genius to realize you just need to switch cars out of sight. And that is assuming they didn't do that already anyways.
States with the death penalty still have murders.
I think you fundamentally misunderstand crime and deterrence.
When did I say death penalty means no murders?
I didn't. Does a strict rule of law and enforcement of said law lead to no murders? No. Does it reduce the amount of murders that occur? Yes (see Singapore).
By that logic, and looking at the data [1] you should come to the conclusion that one should remove the death penalty, because Europe has less homicides compared to the US and does not have a death penalty. So there are actually less murders without death penalty.
Obviously, that conclusion is flawed, because the data also shows otherwise in some countries I guess - and just using the death penalty as data point is useless. There are way more factors in play that lead to murder.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
People tend to behave if they know they are being watched. Yeah it's not going to stop crime 100%, but I bet you it will (and it has) help reduce crime by double digit percentages.
Look at places where there are CCTV cameras all over, there is very little crime there compared to the United States. I won't use China as an example because then you are going to attack me for saying it's an authoritarian state. In that case I will use democratic examples: Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore.
> People tend to behave if they know they are being watched
People tend to behave in the ways that the people who own the surveillance apparatus want them to behave. This assumes that the people who own and operate the apparatus (oftentimes private corporations) can be trusted to monitor and act in the best interests of society. Unfortunately, the people who own and operate these have shown that they are largely untrustworthy and motivated by profit and power.
Regardless, most people would not sacrifice personal agency and democracy for supposed safety. "Behave" just means "obey" or "comply" when used in the context of "people tend to behave if they are being watched"; consent is notably absent.
> People tend to behave if they know they are being watched
At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus...
People tend to behave if they know they are being watched.
As in: no mass protests, no anti-ICE measures but most importantly: no more pesky journalists filming and photographing everything. If we then disable the upload of amateur videos of social unrest to TikTok, we're halfway there, just a little more intimidation of civil rights advocate's via observing their every move via the cars and people will behave even better. /s
That has always been the question. Are you willing to be constantly surveilled for marginally more security?
Me, absolutely not. Unfortunately, my opinion seems to be increasingly in the minority and more and more people will happily be surveilled for even just an illusory promise of safety.
The harsh truth is that safety/security can never be guaranteed. No amount of surveillance will 100% prevent any individual from being a victim of a crime. Surveillance might help catching the criminal to face justice afterwards, but it will never 100% prevent.
Because of that, and because of the potential for abuse, it is better to not be under constant surveillance than it is to give up your rights and privacy for no guarantees.
There is no expectation of privacy in the public setting though. Anyone can record you in public without your permission.
> No amount of surveillance will 100% prevent any individual from being a victim of a crime.
No, but if it reduces crime by 99% would you be in favor of it? (See South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore.. examples of democratic countries with CCTVs all over the public space.. and before you say well those are racially homogenous countries.. I say look at Singapore. Singapore is very diverse racially, and yet they have very low rates of crime. This is because they have strict laws against crime and these laws are actually enforced)
South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore all had significantly lower crime rates before CCTVs were all over the public space.
EDIT: also, most crime happens at home, so if you really want a large reduction put cameras in everyone's home too.
> This is because they have strict laws against crime and these laws are actually enforced
Just before this, you said it was because of CCTV. Is it the CCTV or the strict laws and enforcement?
India and South Africa are democratic countries with large CCTV programs and high crime rates.
India has a very low crime rate. The homicide rate is 2 in 100,000. Murder/homicide is basically unheard of in major cities. For instance Mumbai has a homicide rate of 0.7 in 100,000 making it one of the safest cities in the world.
https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/crime-in-india-s-larg...
https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/statistics...
What are your sources?
The source is World Population Review. The US was used as an example of a country with higher crime that needed more CCTV to be safer. The US and India are almost identical in this ranking of crime.
[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/crime-rat...
Singapore is very diverse racially… with groups that aren’t generally known to be very criminal. It’s mostly a mix of Chinese, Malays and Indians. I doubt the CCTVs have much to do with it.
Also, banning guns would do even more good. Strange that the people in favor of Flock cameras to reduce crime tend not to be in favor of banning guns to reduce crime.
Banning guns does nothing without removal of guns or enforcement of laws. Assault weapons are "banned" in California, has it stopped anyone from getting their hands on them? Extended magazines are "banned" in California, has it stopped any criminals from getting them? Almost every other day a criminal is caught w/ extended magazines found on them. A concealed carry permit is notoriously hard to get in California, and yet criminals still walk around with guns concealed without a CCW permit every day in California.
Banning guns isn't going to solve anything.
You have to ban them everywhere in the US. You can’t have them available one state over and expect a ban to do anything. It works really well, even criminals in the UK use knives for their crimes. Same with most of the rest of the world. You’re right there needs to be a removal too because we already own dozens of guns per American.
If it leads to a high-trust society, yes. (e.g., see Singapore)
I'm pretty sure that if you need ubiquitous surveillance to ensure that your citizens don't commit crimes, you don't have a high-trust society, by definition.
Surveillance and a high trust society are diametrically opposed concepts. You don’t need a high trust society if you have total surveillance and vice versa.
I don't think you understand what "high trust" means. High trust societies have no need for surveillance which is what makes them high trust.
Of course they do some good. You could improve things even further by implementing a system like Judge Dredd, and we'd save a ton of money as well.
This is the problem with limits on law enforcement. There are tradeoffs, and people really don't like tradeoffs. Many people prefer to just assume that law enforcement will use their powers for good, rather than have to think about whether any given change will do more harm than good due to enabling bad law enforcement.
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.
> 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.
> 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".
The actual answer to your conundrum here is that the package isn't actually considered delivered.
When you order something, it's the seller's responsibility to get it to you. They have the choice of having their deliveries require a signature to be delivered but that costs more so they consider stolen packages as a cost of business.
If a package is stolen, it hasn't been delivered. You report to the company you bought from and they send you a new one. They can negotiate with the shipping company if they are at fault.
The reason for the practice of leaving packages at your door is that it's cheaper to replace the few stolen packages for free than it is to pay a driver to require signatures for each package.
High value or non-replaceable items can be shipped more securely.
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.
No, they live somewhere with a working postal law like Germany. Hand it directly to the addressed or a person authorised by the addressed (in which case inform the recipient via card or sms) or deposit it in a postbox, post office. This way it is secure that you receive your stuff even if you are not at home: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Fachthemen/Post/Regelung...
>No, they live somewhere with a working postal law like Germany. Hand it directly to the addressed or a person authorised by the addressed (in which case inform the recipient via card or sms) or deposit it in a postbox, post office. This way it is secure that you receive your stuff even if you are not at home: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Fachthemen/Post/Regelung...
Sure. And that's great. But we're not talking about Deutsche Post, or even the US Postal Service.
We're talking about Amazon Logistics subcontractors who are so over-scheduled that they routinely need to urinate in bottles[0] rather than stop to use a restroom or they won't be able to fulfill their delivery quota for the day.
Those folks are assuredly not going to do anything more than the bare minimum (and not necessarily because they don't want to) because their delivery quotas don't allow for anything more than dumping a package on a porch (or in an unattended apartment building lobby) and maybe ringing the doorbell/intercom.
[0] https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/amazon-depot-s-huge-pi...
Those folks are assuredly not going to do anything more than the bare minimum (and not necessarily because they don't want to) because their delivery quotas don't allow for anything more than dumping a package on a porch (or in an unattended apartment building lobby) and maybe ringing the doorbell/intercom.
So, implement surveillance of all, not only for the fracture of a percent of dogs returned but also because there are no functioning labour laws. Right. Got it. (/s)
>So, implement surveillance of all, not only for the fracture of a percent of dogs returned but also because there are no functioning labour laws. Right. Got it. (/s)
Why stop there? People actually lie once in a while and say they never received a package that was supposedly delivered. We need to put those cameras inside peoples' homes, especially in the bathrooms and bedrooms where they hide the packages that were "never delivered." And why stop there? if we find that folks are lying about that, they should be tased, beaten and sent to prison (or just shot dead on the spot) for many years because they tried to defraud the powers-that-be ^H^H^H megacorps, and we can't allow that now can we? /s[0]
On a more serious note, there actually are labor (but without that extraneous 'u', friend!) laws in the US. But those generally only apply to "employees" and not subcontractors. Here's a page from Amazon about how to become a "delivery service partner"[1] (read: subcontractor so Amazon can avoid pesky things like labor laws, minimum wages, health care coverage, etc.), so you too can spend thousands and finally be allowed to urinate in plastic bottles. Good times!
[0] My '/s' is much broader and more absurd than yours. Please get ready for round two of the /s-waving contest :)
[1] https://logistics.amazon.com/
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/labour
Touche!
I will say that we don't use those limey flavoured spellings over here across the pond, nor do we allow such things in our adverts either, even if we're filling our caravans up with petrol.
It's an honour to be singled out for this, especially as I was whinging about it. ;)
https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=labor
The US is very rural compared to Germany. If I had to drive to a post office for every package that would be a ridiculous hassle. Plus if the delivery try companies needed to hand it to people in person that’s going to take a lot more time, most of which will be completely wasted as people are at work. That means they’ll need a ton more delivery drivers, they’ll use a ton more gas, and our shipping rates will go up a lot.
Where I live nobody can even see my door from the road. Our laws “work” just fine for our situation.
I was specifically responding to:
Do you live somewhere with high crime?
My bad, should have quoted it.
The post depot boxes are located every couple of kilometers, you could walk there. You can define the people allowed to receive your parcel, don't tell me you don't have at-home neighbours at all in your street/block. I prefer this to total neighbourhood surveillance and laws that work "just fine" except where they need to protect my privacy.
I don't even live in a super rural area, but if you think you could just walk a couple of kms in a couple of foot of snow to get something like a bookcase and bring it over is hilarious. Also, I would rather not receive packages for my neighbors, and I assume they wouldn't for me either. Ring works fine, I don't share the footage but I feel it is a cost of living in high crime regions.
You leave out that they can keep it in a warehouse at the other side of the country for pickup and there is no law saying that it cannot be further away than the point of origin. Fun times.
Sadly I rarely see an option for "place it with a neon sign on my front porch" when I order things online, because the chance of having things stolen would often be preferable to a daytrip to the middle of nowhere.
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.
If you live somewhere with high property crime and a large fent problem, the problem isn’t that uncommon. But I have lots of cameras and yell them off (and pick up deliveries quickly).
> 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.
You can use this to track down the guy who just stole your Amazon package and is still making the rounds in your hood.
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.
The ad states that 1 million dogs are lost every year and that Ring returns 1 dog every day. Could the uselessness of the feature be any more prominent?
It’ll probably be significantly more now that people know about it.
And I doubt those 365 families a year think it’s useless.
If you cannot take care/train of your dog maybe you shouldn't have one. Total neighbourhood surveillance for the benefit of the 0.03% is way out of proportion.
What's the threshold for it being worthwhile to build a ubiquitous surveillance system? 365 dogs saved per year is apparently enough. How about 100? 10? 1?
I'll also note that this is just a count of the dogs found by the system, not a count of dogs that otherwise would not have been found.
Did anyone catch the recent development in the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping story?
For days it was explained that, while she had a Nest doorbell camera (which was stolen by the kidnapper) it was sadly useless because Nancy wasn’t paying for cloud storage. Just live video and notifications.
Well what do know happened today? The video of the kidnapper was magically produced by Google. I guess, even when you don’t pay for storage, they’re… you know…. Recording and saving the video anyway.
No one’s really bothered to point this out as they’re all just so excited that the video has turned up.
Turns out you're not buying the storage and compute required to store your video. Google can afford that regardless of whether you pay.
They're licensing your own video back to you.
Do they just store everything? How long is that sustainable?
Google doorbell cameras send clips to the cloud. They're accessible to users for 3 hours for free, and a month or two if you pay. While they become unavailable to users after 3 hours, it's unlikely that they're deleted immediately—partly for operational reasons (easier to clear out many clips periodically in a batch process, rather than individual clips one by one exactly when they expire), and partly because Google keeps a lot of data around for a short period (a week or two) to be able to debug systems. Even when data is requested to be deleted, it's often possible to recover it from off-site backups or soft-deleted data stores for a while. Google ensures that all user data is actually, irrecoverably deleted within 2 months after a deletion request (see https://policies.google.com/technologies/retention).
It has been pointed out in another HN comment thread, but ... surveillors gonna surveil, that's how they make money and accumulate power.
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
I think the initial plan was to introduce lost-kid/elderly plan, but they thought people will be more willing to accept a pet version (pun indented) first.
Also the implementation is quite strange as well. I can imagine a version where the camera itself compares the recorded footage against a well-known database of lost children, just like the milk cartons.
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Not who you are replying to, but I think mass surveillance is bad and evil, period. So, any person or company contributing toward mass surveillance is bad.
Most bad things have some good part you can point to. Mass surveillance and all of the other police and government aiding technologies usually point to improved conviction rates or something similar. But making police more efficient at convicting people isn't the only goal of society. That's only one part of what makes up a country and it's society. And, as the saying goes: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
That's beside the point? Gaining security by losing freedom was always on the table. What's interesting is the cultural shift toward not caring about losing freedom.
I think it is the point: there is a balance between freedom and safety.
For example, it is illegal to carry a loaded handgun onto a plane. Most people would agree that is an acceptable trade of freedom for safety.
There are places with even less safety and more “freedom” than the US so people who take an absolutist view towards freedom also need to justify why the freedoms that the US does not grant are not valuable.
> I think it is the point: there is a balance between freedom and safety.
Sometimes. But freedom and security are not always opposed.
It’s possible to trade freedom for security but it’s also possible that freedom creates security. Both can be true at the same time. Surveillance, not security, is what opposes freedom. Surveillance simply trades one form of insecurity for another at the cost of freedom.
> For example, it is illegal to carry a loaded handgun onto a plane. Most people would agree that is an acceptable trade of freedom for safety.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
2A seems to make the case that the freedom to bear arms creates security. Given how history played out it’s hard to argue against. I’m not arguing we should be able to take guns on planes but 2A is an example of freedom creating security.
Everything I want to do in public I can still do.
What "freedom" is lost? I gain security and lose no freedoms (unless you are doing something illegal).
When property crime is up 53%.. plenty of people are willing to lose "freedom" whatever you are referring to, in exchange for safety.
How about just general privacy? I mean do you really want someone / the government to be able to track everywhere you go?
- Going to your girlfriends place while the wife is at work
- Visiting a naughty shop
- Going into various companies for interviews while employed
With mass surveillance there is the risk of mass data leak. Would you be comfortable with a camera following you around at all times when you're in public? I wouldn't be.
You were recorded smoking marijuana, an illegal drug at the federal level.
You were recorded walking into an abortion clinic, although face recognition identified as a resident of a state where abortion is illegal.
Well aren’t both of those things crimes? I’m not a fan of mass surveillance either but maybe pick a different example.
The second is clearly not. State governments don't have jurisdiction over their residents when they are out of state.
Read about Texas.
It's a crime to leave the state to get an abortion. They can prosecute when you return home.
There have been vigilante patrols in West Texas, watching the necessary routes out of the state. The law gives any resident the grounds to turn in their neighbor for planning to get an abortion.
Is "crime" one and the same as "wrong"?
The solution is to change the laws, not to stop enforcing them. Otherwise this is basically just giving up on the concept of having laws.
The point is to maintain pressure so that even when the law becomes unjust, people aren't immediately harmed.
Selective enforcement has always been the law of the land.
The right to privacy, to not let the government have a master record of everywhere you've ever been and everything you've ever said just in case they decide to someday revoke free speech and due process, or decide it doesn't apply. Lately we have plenty of examples of how quickly that can happen.
The Stasi were "tough on crime" too, back when that was expensive. How quickly we forget. Well, you're welcome to find a panopticon to live it, but excuse other for not finding it a good tradeoff.
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."
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Objection: facts not in evidence!
The problem with the current push on "illegal immigrants" is that
These problems are very much worth drawing a line in the sand over.---
Some people feel that the current push is solving a real problem in the real world.
Unfortunately, the real world is actually very complicated, and you can't flatten that complication without violence.
If that is hard to imagine, replace the ICE acronym with Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, Bureau of Land Management, or Internal Revenue Service.
2a. Many of the "illegal" immigrants are, in fact, legal. 4. immigration status is a civil matter, not a criminal matter.
I have documentation proving that I am, in fact, the Average American Citizen.
I am not fine with mass surveillance.
Because we decided the Constitution doesn't apply to a huge group of people living within the United States, and that seems wrong to those of us raised to believe the Constitution was important and the actual law of the land. It kind of doesn't work at all once we add a government decided 'subjective' layer on top of it. You could argue that already happened but this is the first most obvious in our faces instance.
Because it's them finally becoming aware that abuses of surveillance are real and tangible and not cable news rhetoric.
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.
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.
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."
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.
> 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.
>there's nothing bad with having a camera to spot porch pirates, as long as the data stays private
I'd be more inclined to accept this if the cameras were pointed only at the person's porch and not out onto the public and other people's property
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".
> 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)
You pay a third party to make something like this for you. They can best be described as nihilists.
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.
Wealth should be a source of power and agency, not an excuse for getting dogwalked. On the bright side, given that kids and houses and spouses are all becoming luxury items, there may be fewer people in the future who have to make that choice.
"Learn to live on lentils, and you will not have to be subservient to the king"
> Wealth
Working at Amazon isn't wealth.
Wealth is not having to work in order to live.
> Learn to live on lentils
I'd rather not be vitamin deficient, even if it means being subservient to the king.
Guarantee me health, food, water, shelter for life, and then maybe we can talk about the ethics of the king.
Grow a spine, you don't get a pass to do unethical things because your job depends on it.
Huh? Another dose of reality:
I need to pay rent, pay medical bills, eat, and survive. As long as I'm dependent on an income to do that, I do whatever the employer wants as long as it's legal.
When I'm financially free, I'll have the space to think about the ethics of my work.
You want better? Fix the system so that I'm financially free earlier in life. Tax me less, charge me less rent, give me free healthcare, and let me save up cash for the rest of my life. When the system has delivered that OKR to me, I'll be able to put ethics first going forward.
Until then, I still need to earn money to survive.
I worked for Amazon for a couple years. Not on the above project, but nevertheless, I did what I was told. One of the reasons I went there was that I needed a surgery to replace my implanted defibrillator, which my life depends on, and (a) Amazon's sponsored health insurance would pay for it (b) Amazon's cash comp would be enough to hire lawyers to fight with insurance if necessary. Insurance companies usually pay what they're supposed to if there is a big tech HR behind it; they have a habit, in my experience, of not paying out what they're supposed to if they don't have something to fear. I was in startup land before, and often couldn't pay my medical bills (because insurance would cop out and not pay, and I didn't have money for lawyers to fight them) and had to forgo critical cardiac imaging procedures during that time.
> I worked for Amazon for a couple years.
why am I not surprised
Does it have to be that particular employer though?
Not everyone has their pick of employers, especially during mass layoffs. I arguably joined the most ethical of the offers I actually got at the time.
If you're against me joining an employer, maybe send me an alternative offer and then we can talk. Otherwise it is not constructive.
I'm currently unemployed myself because I didn't want to work for a big tech company that announced a public partnership with Palantir.
I get the "family to feed" etc angle. But at some point we have to realize that this is not some kind of abstract moral dilemma, not when that software is actively hurting other people.
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
> we are fucked if there's many people that fit your description
The reality is 95% of people, especially outside the HN community, fit that description, that's why I wrote it.
The number of people in the greater world who would put employer ethics before survival and livelihood of their family is vanishingly miniscule. Legal systems are how employers stay in check, not people caring about ethics.
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.
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...
Very much appreciated the internet's #1 dog-rating account covering this:
https://www.instagram.com/reels/DUlye8NETR3/
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.
Good point! Thank you.
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.
Feersum Endjinn has this plot line. Can recommend.
Ohhh thank you :-)
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.
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46950915
I genuinely want someone to build nice tech to solve this problem, I have a cctv at my home and once a month a cop shows up to get some info on a crime that has happened in my area, tech like homomorphic encryption should get really really good so that searching for a image or video in a footage should not create privacy nightmare.
The frog has been boiled when it comes to information privacy and if you were an alien you'd think humanity sacrificed privacy and safety for something important but no, it's to trace someone's lost dog. Hilarious.
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.
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?
The system could have used base64 encryption, imagine a mood mesh ring or 'gizmo' for Kotlin DSL code reviews.
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.
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.
Of all the things Amazon brings to the marketplace - global surveillance is not one I would advertise on the superbowl.
I wonder if we'll see backlash of people wandering around ripping out/smashing/destorying ring cameras from their neighbors doors.
Are people going to start referring to said homeowners as ringholes?
I've thought about spray painting them pink, so they stand out.
A country ruled by fear has their "security" systems turned on themselves. We truly live in an Orwellian dystopia
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 people mean by "could be used?" That's the wrong verbe tense.
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
I think it’s also for practical reasons: your dog needs to be near a person with an iPhone. If the dog is in the middle of the woods it won’t show up. Generally most objects require a person to move them and so the chances of them being near an iPhone are much higher.
Or your dog eating the AirTag with the button battery inside it
This is Airtag, but for video
Did they not realize that it is already a mass surveillance network?
Are you a dog?? No?? So you do not have anything to worry about!!
So they say.
Risking downvotes, I am adding this so I can always be reminded of this comment and how much it made me laugh.
It's you. You're the dog. Now roll over and sit-pretty for your oligarchical overlords.
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.
If you search for this story on other sites, the comments are full of backlash.
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-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can you imagine people actually believing a post on Reddit, and then extrapolating that to everybody who is going to a protest?
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What an absurd take.
I'm afraid that ship has sailed
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.
Fears?
This has already been happening for years.
LLMs might have changed the feasibility of cheap data analysis a bit.
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.
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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.
>legally allowed
People aren't arguing about what the law states.
"Recording their neighbors without their consent" implies that consent was ever expected or required. You're walking down a public street and have no expectation of privacy in the US, and correspondingly 0 legal or even "ethical" recourse.
First, in the U.S., privacy laws vary by state, so the blanket statement about 'the US' is incorrect.
Second, laws are made by people. The fact that many of us do not want to be recorded 24/7 is why it is worth discussing.
The 1st amendment protects your right to film in public, so my statement is correct.
The limitations only come from edge cases, like stalking, interfering with active law enforcement, or recording conversations in all-party consent states; none of which would apply to a security camera recording a public view.
A camera pointing at the sidewalk is fairly innocuous.
A camera pointing at the sidewalk that live streams everything it sees to several megacorps and law enforcement agencies is troubling. A million cameras doing this is a surveillance state. That's bad!
Legal? Yes. Dangerous to the populous? Also yes. Something can be legal and also be very very bad. You get that, right? Your argument comes across as "well, I'm within my rights to shout the N-word in a public place!!" Sure, and you're also an asshole. Not for having a camera, but for sending the footage to a bunch of creeps and thinking that's a fine thing to do.
Genuinely asking how is that realistically dangerous to the populace?
Set aside a slippery slope argument, because we’re just talking about security cameras in public areas: do you really think you have a right to privacy on a sidewalk?
If someone recognizes a criminal on a sidewalk from a wanted poster, or a missing child from a milk carton, is that surveillance state? Are they an asshole for calling the tip line, instead of keeping quiet?
"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.
Can they still see through my camera if I have removed the location from my account?
I would expect so, yes; I certainly wouldn't bet against it. I can think of any number of ways for a network-connected camera to figure out approximately where it is, and even if it doesn't know approximately where it is, it can still provide video and that video could go through any amount of server-side analysis.
Move Fast and Stasi Things ...
We are all now dogs
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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've given a bit of thought on this, and I think the best path might be civil liability for the privacy loss-- defined broadly. Private security camera that never goes anywhere? You're fine. Start posting that same footage online where it results in people being massively tracked: big liability.
I think otherwise it's too difficult to define the exact boundary between harmful and harmless use-- instead it's better to say that if your use harms someone you'll regret it.
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.
What needs to be fixed about that for a regular person, realistically?
What harm is a regular person suffering from being recorded by the security camera at Home Depot, their neighbor’s Ring doorbell, or even the TSA face recognition at the airport?
Ignoring the fact that there’s alternate-construction approaches to tracking all that (credit cards, your nosey neighbor just looking out a window, phone tracking, passenger manifests, etc), there’s just no realistic harm you incur by being tracked in those ways. If you’ve repeatedly shoplifted at the Home Depot or stole your neighbor’s Amazon package, I get it, but otherwise, what are you doing in the middle of a street that can’t be recorded forever?
So google maps streetview should be illegal?
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.
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.