If Flock truly believed that the domain name infringes on their trademark, they would file an ICANN UDRP complaint instead of Cloudflare and Hetzner abuse reports.
But they don't, because the former would require them to perjure themselves, and the latter just requires them to lie to a hosting company.
Cloudflare would have to bring that suit since they were the ones defrauded. The site owners probably can't sue Cloudflare because of their contract. So the site owners probably have to go basic "tortious interference" and be ready to show actual damages.
No, if the site owners have been harmed by Flock + Cyble knowingly filing a false takedown notice then they can sue Flock + Cyble. If Cloudflare's reputation has also been harmed then they could sue Flock + Cyble as well.
The local credit union in Eugene had installed Flock cams at the entrances to all their branches. They took em down after only a few of our community members began protests out front a few branches and emailing with the CU's leadership before our city terminated our contract and removed the cams
> The site’s only input fields accept license plate numbers (which are hashed client-side before transmission and cannot be harvested)
License plates are trivially short, hashing them accomplishes no additional level of privacy if the hashes could be bruted in seconds on an antique GPU.
Being able to say "Our server never sees user-input license plate numbers", even though from a technical perspective the hash is just as identifiable, does have value. Even though it offers no additional privacy, it does let non-technically-minded users and so on feel safer, and that's valuable.
If these folks get in trouble, they might try hosting with Freedom.nl . It's +/- the old xs4all crew, and they might be in for some more fun in the 21st century.
dang/tomhow, does Y Combinator have a code of ethics that comes into play when one of your funding recipients does something unethical and/or illegal like this?
To some extent, YCombinator partners are on the record[0] supporting the idea of their startups doing illegal things. Generally they'll frame this as challenging outdated regulations, but they acknowledge that the founders whose strategies they fully support sometimes come into office hours and discuss how they're worried that the strategy puts them at risk of going to jail.
VC system with multiple investors means YC can't tell their company what to do. No mote than you can tell Google what to do because you have $100M in shares.
So these are the scumbags putting cameras in front of schools and sending tickets to people on Sundays. Thank you for making peoples lives materially WORSE.
Absolutely unacceptable behavior. Wild that Americans are so distracted by pointless social issues that they haven’t even realized the ruling elite are treating them like cattle. Absolutely pathetic.
the fact that these majority do accept the distraction points to lack of intelligence and discipline in critical thinking and future planning. The populous has half the blame - not just those who do these manufacturing of distractions.
That's an easy trap to fall in. This industry costs trillions every year to operate for a reason. The people never really stood a chance. It's not as if school educated them to live in the world we actually inhabit.
People with advanced degrees accumulate in those specific states, despite not significantly different rates of HS graduation from other states.
Smart people, as measured by educational attainment, live in the NE coastal states and exceptionally stupid people (by the same metric) live in the South and Midwest. As a guy from Iowa, I was offended, but humbled by the reality of the numbers.
Gallup polls during the Vietnam War found that higher-educated Americans were more likely to be pro-war while the most anti-war group were those with only a grade school education: https://afterthewarproject.org/files/original/3e5e5a47a15203... (page 19 of the PDF, page 38 of the document)
They don't actually allege anything. They add in the keywords without going so far as to say "this website is doing X." It's enough to trip the keyword filters at Cloudflare and other hosting providers and reverse the burden of proof.
Problem is they have way more money to fight and that’s basically their whole playbook. I was caught up in a fraudulent libel claim that had to settle* back in the Twitter days. When those companies want to come after you, it’s really hard to fight back.
* no money was exchanged just some guarantees to not disclose their client and remove tweets.
Remember when Zuck called his fellow students at harvard who used facebook “Dumb fucks”? The US is accelerating into techno-authoritarianism, and all of these tech companies adopted “companies over countries” motto since the start, it’s not a surprise now.
it is fairly evident that contextualisation is paramount in objectively assessing a situation ... in the context of having god like power over billions , it seems entirely moot to debate the merits of why such a god like individual would label his subjects as idiots ...
The context is given, it’s all about users’ data. facebook, google, plantir, flock, you name it, the end goal is to harvest data as much as possible to sell it, profile the individuals, manipulate the public opinion (facebook did a mood-manipulation “experiment” back in 2012, you can only imagine now in the era of social media dependency and AI), invade people’s privacy, among many other things. Now add to that mix a mandatory digital ID, and let’s hear what these CEOs will call the public behind closed doors, I’m sure it’s worse than “dumb fucks”. Fun fact: Zuck early days business card printed with “I’M THE CEO, BITCH.”
In the sense that the US has been anti-intellectualist for decades, I'm kind of ok with it. All the kids who fucked around in school and picked on the nerds for just existing are kind of getting their comeuppance. It's definitely cut off your nose to spite your face type shit, but does give me a little bit of joy. "You stuffed me in a locker and destroyed my social life because I read a book at lunch. I'm going to automate your job away and help billionaires make sure you'll never rise out of poverty."
> I'm kind of ok with it. All the kids who fucked around in school and picked on the nerds for just existing are kind of getting their comeuppance
I have yet to see it. All the stereotypical “asshole jocks” I can recall from school tended to be from upper middle class families. They’re doing much better than many of the nerds many of who are unemployed NEETs.
Though I admit these sort of social cliques are much more complex in real life than in a corny 80s coming of age movie.
All the kids who fucked around in school and picked on the nerds for just existing are running the government. Not sure this is the win you're painting it as?
I don't think "the nerds" are really dishing out much comeuppance here.
Professionally, they're marginalized by finance-bros, who actually decide what gets built and which morals get followed. Privately, everything you might want to repair or tweak or invent is still getting locked down or patented or criminalized.
How much does food and electricity cost you (if the electricity is even on for you at all)? Also, uh, this isn't high school anymore, and the "nerds vs. jocks" framing says a lot more about your own internal state than it does about the state of the world, which is being run into the ground by wealthy oligarchs. If you have bad high school memories to process, that can be done elsewhere.
If Flock truly believed that the domain name infringes on their trademark, they would file an ICANN UDRP complaint instead of Cloudflare and Hetzner abuse reports.
But they don't, because the former would require them to perjure themselves, and the latter just requires them to lie to a hosting company.
I wonder if Flock + Cyble can be sued for fraud. There are 5 elements in a fraud:
Cloudflare would have to bring that suit since they were the ones defrauded. The site owners probably can't sue Cloudflare because of their contract. So the site owners probably have to go basic "tortious interference" and be ready to show actual damages.
No, if the site owners have been harmed by Flock + Cyble knowingly filing a false takedown notice then they can sue Flock + Cyble. If Cloudflare's reputation has also been harmed then they could sue Flock + Cyble as well.
You would need damages
Cloudfare and Hetzner should see this vulnerability of their own making and DO SOMETHING about it.
My city just ended our pilot Flock program. I hope others do the same.
But I think the real issue with Flock will be private security. Random Home Depot parking lots, etc.
https://www.29news.com/2025/12/17/charlottesville-ends-flock...
The local credit union in Eugene had installed Flock cams at the entrances to all their branches. They took em down after only a few of our community members began protests out front a few branches and emailing with the CU's leadership before our city terminated our contract and removed the cams
> My city just ended our pilot Flock program. I hope others do the same.
If someone would like to engage in grassroots activism on this, may I suggest the perfect domain: getTheFlockOutOfMyCity.com
My town in Colorado just did the same. Pretty happy with the result.
> The site’s only input fields accept license plate numbers (which are hashed client-side before transmission and cannot be harvested)
License plates are trivially short, hashing them accomplishes no additional level of privacy if the hashes could be bruted in seconds on an antique GPU.
Being able to say "Our server never sees user-input license plate numbers", even though from a technical perspective the hash is just as identifiable, does have value. Even though it offers no additional privacy, it does let non-technically-minded users and so on feel safer, and that's valuable.
The value is being able to mislead your users
Technically true. Flock could present an unfounded argument that I might be brute-forcing my own security and privacy measures.
I think it'd sound pretty dumb.
If the security depends on the person it's supposed to be secure against not trying to break it...
Part 2: Flock and Cyble Inc. Continue to File False Notices
https://haveibeenflocked.com/news/cyble-part2
Related: Flock Said It Does Not Use Dark Web Data. Code Analysis Tells a Different Story - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46341674
> With the new Divinity game in the works, I decided to do a run as Gale in BG3.
I don't support this decision but I respect it.
Curious what the Cloudflare HNers have to say about this debacle.
Can't be less than what support has had to say up until now.
Flock is trying their best to usher in dystopia
If these folks get in trouble, they might try hosting with Freedom.nl . It's +/- the old xs4all crew, and they might be in for some more fun in the 21st century.
This is a Y Combinator company? https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
dang/tomhow, does Y Combinator have a code of ethics that comes into play when one of your funding recipients does something unethical and/or illegal like this?
To some extent, YCombinator partners are on the record[0] supporting the idea of their startups doing illegal things. Generally they'll frame this as challenging outdated regulations, but they acknowledge that the founders whose strategies they fully support sometimes come into office hours and discuss how they're worried that the strategy puts them at risk of going to jail.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm-ZIiwiN1o&t=8m46s
One long-standing code is that they moderate YC companies less on HN, allowing criticisms like yours to stand: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320816
To HN's credit I haven't seen this rule violated.
For example I wouldn't have known it was a YC company if not for your comment.
> One long-standing code is that they moderate YC companies less on HN, allowing criticisms like yours to stand:
Well, that’s what dang says he does. There’s no transparency and no publicly available data that would demonstrate adherence to the rule.
> To HN's credit I haven't seen this rule violated.
I don’t think you’d observe anything different if it were violated.
yeah their code of ethics is to laugh all the way to the bank and be untouchable. nothing will happen to them from YC.
VC system with multiple investors means YC can't tell their company what to do. No mote than you can tell Google what to do because you have $100M in shares.
Are dang and tomhow involved at all in YC member ethics? I expect they know about ethical behavior on HN.
First time?
So these are the scumbags putting cameras in front of schools and sending tickets to people on Sundays. Thank you for making peoples lives materially WORSE.
Speeding tickets are not related in any way to why Flock (YC S17)* is bad.
* how I will now always refer to them
Absolutely unacceptable behavior. Wild that Americans are so distracted by pointless social issues that they haven’t even realized the ruling elite are treating them like cattle. Absolutely pathetic.
The pointless social issues are manufactured specifically in order to distract Americans from the fact they are being treated like cattle.
And they/we absolutely love the distraction
Because our educational system has been dismantled
Cloudflare outage on Dec. 5 on remote servers were /user/ parsing errors in HTTP.
Flock does this well in terms of bios spinlock releases, whereas a secure measure is stress-testing network traffic.
Cattle is as Cattle does
Moooo
> are manufactured specifically
the fact that these majority do accept the distraction points to lack of intelligence and discipline in critical thinking and future planning. The populous has half the blame - not just those who do these manufacturing of distractions.
That's an easy trap to fall in. This industry costs trillions every year to operate for a reason. The people never really stood a chance. It's not as if school educated them to live in the world we actually inhabit.
> Wild that Americans are so distracted
There is a tonne of civic action against Flock, specifically, in the works, in many cases with successful results.
Like what?
America is huge and there's a lot of exceptionally stupid people especially in the South and Midwest.
Not much I can do about that over here in the coastal Northeast.
I think you will find that fifty percent of people are of below average intelligence regardless of where you live.
The average does tend to vary from state to state. It actually is a bit lower in the southern and midwestern states, but only by a few points.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/average-iq-...
"us smarties would never fall for such obvious bread and circus. not like those silly dumdums what live in {region}!"
said without an ounce irony as the proverbial rug is yanked right out from under your feet
Flock helped catch the Boston/Brown shooter.
the guy who took himself out? what did flock do to assist there?
I was offended and then I defined "exceptionally stupid" a few ways and all the statistics support this claim.
I'm still offended though.
Fucking a lot of smart people in Mass., Vermont, Conn., New York, Maryland, DC.
I’m pretty sure anywhere there’s a lot of people (the northeast of the US for example) you’re going to find a lot of smart people.
People with advanced degrees accumulate in those specific states, despite not significantly different rates of HS graduation from other states.
Smart people, as measured by educational attainment, live in the NE coastal states and exceptionally stupid people (by the same metric) live in the South and Midwest. As a guy from Iowa, I was offended, but humbled by the reality of the numbers.
All things considered, I don't think advanced degrees necessarily correlate with intelligence. It's often just a marker of socioeconomic privilege.
A Carnegie Mellon study found that people with PhDs were more likely than any other educational attainment level to be against the Covid-19 vaccine: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.20.21260795v... (page 17)
Gallup polls during the Vietnam War found that higher-educated Americans were more likely to be pro-war while the most anti-war group were those with only a grade school education: https://afterthewarproject.org/files/original/3e5e5a47a15203... (page 19 of the PDF, page 38 of the document)
Come on, there are exceptionally stupid people almost everywhere. No need for ad hominem.
Is this not libel?
They don't actually allege anything. They add in the keywords without going so far as to say "this website is doing X." It's enough to trip the keyword filters at Cloudflare and other hosting providers and reverse the burden of proof.
Problem is they have way more money to fight and that’s basically their whole playbook. I was caught up in a fraudulent libel claim that had to settle* back in the Twitter days. When those companies want to come after you, it’s really hard to fight back.
* no money was exchanged just some guarantees to not disclose their client and remove tweets.
Remember when Zuck called his fellow students at harvard who used facebook “Dumb fucks”? The US is accelerating into techno-authoritarianism, and all of these tech companies adopted “companies over countries” motto since the start, it’s not a surprise now.
it’s important to contextualize that quote: he called them dumbfucks specifically because they trusted him with their data.
it is fairly evident that contextualisation is paramount in objectively assessing a situation ... in the context of having god like power over billions , it seems entirely moot to debate the merits of why such a god like individual would label his subjects as idiots ...
The context is given, it’s all about users’ data. facebook, google, plantir, flock, you name it, the end goal is to harvest data as much as possible to sell it, profile the individuals, manipulate the public opinion (facebook did a mood-manipulation “experiment” back in 2012, you can only imagine now in the era of social media dependency and AI), invade people’s privacy, among many other things. Now add to that mix a mandatory digital ID, and let’s hear what these CEOs will call the public behind closed doors, I’m sure it’s worse than “dumb fucks”. Fun fact: Zuck early days business card printed with “I’M THE CEO, BITCH.”
In the sense that the US has been anti-intellectualist for decades, I'm kind of ok with it. All the kids who fucked around in school and picked on the nerds for just existing are kind of getting their comeuppance. It's definitely cut off your nose to spite your face type shit, but does give me a little bit of joy. "You stuffed me in a locker and destroyed my social life because I read a book at lunch. I'm going to automate your job away and help billionaires make sure you'll never rise out of poverty."
> I'm kind of ok with it. All the kids who fucked around in school and picked on the nerds for just existing are kind of getting their comeuppance
I have yet to see it. All the stereotypical “asshole jocks” I can recall from school tended to be from upper middle class families. They’re doing much better than many of the nerds many of who are unemployed NEETs.
Though I admit these sort of social cliques are much more complex in real life than in a corny 80s coming of age movie.
All the kids who fucked around in school and picked on the nerds for just existing are running the government. Not sure this is the win you're painting it as?
I don't think "the nerds" are really dishing out much comeuppance here.
Professionally, they're marginalized by finance-bros, who actually decide what gets built and which morals get followed. Privately, everything you might want to repair or tweak or invent is still getting locked down or patented or criminalized.
How much does food and electricity cost you (if the electricity is even on for you at all)? Also, uh, this isn't high school anymore, and the "nerds vs. jocks" framing says a lot more about your own internal state than it does about the state of the world, which is being run into the ground by wealthy oligarchs. If you have bad high school memories to process, that can be done elsewhere.