Is this an older model? I could see them turning off or using weak encryption on media if the hardware couldn't keep up with the amount of data they were writing.
As another commenter pointed out, any cheapo ARM core from the last 10 years could do the job Flock needs it to do, as long as it has a (very cheap and common) crypto engine strapped to it.
But, a question for you: even if it was the case that the hardware was the limitation, isn't that also an indictment of Flock? Selling something that cannot exist securely within the bounds of current technology? Or, at a minimum, bad chip selection leading to a compromised design?
I'm in the process of optimizing a bootolader for my various SoC/SBCs and even the cheapest, oldest least powerful SoC from 15 years ago can manage AES-CBC via crypto accelerator at 50 MiB/s. There's no excuse.
You can achieve 50MiB/s if that's all that you're doing. I've worked with some DSPs (TI's DaVinci line) where some operations would abort if DDR was overwhelmed.
For example, passing a frame of video (YUV) into the peripheral which can resize the overall image, would fail if the system was busy with other DMA transfers. You could attempt to resize again, but there were no guarantee that it would complete successfully. Your options are to reduce overall DDR utilization or drop frames. In an application like Flock's, dropping frames is likely something they need to avoid.
The system in question is doing similar tasks, and I don't think that what I'm suggesting is out of the question.
They can choose the SoC that would be able to fill the requirements. Eg. almost all Rockchip SoCs have NoC with configurable QoS on master ports (even the cheapest IP camera targetted SoCs that cost like 2-3$), or some other interconnect mechanism that can make it so that SDRAM controller gets tasks in some user selected priority order (eg. you deprioritize CPU in favor of camera interface and other things). This is not a new tech. It already existed when Flock was founded.
And in any case. Passing compressed video streams or pictures through HW encryption engine will not saturate 1.5+ GiB/s or whatever even the lousiest 16-bit DDR3 at 400MHz would give you, not even close. It would be like a fraction of a percent of total bandwidth.
In a perfect world, yes, but this is a for-profit company and there's almost zero repercussion for doing it half-assed. They'd have to pay someone to implement it, and deal with the overhead and complexity.
Now they are in a position where they can sell new models with enhanced encryption and more features.
3.18.71-perf-gaf770dc is a Qualcomm Android vendor kernel from roughly late 2017. The 3.18 branch went fully EOL in 2019, so nothing after that was ever backported to it.
2017 was also the year Flock was funded and founded and went through the YConbinator cohort.
But you would have thought that by 2021 when Andreessen Horowitz funded them or at least by 2025 [1] when both further funded them, someone would have actually done some minor due diligence. Coincidentally too, 2025 was when the flock surveillance matrix went up all over the country almost immediately.
We constantly hear that the magic of tech funding lies in the people, not even the product/service. These types of things always seem to uncover that that is effectively just a lie to cover up the ulterior motives of setting up a tyrannical surveillance matrix all around you … to protect the children, of course.
In an ideal world they'd have people whose job it is to monitor upstream activity in the components used in the firmware and maintain this. Sounds like they did not have that.
I don’t think you are catching on. Why would tyrants do ethics vetting? You assume God intentions?
I’m not a fan of the sloppy use of fascism in lieu of the more suitable term, tyranny (which I believe is intentional distraction, because that’s what I would have done), however, if you understand the mechanism of a YC and its total reliance on the money printing fraud, you would understand that YC is the closest thing to “fascism” there actually is, the federal government’s money printing fraud fueling and life blood of the Monopoly money they print to defraud you of value, in order to run their own little con job of how impressive and futuristic and modern these companies are that rely on extracting of value and exploiting vulnerabilities, not actually creating value.
Flock by a guy named Langley is at the very best a rather poetic example of that. I doubt they’re sophisticated enough to have worked this out, but they’re exploiting the vulnerability of people wanting and needing to feel safe in a system that maintains deliberate danger as a social engineering mechanism to control and dominate and even up until recently, deliberately degrade the populace.
What better way to get to more “fascist” fraudulent Monopoly money than to promise the people who’s lives you’ve made insecure that you can protect them through 24/7 surveillance of all of their activities and thoughts.
It’s not really a new thing; the “Patriot” Act was the first major act that simply shoved the American Revolution aside, but Flock by Langley is just the first instance of it being apparent through its ham fisted swashbuckling YC “beak things fast” clown approach that has unfortunately made many people extremely rich, and thus we got more of it.
I don't think you misunderstood, I think they're talking out their arse. Modems don't run Linux, they run RTOS operating systems. ShannonOS in the case of the Pixel 6 with a exynos modem
To be fair if you could SLTS support by CIP (which is designed for things like this) you have 4.19 at least still maintained. 4.4 might still be too but I'd have to check
I'm in the same boat. Using Rust within Yocto is tricky since the whole point of Yocto is that you have a system which can build reproducible images. I can't have Cargo going out and fetching crates during the build process, they need to be recipes and artifacts which are accurately versioned and identified.
I have at least 100 hours in the game, and I have to disagree with you. There's a surprising amount of variety in the creatures and the world generation.
I spend a lot of time building / designing my base. In that aspect, the enjoyment of the game is limited only by my creativity. I've definitely got $25 worth of entertainment from it. I will say, though, it is more fun if you have others to join your squad.
It's vastly better, imo, than Starfield. That was a game which really let me down -- I wanted Skyrim in Space, but I got 1,000 planets with the same cookie cutter quests on each. Or a team member saying something like "I can't believe we're the first ones to set foot on this temple" when there is a randomly generated outpost plopped down right next door.
AFAIK Google is much better at not tearing well-working teams apart in reorgs, and letting people go they have acquihired a few quarters earlier.
Of the few examples I have I my head, I'd even say that the fate of a product that has been acquired by Google is probably even better than those of Google's internally developed products. e.g. Waze is still alive and kicking 13 years after acquisition under its own brand and hasn't been completely swallowed by Google Maps. The Nest brand also stuck around for quite some time.
Amazon will drive these people to quit within a couple years over filling out MBRs and threats about how the MBR isn't good enough (MBR = monthly business report, pure bullshit theatre that drives the whole company mad 2/4 weeks every month).
Google would drive them to quit over a longer timeframe, with no threats or harrassment, just because every time they try to ship something cool, someone else has a reason not to do it and that kills you eventually.
> Google would drive them to quit over a longer timeframe, with no threats or harrassment, just because every time they try to ship something cool, someone else has a reason not to do it and that kills you eventually.
Yeah, I've never personally worked at any of those places, but collaborated on a few open source projects with Googlers and Xooglers and the slow grinding wheels of their "processes" that wear people down over time were very apparent. Nevertheless, it has been a breeding ground for many interesting technologies, even if it often suffocates them over the long term.
> Amazon will drive these people to quit within a couple years over filling out MBRs and threats about how the MBR isn't good enough (MBR = monthly business report, pure bullshit theatre that drives the whole company mad 2/4 weeks every month).
Wouldn't be possible nowadays to LLM your way out of this?
I'm actually curious too, haven't been there in a while. It's possible that the MBR pyramid has become LLM assisted on all sides but the cultural themes are surely all still there.
Honestly, the whole thing felt LLM to start with, tons of people lacking context and throwing words and summaries around.
They do, they’re TPMs and PMs. If you’re a development team at Amazon stressing over MBRs, you’ve failed to give those people the tools to pull important metrics themselves.
> (MBR = monthly business report, pure bullshit theatre that drives the whole company mad 2/4 weeks every month)
Couldn't have said it any better myself having worked at AWS for close to 8y. I was there during their peak growth years and remember very well how some of these processes that were once not as maddening, devolved.
To be fair, I suspect most of the core team is effectively rich after an acqu-hire.
If I had 5 million I’m going to retire and never code for money again.
I do want to make small video games though, make some music. Pay for a friend’s kids college.
I wouldn’t waste a single extra hour making more money. Usually the golden handcuffs fall off after a year or two. That’s why Heroku went to crap, all the core people left.
Google has such a much better reputation when it comes to contributing to and understanding open source. It’s unfair to Google to put Amazon above them.
Heck AWS is the sole reason all these projects needed to go through these license changes to prevent AWS from completely destroying their business models.
What business model do MIT licensed projects even have? If you want to offer support contracts and actually make people use them, don't use MIT. You can't have you cake (accepting public contributions and free labor) and eat it (sole profiteering) too.
> If you want to offer support contracts and actually make people use them, don't use MIT. You can't have you cake (accepting public contributions and free labor) and eat it (sole profiteering) too.
I can't speak to how successful it is, but Daniel/Curl have been running with this model[0][1] for years. Probably not too different from 'drh and SQLite[2][3].
RMS addressed the business model from the very beginning: it's services and consulting. He practiced what he preached.
You might think that's got a very low ceiling. But, even though it's a bad example in many ways, OpenAI showed that the ceiling is very high. And if you're morally flexible even higher.
RMS would probably agree with you and think that I'm apostate. But there's an open source license for the full spectrum of software authors' preferences. Depending on the circumstances some could turn out to be a poor choice.
I know some lawyers who specialize in these choices. Everyone thinks their choice doesn't smell, but there are the resources to make informed choices.
With MIT there isn't much to goan with business comptiable licensing.
There the question turns to "you may sue me, if it breaks" as reasoning. In reality sueing will rarely work, but having a business contract satisfies the company's board and insurance about using the software over an "AS IS"-license alone.
It helps just fine. The original software is still there, available for anyone to use for free. AWS et al can't take that away from us, no matter what they choose to do with their fork.
When they say "doesn't help", they're talking about the developers of the original software you want to use for free getting to eat food and have a roof over their head.
It has an extremely low ceiling. You literally cannot make consumer-targeted software if you want to survive while writing open-source code. Services and consulting is strictly B2B, and services and consulting for open-source software is capable of supporting a population of like 1% of existing software developers. Advocating for this dogmatic ideal that would cull the field by 99% is ridiculous.
I don't know how you came to OpenAI as an example given that they famously succeeded while going closed-source with the release of ChatGPT.
Red Hat grew on GPL licensed projects to become a $34 billion business. Canonical does the same except it’s Ubuntu not RHEL and charges more than Red Hat.
You really underestimate the value of support contracts.
I'm not seeing how MIT licensing has anything to do with your ability to use support contacts as a business model. Yeah, nothing constrains the potential customer to purchase support, but that's just as true of GPL licensed software. I can download GPL software and never pay a dime for a support contract, just like MIT software.
..a strategy valid in the good ol' days when a complete rewrite of the currently non-licenseable non-protectable underlying desings and ideas would not cost you 200$ on tokens to reimplement in a different or even in the same language.. maybe SW patents will be a thing soon .. and inadvertently become another nail in the coffin of FOSS and SW development in general, who knows
One of the things that has hampered the adoption of Dart/Flutter has been the fear Google would abandon it. I always presumed them to be in the lead regarding this kind of shittiness, but this is based on gut feel rather than analysis.
Yes, the game just played it as a regular CD. In fact, if you put a different disc in the drive it would play the tracks from there instead. There were also console commands to change the track, stop the music, loop, or even reload the disc information if you needed to refresh it after swapping CDs.
Yeah, and I remember if you didn't have the audio cable that went from the CDROM into your sound card, you would never hear the tracks. It wasn't your computer decoding the music, the CDROM drive was simply doing the decoding, and passing the audio out into a CDROM input (just a line-level audio signal) on your sound card.
I'd forgotten about those little cables. If I recall correctly, they were small round cables, with maybe four conductors and a little flat connector with a clip?
My cdrom drive also had an audio jack on it, so you could plug headphones directly into that if you wanted to have just CD audio and not the sounds coming from the PC.
I got Bard to execute a fork bomb, I think, when it was first launched. I noticed that it was evaluating the flow of a shell script incorrectly and it allowed execution, then refused to respond for 20 or 30 minutes.
Now, for some users, sharing a YouTube link adds some sort of tracking which then asks people who open the link to be "friends" with the person who shared it. Who thinks that this is a good idea, and why isn't it opt-in?
Always delete the si= or is= parameter from a shared YouTube link. This will work until they copy Reddit's idea of encoding both the video ID and sharing indicator together as one big opaque encrypted string.
Does Reddit do that too? Is it just on the "new" UI?
I know TikTok encodes it in an inconspicuous way, the ID in the shared URL just looks like a normal ID but it's different from the bare video ID. Then both of you (I think) get a "Do you know person xyz?" type of notification.
Reddit encodes the whole thing in an opaque blob, giving you a URL like reddit.com/share/<blob> that cannot be transformed into any other format without fetching it.
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