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.<p>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:<p><pre><code> Misrepresentation of Fact
Knowledge of Falsity
Intent to Induce Reliance
Justifiable Reliance
Resulting Damages</code></pre>
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.
Tortious interference with contract, cut and dry.
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.
> Cloudflare would have to bring that suit<p>At first that seems pretty unlikely, but I could see them wanting to nip this in the bud so it doesn't become more common.
The "resulting damages" is pretty small though, they just had to move off of cloudflare. I'm not sure it would be worth it, especially if the other side doesn't end up paying their legal costs.
You would need damages
Cloudfare and Hetzner should see this vulnerability of their own making and DO SOMETHING about it.
Knowingly filing false DMCA claims will also perjure them.<p>However, ICANN has a whole procedure they follow where complaints are fact-checked, whereas DMCA takedowns put an unreasonable burden on hosting providers that requires immediate action, and many hosting providers will take such action automatically to protect themselves.<p>I doubt they care about perjury. They care about results, and the DMCA gets them exactly that.<p>The phishing reports are interesting, providers aren't necessarily required to act as fast on those. Although, I suspect companies like Cloudflare who get used by countless phishers will probably also set up some kind of automated anti phishing system.
>Knowingly filing false DMCA claims will also perjure them.<p>You are confusing false claims with filing DMCA requests on behalf of someone you don't have permission from.<p>>and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed<p>A false DMCA request is misrepresentation.
Cloudflare is becoming the great firewall of America more and more every day
>they would file an ICANN UDRP complaint<p>Those take on the order of months to go through. Even if they did so, you wouldn't notice until much later. Meanwhile cloudflare and hetzner are faster. If you want to reduce harm by taking down a site you can't just let it stay up for weeks while the ICANN process plays out.
My city just ended our pilot Flock program. I hope others do the same.<p>But I think the real issue with Flock will be private security. Random Home Depot parking lots, etc.<p><a href="https://www.29news.com/2025/12/17/charlottesville-ends-flock-camera-pilot-program-over-privacy-concerns/?outputType=amp" rel="nofollow">https://www.29news.com/2025/12/17/charlottesville-ends-flock...</a>
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.<p>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.
Part 2: Flock and Cyble Inc. Continue to File False Notices<p><a href="https://haveibeenflocked.com/news/cyble-part2" rel="nofollow">https://haveibeenflocked.com/news/cyble-part2</a>
> The site’s only input fields accept license plate numbers (which are hashed client-side before transmission and cannot be harvested)<p>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.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_(cryptography)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_(cryptography)</a><p>(Or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper_(cryptography)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper_(cryptography)</a> off you want to be fancy)
They have indexed publicly available data. The privacy was long gone before you even entered a license plate number.
Or do you think other actors didn’t have the same data but without a frontend to show it to you?
Technically true. Flock could present an unfounded argument that I might be brute-forcing my own security and privacy measures.<p>I think it'd sound pretty dumb.
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.
Related: <i>Flock Said It Does Not Use Dark Web Data. Code Analysis Tells a Different Story</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46341674">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46341674</a>
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.
Flock is trying their best to usher in dystopia
> With the new Divinity game in the works, I decided to do a run as Gale in BG3.<p>I don't support this decision but I respect it.<p>Curious what the Cloudflare HNers have to say about this debacle.
Everyone knows that it all hinges on <i>why</i> they’re being Gale. If they’re doing it so they can romance Shadowheart then it’s permissable.
Can't be less than what support has had to say up until now.
This is a Y Combinator company? <a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety">https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety</a><p>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.<p>0: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm-ZIiwiN1o&t=8m46s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm-ZIiwiN1o&t=8m46s</a>
One long-standing code is that they moderate YC companies less on HN, allowing criticisms like yours to stand: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320816">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320816</a><p>To HN's credit I haven't seen this rule violated.<p>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:<p>Well, that’s what dang says he does. There’s no transparency and no publicly available data that would demonstrate adherence to the rule.<p>> To HN's credit I haven't seen this rule violated.<p>I don’t think you’d observe anything different if it were violated.
> I don’t think you’d observe anything different if it were violated.<p>If the mods were in the practice of moderating like this, yes, it would almost certainly be noticed by someone whose post/comment got deleted.<p>HN, like every other community on the Internet, relies on trust between the users and mods. If you don't trust them, you can always leave.
> it would almost certainly be noticed by someone whose post/comment got deleted<p>Would it?<p>HN has all sorts of sneaky punishments to keep people from noticing what's going on. Shadow bans, limiting how many comments you can post per day, sometimes outright refusing to serve you pages with a "Sorry." error, and even flagging isn't visible to the person whose comment got flagged. HN doesn't notify you in any way for any of this. How often do you check your comments while logged out? That includes old comments, of course, which need to be rechecked on a periodic basis. Archives provide some limitation to how much manipulation can happen, but flagging is a thing, can be abused by anyone with enough karma, and provides a lot of plausible deniability for dang should he opt for a stealthier approach to moderation.<p>Even this account is shadowbanned - and this comment automatically flagged - because I had the <i>audacity</i> to create an account with a VPN, in a world where VPNs are a requirement for unrestricted Internet access for a growing number of people living in "democratic" countries. The only way I know this is through testing, of course, because HN gives no indication that your account will be shadowbanned on creation.
>HN doesn't notify you in any way of this.<p>I'm not sure this is the supportive argument that you think it is, as HN doesn't notify users of <i>anything</i> akin to what you're discussing, be it positive or negative, ever. They don't have notifications whatsoever.<p>>Even this account is shadowbanned - and this comment automatically flagged...<p>No it's not. Edit: mea culpa, see response<p>>The only way I know this is through testing, of course...<p>How did you test this? Your single comment on a brand new account appears to be showing up just fine, as any new account would. Did you unflag your throwaway comment from a different account?<p>I get the feeling you pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable here at one point, and didn't like the result.
> No it's not.<p>It was, actually. New accounts' comments being flagged by default is, I'm fairly certain, very much a thing.
> HN has all sorts of sneaky punishments to keep people from noticing what's going on<p>Another way of putting this is that HN has very standard mechanisms in place to combat spam and other sources of low-signal comments.<p>> Shadow bans, limiting how many comments you can post per day<p>Like these.<p>> Sometimes outright refusing to serve you pages with a "Sorry." error,<p>This just sounds like downtime/server problems. Every site has them, and even the most law-abiding posters on HN will see that sometimes.<p>> even flagging isn't visible to the person whose comment got flagged.<p>Yes it is?<p>> HN doesn't notify you in any way for any of this.<p>This is by design; HN doesn't offer notifications of anything on its own. Besides, most platforms don't usually notify people of these things by default either?<p>> Even this account is shadowbanned - and this comment automatically flagged - because I had the audacity to create an account with a VPN, in a world where VPNs are a requirement for unrestricted Internet access for a growing number of people living in "democratic" countries. The only way I know this is through testing, of course, because HN gives no indication that your account will be shadowbanned on creation.<p>I don't think you need to be so indignant. VPNs are also abused. All of these mechanisms are tradeoffs for making HN one of the best sites I've ever been on for productive, intelligent discussion; and the mods are well aware of this and manage to balance it well. For example, you were still able to register, and you and I are still able to exchange comments. If you contribute to discussions (on an account you don't just throwaway) for a little while, the limitations go away.
yeah their code of ethics is to laugh all the way to the bank and be untouchable. nothing will happen to them from YC.
Are dang and tomhow involved at all in YC member ethics? I expect they know about ethical behavior on HN.
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.
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.
Cameras at schools, I can see how that could be concerning. But what's wrong with ticketing drivers on Sundays?
Speeding tickets are not related in any way to why Flock (YC S17)* is bad.<p>* 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
> are manufactured specifically<p>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.
Cattle is as Cattle does
> <i>Wild that Americans are so distracted</i><p>There is a tonne of civic action against Flock, specifically, in the works, in many cases with successful results.
And yet... many communities are in the process of ending their contracts and lawsuits are being filed against them?
Flock's CEO basically went to the public and said "you all have phones" like the Blizzard people.<p>“If (people are) worried about privacy, a license plate reader is the dumbest way to do surveillance. You have a cell phone. A cell phone knows your exact location at all times,” he said. “If you don’t trust law enforcement to do their job, that’s actually what you’re concerned about, and I’m not going to help people get over that.”<p>Just means I have to have a Faraday bag alongside my polesaw and high-powered laser. I can compete with your shitty outdated Android SoM and a shitty Raspberry Pi webcam in an enclosure.
Like what?
America is huge and there's a lot of exceptionally stupid people especially in the South and Midwest.<p>Not much I can do about that over here in the coastal Northeast.
It's not about stupid people, there are stupid people everywhere, it's about the .1% elite controlling all the wealth and power, using flaws in the ways humans work (stupid or not every human has to have shelter and food to survive).
"us smarties would never fall for such obvious bread and circus. not like those silly dumdums what live in {region}!"<p>said without an ounce irony as the proverbial rug is yanked right out from under your feet
I think you will find that fifty percent of people are of below average intelligence regardless of where you live.<p>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.<p><a href="https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/average-iq-by-state" rel="nofollow">https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/average-iq-...</a>
I was offended and then I defined "exceptionally stupid" a few ways and all the statistics support this claim.<p>I'm still offended though.<p>Fucking a lot of smart people in Mass., Vermont, Conn., New York, Maryland, DC.
Come on, there are exceptionally stupid people almost everywhere. No need for ad hominem.
Flock helped catch the Boston/Brown shooter.
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.
If you operate in a world where your goal is to scam others then anyone displaying any amount of trust is obviously a dumb fuck.
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<p>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.<p>Though I admit these sort of social cliques are much more complex in real life than in a corny 80s coming of age movie.
<i>All the kids who fucked around in school and picked on the nerds for just existing are</i> 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.<p>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.
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.<p>* no money was exchanged just some guarantees to not disclose their client and remove tweets.
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