Go drive/walk by your local police station and note all the plates of unmarked cars in the area. Many of them are likely police vehicles or private vehicles of employees. Do the same near a courthouse. Use those as fodder for this tool.

So start feeding it lots of random 2 to 8 letter/number strings.

I don’t know if this incident involved Flock or a competing product, but John Oliver recently described an incident on his show that demonstrates one of the major issues with this technology.

Apparently an ALPR reported a “hit” on the license plate of an SUV in a shopping center parking lot. The vehicle was reported stolen. So a half dozen or so police performed a felony arrest of the woman in the car along with a number of family members, including small children.

The problem was that while the letters & numbers on the license plate matched, the actual stolen vehicle was a motorcycle from a completely different state. So if any of those half-dozen cops had bothered to confirm even one additional detail about the stolen vehicle then this wouldn’t have happened.

How will Flock improve their technology so that police actually do more than the bare minimum when being told of an ALPR “hit”?

So they both kill each other then commit suicide? Kind of like all those Russians who shoot themselves in the back before falling out of windows?

Heck, if energy density is an issue the use this initially for grid storage, home solar, etc. where a larger size isn’t a huge deal. That would increase existing lithium ion supplies for EVs.

VPNs are too complex for non-technical people. I used to work in IT for a big university. When I managed the installation of a large research cluster they insisted it be publicly accessible so that traveling professors, etc. would have easy access to it. Long story short, I found it had been compromised by an IP address in China within hours of it being on-line.

Some marketing executive earned their paycheck for the month by coming up with this…

What are they offering to buy the homes with, highly volatile shares of the AI companies stock, or millions of tokens they can use the AI with?

Unfortunately it’s not terribly easy to un-family somebody.

I know somebody who works at Flock. Any chance you have a link to that video? I’d love to see what he says about the CEO comparing Antifa to terrorists…

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FYI. Not sure if this is accurate or not but it claims that an Su-35 was shot down: https://sopuli.xyz/post/49147538

A perfect response to the Russian “meat grinder” tactic.

Furthermore, it is the only Russian refinery that produces cracking catalysts, which are components that other facilities depend on for secondary oil refining.

So an even bigger win for Ukraine if this indirectly reduces refining even more at other locations.

The strikes have hit the unit’s process columns. The refinery has a capacity of 8.4 million metric tons of crude oil per year.

had

Probably written by AI…

Maintaining nuclear weapons is far from trivial. The Wikipedia page on stockpile stewardship goes into a bit of detail. But in a nutshell everything from the nuclear material to the electronics to the high explosives used to initiate the nuclear reaction degrade over time.

The US hasn’t manufactured new nuclear weapons since 1992, meaning they’re all at least 33 years old at this point. The US regularly checks & replaces all these components to keep them operational.

Russia is also believed to have stopped building new nuclear weapons since the breakup of the USSR in 1991, so their arsenal is at least as old as the US one. I’m not sure Russia would have been capable to maintain their stockpile the way the US has. Among other things:

• Tritium, used as a booster, has a half life of 12 years, so needs to be replenished fairly regularly. It decays to Helium 3, which can hinder a fission reaction. So it’s critical it’s properly removed.
• The batteries that power everything need regular replacing every few years.
• The conventional high explosives used to initiate the chain reaction degrade over time, especially in high heat, and the close proximity to radiation from the nuclear core. These explosives are critical to triggering a nuclear reaction. They have to be very precisely shaped around the nuclear core, and the timing to detonate each piece of it is also critical. If they are even slightly degraded or the timing is off then you won’t get a nuclear chain reaction when the explosives detonate.
• plutonium changes phases over time, so cores require occasional purification.

Back in the 90’s and early 2000’s when we had treaties like START there were reports that US officials inspecting Soviet missile silos saw standing water in them. The implication was that the Soviets may not have taken maintenance as seriously as the US did.

But the bottom line is we truly have no idea. Organizations like the CIA and MI6 might have insight into all of this if they have assets (like Oleg Penkovsky was) who are able to provide them with verifiable data on the issue.

If Russia is unable to rebuild refineries, keep aircraft flying (safely), etc. without all the supplies they used to import from other countries, it makes me wonder if their nuclear weapons are actually useable at this point. They have to be properly maintained, and the nuclear materials occasionally replenished. The longer sanctions are in place, and the more infrastructure Ukraine damages or outright destroys, the less nuclear capability Russia will have. Not a bad thing.

A decade or so ago National Geographic had a reality TV show called Worlds Toughest Fixes, where they went around and documented all sorts of major repair & other big construction jobs. One episode had them replacing the steam turbine in a nuclear power plant. I really enjoyed that series.

Some other fixes they documented included a valve on the Alaska oil pipeline, replacing an antenna on a 2000 foot tall tower, and launching a rocket in French Guiana. It’s a fun series if you’re into this kind of stuff.

I worked in IT at a university about 15 years ago. As part of a research project I helped set up a Tor exit node. Within a few hours of it taking on traffic I was contacted by the universities IT security team. They were seeing all sorts of malicious traffic originating from that system and wanted to know what was going on. They had the system shut down immediately.