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Comment by shawn_w

4 days ago

So you can do it without your image being captured by the camera?

The camera doesn't have a 360 field of vision, besides COVID masks aren't uncommon now.

  • Where I am (Sydney Australia) we have fixed speed cameras that automatically create speeding fines to drivers going too fast (well, technically the registered owner of the vehicle via ANPR).

    They eventually had to equip pretty much every speed camera with a speed camera camera, usually on a much higher pole to make vandalism more difficult.

    • Reminds me of the story about Aeroflot (Soviet National airline) and hijackings

      - Aeroflot flights get hijacked and flown to West Berlin

      - Soviets decided to put Spetsnaz (Soviet special forces) on the planes much like we have Air Marshals today

      - Spetsnaz figures "we have guns and are on the plane already" so they start hijacking flights

      - So Soviets put TWO Spetsnaz teams on the flight

      - Team 1 decides to hijack flight, realize there is a Team 2 who ALSO agrees to hijack the flight

      5 replies →

  • When Flock helps you lay out camera placements they make sure camera pairs are facing each other.

Drones with a paintball gun attached?

Realistically that’s going to attract a lot of negative attention.

  • The use of a drone also ups the ante from a prosecutor’s perspective. Charging a vandal caught with a paintbrush and a ladder is nothing out of the ordinary. A routine misdemeanor.

    Someone who has the wherewithal to jerry rig a paintball gun to a drone is someone scary. Plus, any officer who witnesses such a drone is almost certainly going to misidentify the paintball gun as an actual gun. I can imagine the operator would be charged with several felonies.

    • Yeah like we gotta be serious here, US cops and courts are out to screw people over because that is how they increase their budget, pay, and bonuses. If they think they can twist some law into giving you a felony, they will, regardless of the spirit of the law.

      Attaching any kind of potential weapon on a drone has no real precedent so they can dig through 19th century law and combine it with some 21st century law and punishment and screw your life over with bull crap unless you got $100K+ sitting around to throw on a good lawyer. The risk of being caught may be a bit lower, but the potential punishment if caught could be absolutely enormous.

  • Just use the drone to spray something on the camera that will etch the glass or destroy the plastic beyond repair.

    • About ten years ago a company started fitting CCTV cameras to the illuminated advertising hoardings in bus stops, initially to discourage vandalism and then using frankly fucking creepy targetted advertising that used fairly crude machine vision stuff to guess the demographic of people at the stop.

      The advertiser's operators could actually look through the camera and shout through hidden speakers at people vandalising their adverts, usually by writing on the specially-coated toughened vandal-resistant glass that ink or paint didn't stick to.

      The local wee wannabe gangsters took to filling bingo markers with the stuff they use to etch frosted glass, and tagging the displays with that.